Posts tagged chemistry
My question regards mirroring, specifically what you would expect from a universe that was mirrored from the perspective of our own, regarding its interactions with our own. The mirroring works exa...
Everyone familiar with Godzilla should know of his iconic blue atomic breath. I've seen "theories" (technically not really theories) on how Godzilla's atomic breath works on the web. However, wha...
I've been mulling over the idea of nanites (microscopic machines that perform work - usually to transform one material into another). I've come to the conclusion that at a macroscopic level, nanit...
Purely hypothetical and kind of creative quesiton. My idea is an alien humanoid-like civilization (and basically everything alive on that planet) which uses methanol/ethanol or other alcohol as a s...
Context for Question The colonisation of the planet [ INSERT NAME ] was an enormous social experiment performed by the Terran Planetary Science and Terraforming Council; this previously-barren wor...
I have an alien race that is carbon-based, like life on Earth, but this alien life uses different essential elements in their biochemistry than those elements used on Earth. I'm trying to come up...
A few years ago, an isolated tribe was found in the middle of South America. They seemed to be a normal tribe, but near their village is a lake with a special property- you can breath underwater in...
In How large a bioengineered mobile lifeform could exist on Earth?, I asked how big my nanoassembled war beasts could be, and it was suggested that I make my question more specific. I am designing...
Let's say we're composing a message intended for radio transmission to intelligent alien life. We'd like to talk about sizes and distances, so we'll need a unit of length. We're already planning ...
This is inspired by What single element could destroy the world?. Injecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere has been proposed as a mechanism to relieve the symptoms of global warming by creatin...
Ignoring how this sort of atmosphere would come about, what are some things that happen regularly on Earth that would be altered by this sort of atmosphere? Example: Would firearms still ignite nor...
I read on the cooking.stackexchange site that all natural salt on Earth was created by seas and oceans, starting with primordial oceans four billion years ago. This got me thinking about my fiction...
Carbon-based life planet with a plenitude of infinite energy crystals. Could it exist? Somehow, when my planet cooled down, there were crystals that output a fixed amount of electromagnetic radiat...
Hydrogenic photosynthesis reduces methane and water to build biomass ($\text{CH}_2\text{O}$) and releases hydrogen: $$\text{CH}_4 + \text{H}_2\text{O} + \text{photons} \to \text{CH}_2\text{O} + 2\...
Background In my story, HD 28185 star system harbors life. One of them is a jovian HD 28185 d (Subralis), located around 1AU of this sun-like star. In-universe, Subralis is approximately 132,000 k...
You were born in Rome, when the Roman Republic was still in power. Your father is an upper middle class merchant and you are (or will be) the sole inheritor of his wealth. One day, a m...
Diamonds are carbon. Plants take in CO2 and use the carbon. Chemically, could the right kind of plant have diamonds for berries, or is there some other limiting factor?
So let's say that an alien civilization that we have made enemies with decides to use an advanced non-lethal biological weapon on the Earth as a warning. The aliens, while not infamous for any tec...
Is it possible to dissipate a blizzard with a chemical component? Or maybe with a special machine? There are no limits here except that the technology is gunpowder-renaissance-Napoleonic technolog...
As far as I understand, when you fuse deuterium (H-2) and tritium (h-3), you get a helium atom and a spare neutron. Basically alpha-rays? Now alpha rays are easily blocked by matter. You can block ...
In this world I'm building, a bunch of previously inactive genes in humans have started expressing, and changed newborns' metabolic system dramatically. As a result, a portion of population cannot...
