Posts tagged chemistry
In a world very similar to ours, rain has a high concentration of simple carbohydrates in it, enough to sustain life on the surface. After some rainfall, this sugary rainwater is left behind and so...
Supercritical CO2 has been suggested as a potential alternative bio-solvent, replacing water, at high pressures and modestly elevated temperatures. But what about supercritical N2? ScCO2 is an ind...
So, this question has been asked before, but I would like to make a few stipulations regarding the specifics of my question. Firstly, the aluminium in question is fabricated in modern times, and...
The setting I'm thinking of is in the not-so-distant future where humanity has become an interplanetary species using conventional propulsion. The solar system is largely colonized with human settl...
Replicators have become a staple of science fiction. However, many stories treat them as magical, or with inconsistent abilities. This is not a magical device that makes anything for nothing. Whe...
I am writing a science fiction novel where dead humans are turned into diamonds by compacting cremated remains. What size of diamond would the amount of carbon in a human body form? I know that the...
What characteristics might define a group of multicellular chemosynthetic organisms (similar to that of bacteria living in earth's hot springs and deep sea vents, but relatively more complex, as mu...
As the title states, is it even possible to remove hazardous air chemicals in Earth? I think I could list the pollutants which I think we could remove, these are the following : Nitrogen oxide...
A civilization is very good at bio-engineering, and I was wondering if there was any kind of chemical an organism could produce which would produce viable rocket fuel. It has to do a of couple of ...
On a world similar to Earth in many aspects, a species exists that is partly carbon-based and partly X-based. X can (mostly) be found in the thick exoskeleton that this creature possesses. I'm look...
There are a lot of acids in the world, many of them present in biological creatures. Humans, for instance, have hydrochloric acid in their stomachs. What I'm wondering here is just how nasty it cou...
I'm working on explaining away the existence of a planet whose entire ecosystem is based upon bioluminescent creatures, and I've been wondering if there could be a reason for their blood (or other ...
What could I "use" to cause a population wide long-term memory loss. So far all chemicals that I have read about cause future memory loss. That is to say, if you are exposed to it today, tomorrow ...
Not long ago I asked about pH indicators and their use in making fantastical skin colors (pH Indicators and Fantastical Skin Colors) In that question, I listed bromothymol blue as a type of indica...
Ever since reading through the creative answers in this question (How can I explain alien skin being different colors?) I've been thinking about the logistics behind fantastical skin colors. Howe...
I've heard that bodies of water boasting high salinities tend to turn red due to seasonal algae blooms. I have a river in a fantasy setting I'm working on that's blood red year-round, and I want to...
Bamboo, horsetail and many grasses incorporate silicates into their tissues to protect themselves from grazers. Diatoms use it to build a glassy outer shell. Carbon is still the choice for metaboli...
Many questions describe hypothetical biochemistries, or alternatives to carbon, water, DNA, etc that aliens could use. They cite specific examples, given a world we know about, of what creatures w...
I've been mulling whether the local gaseous makeup of air is changed by electricity running along a wire. My previous question is on hold, and this one is different anyway. I couldn't find exactl...
Could a pill be made that instead of preventing pregnancy induces a successful pregnancy after sexual intercourse? This article seems to answer my question and is what inspired it, but I'm not 100%...
Halite, or rock salt, is a rock formed by salt deposited in past and then undergone geological processes. My question is: provided that enough (how to get that much sugar is not in scope of this q...
How Long could an "Eternal" Fire last? At some point there is a fire very spiritually important to a certain people - so important that they build a city around it, and begin developing an empire ...
I've wondered about this for years. Reading one of the books in the Inheritance Cycle, I came across a stipulation. It stated that if observed enough, a grain of sand could render to the viewer the...
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...
In my world I've created an alloy that can melt at low temperatures and solidify at high temperatures. This got me wondering, is something like this actually possible/does it exist. With most mater...
TL,DR: Kinetic weapons are great at taking down shields, but can't take out the hull. I need an explosive that works in a vacuum to take out the hull. Nukes are out, since they'll hit the atmosphe...
Basically, I need one main character to be comatose and the other one trying to save him. The antagonist has to give the main character a specific time period to jump through hoops or whatever to g...
Far Future. Almost every household has a 'fabber'. You put raw materials in it (can be almost anything) and it does what you program it to do. It transmutes the raw materials into what is needed. T...
Having in mind a scene from "Avatar: The Last Airbender" where Aang covers his body in a block of ice to float on water I'm wondering if it was possible to get H2O solid at arbitrary temperatures (...
In my world, humanity has made the ultimate invention: A machine that takes raw elements and converts them into anything one desires, like a universal 3D printer. The only thing it needs is a supp...
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...
An alien world with a significant amount of tall metal trees allows lightning to occur at lower voltages than usual. How low could that voltage be pushed and still break apart Nitrogen molecules i...
My race of space-going sentients want to weaponise a life form which is explosive in an oxygen-rich environment. To do so, they have access to any planet they care to use, terraforming, and the ab...
I am writing a book in which criminals get their hands on a polymer which resembles chewing gum , but alters their saliva. This allows them to burn holes into walls made from plastic used as buildi...
This is for a story line that I would prefer to be based on known science as much as possible. Is there a known compound that can phase shift from gas to solid or liquid, or the other way around, ...
I want to design an alien species whose physiology is capable of metabolizing substances regardless of whether their chemical chirality is levorotatory or dextrorotatory. Is this scientifically pos...
So this question, Designing a Carnivorous Plant, talks about animals being attracted to a plant, at first by a sweet scent, and then being drugged by an unspecified toxin which renders them 'euphor...
On planets of have different temperatures, conditions and chemical makeup of the lava/magma, what would be the least viscous lava around? (Relevant to an earlier question - What would an efficient...
I have an idea about a planet that is cold and dark, but very loud. Constant rolling storms, crashing glaciers and icesheets, earthquakes, volcanoes and so on. Instead of photosynthetic plants, as...
I have a story where the characters are colonists heading to a new planet. My plan is to have the native lifeforms be descended from a single celled lifeform on a comet that shares a common ancesto...
An illness has been slowly spreading throughout the inhabitants of my agrarian society, decimating villages. The first sign of infection is the excessive production of slimy yellow saliva, and sinc...
I'm curious what it would take to get a planet with so much free fluorine that you can have an atmosphere of predominantly or purely fluorine. I realize how improbable a planet like this is, so I'm...
Is it possible to create a room-temperature solid made from 100% human blood? One of my stories features a girl who has the passive ability to block the superpowers of anyone in a 100-meter radi...
Primordial Earth was buried in carbon dioxide. When life started, it was with algae using energy from the sun to crack the carbon out of carbon dioxide, with the byproduct of releasing the corrosiv...
While playing old games, I encountered a friend I knew from SciFi series and games alike, the Merculite missile. While thinking about what Merculite might actually be (and linking it to a mineral f...
Which solvent to use for metal nerves? Based on this answer on to how to evolve biological radios, the answer states that if creatures in an ecosystem utilize metal for electrical transmission ins...
So the desired result is a compound that can be left in relatively isolated area, isolated such that weather has no direct affect on the area, and that will ignite/explode when touched, even after ...
I am building a science fiction universe, and I am currently thinking of many different unique sentient alien species that would populate the galaxy. I have thought of a rocky planet with Earth le...
I have to feed my dinosaurs, the plants in the land are mostly destroyed, but the ocean is almost "untouched", so of course, I'm gonna feed my feathery friends with a lot of algae, specially made b...
This question is focused on a purely chemical messaging system for humans that provides the same degree of nuance that spoken human languages convey now as well as all the information that smells c...
