characteristic of a finite field knowing that the characteristic of an integral domain is $0$ or a prime number, i want to prove that the characteristic of a finite field $F_n$ is a prime number, that is $\operatorname{char}(F_n)\not = 0$. the proof i'm reading uses the fact that within $e,2e,3e,\ldots$ there are two that are necessarily equal $ie=(i+k)e$ so $ke=0$ for some positive $k$. But can i say the following argument:
$F_n=\{0,e,x_1,\ldots ,x_{n-2}\}$ ( $e$ is the multiplicative identity ) and since $e\not = 0$ then $e\not = 2e\not =\cdots ,\not = ne$ so we have $n$ distinct elements $ie, i=1,\ldots,n$ of $F_n$ hence one of them must equal $0$; $ie=0$ for some $i\in \{2,\ldots,n\}$, moreover the trivial  field with one element $e=0$ has obviously characteristic $1$. Is there a non-trivial field where $e=0$?
 A: I feel as though the answer you are stating is making things more difficult. As you pointed out all integral domains are either characterstic zero or of prime characteristic, and so in particular all fields are of prime characteristic or zero characteristic. But, if a field has characteristic zero you know that it's multiplicative identity has infinite additive order and all finite groups (and thus all finite fields) have no elements of infinite order (for the reason FIRST reason you stated).  Another route is, if you know group theory (but this is really overkill compared to the other two arguments) to note that $|\mathbb{F}_q|\mathbb{F}_q=0$ by Lagrange's theorem, and so all elements have order dividing $|\mathbb{F}_q|$. 
To answer your last question, no, there are no non-trivial examples where $1=0$ since the ONLY ring with such an identity is the zero ring.
A: Let $1$ denote the multiplicative identity of the field.  Then, $1 \neq 0$ where $0$ is the additive identity.  So every field must have at least two elements: your notion of a field with one element $0$ is not correct. 
So, since the field contains $1$, it contains $1+1$, $1+1+1$, $1 + 1 + 1 + 1, \ldots, 1 + 1 + \cdots + 1$ (where the last sum has $n$ $1$s in it).  All these $n$ sums cannot be distinct since the field has only $n-1$ nonzero elements.  So,
for some distinct $i$ and $j$, the sum of $i$ $1$s must equal the sum of $j$ $1$s,
and by subtraction, the sum of $|i-j|$ $1$s must equal $0$.  The smallest number of $1$s that sum to $0$ is called the characteristic of the finite field, and the characteristic  must be a prime number.  This is because if the 
characteristic were a composite
number $ab$, then the sum of $a$ $1$s multiplied by the sum of $b$ $1$s, 
which equals the sum of $ab$ $1$s by the distributive law, would equal
$0$, that is, the product of two nonzero elements would equal $0$,
which cannot happen in a field.
