Green Rocks - Television Tropes & Idioms

The Minovsky Particle in the classic anime Mobile Suit Gundam acts as a Green Rock; it not only disrupts radio, radar and infra-red radiation (necessitating close combat in space, and by extension Humongous Mecha), it also clusters into "mega particles" which enable the use of Energy Weapons, and can be arranged into a "lattice structure" to form Deflector Shields using electromagnetic fields. Some of the Alternate Universe Gundam series have employed similar do-everything technology for similar results:
- Gundam SEED and Gundam SEED Destiny had the Neutron Jammer (N-Jammer for short), which like the Minovsky Particle was highly effective at disrupting sensors and communications, thus handwaving a reason for Humongous Mecha to be effective war machines. But that was just a side effect; they were created to make nuclear reactions impossible. This not only provides a justification for the battery-powered mecha (which run out of energy as the plot demands, though in a real Wall Banger it's never explained how their motherships, which recharge said mecha, are powered), it makes the use of nuclear weapons (which the series backstory shows as being how the war started) impossible.
  - Basically every superweapon in the SEED universe was also based on technology derived from the N-Jammer. First was the N-Jammer Canceller, which does exactly what it sounds like. It allowed for nuclear-powered mecha, and a revival of nuclear warheads as a viable weapon. The range of N-Jammer Cancellers was short enough that N-Jammers were still perfect sensor jammers, though. N-Jammer Cancellers were also critical in the design of GENESIS, a Wave Motion Gun capable of wiping out all life on Earth that basically combined all of the fictional technologies introduced previously. And early in SEED Destiny, there was the Neutron Stampeder, which forced nuclear warheads to detonate prematurely, thus causing an enemy fleet to nuke itself.
- Gundam 00 continues this trend with the mysterious GN Particles, which can jam communications, be used as a propellant, be used as protective shielding, and is even the basis for the Gundams' energy swords. GN Particles have the added bonus of coming in two distinct "flavours"; the "Pure", blue coloured particles used by the protagonists, and "Impure", red particles used by the villains in their mass-manufactured drives. Incidently, the red particles seem to impede cell functions and healing in humans, while the blue version improves it.
  - Well it generally is the theory of how the particles are cretaed or contained. For a GN shots, the particles are compressed and contained into a stable format before being sent out in a concentrated wave. Beam Sabers are simply GN particles held in check by a contained dispersion field (which is why they tend to be less than effective on GN fields since the fields disrupt the containment field). For GN fields, the GN particles are sent to disperse within a given field and the strength of the field is relative to the density that the particles are dispersed. GN fields also can be used as a foundation to collect particles at high speed to transfer into a projectile format as demonstrated by the Seravee.
  - And apparently cause brief moments of telepathy in some cases, although this hasn't been given much explanation, as of yet.
  - GN Particles are insane. Exposure to massive amounts of GN Particles can cause evolution. Setsuna eventually became a natural Innovator after piloting a Gundam with 2 GN Drives. Hallelujah comes back briefly due to GN Particle spam. Oh, and TRANS-AM Burst, which activates super GN Particle spam, actually helped turn the tide of the last battle and healed Lasse and Louise. These particles somehow allowed the quantization of a huge robot of course with its pilots.
  - GN particles are exotic matter and GN drives somehow involve a topological defect. If you've ever studied theoretical physics or advanced mathematics, you know that either of these alone can basically function as a real-life Screw The Rules I Have Plot button. the best part is that, apparently, they both not only can exist in the real world, but according to current theories, must.
Devil Fruit, from the anime One Piece. Eating one can give you just about any superpower imaginable, the type depending on the fruit you ate. Powers range from animal transformation to elemental control to coming back from the dead as a living skeleton. What really pushes it into Green Rocks territory is the ability for inanimate objects to "eat" the animal-type fruits, becoming Empathic Weapons in the process. But, unlike some Green Rocks, the devil's fruits have a strong stigma. The user is unable to swim, and loses all power upon significant contact with seawater. In addition, the result of eating the fruit is generally unknown. You could control lightning, or you could gain a completely (or seemingly) useless ability. There is no antidote, and eating a second fruit is thought to cause instant death.
- The Dials, magical seashells from the sky (somewhat vaguely implied to be related to the Denden Mushi) that all have different magical powers based on color, fit the trope much more. Much of the Skypeia arc was the Skypeains getting New Powers As The Plot Demands attributed to Dials and the Dials are used from then on in the story to explain away the setting's Schizo Tech.
Yuusha-Oh GaoGaiGar has a literal green rock, the G-Stone, used as the power source for all of its main mecha, as its power output increases as a function of the pilot's or robot's raw courage. There's also a red counterpart, the J-Jewel, with even less well-defined powers, one of which is explosive output when combined with a G-Stone. Indeed, many of the fuzzy properties of the G-Stone and J-Jewel are related to their interactions with other substances and energies. Finally, there's Zonder Metal. Just... Zonder Metal.
The Silver Crystal from Sailor Moon seems to gain whatever properties are necessary for a particular arc's plot. It can defeat evil beings, except for when it only seals them away or heals them! It can grant its user's dying wish, except when using it doesn't cause death! It's useful for saving cities of the future, initiating Transformation Sequences, and also apparently could serve as a great power battery for Big Bads! It even plays music!
Code Geass has a couple of examples. One is Sakuradite, a natural resource with high conductivity that's used in basically everything in the series; the Lancelot's Super Prototype-ness is explained by saying that it uses more Sakuradite than normal Knightmare Frames, giving it incredible energy efficiency. A better example is the Gefjun Disturber, a device that blocks Sakuradite's conductivity, making it work something like an EMP weapon. It also somehow has the properties to block radar and aids in the blooming of energy weapons, which allows the Gawain's hadron cannons to go from awful to amazing.
Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: Spiral Energy solves everything. It is Hot Blooded power incarnate. And is usually green. It's also specifically stated to defy the laws of physics.

In the original Superman comics, Red Kryptonite had a totally random yet temporary effect.
- And guess what Pink Kryptonite (viruses ahoy!) causes?
In The Incredible Hulk comic books, gamma radiation often has a completely random effect on the individual exposed, usually something to do with their psychological makeup, although this effect is often completely arbitrary.
- This is the way they explained gamma radiation turning Hulk into a id-like monster, She-Hulk into a fun loving Amazon, Doc Samson into a musclebound superhero type, and the Abomination into pretty much what you'd expect.
- It's also been revealed that most people would just die horribly when exposed to such large amounts of gamma radiation (which is a rather more plausible result), and the people who got superpowers from it did so because the radiation interacted in some pseudoscientific way with random genetic anomalies they already had.
  - It was explained once that everyone who got a positive mutation from gamma exposure had a single common genetic ancestor somewhere back in the mists of history. No one else has that funny genetic quirk.
The Terrigen Mists, the source of superpowers for Marvel Comics' Inhumans, bestow random superpowers and physical mutations upon anyone exposed to them.
- However, if any non-Inhuman is exposed to them it will inevitably lead to a serious Deadly Upgrade or some similarly unpleasant fate.
In the Just Imagine... line of comics where Stan Lee re-imagines several classic DC characters, almost every character with powers gains them through some form of green energy, mist, or chemical. The green manifestations turn out to be linked back to an ancient magical tree that may be Yggdrasil or the Tree of Knowledge.
The Top Ten universe has S.T.O.R.M.S. (Sexually Transmitted Organic Rapid Mutation Syndrome), a sexually transmitted disease that can mutate you into a monster, a god or (most often) a monstrous corpse.
Marvel's mutant gene is probably the most extreme example of this, letting writers forgo the need for any sort of origin story what so ever by saying the character's a mutant. Mutants can have literally any power imaginable, ranging from the ability to regenerate any and all wounds received, to duplication. Whether this was a bad thing is debatable, since non-mutants' origin stories are often cheesy or downright wallbangingly stupid.
- Scarlet Witch's mutant power over probability is another example, basically letting her do anything the writers need, like making all the bullets in a gun defective. Some Willing Suspension Of Disbelief is needed, since she's been known to use her powers to do things physically impossible no matter how much luck you have, like make gravity stop affecting her. Later retconning revealed that her powers were combined with actual magic to far exceed what should have been possible.
The exact same burst of radiation gave four people each a completely different power in Fantastic Four. Some iterations have explained it as the powers coming from what each felt was their greatest weakness.
- Which just happened to correspond with the classic Alchemical "Elements": Air (Invisible Girl), Earth (The Thing), Fire (The Human Torch) and Water (Mr. Fantastic).
  - Or possibly the four stages of matter (gaseous, solid, plasma, & liquid, respective to the previous examples), if you prefer a more scientific outlook.
- The current explanation is that Reed was partially responsible for designing the entire universe.
In Milestone Comics' Dakota Universe, most super powers are the result of exposure to Quantum Juice, a.k.a. Q-Juice.
Multiple powered characters in DC Comics are a result not from the accidents they had, but mutating to -survive- the accidents. As seen in the Hitman series (and in other comics), it's fairly common for people to crawl out of a vat of toxic goo and go on a rampage. The titular character is often called in to provide a very discreet bullet.
Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic), Tony Stark (Iron Man), and Stephen Strange (Dr. Strange) are Marvel's walking green rocks. It just depends on whether you need something involving physics or biology, technology and computers, or magic!, respectively.
- That is, of course, when they decide to get off their asses. Reed isn't a trope namer for nothing...

Heavy Metal: The Loc-Nar is is literally a Green Rock; a floating, sentient, utterly evil, sadistic Green Rock. It's a green sphere that proclaims itself (correctly, given the havoc that constantly tends to surround it) the sum of all evil in Heavy Metal's universe, and is the MacGuffin for all the stories told in the movie.
In District 9, the "black fluid" serves as some sort of fuel for a space ship. It has the bizarre side-effect of altering the DNA of any human exposed to it, causing them to transform into a "prawn".
Subverted in Creepshow, where the "meteor shit!" only had one effect. It was green, though.

One of the finest examples is in the Dune series of books. Melange, AKA "the Spice", was a combination of Mac Guffin and Applied Phlebotinum. It was a flavoring, a drug, a source of magical visions, and it gave you cool-looking blue-on-blue eyes. It also made Faster Than Light Travel possible, and acted as a mutagen on consecutive generations of users. It also quadrupled the lifespan of anyone who took it. Too bad that The Spice was also insanely addictive, had only one source, and being cut off from supply resulted in an agonizing death.
- As elaborated in some of the later books (including later books by the author's estate) the Spice allows fast space travel because it confers a certain degree of prescience/psychic-knowledge to the navigators of the ships, which would otherwise be impossible to safely navigate, at least not without proscribed AI intelligences. The actual FTL physics are separate from the drug's effects.
- In Frank Herbert's books the Spice only had two properties — life extension and consciousness expansion. Essentially the ultimate nootropic. The variation of effect was due to the variation of short and long-term dosage. At low doses, it merely prolonged life and granted a moderate enhancement to thought processes. It was only at very high doses that the mind was sufficently enhanced to manifest prescience; and for the addiction and fatal withdrawl symptoms to be an issue (and for the blue-within-blue eyes side effect to show up). FTL travel was stated to be purely technological in nature, and implied to be related to the Holtzman Effect. The prescience and cognitive enhancement granted by the Spice was necessary for navigation through folded space, since electronic AI has been subject to both legal and religious prohibition since the Butlerian Jihad (although the world of Ix is implied to have developed some in secret).
  - Three properties. The first book makes it abundantly clear that it can be used as, well, a spice.
  - Four properties. The Spice is also stated to act as a neutralizer for most basic poisons in the Duniverse. Is there anything the Spice can't do?
The Wild Cards virus can produce agonizing death, severe deformities and mutations, or superpowers ranging from useless to nearly Godlike. It also sometimes taps the infectee's subconsious and turns them into their fantasies or fears.
The gelstei crystals in the Ea Cycle come in all the colours of the rainbow and then some. Each type has different powers, but the more powerful ones are versatile. For example, green gelstei can be used to both heal and create mutated monsters.
Keys to the Kingdom had the Keys, the description of which pretty much IS 'magical items that can do almost anything.'
- Although they might have specialities, seeing as the Third Key is almost always shown manipulating water, while the Fifth Key can transport its user anywhere they've already been, so long as there's a reflective surface there.
- And the Second Key is specifically used for making things, the Sixth Key appears to enhance spells written with it, as it is a quill pen and House sorcery almost always involves writing, and the Fourth Key seems to be awfully useful in a fight... Which may indicate that the Keys have powers specific to the demesne they preside over.

The Trope Namer is Smallville's kryptonite. It has been used to kill people, heal people, give people powers (the powers can be anything with no common theme), erase memories, give back memories, make chewing gum, make Clark Kent crawl on the floor in pain, make Clark Kent act like a dick, make Clark Kent lose all his power, make Bizarro Kent explode with too much power, split Clark Kent into a Literal Split Personality, make a phone call to twenty-four hours ago, cause two people who were nearby when they exploded to psychically bond, etc., etc.
At times, the "Orbs of the Prophets" in Star Trek Deep Space Nine acted as green rocks. For example, enabling Time Travel in the famous "Trials and Tribble-ations" episode.
Star Trek Voyager. Seven of Nine's Borg implants and nanoprobes were used to resolve a number of problems.
- Like Voyager's low ratings.
  - That would be the implants on her chest.
  - Oho, I see what you did there...
We can't mention Star Trek without mentioning the almighty Deflector Array. Any time anything in the universe that's even remotely energy-based needs to be absorbed, converted, transmitted, created, destroyed, or, well, deflected, you can count on the ship's engineer thinking up a solution that uses the deflector array. No ship should be built without it!
- Funny you should say that, as Federation/Starfleet ships seem to be the only ones in the Trekverse to have an obvious main deflector dish (and even then not all the time). Everyone else, from the Klingons to the Romulans to the Cardassians to Voyager's Delta-Quadrant-Menace-Of-The-Week, seems to get by without them. Which is especially odd given that the basic vanilla function of a deflector array is to function as a futuristic cow catcher and would be hugely important if you didn't want to destroy your ship by flying into a piece of grit at warp speed...
Naquada from Stargate SG-1 is practically indestructible, is a room-temperature superconductor, enables forming stable wormholes, is a source of power second only to Zero Point Energy, explodes with super-nuclear force on contact with potassium, has an easily detectable energy pattern, etc...
- Naquadria is basically exactly the same, except more powerful and has a tendency to explode more often. Whether the people using the stuff want it to or not.
Promicin, the luminous green neurotransmitter from The 4400, has extremely unpredictable effects. Anybody injected with it will develop some kind of superpower, but there is apparently no way to predict what power that will be. It also has a good chance of killing you but that's the price of power, even if it does suck.
On Land Of The Lost, the light crystals could do any number of things, by themselves or in combination with other colors, including emit light, heat, and energy, explode, and open dimensional portals.
Kind of a literal example, but in one episode of Blackadder, Baldrick and Percy attempt to turn lead into gold. What they end up with instead is a glowing green rock that can only be described as "green".
The British sci-fi drama Misfits, In just six episode the storm that strikes in the first episode has given time travel, mind reading, mind control, invisibility, psychopathy, the ability to make others hair fall out, immortality, youth, and probably a few more!

In Warhammer lore, Warpstone is a magic rock, a form of solid Chaos, that absorbs all light from the surrounding area while emitting its own green light. It can be used to power magical machines or for Faster Than Light Travel or as a magic looking glass or to create mutations, etc. Generally, though, it's The Corruption. Oh, and did we mention that one of the two moons is made out of this stuff?
- And in Warhammer 40000, you get all sorts of magic rocks-Necrodermis, Standard Template Constructs, wraithbone, and the Warp itself all function as magic rocks at various points.
Nerps for acne. Nerps for boredom. Nerps for kidney failure. Nerps for energy. Nerps for ring-around-the-collar.

Tiberium from the Command And Conquer series is the most valuable substance in the world (leading to the GDI and Nod fighting over it) and will either kill or mutate anybody who steps in it. It also corrupts the land so much in the sequels that in the third game a large part of the world is entirely uninhabitable from Tiberium poisoning. To top it off, it's part of an alien invasion plan. It's green, of course. There's also a blue variety, which is much more valuable, but tends to... react, when people start slinging explosives around.
Phazon from the Metroid Prime series was a poison, a weapon, and fuel, and interestingly, was the only thing that could hurt the Metroid Prime despite it also causing the metroid's transformation in the first place.
- In Corruption it turned out to be the corrupting influence of a living planet of the stuff seeking to take over the universe. Whoa.
Skies Of Arcadia features a system of six Green Rocks of which only one is green; the others are red, yellow, blue, purple, and silver. These rocks are energized meteorites that fall from the moons and are used as a Magitek-ish power source for practically every vaguely mechanical item in the game, including prototype airship cannons, vehicle engines, torches, stoves, and even liquor distillers (silver makes the good stuff). Said rocks also allow their owners to cast magic spells, or physically attack with elemental power by slotting a rock into their weapon.
The Chaos Emeralds from Sonic The Hedgehog seem to be the Deus Ex Machina of the series, including everything from heroic transformation to manipulating time to powering doomsday machines. The fact that they weren't all green as the name implies has been attributed to a mistranslation from the original Japanese, and justified in various ways in different Spin Off media.
- Emeralds are a kind of beryl. Beryl comes in a wide variety of colors. I have always thought that they called them emeralds because your average ten-year-old gamer wouldn't know what a beryl is. Or is that attributing too much knowledge on the part of the writers?
  - Archie's Sonic comic makes note of this, by naming Moebius's Chaos Emeralds "Anarchy Beryl".
- The Master Emerald is green. The Chaos Emeralds are "controlled" by the Master Emerald. Good enough for me.
- Archie's Sonic comic adds to this trope by having ALL Chaos Emeralds on Mobius be green. This was later rewritten in issue #169/170 to the normal 7 emeralds.
The Fire Emblem in the series by the same name seems to function somewhat like this. In Sacred Stones it's a plot device, and in Shadow Dragon all it does is let you open locked doors and chests without a key.
The psychic summer camp in Psychonauts is built over a large deposit of Psitanium, which enhances psychic powers. Carrying a large block of this allows Cruller to come to the rescue without splitting into his multiple personalities.
The Jak And Daxter series has Eco, a gooey substance that comes in Green (Healing), Red (Strength), Blue (Speed), Yellow (Power), Dark (Toxic, and turned the hero's best friend into a Weasel Mascot), and Light.
Mass Effect has element zero, or "eezo", formed as a byproduct of supernovae explosions. Its specific property is that it generates the titular "mass effect" fields when electrically charged - they increase mass when positively charged (resulting in Deflector Shields and Artificial Gravity), and decrease mass when negatively charged, even to a negative mass, enabling reactionless Flight and a perfectly researched form of Faster Than Light Travel. But if a lifeform is exposed to airborne particles of eezo in utero, it can result in the child developing the ability to create this "mass effect" selectively and at distances. Of course it usually just resulted in the child and mother's death, and those that did gain powers usually got migraines and/or brain cancer and/or went insane - though the latter is supposedly more due to the cybernetic implants which are necessary to actually manipulate their powers.
The Dig featured glowing Life Crystals created by an advanced alien civilization, which are capable of bringing the dead back to life (albeit with resulting insanity and crystal-addiction). You can probably guess what colour they were.
- For some reason, the crystals were also used to power the various alien machines found throughout the city.
Psynergy Stones in Golden Sun, which were spread over the world by the erupting Mt. Aleph, hit animals and turned them into monsters. They had different effects on more sentient beings (humans, talking trees...), as well as the landscape (caused the sudden apparition of a forest, and a swamp in the second game) and even non-living things such as statues. Basically, everything that hinders you but isn't directly tied to the plot is blamed on them. To Adepts, they restored their Psynergy. They were purple and sparkly, though.
In Half-Life, green (actually gold) rocks and the mishandling of said rocks caused the resonance cascade, which allowed the creatures from Xen to come a-swarming in and nearly end humanity as we know it. The Nihilanth kept three of these crystals in its chamber to heal itself.
- In Half-Life 2 : Episode 2 it turns out that someone arranged for the rock to be placed into the machine for exactly that purpose, and that the computer problems on the same day were most likely to cover up that the machine had been tampered with. It is confirmed that the G-Man procured the crystal which blew up in the test chamber but for who's request is unknown (seeing that he presents himself as a freelance contractor, probably the Combine hired him).
Magicite in Final Fantasy VI are the green gems left behind by deceased espers.
- In Final Fantasy XII, Magicite is merely a stone that has absorbed enough Mist to become magical itself, allowing one to cast basic elemental magic, keep airships aloft, or create city-wide barriers. The most significant (and powerful) Magicite in the Ivalice Alliance world is known as Nethicite and Auracite.
Mako energy, from Final Fantasy VII. It's even green. And, by extension, materia.
Aer in Tales Of Vesperia. Sometimes comes in rock form.
- Expheres and Cruxis Crystals in Tales Of Symphonia. Though they're made by torturing human lives.
Energy X serves this purpose in Freedom Force and its sequel. Not only does it give almost all the super-characters their powers, which are as varied as anything the X-gene ever provided, but it provides the power-ups that are sprinkled around each battlefield. It heals injuries, temporarily super-energises characters, provides permanent power boosts for characters and can give the team a bonus helping them to recruit more members. And it comes in easy-to-carry canisters!
- And trurns out to be a sentient energy being with dark designs on the universe! Too bad the third in the series was never made...
The oft-forgotten classic of the NES, WURM Journey To The Center Of The Earth, has green rocks that shoot at the player's ship
Binchotite. It not only gets New Powers As The Plot Demands (from making floating islands to being refined into fuel to capturing people to powering Musashi's special abilities to making Super Soldiers), it's also green, and a rock (when exposed to air). One does wonder how Grillin' Village survives, though, what with the constant threat of a (totally non-nuclear) Phlebotinum explosion due to an incompetent reactor administrator.
Ember from Torchlight. The game takes place next to a mine for it.
In Alpha Prime, hubbardium are literal green rocks (Turned that way due to radiation from Glomar's heart) that are implied to have a variety of uses ranging from powering things, to alcohol, to Bullet Time.

The Dewitchery Diamond from the webcomic El Goonish Shive is a literal green rock. It does not quite fit this trope, however, in that — as yet — it has only shown a single ability.
- Tedd's Transformation Ray, however, can transform anything into anything else, in any way, shape, or form imaginable. Its single dial must turn in infinitesimal fractions of degrees.
  - He has a computer to program the "dial".
The Blinker Stones from Gunnerkrigg Court were initially presented as Pink Rocks: creating fires and giant glowing sky signals alike, with nary an explanation of how for 20 chapters. Then it was revealed that they are lenses for latent psychic powers.
Erfworld has the Arkentools, superpower magical artifacts created by the Titans that, when fully unlocked, grant their wielders tremendous power. There are four known Arkentools on the face of the Erf at this time, and only three have been revealed in the comic.
- The Arkenhammer grants its user the ability to tame Dwagons as well as produce powerful lightning attacks. Its current wielder Stanley also found out that it also has the ability to turn walnuts into pigeons instead of cracking them open at a probability of about one in five.
  - More recently it's also been shown to turn birds into walnuts.
- The Arkendish grants the wielder unmatched powers of thinkamancy (telepathy, mindcontrol, mind reading, ect.). It also grants its current wielder Charlie control of his Archeons. Those who know latin and watched TV in the 70s are now groaning.
- The Arkenpliers' powers are mostly currently unknown, as they have only recently been attuned to their weilder. The single "major" power they have depicted is perfectly raising a very high level warlord for no upkeep, no decay, and perfect obedience. In the world setting, it's a very powerful power.
  - Wanda also used them to uncroak half of Ansom's army. Their power is thus probably Croakamancy-based.
- The forth known tool has yet to be revealed. Fans temporarily refer to the unknown item as the 'Arkensaw' when making predictions about what role they think it will play.
  - Speaking of fan theory, a popular theory is that there are more Arkentools, nine total, one for each class of magic on the Erf axis. This is supported by Destructomancy, Thinkamancy and Healomancy being on that axis. Another theory puts the total at 27, one for each school of magic.

The Chemical X in Powerpuff Girls also did weird and arbitrary things sometimes.
- Like turning a bowl of toys and sugar and a monkey into three Magical Girls and an evil genius?
Futurama: Bender's Big Score has "Torgo's Executive Powder" which is used for everything, from food to gunpowder substitute and plaster. This is made more bizarre by the fact that this power is made from ground up network executives.
- Granted, the cast of the show are fully willing to eat -stupid- sentient beings...
Quantum Juice (a.k.a. Q-Juice) serves this function in Static Shock, the animated version of Milestone Comics' Dakota Universe.
Taking alongside Comics Lore, Nth Metal from Justice League. Immune to almost any form of magic, virtually indestructible and can be formed into insanely powerful hand-held weapons.

Petroleum. Not only is it a source of fuel, but it's also the feedstock for pretty much the entire chemical industry, including pretty much the entire pharmaceutical industry. Other major products made from petroleum feedstocks include just about all plastics, most rubber, and most commercial fertilizer. Plus it's the source of just about every major industrial lubricant, including synthetic lubricants.
- You can make plastic out of it, that's futuristic enough.
  - Forget plastic. You can make caviar out of it!
Before petroleum, there was coal tar. Cooking coal produced gas for gas lighting before the advent of cheap electricity. And the resulting tar derived from the above process became the feedstock for early rubber products, early plastics, and artificial dye. Used up through the industrial revolution and WWI, until scientists and industrialists figured out that it was cheaper and more energy efficient to use petroleum instead.
Carbon. It can form the shape of nearly any life form on earth. And of course, it's a major part of the aforementioned petroleum and coal tar. Coincidence?
- Pushing this real-life trope a little further, Carbon Nanotubes are a subject in bleeding edge research. Carbon Nanotubes can theoretically be formed into efficient semi-conductors to build computers, can be formed to have tensile strength thousands of times greater than steel, can conduct heat more efficiently than copper, and is one of the best insulators from heat. Yes, it is both an insulator and a conductor, literally doing everything. They're expecting electrical, medical, mechanical applications, from batteries, to bike frames, to drug capsules. Perhaps this is a case of fact is stranger than fiction? And guess what Carbon Nanotubes are made out of? Pure Carbon.
  - The reason for both insulation and conduction is simple; nanotubes, like diamond, are amazing heat absorbers. If you had the money, diamond heat sinks would keep your computer running at something approaching room temperature - unfortunately diamonds are too brittle. nanotubes work on a similar principle, without the brittleness.
  - And the presence of rudimentary nanotubes in Damascus steel (giving it it's tremendous strength) is why the loss of the Damascus forging process is so lamented among both historians and metal workers.
Uranium. Not only is enriched uranium used to power nuclear reactors and bombs, depleted uranium is denser than lead, while being very hard, making it useful for tank armor and armor-piercing ammunition, as well as a number of different civilian uses such as keels for racing yachts.
Hydrogen Bonds. They are why water gets bigger when it expands, why water has a high specific heat, are a big part of protein structure, and hold DNA together. And so much else.
Heck, hydrogen by itself counts as this. It forms 2/3's of the equation for water and the other major part of the aforementioned petroleum and coal tar (hence why they're colloquially referred to as hydrocarbons). It ignites when exposed to air in high enough concentrations, and it can be used as a fuel source both for dedicated fuel cells and in ordinary internal combustion engines (with some modification). It can also be used in fusion reactors (like, y'know, the sun) to produce both energy and any other element you might need. Hydrogen is the original green rock.
Its theorized that silicon could form the basis for complex, alien life, just as carbon does for earthly life.
- In a more down-to-earth sense, it also is used as the conductive element in integrated circuits. No exceptions.
- Except that, where carbon-carbon bonds are energetic enough to require deep UV radiation to break, a silicon-silicon "organic" bond is broken by visible wavelengths of light. Silicon-based life could potentially exist, but not on a planet like ours — it would probably be far more alien than even most sci-fi writers who use the trope have envisioned. (And would get third-degree sunburns from an ordinary flashlight, if you ever find yourself being chased by 'em.)
Sulfuric Acid. Virtually all the industries use it in some way. Foods, dyes, car batteries, plastics. You name it. Also, it can be combined with various salts readily availiable for the production of other usefull acids. And acts as a dehydratant.
Corn. This magical maize has been used for all sorts of wondrous things. The most recent big-news fad is ethanol (of course, sugar cane, switchgrass, and farm refuse work equally well or better. We also won't mention that the amount of fossil fuels that goes into growing corn, transporting corn, and processing it into ethanol somewhat negates any eco-friendly effect using ethanol has). However, by playing around with the molecular structure of corn, one can also get plastics, all sorts of weird food items (high-fructose is just the beginning), and fertilizers. Corn works as excellent fodder and is noted for its beast-fattening abilities. Unlike petroleum, you can also eat it fresh from the ground.

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