Nor can I, a lot of the time.

I'm actually an optimist by nature. This is just reality.

We don't have hope. There's nothing to hope for. Hope requires the possibility of salvation, or it's just delusion.

We don't have hope. There's nothing to hope for. Hope requires the possibility of salvation, or it's just delusion.

Poor, disabled, queer, etc. You know, regular people. Working class. Not rich.

My opinion becomes extremely relevant when stuff like this is used by those in power to justify their exploitative actions toward me and people like me.

Hope is cheap. It can be a great motivator, yes. But this has nothing to do with hope. Hope would be painting the landscape around the lines of the bars. This is 100% about ignoring reality.

One paints a picture of a real and present issue, the other paints exactly what the people who put them in a cage want them to think about.

There are situations that would seem to make that happen. Evolving underwater, for example. Without fire, it's really hard to imagine a species developing beyond the basic tool use we see in dolphins. Fortunately, it's not likely a species would develop much more than dolphin-level intelligence without fire, either. Brains, especially the complex, wrinkly brains we humans have, are really expensive to build and maintain. That's why so many species invest in claws and teeth instead. Dentin and keratin are pretty cheap. But if you use your brain to figure out how to get more nutrients (especially fats and proteins) from your food by cooking it, then evolution selects for that brain. That's part of how our brains evolved. It's hard to see how a species could leverage high brainpower to increase nutrition from food to that point without fire. Maybe they could do it by fermenting meat, but that would require other advancements that I just don't think are likely.

AFAIK, there is no guarantee that fossil fuels will form in a life-bearing planet's geological history. But it's really unlikely not to. On Earth, the initial explosion of photosynthetic life took large amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere. With nothing initially eating it, layer upon layer of dead biomass was laid down, and buried over geological time. When some alien microbe first figures out how to photosynthesize, it would inherently outcompete every other life-form on the planet, expanding far too fast for anything else to eat it. Even if the input of energy to the planetary ecosystem is something other than light - geothermal heat, perhaps, or some kind of chemical energy, or even radioactive decay - that energy will be stored in biomass, and unless it gets burned, that biomass will become fossil fuels.

The second possibility just doesn't make sense. It may not be something we recognize as plants, but an ecosystem has to have autotrophs of some kind. Something that uses an ambient energy gradient to turn the inorganic materials into more living stuff. And that stuff is inherently a store of energy.

Now, if your question is simply, "what would the chemistry be, if not like ours?" that's a different question, and one that xenobiologists are trying to figure out right now.