The Oxygen Bottleneck: Technological Alien Worlds Need Fire
supercluster.com
supercluster.com
Fishbowl planets are something along the lines of: the outer shell is ice, but possibly filled with water, meaning there might be intelligent life that developed and thriving inside the internal ocean, but would likely never have a way to contact us.
But, can a fishbowl planet have underwater volcanos they could use as a heat source to forge tools needed to create more advanced technology? Or do ice ball planets not have a warm internal core?
It feels like a kind of a parochial and underdeveloped argument though, basically taking it for granted that the only path to a technological civilization is the one that humanity took, and then arguing that that path is intrinsically tied to oxygen.
Something doesn't need to be a blocker in the small to be blocker at large.
I.e. anything that introduces more friction, or is less efficient, for making progress could hamper technological accumulation.
Clearly for general life on Earth, water was a tremendous enabler - although surely other forms of life without water must be possible - but perhaps much less likely.
Likewise for technology, fire is a tremendous enabler. So much of chemistry and material structure is temperature dependent. Not having a similarly flexible way to adjust heat over a wide range would make vast categories of advances too costly to be immediately beneficial, and therefore much less likely to be explored.
I'm not convinced a clever species couldn't find another route.
Also, our sun is freakishly stable.
We are very, very rare.