New answers tagged materials
1
Why?
Evolutionary pressure, of course. The same evolutionary pressure that made animals heavier than air learn to fly, trees and plants which find dead with fire having to need the fire to better spread their seeds, and so forth and so on.
How?
One of the possible path is that one organism starts to embody some of those chemicals, like Ta, B, Ti, W, as ...
3
A1:
It uses naturally occurring materials.
Your organism does not generate these high temp ceramics within its body. It finds these materials in the environment and assembles them into its exoskeleton. Circumstances in your world lead to geologic production of your ceramics. Your organism finds suitable pieces like a hermit crab finds a suitable mollusk ...
0
In deep space, there are two different ways to go.
Send the energy to the planet. Large lasers can be built near the sun to take advantage of the large amounts of solar energy, either through solar electric satellites in orbit around the Sun or around Mercury, or directly using sunlight by focusing the sunlight onto a suitable lasing medium. The high ...
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With current and near-future technology, this is likely a poor candidate for colonization
We don't know how to build long-duration settlements outside of our nice blue marble. This is not an ultimate problem perhaps, because presumably this is something we can figure out in time.
Transit time from Earth to a Kuiper belt object is very long. Resupply ...
1
If there are extremely powerful winds on the surface, then the Sun is not too far away. Wind power is Sun power... unless it's geothermal power.
Wind turbines would still work fine, just not wind turbines that look like the ones that work on Earth. You need different shapes for different wind speeds and densities. So, you can get indirect solar / geothermal ...
3
Windpower, geothermal, beamed power, fission and fusion
The kind of planet you are describing is a super-earth or mini-neptune. Given its location it will have a substantial hydrogen atmosphere and a significant part of its mass will be ices (water, ammonia and methane). If there is a surface, it will be an ice desert under a high pressure atmosphere, kind ...
2
If you are looking for cutting edges, you can either go for stone (flint or obsidian), or, in case the geology of your archipelago doesn't support it, shark teeth can be a valuable substitute. You are in an archipelago, at the end, so try to use the sea as much as possible.
I think it is mentioned in Melville's Typee that the indigenous of Polynesia used ...
6
Copy the indigineous tech of a place like your place.
You can pick a people you think are like your people. Or if you want to start fresh, pick a place that you think is like your place. Then copy the tech of the people who lived there. Archipelagos come to exist for different reasons. Tech using stone would be dictated by the geology of that place and ...
3
Bone strength and food was not a limiting factor for dinosaur size.
Most limiting factors are:
Breath - it is not about liters of oxigen per second, but about difference in parcial pressure of O2 and CO2 (not absolute values, but difference!). Large dinosaur has long long blood vessels, and a long time for gases to come throu body. Each cell this flow is ...
6
Using basic square/cube law, a dinosaur with 60x the bone strength could get 60^1/3 times as big (assuming the muscle strength is similarly increased). The cube root of 60 is about 3.9, so they could get a little less than four times as long/tall and still move around as well the original "real world" scale dinosaur.
Of course, unless you have something ...
0
To add to other answers: some meteorites are from metal (mostly iron), others contain carbon with other minerals. So, occassionally, a chunk of material may just drop from above.
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Trade with aquatic people. If there are water breathing species that can mine the bottom you could trade with them. Bonus points if they are unable to use fire so your protagonist civilization is the only ones able to craft metal. That would create a mutal trade dependency.
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In your world, the humongous habitat-creature could start out as a small deep dweller which is connected to the deep sea bottom via feeder tentacles, moving over the bottom to collect nutrients.
As it grows, methane and pure size force the creature to slowly rise to the surface, the feeders growing at a proportionate rate. The creature will therefore always ...
2
Harvest metals from the dead.
Removal of metal ions using an industrial biomass
with reference to environmental control
It is well documented that microbial biomass is capable of absorbing
metal ions from aqueous solutions even when the cells have been
killed... The biosorption of metals using non-living biomass has
recently been comprehensively ...
3
Interesting metals are dissolved as salts in the water (google the worlds' oceans content of gold, or uranium). The huge animals everyone lives on drink the sea water and extract these elements. They can be mined by cutting organs or body parts from animals and burning them, the resultant ash is your ore for further processing.
Some body parts may contain ...
4
Some elements might naturally accrete on the ocean floor like manganese nodules. These contain a wide range of metallic compounds like iron, chromium, etc and are a potentially valuable mineral source.
Your creature-cities might be taught to dive deep and collect these nodules for their symbiotic inhabitants — or parasitic inhabitants as the case may be.
...
2
If you cannot go outside to harvest materials, then the only way is for your creature to eat the materials itself.
We could use the behavior that some land animals use to get access to salts vital to their biology (just google salt lick). Instead, your creature consumes parts of the sea bed to obtain vital nutrients (the animals they eat might be attached ...
7
Off the top of my head:
Still not yet obvious that suitable materials can be manufactured in bulk. This isn't an absolute restriction on space elevators, but it might be one of those things which is always "50 years away".
Lightning could frazzle your cable and break it or seriously damage it. Dry cables might be ok, but no-one is sure whether wet cables ...
12
A space elevator is a well established concept.
Despite being proposed for the first time in 1895, it has not yet found concrete implementation. Why?
Basically we have not yet found any material which is strong enough to withstand all the forces involved in the utilization of a space elevator.
A space elevator cable would need to carry its own weight as ...
0
in reality, you cannot break a sword with a sword, and it very hard to pierce armour with one. with some reasonable metallurgy skills and a design which is essentially a club with one sharp side, you could likely break some swords and smash some armour, and you would not really have to keep it sharp since it is basically a blunt force weapon. you could make ...
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