Question two occurs in Real Life problem is it occurs only at the microbial level that we've ever observed.
Which means the planet this happens on is likely to not be very Earth-like.
Short Hair
Let's make some assumptions.
One, all the cities are destroyed. If you have one large group with their technology intact, they become winners by default. Yes, people might survive the blast, but they won't survive the radiation and fallout.
Two, these people have the time and resources to build fallout shelters. The ones in the cities probably wouldn't survive, but you'd have them in the suburbs.
That leaves most survivors in rural areas, and most of them are farmers. That's good. They'll be very busy for a while, and they'll be very lucky not to starve.
You now have three groups of people: the farmers, the urban survivors, and the shelter survivors. The urban survivors will either find unoccupied shelters or head into the countryside, meaning they will be absorbed by the other two groups.
After the attacks and the poor crops, the biggest problem is likely to be contamination. The fallout settles within a month or so, but there is radioactive material in the air and water. That will work its way up the food chain, getting concentrated at every step. Without a Geiger counter, you'd never know if your rabbit stew had a lethal dose of cesium. With any luck, the rabbit will have died before you catch it, and the signs of radiation poisoning will be obvious (and very familiar).
After a few years of misery on the surface, they should begin putting a society back together. The shelter survivors will emerge sporadically (unless they have some agreed-upon signal). There will almost certainly be friction between the farmers and the shelter people. They may even consider themselves separate packs, and the cycle starts again....
Under World. It rocks!
See ALL the stars!
One problem: From my (admittedly quite limited) knowledge, I believe that one of the major environmental effects of a nuclear winter is destruction of the ozone layer.
Sunlight is now a mutagen. Good luck.
Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.
Radiation doesn't really affect ozone concentrations for the negative. (In fact if I remember my chemistry right, ozone is formed in the presence of radiation especially at high altitude.)
For example, the South Atlantic Anomaly is a region near Argentina and Brazil where the solar wind gets it's closest to Earth's surface. Coincidentally some high altitude nuke testing was done in that region in the 1950s and 1960s. The region has a much higher ozone concentration than the Arctic.
See ALL the stars!
O1 or atomic oxygen isn't stable, it's quite reactive in fact. It'll quickly re-combine into O2 or O3 (ozone) or onto other chemicals.
Basically, I had an idea for an alien species that evolved from pack hunters. Because of that, they divided themselves into rigidly defined groups based on pack lineage. Over time, these tribes developed into civilizations that were each composed of one "lineage" group... and constantly at war with one another in a battle for supremacy. Which is to say, utter extermination of everyone that isn't of their "pack".
Then, one of the more powerful nations developed nuclear weapons. After that, things more or less hit the fan. They essentially mass produce nuclear bombs until they have enough to carpet bomb the rest of the inhabited world. Then they do so.
The question is, besides nuclear winter, what would the consequences of something like this be, and just how many warheads would it take (assuming that only inhabited areas are bombed, and the warheads themselves are rather similar to the ones that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki)?
I kind of get the feeling that more information is needed here, but I wanted to keep things brief for now.
Question two is shorter: would it be possible for a human-sized organism to use sulfur or hydrogen sulfide in place of oxygen?
edited 25th Jan '11 3:31:22 PM by Parakus
[DATA EXPUNGED] - I would NEVER do that to a kitten! -Dr. █████