So… We manage to master space travel. We manage to master interstellar travel. We eventually find a planet with suitable environment for sustaining our species. And we just overlook it.
Can someone explain me the reasoning behind this?
Sci-fi to the side, there are more minerals available - readily - on asteroids and barren planets than anywhere else. Why go hopping around looking for habitable planets, to the reason of 1 out of who knows how many, to then strip mine it?
The resource being extracted on the avatar planet was unobtanium.
It was only available on that planet, precisely so intelligent people like you can’t say “why not mine barren rocks instead”?
This annoyed me also.
If the Avatar universe has physics like ours, which it looks like it does from the way things move etc…
The protoplanetry disk that the planet formed from, must have had the unobtanium, since it is so evenly spread around the later formed planet.
Yes, there are higher concentrations in various places, which could have come from impact events in the past; if this is the case the impactors are likely from the local asteroid belt or equivalent.
The unobtanium must be available, in a much easier to extract form, in asteroids in the soloar system or the moons of Pandora.
Either way, a mineral is a terrible maguffin for a space faring civilization.
In the second movie, the whale brain juice is a much better maguffin, but still kinda stupid for a technologically advanced species.
Assume that to get interstellar travel, with the suspended animation and brain beaming tech we are shown, humans are a good 200 years ahead of where we are now…given that they can also make fully functional alien bodies from scratch, that can breed and pass on genetic material to what look like viable offspring. The level of synthetic biology expertise must be insane, and they can’t make this brain juice…it is just stupid.
There are exactly zero minerals available inside planets that are unavailable on asteroids.
Sci-fi will be sci-fi but can we go back to the time it was at least well thought? Can’t hurt. If the objective of the movie was to make social criticism, it didn’t need to go to such lenghts.
And it was a boring movie; failed to captivate me.
You’re intelligent. Or at least, well read/educated.
I didn’t say it was a good plot-device. The entire movie was hamfisted from the world building through the dialog, the character development, and those hamfists evolved into bulldozers to bring the moral home.
The only thing it had going for it was the CGI… which was obsequious.
Regardless, it’s their fictional world. They designed it to be stupid and boring so they could make some sort of moral superiority bullshit statement about capitalism while grossing 2+ billion.
Also, I’m just gonna say it. It wasn’t even sci fi. sure, sure. it had ships and stuff. but that’s not what makes sci fi sci fi.
There are exactly zero minerals available inside planets that are unavailable on asteroids.
Crystallised urea
There could be many reasons:
- The thing you are mining is actually very rare, and although it could be elsewhere, it’s the only place you found it. This is the case in Avatar. The Unobtanium they are mining is not found anywhere else.
- It’s easier to mine on a habitable planet. You don’t have all the extreme difficulty of operating in space or a planet/moon with no atmosphere. In Avatar workers can freely operate without any special equipment, using just a gas mask, and don’t need to be astronauts.
- You are assuming they found Pandora to mine on it. They probably found it through scientific research, and the mining angle only appeared later when the resource was found.
Another important detail is that in Avatar they don’t have any faster than light tech. Pandora is in the Alpha Centauri system, the closest star to the Sun, and it takes years to get there anyway. Sure, there might be lots of better places to choose, but it’s literally the only habitable body in reachable distance from Earth unless you want to spend decades flying in one direction.
I think there’s a tendency to see inter- (and intra-)stellar travel through the lens of the inter-continental expedition and colonialism. It… kinda makes sense… superficially, there’s some similarities; a voyage in a vessel, going to uncharted places, kicking off a new era of settlement and extraction. For this reason, movies and games really like the comparison, cus it makes for an easy narrative the audience is already familiar with.
In reality, though, nothing about space bares any similarity to anything in our past. Everything about the expeditions to, the colonizing of, and the industrial development and extraction of the Americas? All that was couched within the biosphere, contingent on it. Movies and media and junk get to ignore that because they exist to tell a story. So what if SciFi du jour doesn’t actually make sense? Doesn’t harm anyone, right? Except…
…except Musk and his fanclub really like describing Mars as the next colonial outpost. They’ll tell you it’s only a few short decades away! And I think that’s cus they don’t see where the metaphor falls short. To them, colonizing Mars is just the next thing that will happen in the narrative of history. After all, it’s happened once - so it must happen again right??? They don’t see the sheer wall of work and resources and work and decades (probably centuries, realistically) that would have to go into it. They don’t think about anything more than a superficial picture on a screen. People needed boats to cross the Atlantic, we’ll need rocketships. Now that they’ve got rocket ships, thats most of the work done. Afterall, in movies, you just need to get there. Then the plot can advance.
Tbf, the air on Pandora is toxic to humans. That was the entire point of using the avatars in the first movie… Wouldn’t exactly call that suitable for sustaining the life of our species
And that material they found in the planet was some fictional things humans had never encountered before.
You realized I just opted for having a divergent view on the subject, right?