Posts tagged natural-resources
Tomorrow morning, an apocalyptic event wipes humanity off the face of the earth - except for in Antarctica. The nature of the catastrophe is unclear, but it seems that any human will die within a f...
Humans have colonized the subsurface oceans of Europa - building large cities embedded in the icy crust, hanging beneath it, and resting on the rocky seafloor. These colonists mine metals for const...
Imagine a small planet, rich with iron, but with a negligible atmosphere, mostly devoid of oxygen. Once harvested, how could iron ore be smelted and refined into iron? And would the ore itself be d...
Just assume we are long into the future, all other parameters have been met and we have the technology, will and money to terraform our moon and keep it so. Atmosphere, as commonly agreed on, would...
I have a group of ecoterrorists who want to limit the amount of CO2 the world puts out in a drastic way: by poisoning oil fields so that the oil becomes unuseable, or at least forever uneconomical ...
Let's say we have an Earth-sized planet and the same general solar activity and climatology. However, the continents are much smaller, and it's effectively impossible to accomplish travel between t...
I am trying to wrap my head around the geography of a settlement in my world. The settlement is situated along the coast, along a river roughly 500m wide with temperate mixed forests surrounding i...
I'm interested in creating some construct of a society in the Twilight and Midnight zones of the ocean. By what means could they mine, farm, and trade in what is suppose to be a more futuristic so...
I've got a home-brewed D&D setting. Diamonds, in D&D, are needed for resurrection magic, so access to diamonds is literally life and death for any country with clerics capable of casting su...
In a time period with medieval technology, what would be the most important local resources? I've put together a small list and broken it down into categories, but I'd like to know if there's anyth...
Does anyone know of any compound/substance one could have access to in a stone prison cell (From food? The rocks? The metal bars?) that could be processed through rudimentary means into a quick act...
An IPCC report of Oct 8, 2018 indicates - to keep the world temperature rise at or below 1.5 C, we need to reduce our CO2 emissions globally from the 2010 level by 45% by 2030, and a further 55% r...
What qualities about a land-dwelling creature are absolutely necessary to maintain an effective herd of that creature for food and/or resources? Assume this is an earth-like environment.
Researchers are scratching their heads, and Portland Water Bureau is furious. In Portland, Oregon, a reservoir in one of the City parks has begun spilling out a river of naturally occurring beer/a...
tl;dr What is the strongest glass that can be concocted from a single reasonably abundant, natural source? (Without nuclear or quantum manufacturing) So I am developing a character for a story. He...
I'm trying to flesh out the history of a fictional galactic society, specifically the initial settlements and inhabited worlds. Something that I thought would be important to settlers would be an a...
Lightning is abundant in some places in Earth. Attempts had been made it collect it. Laser triggered lightning below is the closest attempt. By the time it reaches the ground most of the powe...
On earth, all sorts of machines require heavy oils and lubricants in order to function correctly, be it bearing grease, engine oil, transmission fluid or hydraulic oil, the majority of which are pr...
Picture the future, where man kind has spread out across the galaxy. What would be the most precious and sought after materials? Today it is metals like gold and platinum that are most sought aft...
So, if Humanity wants to conquer the galaxy one star at a time, it is going to need a massive fleet. This fleet will require massive resources to build. If I want to build a fleet to take over the ...
I am currently creating a world from scratch, and while I have a map, I still need to figure out distribution of natural resources. For resources like fossil fuels, while many do appear in deserts...
I'm working out the back story of a flying castle run by a king who has a squadron of 200 air cavalry. All the knights ride hippogriffs: head and wings of large eagles, bodies of horses. Horses ea...
250 years in the future, humanity has colonized Mars and the Moon, and built thousands of orbiting outposts and hundreds of O'Neill cylinders in the zone between Venus and Jupiter. The key enabler ...
I'm working on a sci-fi Western scenario on a habitable desert planet along the lines of Tatooine from Star Wars and Arrakis from Dune. For it to be habitable there has to be water below the surfa...
Imagine that a group of Inuits from Greenland settled in Antarctica; let's say on the Antarctic peninsula, if there is no better place in Antarctica. Could they survive there with their traditiona...
I'd like to have a large underground world. Imagine the "Underdark" which will be familiar with DnD folks. A huge network of large and small caverns connected by winding passageways. The occasio...
My scenario is a civilization on a carbon-rich planet. The planet has a hydrocarbon atmosphere, oceans and clouds. Most rocks are carbides. The only flammable substance in such an atmosphere is oxy...
A present day society has had to relocate from their coastal community and have taken refuge at the top of a very high mountain roughly 10,000 feet above sea level. This mountain is the most promin...
Reading this answer I realized that for my purposes I don't really want a fully steampunk world. All I want is lack of cars and planes as we know them, and lack of oil, or inaccessible deposits of ...
Earth is setting up mining colonies on Tau Ceti e. But how can they justify the enormous cost of sending people there? ...Because during the initial exploratory missions, it was discovered that in ...
Edited to give a reason why synthetic diamonds wouldn't work instead. In the distant future, all the diamonds are gone. While synthetic diamonds are an excellent sollution for technology - as @...
If I've recently started a colony on a somewhat habitable, but uninhabited planet, what's the best way to determine the location of any ore or other subterranean resource deposits? The planet is E...
There is an intergalactic war going on in the Milky Way, to get more resources. My company have been called upon to mine nebulae. There is no nebulae in the vicinity but I have got a few high mass ...
As a high mass star which have already burnt through all of the lighter elements and is now building up iron, the fusion reaction will no longer produce sufficient energy to counter its own weight....
I am creating a fictional fantasy (Medieval-ish era) world. The area covered by my map is fairly large, and contains an ocean, mountains, plains, lakes, forests, swamps, etc. It's pretty much all t...
Many planets don't have habitable surfaces, though at least Mercury has good temperatures underground (source: http://www.einstein-schrodinger.com/Mercury_temperature.pdf). So I'm wondering how la...
In my world, the Straits of Gibraltar have been closed during a post-apocalyptic glacial period and the Mediterranean is isolated from the oceans. The result is similar to the Messinian salinity cr...
Time period is renaissance, with the most powerful culture being in a area geographically similar to the middle east. So a cleric was trying to combat a drought in his kingdom using the power of a ...
Basically, it's a question about creating maps or diagrams. In particular, we on Earth are used to maps showing variation over distance & location. The problem with space that is everything is...
Introduction I have a vague notion of building some sort of strategic space game. Similar to other strategic games, locations are assigned value based upon some abstract evaluation. Following in...
After doing some research to find natural resources in a swamp, I found that a swamp wasn't really able to do anything beyond it being good for fish growth, as a sort of natural water and air filte...
Inspired by Nick Staab's recent work "Jack" (pictured below), how would you go around cutting down massive trees? In this scenario the simpler the tools the better, as it would allow a primitiv...
Imagine a world that reaches the end of its resources in silicon, petrol, coal, metals... everything that allows for conventional technology "” even before it has found a way over it (renewable ene...
Okay, so some space miners fly into space to get Helium-3, and then fly it back to earth to sell to non-space people. Flying into and off the earth is rather expensive, so they want to simply take ...
There is a more strict version of Prime Directive on a subspace traveling Empire. This empire (without the morale codex of the star trek crew, maybe more like Avatar) would like to get the resource...
Are there any valuable deposits (gold ore, iron ore, silver, copper, gemstones) which are likely to be found in or around excavation sites for building materials like limestone, sandstone, slate or...
Is there an energy substance, element, material, natural or artificial resource with attributes such that: When its moved it loses energy. When its intact, untouched and unmoved it contains energy.
Aliens steal all our trees. Nothing else happened, just all the trees are gone. Everything not part of the tree was left where it was (apples are stolen, termites are not.) What would be the short...
The Background: I am going to be asking a series of questions that will be relevant to forming some sort of a picture of human space commerce. Let's say that Earth-based human civilizations have ...