I’m answering in hopes that someone else who knows more will answer.
I think, no. Just because if you look at a small flame, like a candle, it isn’t the same as a campfire. An ant-sized fire would be, supposedly, like a much smaller candle flame, but it’s hard to imagine such a thing. I’ve never seen such a small flame, I think they can’t exist. Why? I don’t know. Imagine a spark from a fire, which would be about the size of an ant fire. It burns out quickly because there’s so little fuel--fewer molecules, fewer bonds to break, maybe that’s it. It’s a small amount to us, but not to an ant, but it would still burn out just as quickly. So, there must be some lower physical limit to fires acting like fires as we experience them at our scale. Bigger fires also behave differently to smaller fires. They’re more violent, and “create their own weather”, like you hear when there are forest fires.
There is a theory that if alien life exists, those organisms will be roughly our size. The reasoning is that you can’t achieve advanced civilisation without fire, and you can’t tend a fire if you’re much smaller or larger than a human.
Not my theory, but an interesting thing to consider
I find that theory fascinating, as well as the one where it would have to be carbon based like us because chemistry. (Silicon a distant second on supporting chemistry that a life form might need)
Then intelligent life would need to be land based because you can’t easily do things requiring heat without an oxygen atmosphere and something to burn (an octopus or porpoise might be intelligent but that’s a dead end without fire)
To be space faring, your planet couldn’t have much more gravity than earth, else chemical rockets wouldn’t work
At what point is it usefully generalizing on what any life form would need vs where are preconceptions limiting your thinking?
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Thermal vents under water will keep you alive but it won’t be your energy source for industry. Also, how do you invent the steam engine under water on a thermal vent that cannot move around?
Too much oxygen. A tiny little campfire would be like a massive, and very short lived inferno to the “ant” that built it, because the ratio of oxygen to fuel is perfect for human size creatures but way too high to sustain a tiny fire for a long time.
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If you got shrunk to that size you’d immediately suffocate as your diaphragm would no longer be strong enough to pull enough air into your lungs.
Yes I’m fun at parties.
Maybe yours wouldn’t be strong enough but mine is very strong
ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ
You’d also get hypothermia, since your body wouldn’t be able to retain enough heat to stay warm.
There’s a reason why small animals tend to be round and fluffy.
You might underestimate how much abuse my diaphragm can withstand.
When you think about these questions they make less and less sense. Like. Do your atoms shrink? If so air is too big to process and physics makes no sense as far as I understand it. If not, you’re just losing the vast majority of them and there’s no way human biology will continue to work at all…
Upvote purely because the question took me off guard.
I just wanna be a li’l guy with a bitty fire!
Matchsticks for logs. Pine needles for kindling. Human hair from a guy who eats at McDonalds twice a day for tinder!
All because I was the ant to discover fire while some 7 year old human hellspawn melts the rest of my colony with a magnifying glass.
No regrets.
To help answer your question, you can also think about what happens to a fire when you scale it up. This thought experiment will help guide you on whether the scaling is linear, or by volume (cubed) or perhaps even more dramatic than that. In the case of fire, if you imagine a campfire that is 10x the width, 10x the height, and 10x the depth, you are probably looking at a fire that has not 10x the energy, but more like 1000x the energy. It’s got a massive energy output compared to a modest campfire, it is going to consume a lot more than 10x as much fuel, and it’s potentially going to set stuff on fire and consume it and keep trying to consume more fuel in a way that you wouldn’t expect a 10x sized campfire to, and it is a huge emergency that is difficult to put out for that reason. It’s not just a 10x bigger fire because you scaled it up in 3 dimensions. It’s a vastly bigger monster.
So vice versa, if you’re scaling your body from roughly 1.8 meters to 1.8 milllimeters, that’s a 1000x reduction, so you might want to take your campfire down to 1/1000th of its human-sized dimensions too. But you’re probably not looking at a fire that scales down to 1/1000th with you, you’ll be looking at a fire that only has 1/1000th-cubed or 1 billionth as much energy. That is a very small amount of energy, it will barely do anything or even be noticeable at that scale. It may not even sustain a flame. And if you want a campfire with more proportional energy like 1/1000th of a regular campfire for your ant-sized campfire, that means you’ll need a campfire that is still 1/10th the physical dimensions of your human-sized campfire. So it’s still a really, really big fire relative to your ant-sized body. It’s maybe the size of a large candle or alcohol burner, but that’s HUGE compared to ant-size dimensions. So no, put quite simply, it doesn’t scale like that.
These estimations are approximate and there are probably even more complex scaling factors at play for something as physically complex as fire at such extreme scales, but that should help give you the general idea. You’d probably need much more thorough study and experimentation to get a better idea, unless somebody has already scientifically researched this which wouldn’t surprise me.
Excellent answer.
On a side note: if I could get my ant colony to build small camp fires we could create some ugly forest fires, or some nasty building fires in large cities.
For the campfire to scale down like that it also needs more oxygen in the atmosphere. Otherwise you will just get some smoldering wood shavings(or they will turn into a candle fire in size if there enough of them close together). In both cases such campfire will exist for a very short time.
No, fire behaves differently as smaller scales, different fluid dynamics. Everything will appear MUCH more viscose.
Yes. Everything scales down. Even broccoli.
Even a broccoli haircut?
Your best point of reference is, without being facetious, the movie A Bug’s Life.
You probably could with small enough woody materials, but at that size they’ll incinerate pretty quickly unless the density of the woody material in your campfire was equivalent to that of real life to support similar fire behaviour.
Density generally doesn’t scale with reduction in size, so what would usually be a solid tree log that burns slowly at 1:1 scale, would probably be equivalent to dry straw or grass blades at 1:200 scale.
(scale numbers spit-balled: no science behind them)
Depends on the physics model… would an ant-sized human weigh as much as an ant or a human?
