The “oxygen bottleneck” may leave aliens stuck with primitive technology
3 years ago by Renneder to c/becomeme
That and this assumes that in the face of a different challenge another solution wouldn’t arise.
Our technology formed because of the problems we had and the ways we worked around them and iterated on that. Necessity is the mother of invention.
Idunno. There are some things that can be safely assumed. It's a safe assumption that without access to fire, you can't cook food. You can't easily work metal without fire, which rules out virtually all technological progress past the stone age, if we can even make it to the stone age without cooking.
You can say there might be workarounds and other methods, but you can also say that maybe some things see with dark instead of light. Just because you can hypothesize doesn't mean those hypotheses are potentially right.
Suuuuuper interesting line of reasoning. I think this opens other questions that can help to clarify and better understand where some of the great filters live. We got to space travel and radio communications with the conditions and resources available to us here on Earth. I've heard scientists speculate as to whether life could develop on cold worlds in oceans of methane, but never heard about what sorts of technologies could be possible on drastically different planets. Maybe life could develop in a very different way but technologies hitting some real ceilings depending on what's available. We see even here on Earth, animals with fantastic intelligence such as dolphins that A) never had an evolutionary pressure to develop tool building extremities and B) didn't have the same access to naturally transformable resources as we did. Understanding where these technological ceilings are based on the resources available on a planet could really inform how many other space capable civilizations are out there. Or at the very least, help us to specify how some of these great filters are arranged.
So there could still be things like flowing lava, geysers and other hot spots, just no oxygen powered fire. While it would severely curtail progress there could still be viable alternatives to open air fire. A species that's close to nautally occurring heat features may still evolve.
You can cook food and melt things with volcanic heat. It might be that civilizations on those planets arise around volcanoes, provided there's enough active ones.
Because of the different possibilities to get combustion (example- sodium+water), a more-acurate bottleneck for a species would be "a chemistry & thermodynamics bottleneck". The ability to exploit temperature differences and local elements. And there are many ways to do it... plasma, burning, oxidizing, fusion\fission\compress things, infrared radiation, other radiation types, etc.
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To create advanced technology, a species would likely require the capability to increase the temperature of the materials used in its production. Oxygen's role in enabling open-air combustion has been critical in the evolution of human technology, particularly in metallurgy. Exoplanets whose atmospheres contain less than 18% oxygen would likely not allow open-air combustion, suggesting a threshold that alien worlds must cross if life on them is to develop advanced technology.
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