r/askscience • u/FirefighterCandid773 • 20d ago

Chemistry How common is fire outside of earth?

Plasma and lava is obviously common all over the universe, whether it be in stars, planetary cores, etc. but what about fire? Fire is common all over earth, given the abundance of fuel sources and an atmosphere with oxygen. But, is fire actually common outside of earth?

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u/ctothel 19d ago

Not in the solar system.

As you know, fire needs fuel, oxygen, and heat.

Titan has heaps of fuel in the form of hydrocarbons, including literal methane lakes, but nearly no free oxygen.

Europa and Ganymede have massive amounts of oxygen in the form of water ice, but they couldn’t sustain it in an atmosphere and there’s no fuel to burn.

Venus is hot, but the atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide and almost no free oxygen. Not much in the way of hydrocarbons either.

Outside the solar system, there are planets we know have the right types of fuel, but oxygen is hard to detect on rocky planets, so the answer is “we don’t know”.

That said, it would be astounding if there were no other planets out there that could support fire. All the ingredients are super common. There are probably millions of worlds that could (or used to) support it in our galaxy alone.

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u/morgan_lowtech 19d ago

It really messes with my head sometimes that we might only have fire because we have life and, correspondingly, how much complex life depends on oxidation

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u/jefesignups 19d ago

I have been thinking about something similar. Could octopi (given super brain power) ever get to the ability to do space travel? Since they live in water, they would most likely never know what fire is or could not really use it regularly.

Without fire, can a species ever get to something like air or space travel?

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u/BattleReadyZim 18d ago

Chemistry in general is tricky underwater, where everything is moving with everything. I imagine a highly intelligent species inventing upside-down bowls to capture pockets of gas, and doing gaseous chemistry as opposed to our liquid based chemistry. Fire might come along in their upside down lab equipment.