Can Humanity Regain Control Over Fire?

Of all the traits that distinguish Homo sapiens from every other creature on Earth, none has been more consequential than our relationship with fire.

We are the only species that can control, sustain and deliberately start fires — and we have been doing so for an extraordinarily long time. Fossil and archaeological evidence suggests that our near-ancestor Homo erectus was already transporting burning material from one site to light fires elsewhere as far back as 1.5 million years ago. The ability to actually ignite fire on demand appears to have emerged some 400,000 years ago.

The consequences were profound. Cooking food expanded and enriched the human diet, reducing the energy cost of digestion and freeing metabolic resources for brain development. Controlled fire cleared insects, drove away predators and transformed hunting. Fire fertilized fields through slash-and-burn clearing, and it forged weapons. By the time cities emerged, fire had already shaped how people lived for millennia.

In the industrial age, fire continued to transform human society. Steam engines, locomotives, internal combustion engines and jet turbines are all fire in mechanical forms. Today, fire in its myriad modern guises powers nearly everything: a natural gas burner on the stove, a diesel generator in a hospital, the fossil fuel-fired data center that houses servers running artificial intelligence models. A species that once mastered fire to survive on the savanna now burns fossil fuels at a rate that is remaking the planet's atmosphere.

But ironically, in the era many scientists call the Anthropocene — the age of human dominance — it appears that humanity may be losing control of its defining technology.