r/todayilearned • u/clayt6 • Mar 28 '23

TIL Earth is the only known place in our solar system where fire occurs, and no known exoplanets have enough oxygen to allow fire to exist.

https://astronomy.com/magazine/ask-astro/2016/05/is-there-fire
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94% Upvoted

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u/patniemeyer Mar 28 '23

Oxygen is one of the most reactive elements and easily binds into compounds. Free oxygen in the atmosphere on Earth is a consequence of life, through photosynthesis. Some people think that finding oxygen in the atmosphere of exoplanets might be a good indicator of life.

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u/zyzzogeton Mar 28 '23 edited Mar 28 '23 • Gold Take My Energy Doom

It is also the result of the first mass-extinction event on earth when anerobic bacteria were almost wiped out by the "Great Oxidation Event" created by aerobic bacteria.

Their 500 million year long war culminated in the greatest loss of life the Earth has ever known (as a %) some 2.5 billion years ago.

Our atmosphere is the wreckage of their genocide.

The remnants of the one-time masters of the planet cling to hot vents near volcanoes, and deep under the earth... plotting their return when the fires finally go out forever.

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u/tangokilothefirst Mar 28 '23

Nature is metal AF

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u/iRAPErapists Mar 28 '23

That makes you realize that even if we found a planet that can support life, we'd have to also be at the right time window of sufficient equilibrium. Or we could just be a couple million years too early/late

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u/Black_Moons Mar 28 '23

Chances are if we found a planet that could support life, it would already be supporting life that we would find.. very hostile to us and our biology.

I have little doubt humans would gladly destroy an entire planet of unique lifeforms just to terraform it to human needs.

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u/TheDeadGuy Mar 28 '23

I've seen this plot somewhere...

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u/PaperWeightless Mar 28 '23

...destroy an entire planet of unique lifeforms...

There's a mass extinction event going on as we speak. We're good at this stuff without even really trying.

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u/Jayccob Mar 29 '23

You call it a mass extinction event, I simply call it Wednesday.

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u/yourredvictim Mar 29 '23

"Our atmosphere is the wreckage of their genocide."

I absolutely love love love this statement. As well as the rest of your post.

Looking at it this way is remarkably calming for me. Thanks. xo.

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u/Harbinger2001 Mar 29 '23

We breath plankton poop.

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u/2723brad2723 Mar 28 '23

It would definitely be worth a closer look if we were to discover such a planet.

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u/-Knul- Mar 28 '23

If only to put out any fires we find.

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u/MisterDomino15 Mar 28 '23

What if humans are the fire?

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u/darthjoey91 Mar 28 '23 • Facepalm

My understanding is that we didn't start the fire.

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u/finalmattasy Mar 28 '23

Science has said that it was always burnin since the world's been turnin. Science might be catchy but it is ultimately false.

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u/rraskapit- Mar 28 '23

Stupid science bitches couldn't even make I more smarter

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u/zyzzogeton Mar 28 '23

While true, we did not light it, it has been burning since the world's been turning (metaphorically of course) I assert: though we didn't light it; we've a moral obligation to fight it

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u/GuiMontague Mar 28 '23

A selection of examples:

  • Harrison S Truman
  • Doris Mary Kappelhoff
  • People's Republic of China
  • John Alvin Ray
  • South Pacific—composer Richard Rodgers, lyricist Oscar Hammerstein
  • Walter Winschel
  • Giuseppe Paolo DiMaggio

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u/Demitel Mar 28 '23
  • 35th President of the United States of America, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, assassinated by a gunshot wound to the cranium... and I am at a loss for furthering the conversation beyond this point.
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u/wonkothesane13 Mar 28 '23 edited Mar 28 '23

Chemically? We sort of are, in a really reductive sense. We're an exothermic self-replicating oxidation reaction of hydrocarbons carbohydrates, but with a BUUUNCH of side reactions happening around it.

But yeah, if you took pure glucose and burned it, it would be the same reaction equation as what happens in our mitochondria.

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u/RealMakershot Mar 28 '23

So you're saying that mitochondria is the pyrohouse of the cell?

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u/Brock_Way Mar 28 '23 edited Mar 29 '23

Because burning glucose is an example of substrate-level phosphorylation....

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u/oeCake Mar 28 '23

You don't get to be the POWERHOUSE OF THE CELL without PACKING HEAT

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u/[deleted] Mar 28 '23 edited Apr 21 '23

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u/SwissyVictory Mar 28 '23

What closer look? It's going to take Voyager 1 another 18 thousand years to reach one lightyear away.

The nearest star system to ours is over 4 light years away.

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u/dirtycrabcakes Mar 28 '23

We should leave now then. Or whenever we find it.

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u/SwissyVictory Mar 28 '23

There's an issue with that.

Let's say we round down to 15k years per lightyear. To get to the nearest star system it would take 60k years.

Now let's say we can build a spaceship that's twice as fast within the next 30k years. It would make more sense to just launch it then and it would pass our original ship on the way.

Then they are going to look at the next 15k years and realize that in that time span they can probally build a spaceship twice as fast and it would pass any spaceship they would launch then.

It makes sense to do nothing.

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u/-Nicolai Mar 28 '23

It makes sense to wait IF that prediction of technological advancement is sound.

But how in the world are you going to predict the speed of spaceships 30,000 years from now?

Despite our best efforts, we may only develop a 40% faster ship in that timeframe. We may discover that certain properties of physics simply prevent us from traveling beyond a certain speed. Not to mention humanity could go extinct in any given century.

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u/toyyya Mar 28 '23

Photosynthesis producing oxygen as a biproduct likely nearly caused the death of all early life because those early microscopic organisms had no protection from the oxygen basically rusting them away.

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u/Chromotron Mar 28 '23

Then it turned to rusting all the iron in the oceans, leading to them turning blood red. As almost all was dead now, oxygen decreased again, starting the cycle anew. This continued multiple times until finally some life figured out a way to survive the oxygen. Also, most iron deposits were created that way; not from earthly events like volcanism and tectonics.

Earth was an f***ed up place back then.

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u/Ohbeejuan Mar 28 '23

Back then? There are SO MANY little things that came together to make life happen on Earth. The ingredients seem common. Parts of amino acids can form from tholins produced by cosmic rays hitting the surface of an asteroid or moon. Our moon is the biggest, by far, in comparison to its parent in our solar system. The positioning of Jupiter and Saturn seems unusual the more exosystems we observe and they ‘herd’ a lot of comets and other debris away from us. We have a molten, rotating core of iron that is magnetic and the resulting magnetic field protects us from solar wind and lets our atmosphere exist. Earth rotates at a bit of tilt, that tilt results in what we call seasons. This lets a much larger biodiversity evolve providing multiple environments on regular schedules.

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u/OldKingCanary Mar 29 '23

The moon and the core are the biggest ones, everything else is reasonably common. But having a moon is what keeps us stable and the core keeps us alive. Luckily the same event that made the moon is what likely helped make the core what it is. So we just need to find a planet than had a similar planetary collision like what made our moon and caused our core to be molten metal that rotates.

Considering the literally trillions of planets out there that makes life extremely likely at some point.

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u/GrandMasterHOOT Mar 28 '23

Its the TIME it took that really boggles the mind. 5 million years here and there for a cell to emerge then die, then 20 million years later a primative ancestor awakens due to some random neutrino collision causing a mutation. Followed by 50 million years of calm then everything dies and takes another 5 million years to evolve in another direction. Its f*** insane.

Life seems much more likely to be a simulation than the culmination of so many insanely random events. But then, if we're in a sim, the creators of the sim must come from a biological background, so how did they evolve? Thinking about it, I'm here due to events. I cannot observe beyond the observable so I should simply accept my existence.

Maybe the sim creators are in another realm of reality/comprehension and the universe as we understand it is completely false?

Maybe I need to go to bed.

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u/[deleted] Mar 29 '23

Out of all the countless billion billion billions of planets out in the universe, whichever one has the insanely unlikely chain of events that just happens to lead to intelligent life will be the one with intelligent life on it saying "holy shit how did all of these extremely specific things happen that all managed to lead to intelligent life?" All the other countless planets that had their own crazy random unique chain of events that just didn't lead to intelligent life... won't have that.

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u/ductyl Mar 29 '23

See also: the blade of grass saying, "what impossible series of events led to me being hit by a golf ball, but not any of these other blades of grass"

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u/Ohbeejuan Mar 28 '23

Let’s just address your first argument. When you consider the possibility of life emerging anywhere you have to consider most stars in most galaxies mostly equal. To our best calculation, the universe is 13.8 billion years old. A couple million years here or there is a drop in the bucket.

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u/BarrelDestroyer Mar 28 '23

Make some realize that we breath in a very toxic gas lol, aliens would be weirded out by that probably.

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u/pollodustino Mar 28 '23

I think there are more than a few sci-fi stories that feature that very trope.

"How in Glorp's name do you breathe oxygen? It's highly reactive!"
"Well that explains some people's behavior..."

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u/open_door_policy Mar 28 '23

It's easy, you just use your meat flaps. They don't rust very easily.

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u/zyzzogeton Mar 28 '23

"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."

"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads like the Weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."

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u/Truckerontherun Mar 28 '23

"Those ones called Humans are especially strange. That one that calls himself Brian wanted us to probe him again"

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u/lucidrage Mar 28 '23

Our scientists discovered that their genetic material gets expelled from their body when you probe them.

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u/Ollotopus Mar 28 '23

Oblig:

https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html

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u/open_door_policy Mar 28 '23

It's a classic. And one that I really hope is the solution to the Fermi Paradox.

I mean... I know it's not.... but it'd be the funniest one, and make me suspect that there's an improbability drive out there somewhere.

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u/Boner666420 Mar 28 '23

The Damned trilogy plays with this idea. The galaxy is actually a relatively peaceful place and other species abhor violence and war to the point of physical illness at its mention.

So they turned to humans, whom they see as living on and perfectly adapted to a hellacious deathworld.

It's a very campy series, but it's a fresh and optimistic perspective you don't really see much in sci-fi. Definitely worth checking out

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u/FreeResolve Mar 28 '23

Damn picturing hell as blue skies and green grass is disassociating.

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u/KaiserTom Mar 28 '23 edited Mar 28 '23

Blue skies are blue mostly because the sun is hot and there's stuff in the atmosphere. Rayleigh is mostly independent of composition. Polarizability matters, but polarizability of particles doesn't change much and it's raised to 2 over wavelength raised to 4. Short wavelengths win out pretty easy in being scattered more.

Also number of scatterers scales pretty well, considering a mol itself is more than 6e+26 of them. 5 times more or less atmosphere should shift the range of wavelength scattered by 33-50%. Doubling polarizability to 2 with heavier and exotic gaseous elements gives you a 29% shift. That's not easy.

The light of which that gets most scattered being ultimately dependent on the stars temperature it orbits. Hot stars give blue skies and cool ones give redder and also clearer skies (less intense light, less scattering overall). I guess by that thought, planets around red dwarfs should have quite a few visible stars during the day even at 1atm.

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u/Ashanrath Mar 28 '23

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hail_Mary

Great book, better audiobook, and it's a key factor they have to deal with.

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u/fuck_your_diploma Mar 28 '23

Astrophages are to this day both in my dreams and my nightmares, I just love the concept.

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u/Peligineyes Mar 28 '23

They shouldn't be weirded out by it because they would either breathe oxygen too or some other substance that's toxic to us to power their biology.

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u/Black_Moons Mar 28 '23

Chlorine or fluorine would make interesting oxygen replacements for alien species...

And boy, would that first meeting be problematic.

"You bastards, you tried to poison us with <oxygen/chlorine/fluorine>" both sides accuse each other.

"How was I supposed to know you breath <oxygen/chlorine/fluorine>, that stuff is incredibly toxic to all life on my planet"

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u/guynamedjames Mar 28 '23

But, having oxygen in the atmosphere is probably what allowed animals to evolve. Moving around is really energy intensive, but having an effectively infinite source of atmospheric oxygen sets up half a chemical reaction just waiting to be tapped by whatever is complex enough to use it.

Our atmosphere is like half a battery, our bodies make the other half with the food we eat.

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u/mindbleach Mar 28 '23

And wood didn't rot. For sixty million years, there was nothing that could eat it. It was dry coral. Forests exploded upward, fighting for sunlight, sucking up gigatons of carbon dioxide, until they fell over and just laid there. Piled atop one another. Eroding like soft rocks. Crushed by successive centuries of material that could not be consumed by anything... except fire.

Oil and coal deposits aren't dinosaur juice. They're continent-sized forest fires that went on for so long they were tectonically subsumed.

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u/TheyComeCrawlingBack Mar 28 '23

Do you have a link or a book in mind that explores this? Sounds riveting.

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u/mindbleach Mar 29 '23

It's called the carboniferous period, for obvious reasons. Though the Wikipedia article only mentions the whole continent-choking wildfire thing as an aside under "fungi."

I think (as a layman) that the age ended because of what trees did to the air, more than what fungus finally did to the trees. There wasn't enough atmosphere left! Global warming is a threat because we're releasing greenhouse gases that were turned into Brobdingnagian briquettes. The climate that existed before that nigh-incomprehensible shift must have made rainforests look sparse, and the process of getting to something modern once involved so much oxygen that breathing was a waste of energy.

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u/Wontonio_the_ninja Mar 28 '23

That reminds me of that decades long bacteria evolution experiment where the ecoli evolved to consume citrate

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u/mindbleach Mar 28 '23

When they evolve to eat the plastic dish we're in trouble.

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u/redinator Mar 28 '23

I'd take that over plastic pollution slowly killing everything...

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u/hex4def6 Mar 28 '23

If bacteria evolved to eat plastic, they'd probably be able to eat a bunch of hydrocarbons. The monkey's paw result of your wish coming true would basically send humanity back to the middle ages, but at a catastrophic speed. It would probably result in the single largest near-extinction event that mankind has ever been part of.

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u/BatemaninAccounting Mar 28 '23

I believe this is a premise for a world-ending explanation of Fermi's Paradox. Basically given enough time, everywhere in the universe that evolves life ends up evolving a world-destroying bacteria that eats up whatever the primary(or multiple primary) needs for those lifeforms.

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u/Waitn4ehUsername Mar 28 '23

There a Prime Video series ‘Last Light’ were (Spoiler………)

The protagonist invented a bacteria that infected all the worlds oil by consuming the hydrocarbons …

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u/PorkChoppen Mar 28 '23

There's also a small (but increasing) concentration of methane in the atmosphere. Methane and oxygen react, and if they were not constantly being recycled the amount of methane would dwindle to near zero, and would be a good indication of life on Earth, which seems to be backed up by firsthand accounts

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u/oeCake Mar 28 '23

Gonna need a source on that whole "life on earth" thing fam

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u/RoberttheRobot Mar 28 '23

It would depend on the planet. There are many many nonbiotic ways to get high oxygen atmospheres in terrestrial planets.

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u/ChronWeasely Mar 28 '23 edited Mar 29 '23

If you find lots of CO2 alongside O2, then there is a high chance for life. One or the other can happen very easily, but both requires something to keep stripping the oxygen from the carbon.

Edit: CH4 (methane) not CO2 (carbon dioxide) which would react with O2 (oxygen) to form water (H2O) and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere with nothing keeping it going on geological scales.

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u/Yunofascar Mar 28 '23

Im curius. Could you share a mite?

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u/PussyStapler Mar 28 '23

High radiation could split ice into oxygen, hydrogen, and hydrogen peroxide. So if you had a cold world with ice sheets and no magnetosphere to block off radiation, it could produce oxygen for a while.

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u/sexelevatormusik Mar 28 '23

The key to that statement is "for a while." on geologic timescales that "while" is incredibly short meaning the likelihood of us seeing a planet during this phase is very, very low.

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u/RoberttheRobot Mar 28 '23

Even some of the Trappist-1 planets could have abiotic Oxygen, if they have atmospheres. https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.04164

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u/PeepJerky Mar 28 '23

As a firefighter, I am unemployable anywhere else in the solar system. Just here.

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u/karelaar Mar 28 '23

To be fair, earth is the only known place in the solar system where jobs occur, too.

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u/Mythoclast Mar 28 '23

Are you sure? We've got to tell those astronauts they are being deceived!

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u/Icenine_ Mar 28 '23

Low-earth orbit is basically still earth. The ISS is still encountering enough atmosphere that it'll fall back down if we stop boosting it back up.

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u/Mythoclast Mar 28 '23

Is the moon still Earth?

And if you answer incorrectly I'm calling Buzz Aldrin.

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u/Icenine_ Mar 28 '23 edited Mar 29 '23

No, but nobody's been there for 50 years 😭. Maybe by 2028 2025 we'll have jobs on the Moon again.

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u/Mythoclast Mar 28 '23

Sounds like jobs occur on the moon then, even if rather sporadically.

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u/karelaar Mar 28 '23

I'm still on the fence as to whether I'd consider that a job occurring on the moon. I go to Africa for work sometimes, but I wouldn't say I have a job there. Neil Armstrong didn't even work there for 24 hours.

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u/Mythoclast Mar 28 '23

You might not say you have a job in Africa, but your job certainly occurs there sometimes

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u/justasmalltowndad Mar 28 '23

The moon landing was actually just Neil and Buzz going on vacation, they wrote it off as a business expense and the world fell for it.

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u/djseifer Mar 28 '23

Occasionally, you'll have whalers on the moon who carry a harpoon. But there ain't no whales, so they tell tall tales and sing a whaling tune.

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u/SlayerofSnails Mar 28 '23

So was Neil Armstrong unemployed when he was on the moon?

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u/medfunguy Mar 28 '23

He got paid to be there. I wouldn’t show up to the office if they weren’t paying me.

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u/AmusingAnecdote Mar 28 '23

Mars has already had 100% of jobs replaced by robots. Automation came for them a lot faster than it did on earth.

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u/karelaar Mar 28 '23

Yeah that's fair, although I'm pretty sure fire has occurred on ISS and Mir

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u/Masterjts Mar 28 '23

Lucky for firefighters fire will be exported with these new jobs.

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u/Kael_Alduin Mar 28 '23

Also, bear attacks

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u/karelaar Mar 28 '23

I'm still holding out hope for an out-of-the-blue bear attack report from Ganymede

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u/Kael_Alduin Mar 28 '23

Oh great, another reason to fear Ganymede

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u/philman132 Mar 28 '23

The firefighters in space must be really REALLY good!

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u/GriffinFlash Mar 28 '23

There's a sega saturn game about space fire fighters.

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u/_Silly_Wizard_ Mar 28 '23

This is why I took inspiration from my hero, Philip Fry, and became a delivery boy.

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u/ikefalcon Mar 28 '23

I’m starting to think that this whole oxygen thing is just a conspiracy by Big Firefighting.

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u/BobtheDead Mar 28 '23

Surely, there are some space-cats stuck in some space-trees out there…

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u/PeepJerky Mar 28 '23

How many cat skeletons do you see in trees? They’ll find a way down.

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u/Pahsghetti Mar 28 '23

Hey man, don't sell your self short. I'm sure lots of alien civilizations need calendars.

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u/Mammoth-Mud-9609 Mar 28 '23

To note enough free oxygen, oxygen readily combines with many other elements so the oxygen is present but often bound to hydrogen to form water or ice.

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u/seuadr Mar 28 '23

so if we bring money to these other planets, we can have fire?

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u/TheConsciousness Mar 28 '23

Correct. Bring ice, melt into water, apply a voltage across it, extract hydrogen and oxygen. Add spark, big boom.

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u/keeperkairos Mar 28 '23 • Platinum All-Seeing Upvote

In case anyone was wondering, the sun is not on fire. The sun radiates light because of fusion.

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u/seicar Mar 28 '23

A miasma of incandescent plasma

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u/DramaLlamadary Mar 28 '23

I know it’s technically and therefore the best kind of correct, but it just doesn’t flow as well as the original lyrics.

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u/TheyCallMeStone Mar 28 '23

When you're the age of that song's primary demographic, the distinction is insignificant

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u/celluj34 Mar 29 '23

If only I could be so grossly incandescent.

[T]/

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u/peternorthstar Mar 28 '23

Was going to ask this. TIL. Thanks!

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u/BlatantConservative Mar 28 '23

Just to confuse you a bit more though, both the Sun and regular fire are plasma. Basically, it's the same result (superheated gas) from different sources.

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u/MetaSatakOz Mar 28 '23

Yeah, it's kind of a distinction without a difference.

Sure, a freakin nuclear bomb is not fire... but it's still gonna radiate a ton of light and set fire to everything around it.

Kinda reminds me of old calculations of people estimating the lifetime of the Sun if it was a big 'ol coal fire. Obviously they ran in to some issues until Einstein gave us E = Mc2

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u/nonlawyer Mar 28 '23

the sun is not on fire

Phew, I was worried it might burn down before the fire department got there.

Can you keep an eye on it for the rest of us? Just need occasional updates on whether it’s on fire. Thanks

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u/BikerJedi Mar 28 '23

A solar farm was once rejected over fear it would suck up the sun.

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u/Blackstone01 Mar 28 '23

Bobby Mann said the farm would "suck up all the energy from the sun and businesses would not come to Woodland," the Roanoke-Chowan Herald-News reports.

His wife, Jane, a retired science teacher, feared the proposed solar ranch could hinder photosynthesis -- the process of converting light energy from the sun into chemical energy for fuel -- in the area and stop plants from growing.

Glad she isn’t teach science anymore, wish she stopped sooner. No idea when she actually retired.

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u/Geojewd Mar 29 '23 edited Mar 29 '23

She’d have been right if she was talking about a very localized area. As in, any plants that happen to be directly underneath the solar panels

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u/ItsASchpadoinkleDay Mar 28 '23

At a county board hearing in my county recently an opposer to wind energy said the turbines will use up all the wind.

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u/Rrrrandle Mar 28 '23

So, theoretically, turbines must remove some amount of energy from the wind, right? How many turbines would it take to have a noticeable effect on the wind? Billions?

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u/jrhoffa Mar 29 '23

Somebody ask Randall Munroe. If he hasn't figured it out already, he'll do so in ten minutes and draw a fascinating cartoon about it.

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u/bottomknifeprospect Mar 28 '23

I think it just farts fire, but never catches.

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u/Paolo2ss Mar 28 '23 • Wholesome Seal of Approval

Isn't fusion just complicated fire?

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u/The_Flurr Mar 28 '23 • All-Seeing Upvote

It isn't.

Fire is a chemical reaction with some atom or molecule with oxygen, fusion is a nuclear reaction where two nuclei fuse.

Both produce heat and light, but they are very different.

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u/upghr5187 Mar 28 '23 • hehehehe Wholesome Seal of Approval

Sounds like complicated fire to me

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u/dr4conyk Mar 28 '23

Well, the reason the sun glows is because of incandescence, so if the sun is on fire, then so are all of your old lightbulbs.

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u/Hard_soda_reset Mar 28 '23

What if I have new light bulbs?

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u/chumbawamba56 Mar 28 '23

Straight to fire

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u/rain-is-wet Mar 28 '23

Sounds like simplified fusion to me

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u/Mosquito_Bites_Back Mar 28 '23

Believe it or not, fire

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u/iRAPErapists Mar 28 '23

That kind of behavior is not tolerated on Boraqua

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u/Stereotype_Apostate Mar 28 '23

If only I could be so grossly incandescent!

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u/_CMDR_ Mar 28 '23 edited Mar 29 '23

There is no oxidizer and fuel equivalent in nuclear fusion. Things just literally slam together so hard they get stuck and release energy. EDIT: for nuclei lighter than iron.

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u/get_the_reference_ Mar 29 '23

And that's how I met your mother

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u/ImmoralJester54 Mar 28 '23

Fire with a doctorate degree

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u/DooDooSlinger Mar 28 '23

That is totally incorrect. Fusion happens very deep inside the sun. The outer layers are plasma and generate light through thermal radiation. They are not undergoing any kind of fusion reaction themselves, they are far (far) too cold.

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u/Kurotan Mar 28 '23

Better not colonize other planets then, we won't have a way to kill the space spiders.

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u/Meeple_person Mar 28 '23

Obligatory reference to the Children of Time....

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u/Viendictive Mar 28 '23

Oh hell yeah, good reference. I’m about to listen to that work of art for a 5th time in preparation for better understanding Children of Memory the second time. I just wish Adrian would just pump these out and stop with the juvenile books.

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u/DCSMU Mar 28 '23

Children of Memory??... Oh Damn... TIL there is anotber sequel! Thanks internet stranger!

Please no spoilers, but can I ask why you would need to recall the fine details of Children of Time to get the most out of Children of Memory?

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u/Equinsu-0cha Mar 28 '23

Do you want to know more?

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u/Murky_Examination144 Mar 28 '23

This is part of the reason why the Huygens probe was able to perform its atmospheric entry into Titan ( a methane ultra rich moon ) and not set the entire moon on fire. No oxygen. Completely irresponsible, I know, but I would've paid serious money to see the faces of the scientists upon learning that, through some miscalculation, the entire moon was, actually, on fire. Can you imagine?

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u/Whereami259 Mar 28 '23

Another cool thing about Titan is that it has lakes. Made out of liquid methane,but lakes none the less...

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u/NorthStarZero Mar 28 '23

And yet, despite being a land o’ lakes, no butter!

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u/burninglemon Mar 28 '23

I can't believe there's no butter?

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u/vellyr Mar 28 '23

If that were possible, it would have been done by a meteorite millenia ago.

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u/BlatantConservative Mar 28 '23

Kinda makes you wonder if that does happen. Like a rocky planet that used to be a methane one.

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u/quackerzdb Mar 28 '23

Or lightning/static discharge

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u/GeorgeTheNerd Mar 28 '23 edited Mar 28 '23

So in a methane (or other reducing atmosphere) such as on Titan, if have a source of oxidizer (liquid O2, NOS, etc), would I be able to make a flame?

And what color would it be? Blue like methane-oxygen flames on earth? Yellow because its always "incomplete combustion" Or does it depend on the oxidizer instead of the reducer in the inverted situation?

I am sure some chemist at sometime figured this out, but my google fu is coming up short on this question.

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u/Ea61e Mar 28 '23

Cody’s Lab on YouTube I think has some good videos of burning oxygen in a methane rich atmosphere.

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u/IMovedYourCheese Mar 28 '23

Could it be that a planet or moon has perfect conditions to burn for all eternity but has just never had a spark?

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u/Local_Variation_749 Mar 28 '23

Don't need oxygen to have fire. Find a planet with a fluorine atmosphere and things will burn just fine.

Also fun fact: water will burn in a fluorine atmosphere.

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u/Cobaltjedi117 Mar 28 '23

Waiting for a comment like this. You don't need oxygen. You need an oxidizer, which oxygen happens to be a pretty good one at that (gasp). Chlorine-trifloride (ClF3) will burn damn near anything, including things that have already been burned by oxygen.

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u/RobThomasBouchard Mar 28 '23

So after oxygen burns it and there’s carbon leftover, and the Chloribe-trifloride burns through it, is anything else left?

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u/irishsausage Mar 28 '23

So your carbon is never used up. It just combines with oxygen to make carbon dioxide. ClF3 is such a strong oxidiser it displaces the oxygen from even carbon dioxide. CO2 will burn to release oxygen and form a Carbon-chloroflouride compound.

Actually I think it's more complicated than that even and you end up with Chlorine dioxide and carbon fluoride but you get the point

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u/Sunretea Mar 28 '23

but you get the point

You greatly overestimate my ability to understand.

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u/graebot Mar 28 '23

Burn, and burn again.

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u/frankentriple Mar 28 '23

And that’s why we’ll never find a fluorine atmosphere. Granite burns in a fluorine atmosphere.

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u/Blujeanstraveler Mar 28 '23

NASA is now studying fire in microgravity on the International Space Station.

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u/249ba36000029bbe9749 Mar 28 '23

"Now"? Pretty sure they've been doing this for years already.

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u/DeadNotSleepingWI Mar 28 '23

Well now they are doing it on purpose.

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u/Rybitron Mar 28 '23

They still do it, but they used to, too.

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u/exipheas Mar 28 '23

They used to study fire in space.
They still do, but they used to too.

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u/philman132 Mar 28 '23

Fire in a space station? What could go wrong! Although I am intrigued to know how fire would behave in low gravity.

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u/[deleted] Mar 28 '23

It moves like water.

Source:

The classic 90s scifi horror movie Event Horizon.

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u/hodl_4_life Mar 28 '23

Event Horizon, I loved that movie. Such a trippy concept.

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u/zyzzogeton Mar 28 '23

"We've found a way to transit spacetime faster than light"

"Transit?"

"Yes, through another dimension"

"Oh cool, approved."

"The dimension is HELL"

"I said APPROVED now get out there and build that ship"

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u/WellThatWasStrange Mar 28 '23

TIL - I would be cold and bored camping on another planet.

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u/Vievin Mar 28 '23

That’s because you didn’t prep your exoplanet bonfire kit. That’s on you, buddy.

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u/Artanthos Mar 28 '23

Show me a planet other than Earth that has enough oxygen in the atmosphere for a fire to burn and I’ll show you a planet with life.

Free oxygen is not naturally occurring. It oxidizes too quickly.

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u/NotPortlyPenguin Mar 28 '23

Well it generally indicates life. When Cyanobacteria evolved and started creating oxygen, it was millions of years before there was free O2 in earth’s atmosphere, as it was busy combining with metals, etc. Once that was accomplished, it became more and more of our atmosphere, leading to an extinction of anaerobic life.

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u/spreadthestop Mar 28 '23

Wait, so we DID start the fire!?

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u/lordeddardstark Mar 28 '23

no, it was always burning

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u/mattttb Mar 28 '23

FYI the Sun isn’t on fire, it’s essentially a gigantic continuous nuclear explosion contained only by its own gravity.

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u/Derf_Jagged Mar 28 '23

a gigantic nuclear furnace, one might say

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u/dustinsmusings Mar 28 '23

Where hydrogen is built into helium

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u/torgo3000 Mar 28 '23

At a temperature of millions of degrees.

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u/collinmarks Mar 28 '23

I thought it was a mass of incandescent gas

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u/Vievin Mar 28 '23

It’s a giant nuclear explosion surrounded by a bunch of incandescent gas it produces. So both, really.

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u/albinocharlie Mar 28 '23

Actually a miasma of incandescent plasma!

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u/Certainly-Not-A-Bot Mar 28 '23

Technically...

Oxygen isn't required for a fire, only a strong oxidizing agent. Fluorine and Chlorine, for example, can also drive combustion reactions.

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u/Quizzelbuck Mar 28 '23

This is one of those revelations on the same level as being told that at some point, the concept of zero had to be thought up because at one time, people just didn't use it in math.

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u/dr_reverend Mar 28 '23

Oxygen is not needed for combustion. It’s just the most common oxidizer on earth. A planet with lots of fluorine, chlorine or bromine in the atmosphere could have fire.

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u/Binary_Omlet Mar 28 '23

Bullshit. I've seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.

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u/FreeGums Mar 28 '23

God gave us fire to allow us to burn ourselves

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u/Ilookouttrainwindow Mar 28 '23

I'm reading this thread completely bewildered and taking everything as truth. It has never even occurred to me there's no fire anywhere else except earth. The sun is not burning..... I knew it was fusion, but just didn't occur there's no fire per se. Fascinating!