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 17th 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.
