Could An Alien Earth Without Uranium Exist?

[Spacescifi]

Just curious. Since I have been thinking that a lot of what makes scifi races exactly what they are is tied to what they can do and what they have.

So is it possible for an alien habital earth to exist without uranium?

In it's place would be a few flavors of unobtanium humanity would LOVE to get their hands on such as:

A naturally found metal that when refined of impurities doubles as a zero resistance room temperature super conductor AND can be charged with it's mass equivalent of electrical energy. Otherwise has properties, availability, and density on par with lead.

Thus here an the alien earth they never made the atom bomb... not natively anyway. Their first atom bomb was made from uranium found on another planet in their solar system.

They still managed to make pure fusion bombs though.

Their unobtanium is used for super battery energy storage, with the hazard that if overheated by a fire they would explode releasing all energy stored.

 

Thoughts?

 

Edited December 13, 2023 by Spacescifi

[Shpaget]

In fiction, sure. Just have all the uranium mined by a civilisation long gone (or don't explain it at all).

In reality? What would be the mechanism that prevents U from getting in that particular part of accretion disk which will eventually form the planet, but be present in another part of that same cloud so it can be fount elsewhere in the system?

[RCgothic]

Uranium is really abundant in Earth's crust. More so than gold, mercury, silver and tin. There are traces basically everywhere that metals are found. Rocky inner solar system worlds in the Goldilocks zone are therefore overwhelmingly likely to have decent uranium deposits. If a previous civilization really had stripped a planet of all uranium, they'd likely have taken most of everything else of value as well.

Icy worlds and the atmospheres of gas giants would be very metal deficient generally. As well as presenting an extremely hazardous environment for visiting lifeforms, it's unclear higher life could evolve in such places. Certainly nothing needing decent quantities of iron for blood.

[magnemoe]

Couple of ways to do this, most of the heavy elements come from neutron star mergers, have few of them in the area, second have the gas cloud be old, 
So you get another decay cycle of Uranium 238 and hardly any 235, you also get less thorium. 
Its not that you don't have uranium just that its much more rare. Gold mercury and lead will also be rare here probably also iron is rarer. 

Pure fusion bombs is harder than good fusion reactors as you are going the other way around. First you have to make an fusion reactor then find how to make it blow up. 
Easy to make pure fusion bombs is an great late filer. 

[KSK]

The grouchy chemist in me isn’t a big fan of unobtainium in any kind of science fiction. Room temperature superconducting  alloy? Sure, why not. We have no idea what that alloy would be, but hey - science fiction.

Superconducting elements? Shove them in the same dumpster as any other ‘elements hitherto unknown to science’.  We know what the naturally occurring elements are, and for the extreme end of the Periodic Table we can still extrapolate properties with  reasonable confidence (hi Mendeleev).

Besides, any element at that end of the Table tends to have a half life measured in milliseconds. There are so-called islands of stability (don’t recall if we’ve actually reached them yet) where certain Superheavy isotopes are expected to be more stable on theoretical  grounds but that just means a half life of minutes to days, rather than anything useful. That’s assuming the theory is correct - as far as I know, islands of stability haven’t been experimentally verified.

 

[Spacescifi]

3 hours ago, KSK said:

The grouchy chemist in me isn’t a big fan of unobtainium in any kind of science fiction. Room temperature superconducting  alloy? Sure, why not. We have no idea what that alloy would be, but hey - science fiction.

Superconducting elements? Shove them in the same dumpster as any other ‘elements hitherto unknown to science’.  We know what the naturally occurring elements are, and for the extreme end of the Periodic Table we can still extrapolate properties with  reasonable confidence (hi Mendeleev).

Besides, any element at that end of the Table tends to have a half life measured in milliseconds. There are so-called islands of stability (don’t recall if we’ve actually reached them yet) where certain Superheavy isotopes are expected to be more stable on theoretical  grounds but that just means a half life of minutes to days, rather than anything useful. That’s assuming the theory is correct - as far as I know, islands of stability haven’t been experimentally verified.

 

 

True... unobtanium is a stretch of imagination,

As unlikely as it would be in real life, I think it even more unlikely for a single macguffin do it all unobtanium. Therefore the alien world will have several types of flavors of unobtanium native to their solar system such as:

1. Room temperature zero resistance super conducting materials.

2. A molten metal that can when purified of impurities can hold it's mass worth of electrical energy.

[kerbiloid]

The extraextraterrestrial aliens had visited the protoplanetary nebula, and sucked out all uranium from the dust.