I don't give PBS enough credit for the knowledge, inspiration and entertainment they have provided to me my entire life. The countless people who have and continued to work to build PBS into the most reliable source of educational entertainment have my thanks.
The fact that water, fire and life are so interconnected and reliant upon each other to exist on this planet feels poetic in a way. Water creates life, life creates fire, fire consumes life, water douses fire, life is reborn from the ashes of the old.
I live in Kansas, and this is exactly why we do controlled burns of our fields and grasslands every year. The Flint Hills are my favorite. In winter all the grasses die, in the spring, we do controlled burns, and by later spring, early summer, they are the most beautiful green hills. Kansas doesn't have a lot going for it, but driving through the Flint Hills in late spring/early summer is definitely something to see. You can truly imagine native peoples living alongside the massive herds of buffalo, or imagine people traversing the seemingly neverending prarie in covered wagons.
@@pavel9652Sure, ‘something new’, of course, but a big, perspective-altering, unexpected thing like only earth having fire? That was the point. If it’s so easy for you to find videos (or papers) with ideas like that, I wish you would condescend to make a playlist of them for those of us pitifully watching the wrong videos. I’ll give you an honest answer as to how many of them are on par. Or, could it be you’re just too young and/or ignorant to get it?
@@anjonde4086 "a big, perspective-altering, unexpected thing (...) I’ll give you an honest answer as to how many of them are on par." - it is a totally subjective experience "Or, could it be you’re just too young and/or ignorant to get it?" - be careful with patronizing statements towards me; you aren't engaging in ego battle, are you?
@@pavel9652You’re right, I was acting largely out of base egotism, I’m sorry. You’re comment was itself so patronizing that I wanted to retaliate by doing the same. I mean it doesn’t get more patronizing (and subjective!) than telling us we’re “watching the wrong videos” while, in my opinion, being overly literal and totally missing the point. I stand by the substance of what I said, but I should have assumed you didn’t intend to be patronizing (unlike me, eheh) and that your misunderstanding was honest (if you’re just too young to get it, thats not your fault). I didn’t have to be sarcastic and confrontational and gross-internet about it and I apologize for that.
@@anjonde4086 It was a paraphrase of saying "if you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room". Maybe it was little patronizing, but it was hard to avoid. I didn't miss the point, and I know what he meant. Yet, I still think he isn't pushing the limits of learning enough. On the subject, what do you think about video "56 Seconds to Live" from USHST? "The 56-second time period is based on a USHST study of 221 fatal helicopter accidents that occurred from 2009 to 2019."
I think the societal misconceptions with what fire actually is is very overlooked, and what it and plasma and glowing-hot liquid metals are should be more clearly covered in school
Just to be clear, fire isn't a type of plasma. It *can* have plasma if it were hot enough to ionize atoms and be electrically conductive. Most candles and wood fires are not hot enough to create plasma. The common understanding is that fire is hot glowing gas, much like hot metals glow when sufficiently heated.
I think they are in Canada because i immediately chuckled at the headline and mockingly thought "maybe because were the ones with oxygen...like some public school stuff?"😂
@@garettdoornwaard4822 Keep chuckling. There are plenty of planets with oxygen. What they don't have is both oxygen and fuel, because they lack a cycle by which both can be continually produced, that is, life.
I've always wondered how grasslands could be the dominant biome for an area without it getting taken over by trees. This makes so much sense. I already kind of knew this, I live in an area where land burning is a seasonal phenomenon land owners do (its in a controlled setting) but I really didn't know why. And I had no clue this was an evolved adaptation to benefit the grass. Evolution is crazy and I feel like we as laymen humans forget about the plants but they do some cool stuff.
the world is truly an interesting place, I think we just fail to see it because we are pre occupied by other things such as socmeds, work, studies etc.
The fact that always blows my mind is how long it took for grass to even show up. Like the most basic kind of plant you could imagine, a leaf in the ground, only evolved around 55 million years ago. Yes there were grass-like plants back then, but grass itself, like the kind you see every day, didn't show up until so recently.
Degreed only means you memorized enough things to pass the final at the end of the year. As someone who works in chemicals, I know this idea of fire needing organic matter to burn is simply not true
@@BagBreakerMMA Not necessarily organic, no, but surely would have to compose of the same elements (in same variation) to release (x)CO2 & (x)H2O? But yeah, as a Biologist - I hate the presentation here personally. It makes a lot of presumptions from the get-go, including that only our planet can even support life in the first place.
@@videogamesarecool9280 It's more that they said; "It isn't the only watery planet in the universe, but it is the only fiery planet" Which doesn't mention about "known planets" just outright stated it's the only one. So far, we've been to like two planets. Including our own. So it's a bit of a bold statement to make.
Pretty neat! I hadn’t ever really thought about this even though in hindsight, it seems very logical and obvious. Reminds me a lot of Avatar: The Last Airbender and how Firebending is actually the element of life - not destruction. Without controlled burnings of grasslands and the death of old, decaying plants, new life would never have the chance to flourish.
Another groundbreaking fact from this video: PBS is now being sponsored by a software company who’s main selling point is that it gives people access to porn in states where its blocked. Lol
@therobn The tens of thousands of animals that were vaporized within a thousand kilometer radius around the Yucatan peninsula, as well as the many millions more that were burned alive within a couple thousand kilometers by earth's mantle literally being ejected into space and raining down again in an apocalyptic hellfire of unprecedented proportions in the history of life, to not even mention the billions of plants meeting their demise as molten stone set ablaze entire continents, will be glad to hear that there was no such thing as fire, before mankind discovered it 🤡
2:29 i like it when the hosts enjoy the scripts that they write. gives everyone a bit more voice. Wood is rarer in this universe than Diamond, because only Earth has wood.
I love this. Not only is it interesting for children to learn about, it appealed to me and I'm 70!! Puts a whole new spin on fire; something we take for granted on our planet.
I don't know why but watching this video makes me long to see the days before I ever existed. Not to experience or go through it, but just to observe it and just wonder and wander more.
I always wonder when we will go and just do super realistic simulations of all these time periods … to entertain, educate and also study possibilities. Maybe one day we can take a simulated walk through those times.
that has been one of my deepest desires since I was a child. Be able to go to any period in time before human history as an observer, to gaze upon what we have never been able to.
I would love to see an episode about lichens: their evolution, when the symbiont relation may have appeared, if they have made genetic studies and if they have learned something from them. I always had the idea that lichens have much to say about the emergence of life on land.
I’m in school for natural resources and they’re one of my favourite things to learn about. They are pretty much architects of nature as they break down rock from barren stony landscapes to produce soil which leads to forests, this process is known as ecological succession and it’s very interesting.
This makes me wonder what other kind of things are possible on other planets. If fire is unique to our earth like conditions, what about other things? The universe is constantly amazing.
Oil and coal is also probably fairly unique to Earth, since they largely formed from our specific mass extinction events. It's very possible that, if intelligent life does exist out there, their Industrial Revolution would look very different or may not happen at all
The most amazing basic object that could be grasped might be ice fragments from high pressure planets. As ice is compressed, it becomes incredibly hard, like stone. Like cold crystal. It can be set into lava and not melt. But if you took these cold diamonds out of their high pressure atmosphere, they'd melt (I think).
@@oriontigley5089 yeah you're so right! I read somewhere that as we keep depleting our fossil fuel reserves, we're making it so a hypothetical intelligent life down the line, or future humans, would never be able to industrialize. Wild!!
For fire, you need a chemical to accept electrons and a chemical to give electrons. Oxygen, chlorine and fluorine give electrons really well and you can have fires involving those, I don’t think most other elements are as reactive in that way. There are loads of chemicals that can give electrons to them, fuels. But there’s not really anything weird and new out there as far as flashy reactions like that like you are thinking. Not going to come across some new phenomena.
Excellent video. The only thing I would have said differently is "Earth is the only planet in our solar system that has fire." We don't know if any of the exoplanets (in other star systems) throughout the universe have fire.
You can ask German and Japanese survivors of World War II, they can give you an idea of what it would have been like. Specifically, people who lived in Dresden and Tokyo.
@@TheRogueX You mean the German and Japanese invaders who were quite happy to destroy everything in their path before finally refusing to surrender until their countries were bombed into submission.........
Gosh, I feel like my mental concept of fire is stuck in the medieval era! The fact that both decomposing organisms AND fire didn't exist since the dawn of life and came about far later just blows my mind!
Wow, I'd never considered the fact that fire wouldn't exist without something carbon-based to burn. Thanks for expanding my horizons and helping me to reframe my understanding!
There are some inorganic substances that can burn, too. Sulfur for example would yield you a little blue fire when ignited. Keeping in mind that accumulations of sulfur usually build up at vulcanic areas, this could easily happen. It's more the oxygen in the atmosphere that enables the formation of fires, since you have to have an oxidizing agent to burn stuff ^^
fire has nothing to do with carbon, it's electromagnetic releasing electromagnetic energy in the spectrum of light and inferred , just consider it a very slow atomic bomb
Of course! Rocks can't burn. Only things that have lived can burn. It makes so much sense. Why didn't I think of that. I love your vids. I love learning this stuff. Thanks.
@@leewagner4474yeah, so do a lot of compounds that can exist without living organisms (even if they are much more common in their presence). I get the feeling that fire isn't necessarily ABSENT in the rest of the universe, just A LOT less common
@@leewagner4474 True, but magnesium is pretty rare in a pure metallic form on earth or anywhere else that we know of. And it oxidizes and that layer actually protects it from further oxygen exposure. If you had oxygen, metallic magnesium, and some kind of ignition source like a current, it could happen, but it's probably very rare.
This is something we are missing in modern forest management that has been a contributing factor to the intense wildfire burns we are seeing!!! It's just one piece of the puzzle of course, but the importance of regenerative burning cannot be overstated!
True enough. Smokey the Bear notwithstanding, it turns out we can't prevent forest fires, only postpone them. Then when they do finally happen, the damage is pretty severe.
This is a great point. Fire needs reactive oxidiser and reactive fuel. (Pedantic nitpick: despite the name oxygen is not the only nor the most powerful oxidiser.) The problem is that reactive things, well, react and so they are never naturally available in large not yet reacted quantities. Life is the exception in that it reverses that process, it uses energy to turn less reactive compounds into more reactive ones (endothermic chemical reactions) so that it can use them as building blocks or react them back together to get the stored energy back. Photosynthesis is a pump that takes energy from the Sun's light to perform these reactions, transforming that light energy into usable chemical energy. When aerobic life burns sugar with oxygen to use that energy, the term "burns" is pretty literal. As a side effect, the surplus oxygen and unburnt fuel can result in plain old fire. Although, it might be possible for fire to exist without life. There are endothermic reactions that can occur due to heat without any organic help, so there might be planets where extreme solar radiation or internal heat affect naturally occurring compounds and result in endothermic reactions that produce oxidiser+fuel, which then burn back together, completing a cycle.
Fantastic comment. I was hoping someone with chemistry knowledge would step in. "it might be possible for fire to exist without life" Yeah, I was wondering. My thinking was that a planet with an eccentric orbit might provide suitable conditions. If you had an endothermic reaction storing up energy during the hot period of the orbit, it could burn off when the planet travels farther from its star.
Life lowers the entropy and produces stashes of fuel with the low entropy energy source that is the sun. Then a wild fire happens and takes the entropy for a hike!
Yep. People sometimes naively assume that because gas giants are often largely composed of hydrogen, that they could somehow 'catch fire' if someone dropped a match into one. They cannot of course. Any gasses that the hydrogen could reactively combine with did so eons ago, or have otherwise been separated into discrete layers that don't interact directly. Any chemical reactions that could easily occur within the atmosphere have already occurred, and any ongoing activity would either be due to the effects of sunlight, or the rare mixing of gas layers that are normally kept separate due to the weather behaviors of the planet.
Possibly. So for intelligent life to have access to fire, they'd need to both evolve on land and have oxygen be produced by a large amount of autotrophs
@@geralferaldit's necessary to externalise a part of the digestive process as we understand it, which both enables acquisition of biological energy through food & frees it up for complex & expensive mental processes which are necessary for technological development. No cooking means no extra energy for thinking up fancy things to do with lasers. Brains are expensive electrical devices.
I really liked this one. It is obvious in retrospect that you can't have fire without life or some other ongoing process, given that chemicals that can vigorously react (burn) on geological time will find each other and react until something is completely consumed (the rusting of the Earth's crust is evidence of that); however, until someone mentions it, you don't really think about it. In other words, I liked this episode because it made me look at what I thought I knew differently.
Those are brain cells that you won't get back. The premise that there is no fire without "organic" substance is bogus, and simply not true. There are many inorganic substances that burn with a flame. Sulfer is one. Sulfer was here, as well as other inorganic subtances that burn, long before there was life on earth. There was also oxygen, and lightimg, to ignite things. But, you don't even need lightning, Google says sulfer is subject to spontaneous combustion.
Fire simply needs fuel and oxygen, so as soon as there was a sufficient concentration in the atmosphere, it was a thing. I was a coal miner. Seams commonly have very thin 'soot' bands (actually crushed charcoal) in them where the forests burnt around 350M years ago. Unsurprising that it goes back much further.
@@jamesgeorge4874 No, I didn't. Fire needs an ignition source such as lightning. It doesn't need heat: it produces heat. Also, as a coal miner I know spontaneous combustion is a real and dangerous thing. Coal will oxidise without burning, but the reaction still produces heat. Limited airflow may not be sufficient to dissipate the heat and then you get the carbon dioxide reduction reaction that produces carbon monoxide. All with no flame...
It makes so much more sense now why classical elements consider fire an element. I wonder what kind of such "elements" exist out in the universe that we don't even know exist.
That's a cool question. I always wonder about what versions of life exist but I've never wondered about other forces of nature out there. Thanks for putting that in my head
This is lowkey an anthropologist answer to religious fire and early religions too. Fire made humanity and culture as it is today from the very start. Its importance is woven into most mythologies, for better and for worse.
I understand where she's coming from we often confuse heat from reactions as synonymous with fire but I'm highly skeptical she's right....there are way too many planets with enough carbon, oxygen and suitable fuel....judging on how we don't know exactly how life on earth started we cannot rule out an inorganic source of O2 being possible especially with the strange and unique environments planets have...Obviously this is purely speculative but I believe the universe is too fantastical to make such a bold statement as the title does.
The opening bit about the sun being mostly hydrogen reminded me of this quote: "Several billion trillion tons of superhot exploding hydrogen nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold and slightly damp.” -Douglas Adams, Life, The Universe and Everything.
It may not be very scientific, but I've always liked thinking of fire as an abstract form of life. So it's super interesting to learn that fire wasn't always around, and needed a specific set of circumstances to "evolve" so to speak. Really neat episode, I learned a lot!
Yes, I think so too. Fire is at least in the same category as life, both are in a sense a reaction zone. Fuel goes in, waste comes out, the system sustains itself and seeks more fuel until it "dies"
I have a vague memory of the series of Avatar (the OG one with the element-benders) Discussing fire as an "alive" element, or even the element of life, as it is the only element that grows and needs care to exist. it always stuck with me and I think fire is a beautiful counterpart to our usual understanding of life!
Thanks for such a great video. Love the idea that fire replenishes and nourishes life, especially at this cold time of year. It’s so interesting what fire does in our ecosystems.
What about chlorate reactions like in an oxygen candle? Isn't it possible to have combustion with the absence of Oxygen? Other types of combustion exist as well, like fluorine. Also magnesium/teflon/biton compositions burn without oxygen. Other halogens, such as bromine and iodine, can also act as oxidizing agents.
Or when the alkali metals oxidize vigorously in water or air. Or when hydrogen and oxygen explode to make water? I'm not sure if there would be enough of those reactive species hanging around separately on early Earth for any significant "fires" though.
The reactions discussed in the video (oxygen + organic fuel) are definitely fire, but I neither natural language evolution nor, I suspect, the wide array of possible chemical reactions particularly lend themselves to drawing a sharp line to distinguish fire from not fire without any ambiguous or counterintuitive results.
@@DeRien8 The title of the video is "why only earth has fire". My point is that there are many combustible compositions and an unfathomable number of planets so it is incredibly likely that a) there is fire on other planets and b) they aren't necessarily burning oxygen.
It is absolutely possible. This video is rather misleading. Hydrocarbons can exist without life. Oxygen isn't the only oxidizer (and not even the most powerful one). From there all you need is energy to begin the reaction.
Even today we use fire to reseed the biosphere. Some examples that are at home for me is at Oak Openings in Toledo OH. It's an Oak Savanah and also where I currently live in Yamaguchi Japan. Akiyoshidai, a Karst plateau, both places use fire as a means to promote healthy growth.
Great episode! The story of how our atmosphere became partly oxygen is a fascinating story, requiring research from many fields, including geology, meteorology, paleontology, and biology. An absolutely great book that covers all of these is "Oxygen: the Molecule that Made the World", by Dr. Nick Lane, (professor of evolutionary biochemistry at University College London, director of UCL's Centre for Life's Origins and Evolution ....in fact, I highly recommend ALL of his books.) It is an incredibly thorough and engaging read and remarkably still up to date, even though it was published in 2002. :)
"Fire can't exist without life" 🤯 Wow, that is something to think about. I have had thoughts about fire as a form of life recently, but I have never though fire is dependent on life. It is like we could place fire somewhere in the phylogenetic tree! Heraclitus is the best!
Without life, the fuel and oxidiser would just react with each other and get used up. The thing that’s unique about Earth is that they get replenished, and that requires life.
@@ragnkja but isn't a fire just a sustained reaction though? It's just the combustion of something like wood but it's still functions in the same way just not using oxygen. I mean I could be wrong but when I think of the sun I think fire and light
Technically Prometheus from mythology only gave fire to humans, he didn’t invent or create it. In fact, he stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans.
You can have fire on planets or moons if they have a flammable atmosphere such as methane (Titan) or hydrogen. On Earth we put a bunch of stuff (fuel) in one place and the oxidizer comes from the air. In a place like Titan you put a bunch of oxidizer in one place and the fuel comes from the air.
I kind of knew fire had a archeological record But it was only up to humans discovering and using fire Maybe a bit of the dinosaur's extinction But damn I did not know if first appeared when life appeared or when plants appeared That's insane This channel always has many surprises instored
TLDR: its because Earth is so far the only place with both Free Oxygen and Fuel to combust. all the oxygen we've found elsewhere in the universe are either locked in rocks or found in Gas Giants.
Fire needs an Oxidiser, it doesn’t have to be dioxygen, its just the easiest component and makes fire so common, here on Earth. Fire can exist without life, it would just be much rarer in the absence of life, not completely absent.
Variable vegetative resistance to fire is one driving force in evolution. As mentioned grasses hide their fuel underground, but just as important the fuel does not get hot enough to burn organic matter in the upper few centimeters of soil. Where forests become very hot, the organic matter burns and rocks splinter leaving lack of cover, erosion and mudslides.
This was so interesting, made me think of fire in a different way. I especially loved the analysis of the grassland biome, this is a useful vid for the NoLawns community. This made me wonder about the evolution of other biomes and plant communities. Cloud forests? Alpine grasslands? Temperate rainforests? Steppe?
I got the trivia question right :) I love the new idea of trivia questions but can I suggest for the answers to only be revealed in the next video so that we can create discussions in the comments section without having to worry that people think we skip to the end to get the answer? The more educated guesses may even let us learn about alternate answers to the trivia question!
🤔 I'm not sure alternate answers are ideal given the state of misinformation on the Internet 😕 I love the idea of discussion though! (It could be challenging finding the answers in separate episodes when watching out of order, but YT has dates, so not impossible.) They could pin a discussion comment up top!
Dimetrodon is the trivia answer. Seeing them in Dominion makes me wanna a Palaeozoic Park. The symbiotic relationship between fire and life is really interesting. No wonder a fireplace is so calming and fascinating.
I don't give PBS enough credit for the knowledge, inspiration and entertainment they have provided to me my entire life. The countless people who have and continued to work to build PBS into the most reliable source of educational entertainment have my thanks.
I'm glad our taxes are doing something cool.
@@themanhimself3whos taxes and how?
@@CoNteMpTone My taxes pay for pbs.
@@themanhimself3 i didnt even know that.
@@beattheovenludwigvan Only partially, they aren't completely state funded.
Uncle Iroh was right, fire really is the breath of life.
😂Lol
"and with fire, came disparity. Heat and cold. Life and death. Light and dark."
Lordran is prehistory, confirmed
Jeong Jeong*
bruhhh, i just wrote an avatar statement without seeing yours hahahah,. so funny
Uncle Iroh never steered us wrong!
The fact that water, fire and life are so interconnected and reliant upon each other to exist on this planet feels poetic in a way. Water creates life, life creates fire, fire consumes life, water douses fire, life is reborn from the ashes of the old.
I appreciate Terra even more
awesome!
I was thinking that but chemically. At the end of the day it's just moving the same things back and forth.
its like an unending game of rock paper scissors
Puts a whole new spin on "Everything changed when the fire nation attacked."
I live in Kansas, and this is exactly why we do controlled burns of our fields and grasslands every year. The Flint Hills are my favorite. In winter all the grasses die, in the spring, we do controlled burns, and by later spring, early summer, they are the most beautiful green hills. Kansas doesn't have a lot going for it, but driving through the Flint Hills in late spring/early summer is definitely something to see. You can truly imagine native peoples living alongside the massive herds of buffalo, or imagine people traversing the seemingly neverending prarie in covered wagons.
The older I get, the less common it is to come across something that truly teaches me something new. This video accomplished it. Thank you.
You are watching wrong videos, not to mention there are plenty of scientific papers that will teach you something new, guaranteed.
@@pavel9652Sure, ‘something new’, of course, but a big, perspective-altering, unexpected thing like only earth having fire? That was the point. If it’s so easy for you to find videos (or papers) with ideas like that, I wish you would condescend to make a playlist of them for those of us pitifully watching the wrong videos. I’ll give you an honest answer as to how many of them are on par. Or, could it be you’re just too young and/or ignorant to get it?
@@anjonde4086 "a big, perspective-altering, unexpected thing (...) I’ll give you an honest answer as to how many of them are on par." - it is a totally subjective experience
"Or, could it be you’re just too young and/or ignorant to get it?" - be careful with patronizing statements towards me; you aren't engaging in ego battle, are you?
@@pavel9652You’re right, I was acting largely out of base egotism, I’m sorry. You’re comment was itself so patronizing that I wanted to retaliate by doing the same. I mean it doesn’t get more patronizing (and subjective!) than telling us we’re “watching the wrong videos” while, in my opinion, being overly literal and totally missing the point. I stand by the substance of what I said, but I should have assumed you didn’t intend to be patronizing (unlike me, eheh) and that your misunderstanding was honest (if you’re just too young to get it, thats not your fault). I didn’t have to be sarcastic and confrontational and gross-internet about it and I apologize for that.
@@anjonde4086 It was a paraphrase of saying "if you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room". Maybe it was little patronizing, but it was hard to avoid. I didn't miss the point, and I know what he meant. Yet, I still think he isn't pushing the limits of learning enough. On the subject, what do you think about video "56 Seconds to Live" from USHST? "The 56-second time period is based on a USHST study of 221 fatal helicopter accidents that occurred from 2009 to 2019."
I think the societal misconceptions with what fire actually is is very overlooked, and what it and plasma and glowing-hot liquid metals are should be more clearly covered in school
Agreed. This is very important.
Just to be clear, fire isn't a type of plasma. It *can* have plasma if it were hot enough to ionize atoms and be electrically conductive. Most candles and wood fires are not hot enough to create plasma. The common understanding is that fire is hot glowing gas, much like hot metals glow when sufficiently heated.
Children and fire.
What could go wrong.
I think they are in Canada because i immediately chuckled at the headline and mockingly thought "maybe because were the ones with oxygen...like some public school stuff?"😂
@@garettdoornwaard4822 Keep chuckling. There are plenty of planets with oxygen.
What they don't have is both oxygen and fuel, because they lack a cycle by which both can be continually produced, that is, life.
I haven't thought about this before. Goes to show you you never stop learning
where there's life... there's fire
@@360.Tapestry define life. Because some planets also have life.
@@jelly.212 Name one
Regrettably I meet people daily who proved they stop learning. A lot. And young. Sad.
@@jelly.212Which other planet? Did you apply for your nobel prize yet?
I've always wondered how grasslands could be the dominant biome for an area without it getting taken over by trees. This makes so much sense. I already kind of knew this, I live in an area where land burning is a seasonal phenomenon land owners do (its in a controlled setting) but I really didn't know why. And I had no clue this was an evolved adaptation to benefit the grass. Evolution is crazy and I feel like we as laymen humans forget about the plants but they do some cool stuff.
I grew up in Kansas where they do the same thing! Nothing quite like the smell of the pastures burning!
the world is truly an interesting place, I think we just fail to see it because we are pre occupied by other things such as socmeds, work, studies etc.
The fact that always blows my mind is how long it took for grass to even show up. Like the most basic kind of plant you could imagine, a leaf in the ground, only evolved around 55 million years ago.
Yes there were grass-like plants back then, but grass itself, like the kind you see every day, didn't show up until so recently.
@@giraffelord94 yeah, grass (of any kind) is so ubiquitous I can't imagine a world without it
You should look up what happened to Yellowstone National Park after wolves were reintroduced. It is rather amazing.
As a degreed and professional forester. Thank you for this! I wish more people would fully understand this!
Degreed only means you memorized enough things to pass the final at the end of the year. As someone who works in chemicals, I know this idea of fire needing organic matter to burn is simply not true
As a degreed person, one would believe you would not write a fragmented sentence.
@@BagBreakerMMA
Not necessarily organic, no, but surely would have to compose of the same elements (in same variation) to release (x)CO2 & (x)H2O?
But yeah, as a Biologist - I hate the presentation here personally. It makes a lot of presumptions from the get-go, including that only our planet can even support life in the first place.
@@Patrick-y4d1zthey did specify 'know planets' and earth is the only planet we currently know of that provably has life
@@videogamesarecool9280
It's more that they said;
"It isn't the only watery planet in the universe, but it is the only fiery planet"
Which doesn't mention about "known planets" just outright stated it's the only one.
So far, we've been to like two planets. Including our own. So it's a bit of a bold statement to make.
Pretty neat! I hadn’t ever really thought about this even though in hindsight, it seems very logical and obvious. Reminds me a lot of Avatar: The Last Airbender and how Firebending is actually the element of life - not destruction. Without controlled burnings of grasslands and the death of old, decaying plants, new life would never have the chance to flourish.
Sometimes a video tells me stuff I already knew, but recontextualizes it in a way that makes it feel brand new. This is one such video.
knowledge AND wisdom :D
I recognize your profile picture but can't remember where I've seen it! @willmendoza8498
Another groundbreaking fact from this video: PBS is now being sponsored by a software company who’s main selling point is that it gives people access to porn in states where its blocked. Lol
pretty much, yeah.
Life is older than fire. That's going on the "obscure perspective-changing facts" list.
who would want to live in a world where you can't tell someone else to go die in a fire?
They had to come to that conclusion for you? Man basically discovered fire
@therobn The tens of thousands of animals that were vaporized within a thousand kilometer radius around the Yucatan peninsula, as well as the many millions more that were burned alive within a couple thousand kilometers by earth's mantle literally being ejected into space and raining down again in an apocalyptic hellfire of unprecedented proportions in the history of life, to not even mention the billions of plants meeting their demise as molten stone set ablaze entire continents, will be glad to hear that there was no such thing as fire, before mankind discovered it 🤡
@@therobn ? that's not true
@@therobnWe didn't start the fire. Earlier living things did.
2:29 i like it when the hosts enjoy the scripts that they write. gives everyone a bit more voice. Wood is rarer in this universe than Diamond, because only Earth has wood.
I love this. Not only is it interesting for children to learn about, it appealed to me and I'm 70!! Puts a whole new spin on fire; something we take for granted on our planet.
my incredibly dyslexic arse read the title as "What if the Earth was only Fire?"
I don't know why but watching this video makes me long to see the days before I ever existed. Not to experience or go through it, but just to observe it and just wonder and wander more.
I always wonder when we will go and just do super realistic simulations of all these time periods … to entertain, educate and also study possibilities. Maybe one day we can take a simulated walk through those times.
This just proves that there are far more things that we would never know or understand than the things we do
That’s stupid
that has been one of my deepest desires since I was a child. Be able to go to any period in time before human history as an observer, to gaze upon what we have never been able to.
Must’ve missed the part about the fire tornadoes
This is one of your best presentations. Never actually thought about fire as discussed here. Very informative. Thx.
I would love to see an episode about lichens: their evolution, when the symbiont relation may have appeared, if they have made genetic studies and if they have learned something from them. I always had the idea that lichens have much to say about the emergence of life on land.
Just seconding (or fiftieth-ing) the lichens. They're fascinating.
agreed
Upvote! This would be a great episode.
I'm here for that too. I'd love that
I’m in school for natural resources and they’re one of my favourite things to learn about. They are pretty much architects of nature as they break down rock from barren stony landscapes to produce soil which leads to forests, this process is known as ecological succession and it’s very interesting.
This is quite fascinating. I'm not exactly a scientist (which is a big reason I'm here-- to learn), but I'd actually never thought of this.
We already had earth & wind, we just needed to add fire to complete the band!
"Damn, this planet is fire"
no cap, this planet is straight-up bussin'
No it's lit
"like, literally fire i can see literal fire storms on its surface"
This makes me wonder what other kind of things are possible on other planets. If fire is unique to our earth like conditions, what about other things? The universe is constantly amazing.
Oil and coal is also probably fairly unique to Earth, since they largely formed from our specific mass extinction events.
It's very possible that, if intelligent life does exist out there, their Industrial Revolution would look very different or may not happen at all
The most amazing basic object that could be grasped might be ice fragments from high pressure planets. As ice is compressed, it becomes incredibly hard, like stone. Like cold crystal. It can be set into lava and not melt. But if you took these cold diamonds out of their high pressure atmosphere, they'd melt (I think).
@@oriontigley5089 yeah you're so right! I read somewhere that as we keep depleting our fossil fuel reserves, we're making it so a hypothetical intelligent life down the line, or future humans, would never be able to industrialize. Wild!!
Like how there are so many different thermite reactions here, then there's Uranium!
For fire, you need a chemical to accept electrons and a chemical to give electrons. Oxygen, chlorine and fluorine give electrons really well and you can have fires involving those, I don’t think most other elements are as reactive in that way. There are loads of chemicals that can give electrons to them, fuels. But there’s not really anything weird and new out there as far as flashy reactions like that like you are thinking. Not going to come across some new phenomena.
Wow. This episode explained one of the longest interconnected chain of events ever.
Excellent video. The only thing I would have said differently is "Earth is the only planet in our solar system that has fire." We don't know if any of the exoplanets (in other star systems) throughout the universe have fire.
may be biased, but this is one of the best eons videos yet! thanks for sharing the important and ancient relationship of life on earth with fire!
Those fire storms of the Carboniferous would have been a terrifying sight to behold.
Ah yes, the Carboniferous
When everywhere was Australia
@@Flesh_WizardIf Australia was predominantly rainforest instead of desert
But also terrifyingly beautifull.
You can ask German and Japanese survivors of World War II, they can give you an idea of what it would have been like. Specifically, people who lived in Dresden and Tokyo.
@@TheRogueX
You mean the German and Japanese invaders who were quite happy to destroy everything in their path before finally refusing to surrender until their countries were bombed into submission.........
Gosh, I feel like my mental concept of fire is stuck in the medieval era! The fact that both decomposing organisms AND fire didn't exist since the dawn of life and came about far later just blows my mind!
plants that are fire resistant are usually also more tolerant to poor nutrient deficient soils as well
This was an original and interesting angle! Great job.
But then the fire planet attacked.
😂
Wow, I'd never considered the fact that fire wouldn't exist without something carbon-based to burn. Thanks for expanding my horizons and helping me to reframe my understanding!
There are some inorganic substances that can burn, too. Sulfur for example would yield you a little blue fire when ignited. Keeping in mind that accumulations of sulfur usually build up at vulcanic areas, this could easily happen.
It's more the oxygen in the atmosphere that enables the formation of fires, since you have to have an oxidizing agent to burn stuff ^^
And an oxygen rich atmosphere rich
Same here. Turns out rocks don't burn lol.
fire has nothing to do with carbon, it's electromagnetic releasing electromagnetic energy in the spectrum of light and inferred , just consider it a very slow atomic bomb
I don't think rocket fuel is carbon based , but it definitely creates a powerful fire .
Earth: Creates Giant Insects:
Also Earth: Creates fire to deal with said giant insects.
the only sensible action
Of course! Rocks can't burn. Only things that have lived can burn. It makes so much sense. Why didn't I think of that. I love your vids. I love learning this stuff. Thanks.
Magnesium burns.
@@leewagner4474yeah, so do a lot of compounds that can exist without living organisms (even if they are much more common in their presence). I get the feeling that fire isn't necessarily ABSENT in the rest of the universe, just A LOT less common
@@leewagner4474 True, but magnesium is pretty rare in a pure metallic form on earth or anywhere else that we know of. And it oxidizes and that layer actually protects it from further oxygen exposure. If you had oxygen, metallic magnesium, and some kind of ignition source like a current, it could happen, but it's probably very rare.
I am going to learn now
What about coal? (Genuinely asking)
WOW I never thought of this!!! I have always thought of water but didn't realise fire is also exclusive to Earth.... WOW.
water is not exclusive to earth.
is fire unique on Earth??? @@amandamatheny3675
This was miles more interesting of a video than I thought it’d be
This is something we are missing in modern forest management that has been a contributing factor to the intense wildfire burns we are seeing!!! It's just one piece of the puzzle of course, but the importance of regenerative burning cannot be overstated!
True enough. Smokey the Bear notwithstanding, it turns out we can't prevent forest fires, only postpone them. Then when they do finally happen, the damage is pretty severe.
Pine cones are serotinous. That means they will not open without extreme heat from a fire.
This is a great point. Fire needs reactive oxidiser and reactive fuel. (Pedantic nitpick: despite the name oxygen is not the only nor the most powerful oxidiser.) The problem is that reactive things, well, react and so they are never naturally available in large not yet reacted quantities. Life is the exception in that it reverses that process, it uses energy to turn less reactive compounds into more reactive ones (endothermic chemical reactions) so that it can use them as building blocks or react them back together to get the stored energy back.
Photosynthesis is a pump that takes energy from the Sun's light to perform these reactions, transforming that light energy into usable chemical energy. When aerobic life burns sugar with oxygen to use that energy, the term "burns" is pretty literal. As a side effect, the surplus oxygen and unburnt fuel can result in plain old fire.
Although, it might be possible for fire to exist without life. There are endothermic reactions that can occur due to heat without any organic help, so there might be planets where extreme solar radiation or internal heat affect naturally occurring compounds and result in endothermic reactions that produce oxidiser+fuel, which then burn back together, completing a cycle.
Fantastic comment. I was hoping someone with chemistry knowledge would step in.
"it might be possible for fire to exist without life"
Yeah, I was wondering. My thinking was that a planet with an eccentric orbit might provide suitable conditions. If you had an endothermic reaction storing up energy during the hot period of the orbit, it could burn off when the planet travels farther from its star.
Life lowers the entropy and produces stashes of fuel with the low entropy energy source that is the sun. Then a wild fire happens and takes the entropy for a hike!
Yep. People sometimes naively assume that because gas giants are often largely composed of hydrogen, that they could somehow 'catch fire' if someone dropped a match into one.
They cannot of course. Any gasses that the hydrogen could reactively combine with did so eons ago, or have otherwise been separated into discrete layers that don't interact directly.
Any chemical reactions that could easily occur within the atmosphere have already occurred, and any ongoing activity would either be due to the effects of sunlight, or the rare mixing of gas layers that are normally kept separate due to the weather behaviors of the planet.
Considering Fire's role in human societies, this might also be a small step towards the Fermi Paradox
Possibly. So for intelligent life to have access to fire, they'd need to both evolve on land and have oxygen be produced by a large amount of autotrophs
@@Ethan-cz8xqfire isn’t necessary to technologically debelop
@@geralferald You can't have a Kardashev-2 civilisation without barbecues.
@@geralferaldIt's not strictly neccessary, no, but it is extremely helpful.
@@geralferaldit's necessary to externalise a part of the digestive process as we understand it, which both enables acquisition of biological energy through food & frees it up for complex & expensive mental processes which are necessary for technological development. No cooking means no extra energy for thinking up fancy things to do with lasers. Brains are expensive electrical devices.
Thanks!
Great narration from an awesome host!
I really liked this one. It is obvious in retrospect that you can't have fire without life or some other ongoing process, given that chemicals that can vigorously react (burn) on geological time will find each other and react until something is completely consumed (the rusting of the Earth's crust is evidence of that); however, until someone mentions it, you don't really think about it. In other words, I liked this episode because it made me look at what I thought I knew differently.
Those are brain cells that you won't get back. The premise that there is no fire without "organic" substance is bogus, and simply not true. There are many inorganic substances that burn with a flame. Sulfer is one. Sulfer was here, as well as other inorganic subtances that burn, long before there was life on earth. There was also oxygen, and lightimg, to ignite things. But, you don't even need lightning, Google says sulfer is subject to spontaneous combustion.
I'd not really thought about this before. This is truly amazing. 🔥
New criteria in the search for earth-like exoplanets: signs of fire.. Edit - I correctly guessed Dimetrodon
Oh my! Kelly, everytime you manage how to amaze me. Thank you all so much guys at EONS!
When I’m feeling down and want some peppy, accessible, informative kick, I watch PBS Eons
Fire simply needs fuel and oxygen, so as soon as there was a sufficient concentration in the atmosphere, it was a thing.
I was a coal miner. Seams commonly have very thin 'soot' bands (actually crushed charcoal) in them where the forests burnt around 350M years ago.
Unsurprising that it goes back much further.
You forgot heat.
@@jamesgeorge4874 No, I didn't.
Fire needs an ignition source such as lightning.
It doesn't need heat: it produces heat.
Also, as a coal miner I know spontaneous combustion is a real and dangerous thing.
Coal will oxidise without burning, but the reaction still produces heat.
Limited airflow may not be sufficient to dissipate the heat and then you get the carbon dioxide reduction reaction that produces carbon monoxide.
All with no flame...
Fire needs fuel and an oxidizer. Oxygen isn't the only oxidizer.
It makes so much more sense now why classical elements consider fire an element. I wonder what kind of such "elements" exist out in the universe that we don't even know exist.
"Classical elements consider..."
That's a cool question. I always wonder about what versions of life exist but I've never wondered about other forces of nature out there. Thanks for putting that in my head
This is one of y'all's best videos of all time imo. Wow
This make me appreciate Dark Souls lore even more.
Fire is an element as fundemental as water is for life? Epic.
what? Fire is not an element. It is a chemical reaction, heated up gases
I can't believe I'm learning this in my mid-forties. This should be middle school basic science knowledge 🤔
This episode is straight fire.
This is lowkey an anthropologist answer to religious fire and early religions too. Fire made humanity and culture as it is today from the very start. Its importance is woven into most mythologies, for better and for worse.
I understand where she's coming from we often confuse heat from reactions as synonymous with fire but I'm highly skeptical she's right....there are way too many planets with enough carbon, oxygen and suitable fuel....judging on how we don't know exactly how life on earth started we cannot rule out an inorganic source of O2 being possible especially with the strange and unique environments planets have...Obviously this is purely speculative but I believe the universe is too fantastical to make such a bold statement as the title does.
fire is really a driving agent of life :)
The opening bit about the sun being mostly hydrogen reminded me of this quote:
"Several billion trillion tons of superhot exploding hydrogen nuclei rose slowly above the horizon and managed to look small, cold and slightly damp.” -Douglas Adams, Life, The Universe and Everything.
Nowadays iron contained in vehicles still absorbs oxygen. We call the product of this process "a beater car".
Perhaps in time this process can be preserved as a hooptie-ite.
@@DangerB0ne😂😂😂
@@DangerB0ne As you can see this rock layer contains a high concentration of jalopicite...
Such pure geekery! 🥲
Weight reduction bro
It may not be very scientific, but I've always liked thinking of fire as an abstract form of life. So it's super interesting to learn that fire wasn't always around, and needed a specific set of circumstances to "evolve" so to speak. Really neat episode, I learned a lot!
I love this idea too. Someone should write something about that!
Yes, I think so too. Fire is at least in the same category as life, both are in a sense a reaction zone. Fuel goes in, waste comes out, the system sustains itself and seeks more fuel until it "dies"
fire is simple electromagnetic at the atomic structure , absolutely no electromagnetic physics on earth create cells , much less life
I have a vague memory of the series of Avatar (the OG one with the element-benders) Discussing fire as an "alive" element, or even the element of life, as it is the only element that grows and needs care to exist. it always stuck with me and I think fire is a beautiful counterpart to our usual understanding of life!
Robert de Niro, as a fire-department investigator, has a monologue to that effect in the movie, "Backdraft."
This channel's a gem in youtube
Thanks for such a great video. Love the idea that fire replenishes and nourishes life, especially at this cold time of year. It’s so interesting what fire does in our ecosystems.
I didn’t expect this video to heighten my appreciation for fire and grass to this height.
What about chlorate reactions like in an oxygen candle? Isn't it possible to have combustion with the absence of Oxygen? Other types of combustion exist as well, like fluorine. Also magnesium/teflon/biton compositions burn without oxygen. Other halogens, such as bromine and iodine, can also act as oxidizing agents.
Or when the alkali metals oxidize vigorously in water or air. Or when hydrogen and oxygen explode to make water? I'm not sure if there would be enough of those reactive species hanging around separately on early Earth for any significant "fires" though.
The reactions discussed in the video (oxygen + organic fuel) are definitely fire, but I neither natural language evolution nor, I suspect, the wide array of possible chemical reactions particularly lend themselves to drawing a sharp line to distinguish fire from not fire without any ambiguous or counterintuitive results.
@@DeRien8 The title of the video is "why only earth has fire". My point is that there are many combustible compositions and an unfathomable number of planets so it is incredibly likely that a) there is fire on other planets and b) they aren't necessarily burning oxygen.
It is absolutely possible. This video is rather misleading.
Hydrocarbons can exist without life.
Oxygen isn't the only oxidizer (and not even the most powerful one).
From there all you need is energy to begin the reaction.
That's also my understanding. Fire most likely exists in lots of places. @@TheRogueX
Even today we use fire to reseed the biosphere. Some examples that are at home for me is at Oak Openings in Toledo OH. It's an Oak Savanah and also where I currently live in Yamaguchi Japan. Akiyoshidai, a Karst plateau, both places use fire as a means to promote healthy growth.
I’ve been wondering my whole life why areas looking so dry and dead like this managed to sustain so many lives! Thanks Eons 😊🎉
Great episode! The story of how our atmosphere became partly oxygen is a fascinating story, requiring research from many fields, including geology, meteorology, paleontology, and biology. An absolutely great book that covers all of these is "Oxygen: the Molecule that Made the World", by Dr. Nick Lane, (professor of evolutionary biochemistry at University College London, director of UCL's Centre for Life's Origins and Evolution ....in fact, I highly recommend ALL of his books.) It is an incredibly thorough and engaging read and remarkably still up to date, even though it was published in 2002. :)
"Fire can't exist without life" 🤯 Wow, that is something to think about. I have had thoughts about fire as a form of life recently, but I have never though fire is dependent on life. It is like we could place fire somewhere in the phylogenetic tree!
Heraclitus is the best!
Fire isn't dependent on life.
Without life, the fuel and oxidiser would just react with each other and get used up. The thing that’s unique about Earth is that they get replenished, and that requires life.
The sun is a nuclear fire, it's not really an explosion as it is constant so it's a fire @@ragnkja
@@cowboybeebop3451
But it’s not a fire, it’s a nuclear chain reaction.
@@ragnkja but isn't a fire just a sustained reaction though?
It's just the combustion of something like wood but it's still functions in the same way just not using oxygen.
I mean I could be wrong but when I think of the sun I think fire and light
Never would have realized this. Love the show!
Well darn, I thought we only had fire because of Prometheus.
What a plagiarizer
Technically Prometheus from mythology only gave fire to humans, he didn’t invent or create it. In fact, he stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans.
You can have fire on planets or moons if they have a flammable atmosphere such as methane (Titan) or hydrogen.
On Earth we put a bunch of stuff (fuel) in one place and the oxidizer comes from the air.
In a place like Titan you put a bunch of oxidizer in one place and the fuel comes from the air.
This was the most beautiful video ever that came from this channel.
This episode SLAPPED! I learned so much in 12mins it’s an absolute masterpiece, congrats to the writing!
You did it again: the title is enough to make me drop everything I'm doing cause now I HAVE to know 😅
I kind of knew fire had a archeological record But it was only up to humans discovering and using fire Maybe a bit of the dinosaur's extinction But damn I did not know if first appeared when life appeared or when plants appeared That's insane This channel always has many surprises instored
Fire has existed for way longer than Earth has. This video is extremely misleading.
TLDR: its because Earth is so far the only place with both Free Oxygen and Fuel to combust. all the oxygen we've found elsewhere in the universe are either locked in rocks or found in Gas Giants.
I understand why the title is the way it is, but a more accurate statement would be "why combustion is common on earth and rare on most planets"
Fire needs an Oxidiser, it doesn’t have to be dioxygen, its just the easiest component and makes fire so common, here on Earth. Fire can exist without life, it would just be much rarer in the absence of life, not completely absent.
Since volcanoes emit sulfur, that may have fueled Earth's first fires, although not wildfires.
The thing that life provides is the ability to reverse energy-releasing chemical reactions. So without life, burned-up things stay burned-up forever.
Given I live on a continent synonymous with fire, the lack of mention of the Eucalyptus family of flowering plants is bemusing.
This
Well our seasons are under water, on fire ,drought and magpie mating season.
Damn, just opened RUclips and new video
same for me too
It’s 3:00 am tho
@@paraceratherium255 different time zones
@@owensanfordstuff that’s not what I was saying. I am just sleep deprived and should be asleep.
@@paraceratherium255 yeah I didn't get that from your first comment 😂
I just have to say I love this RUclips channel
I've always wondered how a planet with so much oxygen back then never got it self set on fire. It really was on fire. This topic is Lit.
1:14 "Or two molecules of oxygen bonded together." There was a mistake here. It's "atoms" and not "molecules"
man, this episode is 🔥 (jokes aside...I now understand why it's called the CARBONiferous period!)
I love learning. Thank you everyone at PBS. ☮
Variable vegetative resistance to fire is one driving force in evolution. As mentioned grasses hide their fuel underground, but just as important the fuel does not get hot enough to burn organic matter in the upper few centimeters of soil. Where forests become very hot, the organic matter burns and rocks splinter leaving lack of cover, erosion and mudslides.
An overview of the evolution of plants would be a useful episode.
That would need to be several episodes. Plants are ... complex
@@WAMTAT what is not complex
This was so interesting, made me think of fire in a different way. I especially loved the analysis of the grassland biome, this is a useful vid for the NoLawns community. This made me wonder about the evolution of other biomes and plant communities. Cloud forests? Alpine grasslands? Temperate rainforests? Steppe?
Can you continue this video by talking about trees that only spread seed when submited to fire?
Has the author visited every planet in the universe to come up with that conclusion
Really puts the term "Fire power" to a different level
Earth not only has fire, but also wind. Mainly in September ♬
😂
Facts 😂
Finally, someone remembers 😂
Fire is a chemical reaction and life is a chemical reaction.
Life is not a single chemical reaction but thousands of chemical reactions.
I got the trivia question right :) I love the new idea of trivia questions but can I suggest for the answers to only be revealed in the next video so that we can create discussions in the comments section without having to worry that people think we skip to the end to get the answer? The more educated guesses may even let us learn about alternate answers to the trivia question!
🤔 I'm not sure alternate answers are ideal given the state of misinformation on the Internet 😕
I love the idea of discussion though!
(It could be challenging finding the answers in separate episodes when watching out of order, but YT has dates, so not impossible.)
They could pin a discussion comment up top!
The classic "I'm not a dinosaur, but I play one in TV, children's toy sets, and the public consciousness" animal. 😁
hehe so cute how ya got excited about the "EONS later" bit, same girl same
Earth confirmed as Fire Nation. Got it
So is it not actually fire if a different oxidizer causes something to combust?
Excellent question
@@KangwithoutaKangdom Still fire.
@@sydhenderson6753Nope! At least not by this videos logic.
As a fire being, this is nice
I guess our early ancestors were right to worship fire. It really is quite something
Kallie is beautiful and irresistible. And she has a charming way of presenting science. Brava, signora! ❤🎉😊
This intro is missing Lindsey Nikole's "THAT WE KNOW OF" XD
It is missing Lindsey Nikoles "that we know of" THAT WE KNOW OF*
Dimetrodon is the trivia answer. Seeing them in Dominion makes me wanna a Palaeozoic Park.
The symbiotic relationship between fire and life is really interesting. No wonder a fireplace is so calming and fascinating.