Questions tagged [natural-resources]
For questions that deal with the natural resources found in the environment.
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Can an advanced android interface with nature to repair themselves? [closed]
Context: This takes place in a soft science, post apocalyptic world. The actual time is a WIP, but technology would be advanced, post nuclear age but not quite interstellar travel. The world itself ...
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How would trees which contain magic react to being cut down? [closed]
In my fantasy world, trees inhabit the magic that flows through all life. This magic contains the energy of both earth (roots) and air (branches), foregrounding the balance that is needed in both ...
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How would a medieval society look if food was not a factor to consider? [closed]
The Context
To give a short context of the question, my world is called Atmos, and it's a world where continents float above a layer of clouds. They aren't just floating islands, there are landmasses ...
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Where would an interstellar society mine phosphorous and rare earth metals?
I know that rare earth metals aren't too rare and the name is mainly due to their low density. I also know that phosphorous is comparatively rare but is hyper concentrated on Earth due to its ...
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Following normal physics, can a world be unable to make electronics due to a lack of resources/materials?
I want to have a post apocalyptic world where 21st century tech is unable to be made anymore due to humans using up all the resources on the planet. Since space programs also use computers, there ...
user99723
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What types of environments and geographic features can uranium be found in? [closed]
There is a magic society, created by sorcerers to escape persecution. Their society is isolated from the main kingdoms, though they eventually will trade with them again in less than a few decades. ...
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Desert clothing in a world without plants
Suppose there was a world in which there were no plants, and with that no vines, fibers, or cotton and whatnot. There are animals that produce fur, in large abundance, and so that is a major source of ...
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Would human intelligence evolve if humans had access to infinite food?
In a world with infinite food (each organism had access to an infinite amount of food/energy from another universe), would human intelligence develop through some evolutionary mechanism?
If resources ...
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What natural ocean resources can be used to make into clothing?
I have a civilization that lives not exactly underwater, but completely surrounded by water in which their cities are both submerged underwater or built floating right on top of it. Almost all of ...
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Course correction for Easter Island - Ecocide
While this post: Course correction for Easter Island discussed potential measures to avoid the collapse of the Rapa Nui culture due to contact with the West, I'm planning to open the scope up now to ...
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Is excavating alien technology legal? [closed]
I know that there are diffrent laws regarding excavating resources on other planets and asteroids,but they are far from being precise. Many conflicts arise when nations want to make one law that ...
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Making plutonium and tritium nuclear fuel with N.I.C.E. (Nuclear Ice Contained Explosions)
I want to produce fissile material.
I want to produce a lot of fissile material.
Fortunately, I read the Wikipedia page on Ted Taylor. It states that:
Apart from bombs, Taylor also explored concepts ...
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Could the extraction of rare earth elements (REE) be more efficient on asteroids as opposed to on earth?
Could we mine or extract REEs in asteroids more easily than on earth? The following conditions apply:
Ease of extraction does not include getting to the asteroid or transferring materials back to ...
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Ore/mineral hotspots in planetary rings
In my setting, there is a small, rocky ring system surrounding an earth-like habitable planet. This ring was formed relatively recently (approx. 50 million years ago) from a small moon with a Moon-...
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What would the commodity money system of an interstellar civilization be made of?
I'm building an interstellar empire that uses commodity money as its preferred currency. Despite the network of wormholes connecting various star systems, light lag between planets and stations within ...
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Are there any non-organic resources that are rare in the grand-scheme of the Universe, but common on Earth?
I have been world-building a setting where a species of advanced aliens invades Earth, only to be forced off after the humans resort to guerilla tactics. In this setting, biological life is abundant ...
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Why are Orcs always at war for seemingly no reason? [closed]
Orcs are just as smart as humans. They have access to all the resources they need to survive in abundance. Why are they constantly at war?
INFO
Orcs are a society of roughly 0.8 Million people. Each ...
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What could be ethical reasons for deep sea mining? [closed]
Unfortunately in real-life on our planet (Earth) deep sea mining for rare earth minerals is devastating to biological ecosystems and has very little motivations beyond the capitalistic/industrial ones,...
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How can a planet's seasons be only controlled by either its land, sky or water?
I have a planet established (similar to Earth) which instead of countries has 3 main zones of habitation: land, water & sky. Each supernatural inhabitant looks after one natural part of this ...
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Drinking water distribution in the event of permanent shortage [closed]
In a world with a strong water deficiency and without the possibility to produce more. It is at a level where some people die of thirst. How could drinking water usage be regulated? Distribution per ...
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What would a gaint make it's house out of
For one the giant is much bigger than a normal human, To be precise about 110,000 feet tall and about 500 feet wide. Because of their size what would be some reliable things to make their houses and ...
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How could my island-country mostly populated by massive humanoids subsist its inhabitants?
In my prospective dramedy science-fantasy children's videogame Salade de Fruits (which means naturally Fruit Salad), there is an island-country comprising a total of eight islands:
The smallest has ...
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How would you rebuild a time machine in the wilderness? [closed]
In my game the player travels to a parallel dimension and their time machine gets heavily damaged. So now they have to use the resources in the world to rebuild/repair it. We can assume that the ...
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Where can lithium be found in the Solar System?
My question is pretty straightforward, beside earth, what celestial bodies could hold exploitable quantities of lithium-7 and lithium-6?
I understand that lithium is a scarce element in our universe. ...
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How do I make a steam engine work - with next-to-zero hydrocarbons, or, for that matter, biomatter - to use as fuel?
Let's say that my colony ship crash-landed on an atmosphere-less planet. Sure, there might be sub-surface pockets that have evolved primitive life, but sulfur and phosphorous are at a premium in the ...
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Where would be the most likely location for an early Mars base?
Quite simply, given considerations like radiation protection, locations of scientific interest, local resources for building construction, water, propellant production, mining, etc, what would be the ...
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Transportation in a fantasy world without wood
In my low-fantasy world wood is a very limited resource because all forests are haunted. Cutting a tree often means drawing the wrath of the creatures living in the woods, resulting in some very ...
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Why would space nations find more value in empty space rather than star systems?
In most 4x games, almost every space nation fights for star systems, planets, black holes, etc. The benefits are obvious: planets to colonize or mine from, solar energy, strategic positions and so on.
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How Do You Get Wood in a World Where Monsters Defend The Forests?
PROJEKT ' IRON SONG '
In the Empire of Tyvertsia, there are many strange and often hostile beasts—bears, mountain lions, sirin, bauk and the like—living among the wildlife of the thick Western forests,...
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Could medieval people build an airtight spaceship or space ark using their common resources?
This is set on a fictional alien world with medieval people. However, this world has alien livestock that are capable of flying into outer space and traveling to other worlds. These medieval-age ...
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What natural material shatters when thrown like a grenade?
Our intrepid wizard protagonist realizes there is only one of him and an army of baddies. He has a band of some 50 people with him, but only a dozen have combat training and he is the only spellcaster....
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How realistic is finding ore veins in natural caves?
I used to play World of Warcraft and a few other MMOs for their crafting systems and always wondered what a fantasy RPG with a crafting system would look like with a more realistic distribution of ...
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Could humans survive in the solar system if the earth was destroyed? [closed]
In this setting humans have settled all around the solar system but the bulk of the population is still in earth however an asteroid wiped out all life. Now can humans sustain themselves with whatever ...
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Could a space faring civilization extract valuable resources from a gas giant?
I have been developing an advanced civilization inhabiting a world orbiting a gas giant about 3 times the mass of jupiter, the conditions have already been tuned to allow life to develop over its ...
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What are some non-military reasons for a country wanting to control an impact crater where the Strait of Gibraltar used to be?
Let's say that there's a 2-million-year-old impact crater where the Strait of Gibraltar used to be, and that there's an impact peak or a series of impact peaks in the middle that are far enough above ...
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How would closing borders and supply routes affect market prices? [closed]
This was originally posted in Role Playing Games but they felt it was better posted here (this will be used for D&D 5e, some people thought it might be relevant.)
I'm developing a world where ...
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Where would primitive settlements first start to occur outside of the middle-east and turkey? [closed]
Say when people as nomads, and started to form settlements with other people, where would these primitive settlements first started to appear, they would have first started to settle in regions around ...
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Effectiveness/Possible Uses for a Nationwide Draft, Post World War 3
I'm making a situation where in the near future(5 year), the world is thrust into world war 3. The vast majority of the world's military is decimated, and it is to the point where any high tech ...
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What kind of Alien artifacts or minerals could advance the human race?
Let me explain what I mean.
Let's say an Alien civilization left a lot of devices on a planet or moon (in our solar system or wherever). They had a colony, want/wanted to Terraform (or "Xenoform&...
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natural water filters, natural water de-pollution
Memories of my childhood come by reminding me of how I used to swim in the Danube river, until the age of 6 when after a walk along the coast I saw bodies of various animals rotting by the river, cows,...
user86450
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How to estimate maximum possible colonization of Solar system?
How many people would be able to live in the Solar system before resource problems similar/comparable to what we have now on Earth would arise (rough estimation)? Is that equation/extapolation just ...
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Mining, Scavenging and Recycling in an artificial world
Billions of years ago, an extremely advanced civilization created an artificial world. Whether it is a ringworld, a shellworld, or something more isn't really relevant. This world's crust has a depth ...
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Pumping Oxygen into Titans atmosphere
In the future, humans build massive factories on the moon Titan, components of which drill tunnels down to the water ocean beneath the ice surface. Assuming the ocean is there, and that it's similar ...
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Scanning for Resources and Mapping a Rogue Planet
EDIT: Thanks to Starfish Prime's answer to this it looks like the atmospheric ice would only be ~16m thick, and the water vapor is a rounding error. I have adjusted the layering to account for their ...
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Robbing the past to pay the future: Where do the resources go? How to balance the books?
In the future, the world is in a parlous1 state. Earth people of the future (let us call them Futurians as in the answer by DWKraus) are desperate but they still have a number of time portals in ...
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Why are there still resources in space?
In this universe humans aren't the first civilization to reach space in the local stellar neighborhood (a bubble of ~1000 light years across). In fact for the past several billions of years ...
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Coal or coal analogs without Carboniferous?
In my world, there could be no Carboniferous, during which the overwhelming majority of coal was deposited on our planet. No swamps probably exist either, cutting off that way of generating coal as ...
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How can various tiers of worlds be beneficial for God's portfolio?
God is the ultimate world builder who designs various planes, which with their own worlds. He created human beings as living batteries in order to fuel him and give him power. Dea feeds off of the ...
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Time to develop a human breathable atmosphere on a captured frozen wandering planet
Suppose that a wandering frozen planet is captured by a star and this planet could develop an human breathable atmosphere.
How much time could the process take?
EDIT: the planet is earth-sized with ...
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What would America lack if cut off from World trade for years?
North and South America totally cut off from world trade for years in modern times. No intercontinental except between the two. Would there be any current technology that couldn't be made due to lack ...
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