The only planet we know of that has ever had a fire is Earth. While there may be volcanoes erupting boiling lava on Venus’s surface, the hottest planet in the Solar System, there has never been a fire. Neither on Mercury, Jupiter or any of the other planets that orbit our or any other star.
In truth, there was no fire throughout billions of years of Earth’s history. It took billions of years for the circumstances for fire to exist, with the planet’s initial occupants living in a world without fire for longer than one can conceive. While volcanoes would have created “fire fountains” like those seen on Io, and there may have been the occasional flare from a gassy volcano belch, this is magma being driven up and sprayed from a vent, not actual fire.
The Earth’s atmosphere was most likely a dense cloud of methane around 2.4 billion years ago, the result of bacterial life developing on the planet. Then came the Great Oxidation Event, when ancient cyanobacteria started producing energy from sunlight and releasing oxygen into the atmosphere. For the first time, molecular oxygen began to build in the atmosphere, though not in sufficient quantity to allow combustion to occur. The Great Oxidation Event, also known as the Oxygen Catastrophe, is thought to have plunged the Earth into a widespread deep freeze as oxygen destabilized methane, clearing it and destroying its greenhouse influence. The Earth became cold and fireless.
The first fossil record of fire dates back billions of years to the Middle Ordovician epoch. There is a sweet spot in terms of flames. Plant matter will not burn if the oxygen level falls below 13%. Any higher than 35% will burn so quickly that forests will be unable to grow and sustain themselves.
The first terrestrial plants, mosses, and liverworts, created more oxygen 470 million years ago, eventually producing enough concentration of it to inflict flames on themselves. We eventually have the first fossil evidence of fire on Earth, charcoal found in rocks from this time period, roughly 420 million years ago. However, because oxygen levels were still erratic, the first large-scale wildfires did not occur until roughly 383 million years ago. Since then, the flames have been a jerk.
