People centuries ago relied heavily on fire to cook raw food, heat their freezing children, to add light among a dark village. These people from ancient times considered themselves lucky to have fire. It may not have been an everyday event for some, due to wet conditions, but always a blessing. One very important thing that villagers have learned from fire is that they can scare away predators. This enabled many people to survive and not have to give into other villagers or man-eating animals. Fire for people in the ancient days was a blessing, almost noble. They were not getting sick from raw meat and were able to keep warm when the wind blew. Nobles are only so lucky.
So many helpful and useful needs for such a devastating “element.” Yet we use fire everyday and we cannot seem to find a way to live without it. We know of people in ancient times using fire as a necessity for survival, yet to many of us today we view fires as a tradgity. Having “hot” fires that burn to destroy is all we hear about in the news. This man died, this house is ruined and there is no chance of recovery. Yet, there are “cool” fires used to help the land by burning toxic fuels beneath it that trigger these “hot” fires and allow them to burn with such intensity. Also many different things we use today require fire. To accomplish a weld, you need the heat from the fire to melt the metal. In guns, do you not see the flame that comes out? Then man kind finds it fun to create fire and you are not a “real” man unless you know how to rub two sticks together and create a spark. Does this logic make sense to anyone that knows how devastating fire can actually be?
Yet we the people of planet Earth have discovered through science good ways to detain these “hot” fires. We learned that there are four elements to a diagram called the “fire tetrahedron.” They are heat, oxygen, fuel and chain reaction. Without any one of these four things there will never be a fire, so logically the only way to detain a fire is to get rid of one of the elements. For example, fire fighters detaining a house fire use water from the fire hydrents to get rid of heat from the blaizing fire. Another is, in detaing a forest fire fire fighters will actualy creat smaller fires ahead of the main fire. This deprives the main blaze of fuel. Light it and then fight it seems to be a common action in many fires we see today.
For our future how can we get away from depending on fire? How can we make fire less scary? How can we gain better knowledge about how to use it in appropriate and safe ways? Personally, there may not be a better way, what we know may be it. Maybe, just maybe some day we will advance to something else discovered and we may not have any more use for fire except for the occasional campfire to toast the marshmallows, if they even exist?
