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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Nellisir" data-source="post: 6255738" data-attributes="member: 70">Right. According the all-knowing wikipedia, which was all I had time to look at tonight, fire-use goes back somewhere between 200,000 and 1.2 million years, with 400K being pretty solid right now. 200K would put it out of H. sapiens, and into very late H. erectus. I forget where things are with neandertals; I think there's evidence for fire-use there.  1.2 million puts it way back into solid H. erectus; no neandertals, no sapiens.Right, exactly. Is fire-use causation of humanity, or consequence? Is it a tool, or more than a tool?  Ants don't have radio either, but not many people would argue radio is our defining feature - it's a tool we use.  I'm not saying anything with communication and socialization is a civilization; I'm saying a civilization has to have communication and socialization. So not all human-level intelligences are going to form civilizations, because not all of them will a) communicate and b) socialize.The weird exemption may be AIs. Above a certain point, I fail to see what would keep two AIs from becoming one (it's all just code, and given sufficient processing power and storage, you can run all the code you want), at which point you might well end up with something that could reasonably be called a solar mono-intelligence, and mimic a civilization.</blockquote>