I mean... not if your fantasy world has any internal consistency... and if it doesn't then it might as well be Cloud Cuckoo Land.
Oh no, we're not stopping to pick up hitchhikers this time, we're just going to blow your planet up and move on. Have a good day!
"This is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz of the Galactic Hyperspace Planning Council..."
For all we know the hogwarts express runs on magic
It makes steam.
Explosions are combustion.
And really we're just talking about oxidation. If oxidation works (which it must, because the characters are breathing) then chemically-propelled projectiles must also work.
Combustion is very old technology. Putting it inside a different machine (e.g. a gun or a car engine) doesn't change the chemistry. If you want to get right down to it, we're just talking about oxidation - which means that in any sort of world where rapid oxidation doesn't work (i.e. explosives), your lungs also don't work because you need that oxygen bonding with the iron in your hemoglobin or you die.
If you can light a fire, you can make an explosion. If you can make an explosion, you can use it to launch a projectile.
There's no world in which fire exists but guns are impossible. Even if you don't have the metalworking sophistication for a modern gun, you could still make a Chinese-style gunpowder rocket.
Don't they drive a car? and ride a train? so combustion works... kind of has to work
So check this out:
Lazard - Levelized Cost of Energy
This is an industry study that gets published every year by Lazard, for the past 18 years. It is focused on the US market. They put in a lot of effort to assess the whole cost of various forms of energy generation, including government subsidies.
Here we go, found it in the Health Impacts article:
There is experimental evidence that very slim fibers (<60 nm, <0.06 μm in breadth) tangle destructively with chromosomes (being of comparable size). This is likely to cause the sort of mitosis disruption expected in cancer.
And here in MECHANISMS OF ASBESTOS-INDUCED CARCINOGENESIS
It is somewhat more difficult to understand the “chromosome tangling hypothesis.” We recently found that asbestos fibers including crocidolite are actively taken up by several different kinds of cultured cells. Furthermore, those fibers enter both the cytoplasm and the nucleus. In this situation, asbestos fibers may tangle with chromosomes when cells divide. Whether there is a specificity of tangling for any chromosomal region is the next question to be addressed.
So not quite down to the DNA level, but basically chromosomes can get wrapped around asbestos fibers during cell division.
Why does a retail store need a license plate reader?