Spark Of Civilization

                                                                   Origins

                    Of

                                                                                   Fire

                              

           

             “We are fire creature from an Ice Age”

                                                                                                                                                                 Satya Prakash

Fire no single tool in the human arsenal explains our existence more than fire. From an animal, like any other to the dominate species an Earth because we figured out how to steal from the heavens and harness the power of the sun. It was a piece of magic so exceptional so inexplicable, we told our children it was a gift from the gods and turned it into a myth to be handed down for thousands of years.

                        

Heat, nourishment, transportation, communication, annihilation. Fire made us warriors and builders and explorers. With each advance we paid with our blood. But still, we kept going, and today, when we break through the only thing we see when we look back is the light of our greatest conquest. Like a flame that can’t be extinguished the drive within us to create, expand and dominate not just this world but the next the very spark of humanity starts here with fire. This is Origins.

It’s the greatest adventure story ever told the story of humankind. We’re going back in time to explore some key moments origin moments that changed the course of our shared history. Moments that showed how we rebelled against our fate in the animal kingdom and found a way to rise up to transcend to forge a new future in the modern world. It is the biggest question of them all how did we get here? How did Home Sapiens go from swinging tree-to-tree naked apes on a rock floating in space to walking on the surface on the moon? There’s no way it happens without fire. Fire didn’t just change the course of our history revolutionized our tools and our technology. Fire fundamentally changed our biology. As Marshall McLuhan used to say “We build the tools and the tools build us”. But there is one moment in time, an origin moment when we humans were instantly transformed from the hunted to the hunter.

Imagine life in 12000B.C. There are no societies, no protections, and no guarantees just small bands of nomads wandering the woods of Eurasia trying to survive in a hostile world.

à These people lived in very predator rich environments. Lots of animals who regarded humans as prey. Fire was a deterrent. It protected you against predators.

Imagine a life so fragile so fraught with uncertainty. Only fire offers a chance at survival moment to moment. This is the moment in time when life for Homo sapiens depends on trick to take control of the natural world and create a weapon to fight back. Fire gave us the chance at a future.

à Animal’s hunts, animals make tools but only humans have mastered fire. This was the first great breakthrough that enabled humans to separate ourselves from the other apes.

Once we learned to walk with fire we began to leave the animal kingdom behind. Fire became the dominate idea of our species. Its power cast a spell over us captivating us. We were drawn like moths to a flame. We began to experiment with fire and to put it to other uses. Beyond warmth and protection. The origins of cooking gave Homo sapiens a whole new future on Earth.

à Cooking did wonderful things for us. It gave us more energy, free time, small guts and it enabled to get big brains.

à The hearth brought everybody together. I means, everybody gathered around it for warmth.

à It’s around the fire that people cook their food, share stories and become unified.

à The grates moment in the history of humanity is fire. Because fire transformed humanity and human beings in such a fundamental way that there is nothing else that you can compare it to.

à For the first time humans were able to cook. They could heat food and consume it when it was hot or warm.

àSo, cooking with fire was wonderful because it meant that the food became soft it was easily chewed and instead of spending five or six, or seven hours a day chewing we spent than an hour’s day. All of a sudden we got four or five hours free and what do we do with it? In a small scale society the women cook. But the men go out and hunt. And it enabled us to penetrate a new world that animals had never penetrated.

à When you can cook food, you can transformed it, and suddenly you are getting all this nutrition and your brain start to grow. Why is that important? Well, when you start to grow in uterus with your bigger brain it becomes much more difficult to give birth. And why is that important is because human beings are the only animals in the world that require assistance giving birth. You have the origins of social cooperation. That begins to differentiate the herd into a community. Because you need language, you need empathy, you need sharing all these things are the building blocks of society, and communication and communities.

à In every small scale society, every open air society nowadays fire is a huge focus. It really creates the society.

The fire on the hearth is a part of modern life that we’ve carried through time. Whether you’re eating around a campfire in your kitchen, or at a restaurant you’re participating in one of the essential activities that turned us into the dominant species on Earth. Cooked food fed our brains, made us smarter and gave us an edge over the rest of the animal kingdom. The fires of the hearth made that possible.

à We know 30,000 years ago, all across Europe, frankly all around the world by this point all our ancestral humans had great control of fire and they were also using it as a technology. So, wherever they moved they would have taken this knowledge with them. And we can see it even as we move forward in time to say about 10,000 years ago in Oregon.

à EASTERN OREGON site is potentially the oldest site in North America. All the way along this rock face, there are hearths. Now, the oldest hearth we’ve dated here is about 10,000 years ago. We’ve been able to get enough hearths to go all the way from 10,000 and maybe below, all the way up to probably 3,000. And we see the changes of the plants they used for firewood, we see the changes of the seeds that are in the fire hearth and so, it looked like this probably for the last 7,000 years. The hearth is the place where people gather the place where people cook, the place where people stay warm. It is a central feature to people’s lives. You reflect on the fact that nothing has really changed over time, has it? I mean, we’re humans. We’re sitting around a fire. You think about what it would have been like 10,000 years ago. And maybe not a lot different than it is today. And it’s the fire that gets us that connection. It’s the human thread.

Fire gave us a bridge to the future protection against predators improved our chances for survival. But as our numbers increased so did the size of our conflicts. Small skirmishes between tribes grew into enormous battles between mighty armies. Once again the deadly power of fire would change the world. In ever age, we have been obsessed with fire. Cooking revealed the transformative power of the flame. And so, we turned to the natural world and wondered what else can fire transform? We began using fire to harden our wooden spears but the breakthrough came 7,000 years ago, we discovered that minerals could be melted down and cast into new form. We built bigger and hotter fires superheating the Earth in search of new discoveries. Mixing tin and copper gave us bronze a material more potent than anything we knew before. We now had the power to create a new material world. This was beginning of a new age the age of metal. Two and a half million years of Stone Age tool were suddenly obsolete. Out of the flames came new materials stronger, lighter, better than their parts. From copper to bronze, to iron to steel fire transformed the natural into the extraordinary. Metal opened up the floodgates to a new world of technology. We used it to launch empires to build industries. It transformed weapons, tools, transportation and ultimately civilization itself. Fire gave us metal and metal us the modern world. You can draw a line from the dawn of humankind to the dots. Our constant companion in the march of progress. For centuries, we relied on fire for the basics, heats, food, and survival. Then we began to use flame to bend the world to our will until we had the power to explore other worlds and completely destroy our own. Fire lies at the heart of the modern tools of war on bloody display in conflicts across the globe. The great irony is the moment it happened the origin moment when fire produced the first shot heard round the world it was the product of our human desire for immortality.

1232 A.D, China’s capital, Kaifeng was at the center of the Jin Dynasty. Its soldiers fought with the high-tech weapons of the day iron-cased bomb and fire lances. Their border was under constant attack. The Chinese needed a miracle. In a split second of ingenuity they got one that ushered in the dawn of modern warfare. The Jin Empire had been under siege by the Mongols for nearly two decades. So, the Mongols knew their enemies quite well. They had begun the war under great Genghis Khan who had conquered most of Eurasia before his death. The city of Kaifeng was one of the last holdouts for the Jin Dynasty. Fireworks had been the hallmark of Chinese empires since the seventh century. They were said to ward off evil spirits and chase away the ghosts. And they would become the inspiration for the Jin Dynasty’s mast terrifying defense against the Mongol hordes. It was a simple concoction charcoal, the product of fire, potassium nitrate and sulphur. The result Black powder. This invention gave the Chinese a chance against a more powerful enemy and set the path for a new kind of war for the ages. This humble mixture of saltpeter and sulphur contains one of the mass disruptive innovations in the history of mankind.

à The irony of gunpowder is that it was first conceived as an elixir of immortality. So, elixir of immortality became quite paradoxically a recipe for mortality. Once this revolution started, it couldn’t be stopped.

à Gunpowder originates in China. But it spreads and it spreads as a tool of war. The China are first using it against the Mongols but then the Mongols are using it in the Middle East and then using it in Europe. And everyone’s learning from each other how to use this new technology, how to battle with it.

à The transformation of warfare by the introduction of gunpowder in the early middle ages was nothing short of momentous. You had the replacement of bladed weapons by projectile weapons against which the armor of the medieval knight was powerless. Commoners with no training whatsoever let alone high birth could fire a projectile at them and kill them.

à When you’re looking at gunpowder you’re seeing modernity. You’re seeing everything from chemistry in its creation to the destructive power that it has on the battlefield but also in terms of how it you move from a world of lords and knight into something new.

Fire gave us life a way to rebuild our brain and spark our imagination. And with that power we began to harness fire’s destructive potential. We turned against each other. But it’s dangerous to believe you can command force of nature. As we all know, fire can bite back. But out of its destruction can came a rebirth. To our ancestors, fire was a mysterious force. There was nothing like it. Each new generation was taught that it was a gift from the gods because it held a power that could not be explained. But the true history of fire is stranger than anything we could have imagined. Billions of years ago, Earth was a sea of molten rock bombarded by meteor impacts. But fire was nowhere to be found. It was missing something that only Earth could provide life. Over the millennia, as the planet cooled Earth’s great oceans were formed. Out of the depths came life the first organisms releasing billions of tons of oxygen into the atmosphere. As life evolved over eons, plants began to colonize the land the last ingredient in the recipe of fire. Soon, the Earth’s surface was a tinderbox waiting to lignite. The crack of thunder and lightning would light the spark and the age of fire had begun. For 350 million years fire swept over the planet. Life on Earth was forced to contend with the monster it had created. But to one creature, it was more than something to fear. It was the key to global domination. To tame it, to enslave it we would sacrifice again and again only to create the modern world out of the ashes of our past. When we harness the great power of fire and wield it for our own purpose it makes us feel as though immortality is within our grasp. It’s intoxicating. You see it in all of our creations and our conquests. But that monster still lurks. For every advance we have made fire still reminds us of our place on Earth. Even today, no matter how far into the future we project ourselves we are helpless when exposed to unexpected fire. But we serving and we came back bigger, stronger, and smarter. Some of the great cities the most modern societies of their time Rome, Constantinople, Munich, Moscow all were ravaged by fire. But the one that really changed the way we live even to today be the Great Fire of London in 1666. This is the fire that changed the world.

à London in the 17^th century was really like a small village in many ways. It was made of wood; the houses were really close together. The streets were all windy and higgledy-piggledy. You knew everyone. You were really close to your neighbors. But it meant that it was disgusting, it was dirty it was smelly, unsanitary. But all that was about to change with the Great Fire of London.

Tens of thousands of families in London lived very much like this in wooden homes, one on top of the other with open flames to keep them warm. One of the most sophisticated cities in the world it was also an unregulated tinderbox of urban sprawl. In 1666, there were no firefighters, only buckets there were no civil servants with a plan to keep citizens safe. No one was coming to save you or your belongings.

à The Great Fire of London was like a firecracker going off it cleansed everything. The actual physical devastation was huge. Over 90 churches were burned over 13,000 houses went up in flames and 100,000 people here made homeless.

à The Great Fire of London was one of those sorts of, opportunities to rebuild not just physically, but mentally. It coincides with the scientific revolution and it’s really an opportunity to start from scratch.

à It’s extraordinary how a really terrible event can often lead to something wonderful. Although almost 4/5 the of London were destroyed the rebuilding of it became one of the great engines of the enlightenment and certainly helped to fuel the industrial Revolution because it gave people the confidence to rely on the things that made that revolution belief in science, belief in moths, belief in engineering.       The idea that humans can improve their surroundings and builds on what they know. And all of that came out of this terrible event.

London rese like phoenix form the ashes. And with the new construction came new ideas that would be employed the world over. Urban planning. Building safety codes and regulations, sanitation and civil services like fire department. Within decades, London was the largest city in Europe and the blueprint for a new world driven by the industrial Revolution. This seismic change gave birth to the world we live in today. The London fire gave us a second chance and allowed us to reimagine cities and rethink the way we live together in an urban environment. London, New York, Tokyo, Dubai, Shanghai these aren’t just cities they are symbols of our sophistication our ingenuity, our humanity. And fire had another gift for us. By using it to release the energy trapped in fossil fuels like oil and coal we had the means to heat our home and create the most powerful machines. Suddenly, we’re creating industries economies, modernity. But like all the gift of fire, that magic comes with a price. Unlike wood or waste, coal can burn for a very long time and very high temperatures. This sparked our human imagination and ingenuity. We created machines that we could feed this power. Steam engines ushered in the industrial Revolution which led to the invention of the Locomotive and on, to the modern world. Fire is a force of nature a force we can’t always contain. But we can’t give it up, we won’t give it up! Because we get so much out of it. By tapping the power of fire we became closer as a species. It’s allowed us to make the world smaller and smaller and take us anywhere on Earth we can dream and beyond. Right now, fire is fuelling our dreams of a new life across the universe. It’s quite the trick to take the most destructive power on Earth and turn it into a tool for reaching the heavens but that’s exactly what we’ve done over the course of human history, steam engine, turbine, internal combustion once we get going, my friends, we don’t stop. We just dream bigger than ever before. We have always used fire to push the boundaries of our human limitations to go faster, higher, farther. Today, we routinely launch rockets into space sending satellites into orbit or robot explorers deeper into the unknown. But to do it the first time to make it work in that origin moment took serious ingenuity imagination, persistence. It took man named Robert Goddard an engineer, physicist, teacher and inventor. He put his life’s work to the test in the 1920s.

àThe American scientist Robert Goddard. I think was truly the pioneer of rocket technology a dreamer looking up into the skies thinking of where rockets might take mankind but overlooked in his time.

Goddard filed two landmark patents an rocketry that were registered by the U.S Government in 1914. A decade later, he married his wife, Esther and began to test his bold ideas. He had successfully tested liquid fuelled rockets over the years but was attempting to scale up his experiment to find out if his dreams of space were even possible. For two years, Goddard worked to answer his wife’s question. The problem was getting the fuel to the fire. He’d been using piston pumps, like the automobile. His failures led him to a new path a pressurized fuel feed system a trick we still use in liquid-propellant engines today. He also tried a steering mechanism using veins in the exhaust flow controlled by a gyroscope.

à Robert Goddard was interested in the science of rocket technology from the pure science point of view not to do with military applications. But the scientific papers he wrote on aspects like liquid fuel technology would be picked up by other during the Second World War to develop military rockets notably the world’s first ballistic missile, the v2 rocket. But, if we hadn’t had the v2 rocket perhaps we might not have had the space program. We wouldn’t have had rockets delivering astronauts into space, delivering satellites revolutionizing our whole communication system.

Goddard’s experiments were some of the most high tech sophisticated projects of their day. He took humanity another step forward. We walked with fire, and then we found a way to trap it to use its power for our own desires. Our advancement runs parallel to our relationship with fire charcoal, gunpowder, coal, oil. The next great step may be fusion that is recreating how stars transform matter into energy ‘Mind-blowing’.

àFusion as an energy source is very attractive. It would be a carbon-free energy source that could power mankind forever. The challenge is, is making fusion work.

à At the National Ignition Facility what we’re trying to do is overcome a natural barrier that nature has set up for atoms to fuse together. The idea behind fusion is the two atoms that you try to put together. Those cores have the same charge and they repel one another just like the two parts of a magnet tend to repel each other.

à So, where we are today on the National Ignition Facility with regard to ignition is we’re creating a lot of fusion events where we take atoms and we force them together and we see the energy released. It’s kind of like a sparking match being applied to a bonfire. You haven’t yet caught the fuel on fire in such a way that the whole thing burns. What you’re getting are isolated events happening within the bonfire stack. So, we see the beginning of the sparks but we’re not there yet with the bonfire. So, if we were successful at showing fusion is feasible from my point of view, it would be a defining moment much like the demonstration of flight with the wright brother’s plane. In a similar way, if we get ignition on NIF we’ve now harnessed the same processes that power the sun so we will have the opportunity before us to move from the very first beginnings of fire. Where we hit stones together to make sparks to harnessing the power of the sun. That’s an exciting possibility for humankind.

We are a fire species and there are the stories that have made us human. This is our-evolution the never-ending journey. We have only our past to help us navigate and face our future. When we captured fire for the first time we set upon a path that would redefine our species and forge the modern world. It drove the evolution of our biology. Seizing fire didn’t just transform us it gave us the power to transform reality to create light, to create heat to shape the Earth to our own design and rise to the top of the food chain Fire created the world as we know it. It gave us humans the power to create. To destroy and we used that power to give ourselves super human strength and speed breaking our bond with Mother Earth. No longer do we carry fire, fire carries us.