First, there were industrial nations which were autocracies and lacked significant middle class. For example, Russian Empire of early 19 century. So the argument “no industry without middle class” is simply wrong.
Second, this chain of logic relies on every alien species having such social group as nobility. This is utterly absurd. For heritable social status, it is necessary that upper classes have the same (or lower) number of (surviving) children as commoners, otherwise in a few generations everybody would be a nobleman. This only happened because humans are poorly adapted to civilized life. For civilizations that exist for millions of years, evolution would definitely fix this.
First, there were industrial nations which were autocracies and lacked significant middle class. For example, Russian Empire of early 19 century. So the argument “no industry without middle class” is simply wrong.
Second, this chain of logic relies on every alien species having such social group as nobility. This is utterly absurd. For heritable social status, it is necessary that upper classes have the same (or lower) number of (surviving) children as commoners, otherwise in a few generations everybody would be a nobleman. This only happened because humans are poorly adapted to civilized life. For civilizations that exist for millions of years, evolution would definitely fix this.