Do you hear about Terra Invicta? This is very, very realistic space strategy, one of the best ever made in my opinion, only issues are tutorials, they doesn't explain almost anything.
Alpha Centauri how quaintly old fashioned of them to pick that system. Should have picked something not used much like Gliese 1, Lalandai 21185 or Gliese 687 or Wolf 1061 or Lacaille 8760. & it's best avoid the ones people always use like Epsilon Eridani & Tau Ceti & really best to avoid Giant stars and Binary systems like Cygni A/B too. Even Sirius A would have been better that Alpha Centauri is as at least that one's 2nd binary is kinda minuscule. I guess I will hand wave it away a bit as at least Proxima Centauri b is in the star systems Habitable zone more or less at least .
One thing we know is that when Venture Star left Pandora in 2154, there were like a half dozen more ISV's already on their way to Pandora. So they had to have either abort the trip or done a flyby abound Pandora and head back to earth. When the dozen or so ISV's return in 2169 multiple were seemingly retrofit with fusion engines that also work in atmosphere to deploy those prefab base cores. I thought the sequence was amazing and an innovative way to get a beachhead on Pandora again. I love the ISV's and their lore/capabilities.
If lore says that the Valkyrie shuttles are left behind to work as gas harvesters after each ISV leaves, those would need somewhere to store the fuel they were harvesting. There was likely a space station, likely orbiting Polyphemus with a crew of its own. The ISVs which were still in route probably altered their course to rendezvous directly with the refuel station before only thawing and cycling the crew for the refueling station and immediately heading back to earth. Then all of them, even the Venture Star itself were likely in the armada that arrives at Pandora in the opening of the second film.
While a visual spectacle, I thought the atmospheric usage of the ISV was rather silly. It's canonically a truss vessel made to operate in deep space, not endure the strains of atmospheric conditions, never mind one as dense as Pandora. And being a sky crane requires a stable platform, something a two-engine setup isn't optimized for (especially when it looks like it can't gimble). Now, it might be unreasonable for me to expect realism in a movie starring blue cat people (that I got my own problems with in the sequel), but the first movie gave so much thought to technical realism that it gave me a set of standards to define the franchise by.
I wondered about that too.... when the Navi won at the end of Pandora there would've been several vessels at various points in transit along the 5+ year journey that wouldn't be able to resupply at Pandora. I highly doubt they would have enough resources in terms of fuel etc to just turn around and head back....
I'd say a bit of both. Corporations are not built around being generous and humanitarian, and there has to be genuine demand for a project the size of Pandora's operation.
Same. No corporation would invest easily thousands of billions for a project that may fail, heck we're already struggling with building HSR lines with government backup despite the increasing demand for clean, fast, reliable and safe mass-transit options.
You guys are mixing up 'demand' and 'need', you can 'demand' something that you don't 'need'. People are/can be made to 'demand' a $1000 bag or a spot in a what turns out to be a pyramid scam or a pointless vitamin supplement -there's no requirement for the demand to be 'legitimate'.
It most likely is a case of artificial scarcity. something we already see today with food production, a lot of tech (planned obsolesence and multiple inferior products made via the same process solely done to inflate the cost of the "good" variant of a product), clothing, housing, etc. And as the demand for profit margins perpetually increases the incentive is there to only increase the artificial scarcity, like the inflation we're experiencing right now. This is what you get when you use a steam age economic system like capitalism into the digital age and beyond. This is why humanity needs to change economics according to it's thechnological advancement, we always did that before and we will have to do it again, or we will destroy ourselves as the logistics of capitalism hit limits where you will get aburdities.
@@fl00fydragon Basic example of modern artificial scarcity: The oil industry actively controls how much oil they extract in order to keep prices high. Could be a similar thing going on with the RDA.
It is also possible that the RDA's fleet laser and anti-mater manufacturing uses a solar power station built in a close orbit to Sol. While it is possible to transmit that power to Earth via microwaves, that method would have enough limitations for Earth to still have an energy crisis.
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"Unobtanium" is what engineers call "fantasy materials", stuff that doesn't exist but has properties that fulfill some specific use. I think if the material from the movie was discovered, it would be an appropriately punny name, just like many before it.
You’re describing Handwavium, something that isn’t physically possible but fits a plot-driven purpose. Unobtanium is something that, to quote Rocket Cat, is described as “ain’t no laws of physics that say they’re impossible, we just can’t make it yet.”
Well, unobtainium is used to make generators, it's not a fuel that is consumed. So even if there's an energy crisis, it would make sense to spend some of that energy to get the resources to up the rate of energy production/reduce the degree of wastage, which will pay for itself after a while.
Yeah, it's proposed as a solution to power problems, that, from the depiction of earth, seem to be more of the 'global warming/price problems' and less of the 'power physically ran out' kind. Having studied some of the problems with energy production/distribution, the most likely scenario is that earth faced increasing environmental problems, and unobtanium was seen as a way to reduce reliance on very inefficient sources like shale oil by solving the efficiency problems with Nuclear Fusion in a permanent fashion. Fusion as a solution to the power problem doesn't have any of the other issues envisaged- each piece of unobtanium taken will effectively reduce the cost of power production permanently. It's not being used up, as you said, and no-ones stealing it from power plants.
In the cannon they already state that its RDA bullshit to give themselves a right to control the supply and rack in an immense profit. It is likely the entire reason why the RDA kept their operations so... minimalist, is to inflate the rarity and therefore the price of the material. This is the exact same thing happening on earth right now for things like Diamonds. A single entity controls their extraction, their processing and sale. They bought all of it when it was still considered what it was: a worthless chunk of compressed carbon. Then they made the single best publicity stunt ever convincing people that they all needed to buy one, and constricted the supply of an otherwise abundant material to rack up its price to insane levels. When the army took over the endeavor they essentially accomplished in seconds what the RDA likely kept spending trillions to do over decades, simply because with the objective to colonize rather than run a profit driven private mine. Which I would find to be a great way to spin the mguffon of the first film as being nothing but a false justification for unchecked green if it wasn't almost immediately replaced by yet another fantasy material for the purposes of the next film.
Sure, if it was just some energy - not nearly all the energy!! Current world power production is about 175,000 TWh annually. If we assume an ISV weights just 1,000 tons (and note it is said to carry 350 tons just of cargo) it would take about 9,000,000 TWh to push it up to its stated 0.7c top speed - assuming the laser sail was 100% efficient. Oh, and it's supposed to reach that in 6 months - but OTOH Earth also needs to produce enough antimatter for the Pandora side of the mission. So let's also assume that the production, storage, and usage of antimatter is also 100% efficient, and further assume is any given year only 1 ISV is getting powered, with 6 months making antimater and 6 months getting the laser boost. Earth would need to product about 104 times as much power as it does today, and 99.04% of that power is going to just that one ISV. I don't care how much better unobtanium is for energy distribution and transportation; any power shortage on Earth is far, far, addressed by ending the ISV project and diverting the unfathomable amount of power they've been consuming to local uses!
@@jonathan_60503 i think when humans can make ISV we can make dyson sphere already so it's probably "within budget" to run ISV, just energy for individuals are not affordable. just like how housing is not "there's no housing crisis" yet we still have housing crisis because they are not affordable
It's actually canonically the first one. There's an official bit of supplementary lore called the "Activist Survival Guide" that's basically a guide to Pandora with little notes in the margins from political activists back on Earth that canonises the idea that the supposed vital need for unobtanium is actually RDA propaganda to line their pockets because no one can really tell them to shove it.
I'm glad to hear it. I'm kind of over sci fi that depicts giant corporations but pretend like we got over their tendency for corruption/human rights abuse without explaining how. It's such a cool plot point, and hand-waving it away is such a waste imo.
Ironically, unobtanium does seem to actually be quite useful. I recall those ISVs were made a good deal smaller than they used to be thanks to unobtanium. And apparently Pandora has a ton of useful biotechnical potential, including longevity stuff. The issue is that RDA was able to push for making themselves the only ones allowed to touch Pandora, making them a monopoly.
Knowing _Avatar_ and hollywood sciencefiction in general, there was probably a logical explanation somewhere in development which was cut because the executives thought it'd confuse the viewers too much.
Yep - there's a *ton* of worldbuilding info in the "Survival Guide" and visual guides that never ever made it into the films. Some of the characters and cultural / anthropological bits about the Na'vi clans and the natural world on Pandora thankfully did make it into the comics, which is lovely - as that's 99% of the interest for me
Well... As far as I'm aware, there was a lot of world building done specifically to never be blatantly told in the movie. Everything had something written as to how things should work, but they wanted to leave that as background mechanics that keep everything cohesive. Plus... It's James Cameron. As far as I'm aware the guy had complete creative control over both Avatar movies.
@@martijnvanweele6204 Well I haven't watched the second one and it's been ages since I watched the first. I just know a couple cool things about the behind the scenes.
I still think Unobtanium is perfectly named. The IRL term literally means "substance that does exactly what we need for a given purpose". It's a science joke. Like Encabulators.
Which do I think is more likely? Cameron is known for his ridiculously extreme attention to detail, so I'd say "corporate profiteering in-universe" is the answer, rather than "out of universe mismatch".
There's the rub: earth can't have energy problems if it's capable of fast interstellar travel. Literally every method of harnessing energy that allows you to accelerate a large spacecraft to a significant fraction of c in a short time can be used to eliminate even the most monumental energy shortage on earth.
That's the problem with the world building in Avatar. All the technology that the humans have access to, makes the plot unnecessary. If they've colonized the solar system, why are there resource shortages? If they have fusion, antimatter, and the ability to beam energy from solar collectors, why is there an energy crisis? If they have advanced cloning technology, why don't they just clone back the recently extinct species on Earth? Why is Earth still a polluted mess when they have the resources and technology to fix it?
Unobtanium would probably be used to make the engines of the ISVs, since they would require extremely high-energy reactions that are very difficult to contain in order to be efficient enough to make the journey in only a few years. It follows that the crisis can only be solved with Unobtanium, or with other resources gathered using interstellar travel.
I think Unobtanium was necessary in the manufacture of Fusion powered stuff etc, it served its purpose as a "super conductor" and became integral to creating a system capable of sustaining Earth. But by the point in the second film the climate degradation on Earth have deteriorated way more. I imagine that they have colonies on the Moon and Mars but lower gravity and radiation makes them less than ideal for massive colonization programmes.
@@Akapaco2 The resources to sustain life such as air, food and medicine are vastly different than the resources for energy production. The earth's ecosystem cannot be replenished with anything in our solar system. So while the "energy crisis" might be corporate propaganda. Resource shortages in other areas are defiantly not propaganda.
@Th3Comb1ne Frozen water ice is abundant throughout our solar system. Jupiter and Saturns moons, as well as millions of asteroids contain frozen water. Oxygen can be extracted from this ice. The Hydrogen can also be refined for fuel. Food can be mass produced inside fully enclosed enviroments using hydroponics. This could be done even if the atmosphere outside was heavily polluted/ toxic. Vertical farms could be used to grow food in densely populated cities using relatively small footprints. Additional farms could also be placed inside of orbital habitats. Having abundant, clean energy would allow humanity to run carbon capture plants around the globe, removing CO2 out of the atmosphere. At the end of the day, repairing the ecological damage to Earth is much easier than moving humanity to another solar system. Humanity in Avatar is capable of genetically engineering alien- human hybrids. That implies that their medical technology is ridiculously advanced. With the exception of bioweapons, diseases really shouldn't be as prevalent as they are today. The only reason Earth should be struggling at all in Avatar, is because of geopolitics. Competing nations/ corporations could be causing war and resource inequality. But even in that scenario, Humanity shouldn't be facing a civilization-wide collapse.
Please do videos about the new vehicles introduced in Avatar: The Way of Water, such as the Aerospatiale SA-9 Kestrel, the AT-101 Sea Wasp, the SMP-2 Crabsuit, the S-76 Sea Dragon, the Matador speedboat, the Picador speedboat, and the Mako Submersible.
So true. I just didn't get when this private military got their ass whipped by some natives with bows the first time why they would return with vehicles that offer no greater amount of protection and completely unprotected ground troops a second time to be defeated AGAIN. Makes no sense at all.
@@dereinzigwahreRichi there is no plot if the military just can shoot from far away while behing inside an armor transport. Imagine invading some guy that uses arrows while behing shooting some 30mm air burst from an IFV
@@daquemasquieren that's true, but then the Navi resistance would have to come up with something new. Incoprorating wildlife as scouts and attack troops, manipulating the surroundings itself, becoming invisible (blue people in a green jungle dont make much sense anyway) or some other space nature magic. And then it would have been a new plot instead of just stupidly repeating the one from the first movie again... I had expected more for my money when seeing that film!
@@daquemasquieren That's half the fun when trying to figure out how to make asymmetric warfare work. On Na'vi's side is Eywa acting as an unfathomable superorganism.
RDA wouldn't be the first company to prolong the existence of a problem as a side effect of the method they use to try to solve that problem. Ultimately what matters is that Earth gets its hands on as much unobtainium as possible, so it can be used for more productive things than making mountains float on a distant moon.
I know which is more likely but I also know which is more compelling, and the supercorp that is sucking back all the available power on earth so it can mine a planet is absolutely a fun one
Virgin airdrop 500lb mining explosive from a civilian shuttle 500ft up Chad nuke em from orbit Thad rod from god Lad literally just cycle your main engines to full power for 30 seconds
@@crizznik2312 It looked pretty intentional to me. Most of the human's problems on Pandora came from the local flora and fauna (including the Pandorans). Doing what they did solves a lot of those problems in the immediate area of the new base.
@@randlebrowne2048 The quote I'm responding to is referring to the first movie, where they are going to drop a fuck load of explosives on the sacred site, and the person I responded to said they should have just turned on the main engines for three minutes. What I said was referring to the fact that when they actually did do that in the new movie, it did way more damage than what they were wanting to do in the first movie. I agree, I think in the second movie that devastation was entirely intentional.
You would not need particle accelerators to make antimatter. Just have a generation station in the Lagrange point between Io and Jupiter and pull the Anti-protons from the flux tube. Also positrons are a byproduct of fusion itself so you catch them.
It was short sighted world building. What most writers don't realize is that fusion power is one of those technologies that once mastered can bring humanity to being a post scarcity civilization. It is cheap abundant power from easy to source fuels and with such cheap power it is easy to smelt or synthesize whatever you need to build whatever you want. With fusion power plants it would be easy to build as many O'Neal cylinders as you could ever want to house the human population, especially with the level of automation the humans have. It would be way cheaper than sending people to colonize a world with a toxic atmosphere in a different solar system. Hell the very war over energy that Jake lost his ability to walk over would likely not have even happened as fusion would make fossil fuels absolutely redundant. I normally consider Cameron to be pretty smart but it is a pretty big oversight it you really think about it.
I'll never forget what a heard on a science channel once. With mastery of fusion power a glass of sea water will produce more power then a dump truck full of coal.
I mean, in real life we grow more than enough food to feed everyone. But people still starve. The entire problem being corporate greed would *absolutely* fit the tone of the setting.
@@eventua8474 Yes but no where the same magnitude. Take for instance the largest preventable famine in US history 1878-1880 a thousand people lost their lives because of supply issues caused by a railroad strike. However prior to that there was a period of significant drought in the Midwest that caused approximately the loss of ten thousand over five years. Now compare this to millions and millions that were lost in China in the late 1950's and prior to that, in 1920's Ukraine. Of course who can forget the willingness of the Soviets to stop road and rail shipments of food into west Berlin in in the late 1940's which lead to the Berlin Airlift where the US and UK flew in enough supplies to feed half a city for a year. I think history paints a pretty clear picture here.
Can you imagine how insecure an employment environment it must be to live six years' travel away from your head office? By the time your next shipment gets back to Earth, someone may have discovered a more abundant and easily-accessible source of floaty-metai elsewhere, or a way to synthesise it back on Earth, or the whole company may have gone bust.
IIRC, the ISV issue was addressed in the canon, in that the first ISVs were *much* less efficient due to the lack of unobtainium, and it was only once the mines on Pandora came on stream that the current ships could be built. I believe that the 12 ships mentioned include both the older and newer ones, which are still used alongside each other. Whether or not the early ones did still rely on anti-matter as part of the engine fuel cycle, or wether they also had to use a different altogether I'm not sure. It is mentioned they were *much* more massive, which implies, perhaps, a nuclear impulse type propulsion system was used (maybe a "Medusa" style sail/chute design, given the newer ISVs use sails as well). The maglev train system was a weird bit of world building IMHO. You could explain it as the maglev was built using regular materials (since that is entirely possible) but that as a result is horribly inefficient and complex (which is 100% true when it comes to maglevs IRL - hello, Japanese maglev project!), and that Unobtainium will be a big help in improving it, as well as the other issues. But yeah, it was a weird way of doing it - when the *desire* to build one would provide an extra motivation for the RDAs colonial shitshow. To be fair though, the desire to simply secure a monopoly on it and screw over the entire planet for corporate gain would be entirely believable based on how real-world monopolies with massive lobbying and regulatory capture do behave right now. Not that any of this detracts from Avatar 2009 in my opinion - I absolutely adore the Avatar universe, and the 2009 movie had a huge impact on me, and even with second movie now out, and the comics as well, 2009 is still my favourite of the lot by a long way.
I think there had to be a different ship class in the first mission or missions and the ISVs require unobtanium for their engines and reactors that they would have built with what they brought back. Maybe something in between used a lightsail on both branches of the journey with a much longer deceleration.
The different ship class might be the key. Unobtainium is the key to smaller ISVs, allowing humanity to have a space-based civilization. Without Unobtainium, the ships have to be (IIRC) 4* larger, meaning a power budget at least 4* higher for the same cargo as the smaller Unobtainium-fitted ISVs.
While the corruption/ego issues that lead to things like that are real, I think a lot of writers underestimate the shear cost of sending things to and from another system, even one as close as Alpha Centauri. I think an FTL system in low multiples with less energy intensity requirements would have worked better. Or, some kind of gravity manipulation ore to allow for gravity acceleration.
Human civilization as shown in the movie does not seem to have energy problems, nor (as far as I recall) is energy crisis ever mentioned as a problem by any character in the film. It does seem more likely that what plagues Earth is overpopulation, pollution, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, food-web collapse (and most importantly greediness gone awry)
It does make you think, if energy consumption was the issue, wouldn't it be simpler just to build a dyson swarm and beam the energy back to earth with the same laser technology they used to propel the ISV?
Maybe, but maybe it wouldn't have been as profitable for the RDA. It's Canon in source books that they sabotage works to find alternative energy sources to Unobtanium.
I've watched enough Isaac Arthur to wonder why(if you're having power problems) you'd build an interstellar spacecraft instead of a fleet of solar power collectors around the sun.
If that was the case then it should have been clear in the first film . And human should not be colonizing pandora . I always wondered why jamws cammerron decided to add the earth is dead theme in the film because his story would have been better if earth was fine and RDA just was a greedy company looking to extract resources
As I know, in the world of Avatar unobtanium is used to solve Earth's energy crisys as a material for fusion reactros and many other vital economic spheres. So I think despite how many recorses RDA spends on unobtanium mining, it completely worth them.
I think that the antimatter production issue could at least partially be mitigated by using magnetic collectors in orbits, say Jupiter or Saturn for our solar system and Polyphemus for Alpha Centauri B, as there is a relatively decent amount trapped in their magnetic fields and Unobtanium would also play a big part in simplifying the collector's designs and scales.
I mean judging by how the second movie says that they don’t really care about unobtanium anymore and everything is now about that liquid that stops human aging it seams that maybe they didn’t have an energy problem after all.
Cameron definitely likes to explore corruption in government entities and corporations, so I could see that little hiccup maybe being on purpose with him.
@@keiyakins and really great scifi does all that while also managing to have a compelling personal narrative, which is probably why there isn't much really great scifi
It's possible that Cameron and co. realized the problem because in Avatar 2, the wonder resource of Pandora is an extract from a brain of a Pandoran whale which provides eternal life.
Yeah that one has its own major problems - if cloning is widely established technology then why don’t they just clone the organs from the whales that produce the immortality juice? Seems a lot easier than funding interstellar military expeditions.
@@sharksareneat8723 True. But perhaps they need a certain amount of them because otherwise there wouldn't be enough material to make clones out of. Or perhaps they haven't fully understood the whale's genome.
@@stevenmann9769 it is possible that they are cloning the whales and the whales just need a lot of time to reach adulthood. It is also possible that the cloned whales either can’t survive on earth or perhaps they don’t do well in captivity.
In Gurps Transhuman [RPG] there are antimatter manufacturing facilities located on Mercury, taking advantage of the massive constant supply of solar energy that's easy to collect. They produce enough antimatter that is viable to be used for high performance spacecraft that need that level of fuel efficiency with thrust output, but it's not viable as a power supply for Earth - and imagine the issues with trucking it down to the Planet, screw up a shipment decent and that's a multimegaton clean nuke that's just impacted. It's a bit like AVgas, you can run a airfleet on it, but as a baseload power station it's not really economic. As for using room temperature superconductors on Earth, they wouldn't just allow efficient Maglevs and lossless power transmission around the globe (still incredibly useful, have giant solar farms in deserts and a Planet spanning energy grid), they would most likely allow a lot of new technologies that we don't have. More advanced computers that allow bypassing the _'current'_ restrictions, medical tech … Sully could get his legs fixed _if he had the money_ plus there's very advanced brain scanning that allows avatars and personality downloading¹ [Avatar 2]. There are so many theoretical drawing board ideas that would be enabled by room temperature superconductors, that if the material was somehow 🪄 developed in the near future it would revolutionise the World. ¹ Avatar 2 skips over some game changing technological changes on society, _immortality and backups._ The 'whale juice' stops aging, so the mega rich will not grow old [dying of old age is the only way some powerful people will be removed …what if?]. And then colonel Quaritch _mark 2_ and his team show that you can have backups made of yourself that can then be downloaded into a new body (if they can do it into a Nav'i, that can do it into a Human body). And why just stop at a replacement for when you die? If you're a egomaniac you could have multiple copies of yourself to assist you - just how would someone who _wants to do that_ be able to get along with themselves though? A megalomaniac couldn't co-operate with themself … but a talented individual that a organisation wanted more of could be duplicated. But it would completely change what it means to be Human, however it's treated.
Well the ISV wouldn't work anyway. It's engines would vaporize most of your ship. Look at how much the exhaust on the Saturn V spreads out in the upper atmosphere vs at ground level. The exhaust from the ISV's engines would be spreading out *WAY* to fast to be mounted on the front. Plus metals like steel, aluminum, and Tungsten have better compressive strength than tensile strength.
Could the antimatter have been used to jump start a standard fusion reaction? I mean as I recall, the movies were not exactly dripping explicit or even a lot of implicit world building...
You can do that but for fast interstellar travel you need high specific impulse which you won't get with fusion. Initiation of fusion and fission for rockets by antimatter is a real idea though and could be a massive help for in-system travels for example
4:00 exactly my thoughts, it is strange that a "dying civilization" with problems with energy supply has so much energy and materials to spare and send to a far away planet, it even contradicts the existence of the "whalers" in the second movie which only go to pandora to extract the yellow thingy from the whale like giant alien fishs for money, we don't know for sure, but maybe there is a bigger plot going on? I hope so.
Considering that Jack from Titanic was from a lake that didn’t exist yet. I’m going with writing oversight. Which is sad as the ISV was my favorite thing in the Original.
This is a sequel on an alternate canon were the Fire Nation travels to Alpha Centauri after unifying the other 3 elements, only to find out that any aliens they encounter are element divided too. Sorry for the confusion, this is a common misconception among fans. On the third film they’ll eventually meet the T’au for even more comedic timing.
@@ilosada2933 I have made this mistake a few times and can now confirm this is fact. I heard rumours that they have a contract for another 2 films. Am excite
I mean it would be cool to see a setting with hard magic and hard scifi at the same time. It's kinda like babylon 5, but with bigger emphasis on supernatural aspects
Antimatter can be harvested from space, although it's not a easy task (Jackson & Marshall 2006 NIAC Phase I Final Report “Antimatter Harvesting in Space”). A set of large mirrors in close proximity to the sun could potentially provide a 'laser', or at least power for them, to boost the fleet. None of that deals directly with the supposed Earth energy shortage as that power could just as easily (easier) be used for the planet.
maybe the power used to move the ships is actually relatively small to the total power consumption of earth. Or the prospect of a potential infinite power generation catalyst is so great its worth the massive amount of power needed.
I would imagine that future humanity's power grid would be many orders of magnitude larger than our current one. For a civilisation that has likely mastered fusion (thanks to the unibtanium no doubt), the energy requirements for star-hopping is likely peanuts.
There's tonnes of resources needed to power the big super lasers and manufacture antimatter, betting they all need superconductors that are hard to maintain and extremely expensive. Then here's unobtanium, a relatively cheap, low maintenance alternative to the expensive, high maintenance superconductors. Meaning everything they need to sustain them that was once expensive is now cheap at the expense of the Na'Vi But that's just my 2¢.
That's realistic point of view. They want the cheaper way generate energy on Earth. Also considering humans mastered antimatter, building fusion reactors shouldn't be problem, right? That means almost unlimited power source. This supports your theory that all the Earth is missing are exotic materials to economicaly generate energy for people.
@@111baf Note: they have fusion reactors even miniature ones like on the valkyrie shuttles. also remember fusion reactors are non-renewable effectively like the typically used deuterium and tritium. And theres only a limited amount (unless you could mine like the sun) Edit: Just realised Jupiter is made up off largely hydrogen so yeah, they should have plenty of resources. Unless they need the resources to make the reactors (which unobtanium is very helpful for) like op said
The latter of the two is the most likely. If anything it just underscores the weakness the plot - any civilization that can bridge the interstellar void as a matter of routine is not going to be thwarted, stymied or otherwise inconvenienced by Neolithic-like natives, be they furry Teddy bears or any other embodiment of the noble savage myth. [edited b/c autocorrect is a %^%$#@!]
I'm not a big enough expert on solar sails, but could an array of solar mirrors work instead of a laser, or in support of one? Thinking of the Troy Rising novels, lots of small mirrors directing light to larger mirrors that direct it to a small number of still larger mirrors, which then can focus a massive amount of light onto a target. Free energy from the Sun (yeah, Earth's energy problems could be solved with that, too, so RDA conspiracy).
Probably a little of both. Tbh this discrepancy is a bit on a level with the ships from The Expanse eschewing radiators. Even with the best science fiction and world building, you can't win them all. Tbh, it's just another bit of suspension of disbelief like the Unobtainium
There's another "BIGGER" problem, "Transmutation of elements." Theoretically, instead of using a combination of antimatter and massive lasers. Unobtainium could be made in breeder reactors, enhanced by the solar laser and antimatter, with no need to leave the solar system at all. Negating the entire plot of Avatar. Also, it has been theorized that anti-matter particles can be trapped by power magnets fields from gas giants. And accumulate over s very long period of time. So, mining anti-matter from Saturn or Jupiter's magnetic field is a theoretical possibility. It's still far from proven, though.
They might have tried to do so on earth, as raw Unobtainium sells for 20 million per kilo. Now if RDA is also sabotaging the experiments to maintain its monopoly . . .
Given how little consideration the films seem to give the supposed energy crisis, it's probably the second. They could easily have made it the focal point of the humans' motivations and given them a more grey motivation rather than the black-and-white "humans want to destroy the environment so they're evil" treatment they're given in the first film. Also, that level of industrialization and the massive tech disparity should mean the humans could stomp all over Pandora super easy, if it weren't for the absolutely absurd amounts of plot armor the protagonists have. If they framed the energy crisis as an actual existential threat, it would be easy for them to justify a Desert Storm-style military operation that would end in a massacre for the Pandorans (like, seriously, no air superiority? It's like James Cameron has never heard of what a modern missile can do)
Some of that was explained. Firstly, the magnetics in the area screw with sensors of various kinds, so doesn't really help much with modern missiles. And the other part. That isn't actually the military. They are essentially a heavily armed civilian security force.
Which would have (& should have in A2-damn you Cameron for neglecting the implications of YOUR OWN world building) just made things worse. That heavily-armed civilian security force nearly won the war, despite those issues, and the lack of a suitable heavy bomber, hence using that dropship to carry the Eywa-buster. If Earth faced an actual energy crisis, the UEG/UN would have responded by deploying the actual military to Pandora with orders to exterminate the natives, or at least the tribes that fought against mankind and the traitors who sided with them. They've already proven non-receptive to diplomacy, and the planet's Zerg Overmind wants them dead, too. TL;DR- the Na'vi are (should have been) totally screwed, and the opening minutes of the next war will be a rain of multi-hundred ton nonferrous kinetic strike rods. Or neutron bombs, blasting everything around them with the closest thing to a death ray which is possible under known science. Let's see the meddling tree-devil survive that!
@@praetorurbanus2917 True, but at the end of the day these are movies about a struggle between two forces. Think of it like wrestling, sure the Undertaker could just whip out a glock and blow the other guy away but that would be boring lol After a certain point the realities of storytelling contrivances must take hold. No one can tell a perfect story. And just watching a torture porn snuff film of blue native American analogs would be really freaking miserable to like 90% of the movie-watching audience... Now that being said, I do wish cameron would include more general battle scenes. That bit with the firing line of AMP suits in the first movie was delightful mecha fan service for sure. And I could watch different variations of that landing scene from the second movie all day long lol
Similar thought I've had - the timeline seems a little bit too short for this all to be plausible. like pandora is discovered when, visited how much later, unobtainium discovered how much longer after, research into applications (including isv) takes how long in order to produce the first isv, and then to establish and have the rotating fleet in place for jake to appear. 130 years at the most seems a little short to me
130 years ago the idea of an electronic computer didn't even exist. When I was born the internet ran on the damn phone lines, and downloading a small video game was hella expensive. Even downloading a picture could take quite a while. Now I can download a full 120 GB game in an hour or two, while streaming on Netflix and playing videogames... While my roommate is gaming and watching RUclips. That is just a 30 year difference.
It's really not that long if you already have a space based infrastructure. And with a pushing laser like that and the anti-matter production it seems they already have that. My big question is why they didn't build a pushing laser in the destination system to help push the ships back. It seems to me that you would build facilities at the destination like that as eventually the ships will begin to break down and it won't always be in the Sol system that they do. A laser there to help push them back and/ or repair facilities on site would be a must contingency in my opinion.
130 years is nothing. It’s been about 100 years since cars and planes were introduced. Cars can go full electric. Planes can cross the country in a couple hours. Cross the world is less than a day. When planes were introduced, boats were still the primary method of crossing the sea. We launched humans to the moon in the 60s. 50 years later, we’re taking big quality photos of mars.
From the ISV, I have thought of ways of how to move between the stars more efficiently without the use of an FTL system. My idea involves the use of electromagnetic sails that not only use the solar wind to accelerate the ship, but to use magnetic phenomena that NASA has be researching, like magnetic explosions or something like that. Plus, the ship is several, like a train. With new information, the electromagnetic sails get the Space Train up to speed before particle accelerator engines kick in.
The Avatar ISV already uses electromagnetic sails. For leaving the solar system and entering the Pandoran system, they use a massive solar sail roughly 16km long and wide.
I actually wasn't aware that Pandora was in the Alpha Centauri system, which kinda works against the worldbuilding I feel. If not only life, but complex organized life not too dissimilar to humans of 10,000 years ago was present in what is effectively our galactic back yard, life must be insanely prevalent in the universe and it's unlikely that we would be the first to find a method to ply the void between the stars in a non-ridiculous amount of time. That would be an oddly anthropocentric view in a movie that seems very much against that line of thinking
Ignoring the assumption that just cause 2 systems have complex life hence very prevelant (may still be semi common). I think the fact that Avatar doesnt use FTL technology makes this far more plossible due to time restriction. Especially if that life cannot (for whatever xenobiological reason) go into a cryosleep.
In truth a lack of viable FTL is a serious handicap. No manned exploration for any race would be realistic beyond a few years. You couldn't return to a world after hundreds of years. You'd be hopelessly out of date. So one way trips only. And ships themselves would be problematic after a hundred years. Any interstellar trip requires you carry your energy supply with you, and keep the ship functional the entire time. So without FTL, it is limited to one way colonization at limited range.
The laser propulsion *could* be an orbital solar powered type (that every source isn't necessarily very transportation), but if they've got antimatter initiated fusion on that scale I'm having a hard time believing energy shortages could exist.
All these years, and I'm just now learning what 'Unobtanium' is really used for......and it seems kind of silly, really. Yes, room temp super conductors are good, but I was thinking it was probably the 'Dilithium' of the 'Avatar Universe', the Impossible Element that somehow made FTL travel possible (or at least made Near Light Speed Travel possible).
The laser sail isn't as much of a plot hole as the antimatter production thanks to the sun. Creating a solar collector powered laser drive makes more sense and the efficiencies of having a continual string of ISVs using a shared fixed drive source also works. As long as the solid angles of the sails don't overlap and the beam is wide enough you could make that process fairly efficient. Solar collectors work for the laser because you can filter and concentrate the solar spectrum to pump your gain medium without costly energy conversion while the accelerators would take photon-electron conversion. Overall I think it's a minor oversight but not as glaring as made out to be.
Based on what we learned in the second film, Earth has basically been consumed to death. Seems likely this venture caused a feedback loop of consumption that doomed the planet in order for the corporation to get more and more wealthy. So whether that was the intention during the first film or taken advantage of by the second film, it appears to be intentional at this point.
ISV is probably just something NASA or some other government had lying around that the company just bought or built a copy of. Companies always choose the cheaper easier option over the long term cost saving one that is more expensive now.
The RDA is greedy The answer is in the first movie “This is why we’re here, because this little grey rock sells for 20 million a Kilo” Not because “this little grey rock is saving humanity” Because it sells well. That should answer our question.
up until an hour ago, the disparity was probably a world building hiccup. now? pretty sure you just gave them a canon explanation as well as the framework for the story of Avatar 3.
The whole setup is stupid. World wide maglev? Yet the ISVs only transport enough 'unubtanium' to fit in 16 big rigs...from there you have antimatter pumped lasers. How is Pandora a problem exactly? I mean with 24 antimatter pumped lasers how have they not made massive solar mirrors able to generate insane amounts of solar energy? Oh wait, maybe they did and it runs a massive solar pumped laser. The world build makes no sense and is once again the result of people saying and doing things that seem cool without understanding the implications of those technologies.
That's so weird because I just yesterday shared the last video you did on this ship because it came up in conversation. I was talking with my sci-fi writing Discord group about the idea of heat sinks to manage temperatures on spaceships.
@@revolverocelot6334 or some sort of made up heat absorbent super material. Honestly I feel that this would be a fun writing prompt for a sci-fi series. Like could this material be used as armor to protect against lasers or if it is still able to radiate heat, the heat could be used if the material can be removed from the ship while hot.
@@Nostripe361 I mean, that's essentially what they used in the Star Wars universe before ship-sized energy shields became a thing. Super conducting armor that spread the heat out and radiated it away.
@@revolverocelot6334 I mean as long as they give you something. Most sci-fi shows just say the heat was dealt with off screen with no explanation on how.
How much time took to reach Pandora from Earth, from the time perspective of someone in Earth? I didn't remember Pandora/Polyphemus was in Alpha Centauri ("just in the next door"), I was thinking it was farther away and the ship had some kind of "low level FTL"
First, THANK YOU for putting out a video on this - it's always been a problem with the film in my mind. As for the reasoning, I fully expect it's the second option: they just missed something in the world building. But, I'm sure Cameron will say it's actually the first: has he ever NOT had a movie where a corporate entity wasn't outright evil?
I have a little secret about history for you , you are not going to like it, but corporate governance of private resources has been behind the greatest crimes of humanity.
It's probably just inconsistency, but I may have a solution. It could be that the lasers used to propel the ISVs consist of pairs of mirrors orbiting close to the Sun that bounce sunlight between them (the Sun's atmosphere being a natural lasing medium) before it ultimately reflects in the direction of the ISV's sail. So why not just shine those lasers on giant solar collectors, you ask? Well, giant solar collectors would require unobtanium, which takes us right back to square one.
Inconsistencies in world building is the more likely explanation. But I think its fair to claim this as a happy accident that adds a bit of unintended depth to the conflict. The best stories always have an element of improv afterall.
Well regarding the refueling at Pandora they are supposed to be harvesting nautrally occuring anti-matter from the atmosphere of Polyphemus (the gas giant Pandora orbits) using shuttles that are left in orbit when they leave. Regarding earth's energy crisis, given RDA is supposed to be blocking the development of synthetic alternatives its highly likely that yes they are overstating the issue.
it would have made a lot more sense if the unobtanium had some sort of exclusive benefit, like making FTL possible. Otherwise, it doesn't matter how miraculous the material is, if it's not so direly needed that the trip to pandora can't be made profitable through sheer desperate need, or through serious speculative value.
I refuse to think that James Cameron half-baked a major prop like that. Go watch Alien Theory's channel and be blown away at how subtle the worldbuilding actually is through the use of props. This guy is next level in planning out his universes.
Or option 3, probably the least likely, earth has an even greater demand for energy than whatever energy all those antimatter ships use just to get to Pandora.
well it's true that they need a lot of energy and ressources for the IFV's to work. earth ressources used for the IFV's wouldn't have sustain humanity on the long run anyway so using them now is logical
I really hope you consider to cover the new vehicles from Way of Water, they were awesome to see and I’m eager to see a breakdown and reaction of them!
I think the second option is way more likely than the first. The movie really has very little interest in earth, apart from to say ‘it sucks.’ They came up with a semi-plausible way to get between earth and Magic Alien Land, and called it a day. Something that few people ever seem to bring up, though, is all the marines/ex-marines. They mostly seem to be combat veterans, so who have they been fighting? They’re all wearing AMerican flags, too, which would seem to imply the earth of that future is much the same as ours, though crappier. Bunches of independent nation states still fighting periodic wars with each other. So if The Company has a dozen ISVs, do any of the other megacorps have ISVs? And if so, where are they going?
Maybe it's not actually a laser, and is instead just light reflected from the sun and focused until it becomes coherent. Often when people say "laser" they are talking about coherent light, and not the light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.
My theory is, humanity has used more and more energy (exponentially?) per person over time. With an exponentially growing population and an exponentially growing per-person energy use, maybe there is an energy need AND the ships still use a bunch.
I don't think it's out of sync. I think your comment about an administrative apparatus that allows a company to have monopolistic control over a resource with extreme strategic and economic value is the more likely explanation. The energy problems of Earth are one of artificial scarcity and disparity in access. For example, is using maglev trains to travel a quarter-way around the planet for a daily commute an efficient use of energy? Heck no! But rather than restructure society to be less energy in-efficient (like say by cultivating talent local to where labor is needed or adopting remote working options where available) they just keep raising the consumption. And if RDA is big enough that it has a monopoly on common maglev travel and a monopoly on power production and a monopoly on the resources that go into both *and* it can rather casually get a garrison of marines to protect its corporate extraction sites... then face it, we're looking at a government that has been effectively captured by a megacorp. And a megacorp has a set of priorities that set its own growth well above that of the general welfare. RDA isn't going to support a plan that would involve shrinking the dependence society has on the things that they make a planet-sized mint off of. As for the ISVs, I doubt that the first ships sent to retrieve Unobtainium were anti-matter powered. Quite probably they weren't and had much slower acceleration and longer trips as a result. But I'm guessing the first technologies that Unobtainium were applied to back on Earth were put toward anti-matter production and an acceleration laser system. Their first priority wasn't easing the immediate burdens of people in general, they were easing the company's burdens of getting more Unobtainium. Once they can produce a sufficient quantity of anti-matter and have a sufficiently powerful laser acceleration system, then they've passed the limiting factor for building new ships and the marginal cost of each ship after that would be low (relatively speaking, I'm sure the ships themselves are plenty expensive on their own.) That in turn reduces the price of Unobtainium and they can start applying it to other things, like upgrading their maglev infrastructure.
Unintended consequences in sci-fi writing are really fun because they show what the authors don't really see as contributing to the story being told, and because it can be goofily fun to just 'realistically' go through what a setting would actually be like if realism were more involved. That said it's 1000% because the writers did not understand that they were accidentally undermining their Space Dances With Wolves story
0:55 Gonna have to disagree. Many people don't realize this, but "unobtainium" is an actual term used in material science and engineering (and as generic scifi term like "MacGuffin" is for writing in general). It refers to any material with qualities/capabilities well-suited for a given application, if not for the fact that it's actual existence is entirely speculative. It also has a sibling term-- "unaffordium" --for any substance that is both ideal for its use AND real to our knowledge, but that is simply too costly or impractical to use. The point is that, in Avatar, the superconductor they found on Pandora was so genuinely miraculous and widely-applicable in its uses that they just went ahead and named it after the catch-all term for such materials. It kinda reminds me of how we named "X-Rays". I could easily see this name being used for real.
Considering that ISV Venture Star and it's newer sister ship, ISV Manifest Destiny use Unobtainium in their construction, and Pandora gravity being only 80 percent of that of Earth, pretty sure the same effect that cause Hallelujah Mountain float, also allowed extremely large vehicle like ISV to descend and hover into Pandora atmosphere without any difficulty while landing it's Large Transport Module where in a spectacular scene, RDA troops, AMP Suit and Bulldozer would get spring into action, quite weird they use bulldozer instead of tanks
The ISV is capable for 1.5 G acceleration for 5 months straight. I'm sure a simple skycrane operation in lower gravity is firmly within the capabilities.
Even though it is probably an oversight this would make it way darker. Earth already has a room temperature superconductors but someone somewhare at RDA calculated that transporting them already "grown" from another solar system would be 10% more profitable
Not completely. The light sails would get a boost leaving Pandora as they can get light from Alpha Centuri's twin stars much like sailing ships on earth get a boost when traveling with the underwater currents. They would only need to be used at full power once they leave the system and when they return to sol. Also nasa in 2020 used solar winds to increase the orbit of a satellite just by turning the panels into the solar winds. However the experiment would only made the satellite's orbit more oval.
I mean a Laser-powered sail isn't really something you have to do with earth-based power. Basically you just put enough mirrors around the sun with gyroscopes on them and you've got it. There was a whole episode of SFIA where we basically discussed how you could just also accelerate a bunch of reflectors themselves and sacrifice them into the target star whose sole purpose is to build waves of sacrificial lasers to slow down your fleet of colony ships lol.
Real-world reason IMO is that it was slightly overlooked. I say "slightly" because they seriously did an amazing job at making everything else about these starships believable. But it's such a minor issue that *could* conceivably have an in-universe explanation that perfectly meshes with what we already know about the RDA corporation. So I'm fine accepting the HC of, "RDA is hoarding energy".
Fun Fact: The ISV is a Capital Star Class ship. And before unobtanium was harvested, the ancestor ISV classes actually used standard large scale super cool superconductors and had large radiators according to the Avatar wiki
Unobtainium is an engineering term. It is usually referenced in theoretical concepts where no material exists that can allow some particular device to function, but if the "unobtainium" did exist then the design would be feasible. I'm sure that I didn't fully explain that right, but hopefully I did convey the general concept.
I think antimatter can also be collected in space. I can't remember the details, but as far as I know there are certain altitudes above planets with a magnetic field, where antimatter collection is viable, depending on the strength of the magnetic field. I don't know how much antimatter you get with this, but it's certainly preferable to making it in particle accelerators. Still, if they can collect the antimatter, RDA could use it's energy on earth as well, so the energy crisis is a bit of a stretch either way.
Would be easier if they said Sol system energy crisis, cause it’s hard to believe all those ships are using antimatter but earth as a whole has an energy problem. If earth, mars, Venus and any other habitat or whatever needed it too then that would be more believable
Time out. I can't be the only person with this thought, because it is so obvious. You need dedicated fusion to effectively manufacture antimatter fuel. In order to fuel the massive arrays of fusion plants and antimatter generating colliders, you would require a gas giant. Hear me out. On a planet, or in orbit, fusion is king, and also for powering spacecraft, but, for transit through space, antimatter is king. You don't want antimatter reactors planetside because of all the things which could go wrong with the fuel near population centers, but, fusion is less of a risk. In space there is less risk, so antimatter becomes more useful. Now, we have gas giants providing nearly limitless amounts of fusion fuel and oxygen for spaceflight, so... I don't understand sci-fi premises like this. Sure, lasers, every boost is a good one, but... When there are gas giants in both systems, and both fusion and antimatter are present and used in the story, the most obvious choice for propulsion (given what is provided in the film) would be a combination of antimatter and laser sail thrust each way, not from Earth or Pandora, but from bases orbiting Jupiter or Polyphemus. Additionally, that Earth is having any sort of energy crisis in this film is absolutely stupid beyond words for the same reasons.
4:12 the former might actually be me more likely. #1. It never says what's actually causing the energy shortage, but given how the energy costs of a civilization like ours would be completely eclipsed by those of interstellar colonization, I think it's safe to say that colonization itself is probably what's driving the energy shortage. They might be pushing it through propeganda or total control, but it's just as likely that Earth's controlling powers only agreed to this particular solar system because A: it's our closest neighbor, and B: it's expected to yield an electrodynamic miracle. More to that point-- #2. The room-temperature superconducter they're collecting through energy-intensive space exploration is exactly the thing you'd WANT for energy-intensive space exploration, so the plan was likely to set up a feedback loop with high initial investment that rapidly evens out. They say Earth and its economy was pretty wrecked by the time they arrive at Pandora, so that may very well have been the result of such an investment.
If I recall correctly antimatter can be won in the radiation intense Auroras of the gas giant Prometheus. On the Earth side it is more like long game calculation. The energy needed to produce the antimatter is offset by the long-term savings of the Unobtainium applications.
The energy crisis more likely is coming from issues with transport and usage not from the actual amount generated, especially considering how populated earth would be by that point building power plants near cities or industrial centers is likely immensely difficult if not impossible
so i think, for the antimatter needs of the ISVs that rda would put "antimatter farms" around the sun, basically a automated particle accelerator and solar panel fields. depending on how many of them rda installed it may only be viable as a fuel source for the ISVs, not to mention the dangers of antimatter losing containment. it could be that there are international laws prohibiting the use of antimatter in earths orbit/atmosphere
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Do you hear about Terra Invicta? This is very, very realistic space strategy, one of the best ever made in my opinion, only issues are tutorials, they doesn't explain almost anything.
In the sequel they don't care about unob… the floating metal anymore, and prefer to hunt magic whales
unobtanium is not stupid but on purpose, scientist have senses of humor, they named a star, Betelgeuse.
The name itself is a joke of a name scientists give materials that don't exist or are so hard to obtain they might as well not exist
Alpha Centauri how quaintly old fashioned of them to pick that system.
Should have picked something not used much like Gliese 1, Lalandai 21185 or Gliese 687 or Wolf 1061 or Lacaille 8760.
& it's best avoid the ones people always use like Epsilon Eridani & Tau Ceti & really best to avoid Giant stars and Binary systems like Cygni A/B too.
Even Sirius A would have been better that Alpha Centauri is as at least that one's 2nd binary is kinda minuscule.
I guess I will hand wave it away a bit as at least Proxima Centauri b is in the star systems Habitable zone more or less at least .
One thing we know is that when Venture Star left Pandora in 2154, there were like a half dozen more ISV's already on their way to Pandora. So they had to have either abort the trip or done a flyby abound Pandora and head back to earth. When the dozen or so ISV's return in 2169 multiple were seemingly retrofit with fusion engines that also work in atmosphere to deploy those prefab base cores. I thought the sequence was amazing and an innovative way to get a beachhead on Pandora again. I love the ISV's and their lore/capabilities.
I think that they may have aborted and simply returned
@@heintz256 One does not simply abort an interstellar journey without fancy warp drives
If lore says that the Valkyrie shuttles are left behind to work as gas harvesters after each ISV leaves, those would need somewhere to store the fuel they were harvesting. There was likely a space station, likely orbiting Polyphemus with a crew of its own. The ISVs which were still in route probably altered their course to rendezvous directly with the refuel station before only thawing and cycling the crew for the refueling station and immediately heading back to earth. Then all of them, even the Venture Star itself were likely in the armada that arrives at Pandora in the opening of the second film.
While a visual spectacle, I thought the atmospheric usage of the ISV was rather silly. It's canonically a truss vessel made to operate in deep space, not endure the strains of atmospheric conditions, never mind one as dense as Pandora. And being a sky crane requires a stable platform, something a two-engine setup isn't optimized for (especially when it looks like it can't gimble). Now, it might be unreasonable for me to expect realism in a movie starring blue cat people (that I got my own problems with in the sequel), but the first movie gave so much thought to technical realism that it gave me a set of standards to define the franchise by.
I wondered about that too.... when the Navi won at the end of Pandora there would've been several vessels at various points in transit along the 5+ year journey that wouldn't be able to resupply at Pandora. I highly doubt they would have enough resources in terms of fuel etc to just turn around and head back....
I'd say a bit of both. Corporations are not built around being generous and humanitarian, and there has to be genuine demand for a project the size of Pandora's operation.
Same. No corporation would invest easily thousands of billions for a project that may fail, heck we're already struggling with building HSR lines with government backup despite the increasing demand for clean, fast, reliable and safe mass-transit options.
You guys are mixing up 'demand' and 'need', you can 'demand' something that you don't 'need'.
People are/can be made to 'demand' a $1000 bag or a spot in a what turns out to be a pyramid scam or a pointless vitamin supplement -there's no requirement for the demand to be 'legitimate'.
It most likely is a case of artificial scarcity.
something we already see today with food production, a lot of tech (planned obsolesence and multiple inferior products made via the same process solely done to inflate the cost of the "good" variant of a product), clothing, housing, etc.
And as the demand for profit margins perpetually increases the incentive is there to only increase the artificial scarcity, like the inflation we're experiencing right now.
This is what you get when you use a steam age economic system like capitalism into the digital age and beyond.
This is why humanity needs to change economics according to it's thechnological advancement, we always did that before and we will have to do it again, or we will destroy ourselves as the logistics of capitalism hit limits where you will get aburdities.
@@fl00fydragon Basic example of modern artificial scarcity: The oil industry actively controls how much oil they extract in order to keep prices high. Could be a similar thing going on with the RDA.
It is also possible that the RDA's fleet laser and anti-mater manufacturing uses a solar power station built in a close orbit to Sol. While it is possible to transmit that power to Earth via microwaves, that method would have enough limitations for Earth to still have an energy crisis.
"Unobtanium" is what engineers call "fantasy materials", stuff that doesn't exist but has properties that fulfill some specific use. I think if the material from the movie was discovered, it would be an appropriately punny name, just like many before it.
Its even said in James Cameron's 1995 script that Unobtaniam in universe is joke name that stuck.
You’re describing Handwavium, something that isn’t physically possible but fits a plot-driven purpose. Unobtanium is something that, to quote Rocket Cat, is described as “ain’t no laws of physics that say they’re impossible, we just can’t make it yet.”
@@petamerican2588 Correct, thanks.
@ No problem, man.
handwaveium
Well, unobtainium is used to make generators, it's not a fuel that is consumed. So even if there's an energy crisis, it would make sense to spend some of that energy to get the resources to up the rate of energy production/reduce the degree of wastage, which will pay for itself after a while.
Yeah, it's proposed as a solution to power problems, that, from the depiction of earth, seem to be more of the 'global warming/price problems' and less of the 'power physically ran out' kind. Having studied some of the problems with energy production/distribution, the most likely scenario is that earth faced increasing environmental problems, and unobtanium was seen as a way to reduce reliance on very inefficient sources like shale oil by solving the efficiency problems with Nuclear Fusion in a permanent fashion. Fusion as a solution to the power problem doesn't have any of the other issues envisaged- each piece of unobtanium taken will effectively reduce the cost of power production permanently. It's not being used up, as you said, and no-ones stealing it from power plants.
In the cannon they already state that its RDA bullshit to give themselves a right to control the supply and rack in an immense profit. It is likely the entire reason why the RDA kept their operations so... minimalist, is to inflate the rarity and therefore the price of the material.
This is the exact same thing happening on earth right now for things like Diamonds. A single entity controls their extraction, their processing and sale. They bought all of it when it was still considered what it was: a worthless chunk of compressed carbon. Then they made the single best publicity stunt ever convincing people that they all needed to buy one, and constricted the supply of an otherwise abundant material to rack up its price to insane levels.
When the army took over the endeavor they essentially accomplished in seconds what the RDA likely kept spending trillions to do over decades, simply because with the objective to colonize rather than run a profit driven private mine. Which I would find to be a great way to spin the mguffon of the first film as being nothing but a false justification for unchecked green if it wasn't almost immediately replaced by yet another fantasy material for the purposes of the next film.
Sure, if it was just some energy - not nearly all the energy!!
Current world power production is about 175,000 TWh annually. If we assume an ISV weights just 1,000 tons (and note it is said to carry 350 tons just of cargo) it would take about 9,000,000 TWh to push it up to its stated 0.7c top speed - assuming the laser sail was 100% efficient. Oh, and it's supposed to reach that in 6 months - but OTOH Earth also needs to produce enough antimatter for the Pandora side of the mission. So let's also assume that the production, storage, and usage of antimatter is also 100% efficient, and further assume is any given year only 1 ISV is getting powered, with 6 months making antimater and 6 months getting the laser boost. Earth would need to product about 104 times as much power as it does today, and 99.04% of that power is going to just that one ISV.
I don't care how much better unobtanium is for energy distribution and transportation; any power shortage on Earth is far, far, addressed by ending the ISV project and diverting the unfathomable amount of power they've been consuming to local uses!
@@jonathan_60503 Or, if they could run that many ISVs constantly, there isn't an energy shortage.
@@jonathan_60503 i think when humans can make ISV we can make dyson sphere already so it's probably "within budget" to run ISV, just energy for individuals are not affordable. just like how housing is not "there's no housing crisis" yet we still have housing crisis because they are not affordable
It's actually canonically the first one. There's an official bit of supplementary lore called the "Activist Survival Guide" that's basically a guide to Pandora with little notes in the margins from political activists back on Earth that canonises the idea that the supposed vital need for unobtanium is actually RDA propaganda to line their pockets because no one can really tell them to shove it.
Huh. I hadn't heard about the Activist Survival Guide, and now I need to go hunt it down, clearly.
I knew it was written into the canon somewhere!
I'm glad to hear it.
I'm kind of over sci fi that depicts giant corporations but pretend like we got over their tendency for corruption/human rights abuse without explaining how.
It's such a cool plot point, and hand-waving it away is such a waste imo.
Ironically, unobtanium does seem to actually be quite useful. I recall those ISVs were made a good deal smaller than they used to be thanks to unobtanium.
And apparently Pandora has a ton of useful biotechnical potential, including longevity stuff.
The issue is that RDA was able to push for making themselves the only ones allowed to touch Pandora, making them a monopoly.
Cameron missed a great opportunity to make Avatar an Aliens prequel, with Weyland-Yutani (or is precursor) as the evil corporation instead of RDA.
Knowing _Avatar_ and hollywood sciencefiction in general, there was probably a logical explanation somewhere in development which was cut because the executives thought it'd confuse the viewers too much.
Yep - there's a *ton* of worldbuilding info in the "Survival Guide" and visual guides that never ever made it into the films. Some of the characters and cultural / anthropological bits about the Na'vi clans and the natural world on Pandora thankfully did make it into the comics, which is lovely - as that's 99% of the interest for me
Well... As far as I'm aware, there was a lot of world building done specifically to never be blatantly told in the movie. Everything had something written as to how things should work, but they wanted to leave that as background mechanics that keep everything cohesive.
Plus... It's James Cameron. As far as I'm aware the guy had complete creative control over both Avatar movies.
Though, to be fair, the majority of that world building was about Pandora, not Earth and politics.
@@plzletmebefrank They didn't even keep most of the worldbuilding as background mechanics, though. They completely watered down Na'Vii culture.
@@martijnvanweele6204 Well I haven't watched the second one and it's been ages since I watched the first. I just know a couple cool things about the behind the scenes.
I still think Unobtanium is perfectly named. The IRL term literally means "substance that does exactly what we need for a given purpose".
It's a science joke. Like Encabulators.
Which do I think is more likely? Cameron is known for his ridiculously extreme attention to detail, so I'd say "corporate profiteering in-universe" is the answer, rather than "out of universe mismatch".
There's the rub: earth can't have energy problems if it's capable of fast interstellar travel. Literally every method of harnessing energy that allows you to accelerate a large spacecraft to a significant fraction of c in a short time can be used to eliminate even the most monumental energy shortage on earth.
That's the problem with the world building in Avatar. All the technology that the humans have access to, makes the plot unnecessary. If they've colonized the solar system, why are there resource shortages? If they have fusion, antimatter, and the ability to beam energy from solar collectors, why is there an energy crisis? If they have advanced cloning technology, why don't they just clone back the recently extinct species on Earth? Why is Earth still a polluted mess when they have the resources and technology to fix it?
Unobtanium would probably be used to make the engines of the ISVs, since they would require extremely high-energy reactions that are very difficult to contain in order to be efficient enough to make the journey in only a few years. It follows that the crisis can only be solved with Unobtanium, or with other resources gathered using interstellar travel.
I think Unobtanium was necessary in the manufacture of Fusion powered stuff etc, it served its purpose as a "super conductor" and became integral to creating a system capable of sustaining Earth. But by the point in the second film the climate degradation on Earth have deteriorated way more. I imagine that they have colonies on the Moon and Mars but lower gravity and radiation makes them less than ideal for massive colonization programmes.
@@Akapaco2 The resources to sustain life such as air, food and medicine are vastly different than the resources for energy production. The earth's ecosystem cannot be replenished with anything in our solar system. So while the "energy crisis" might be corporate propaganda. Resource shortages in other areas are defiantly not propaganda.
@Th3Comb1ne Frozen water ice is abundant throughout our solar system. Jupiter and Saturns moons, as well as millions of asteroids contain frozen water. Oxygen can be extracted from this ice. The Hydrogen can also be refined for fuel.
Food can be mass produced inside fully enclosed enviroments using hydroponics. This could be done even if the atmosphere outside was heavily polluted/ toxic. Vertical farms could be used to grow food in densely populated cities using relatively small footprints. Additional farms could also be placed inside of orbital habitats.
Having abundant, clean energy would allow humanity to run carbon capture plants around the globe, removing CO2 out of the atmosphere. At the end of the day, repairing the ecological damage to Earth is much easier than moving humanity to another solar system.
Humanity in Avatar is capable of genetically engineering alien- human hybrids. That implies that their medical technology is ridiculously advanced. With the exception of bioweapons, diseases really shouldn't be as prevalent as they are today.
The only reason Earth should be struggling at all in Avatar, is because of geopolitics. Competing nations/ corporations could be causing war and resource inequality. But even in that scenario, Humanity shouldn't be facing a civilization-wide collapse.
Please do videos about the new vehicles introduced in Avatar: The Way of Water, such as the Aerospatiale SA-9 Kestrel, the AT-101 Sea Wasp, the SMP-2 Crabsuit, the S-76 Sea Dragon, the Matador speedboat, the Picador speedboat, and the Mako Submersible.
A yes the sitting ducks of RDA
So true. I just didn't get when this private military got their ass whipped by some natives with bows the first time why they would return with vehicles that offer no greater amount of protection and completely unprotected ground troops a second time to be defeated AGAIN. Makes no sense at all.
@@dereinzigwahreRichi there is no plot if the military just can shoot from far away while behing inside an armor transport. Imagine invading some guy that uses arrows while behing shooting some 30mm air burst from an IFV
@@daquemasquieren that's true, but then the Navi resistance would have to come up with something new. Incoprorating wildlife as scouts and attack troops, manipulating the surroundings itself, becoming invisible (blue people in a green jungle dont make much sense anyway) or some other space nature magic.
And then it would have been a new plot instead of just stupidly repeating the one from the first movie again...
I had expected more for my money when seeing that film!
@@daquemasquieren That's half the fun when trying to figure out how to make asymmetric warfare work. On Na'vi's side is Eywa acting as an unfathomable superorganism.
RDA wouldn't be the first company to prolong the existence of a problem as a side effect of the method they use to try to solve that problem.
Ultimately what matters is that Earth gets its hands on as much unobtainium as possible, so it can be used for more productive things than making mountains float on a distant moon.
I know which is more likely but I also know which is more compelling, and the supercorp that is sucking back all the available power on earth so it can mine a planet is absolutely a fun one
Virgin airdrop 500lb mining explosive from a civilian shuttle 500ft up
Chad nuke em from orbit
Thad rod from god
Lad literally just cycle your main engines to full power for 30 seconds
Have you seen the new one? Minor spoiler, but doing that does a hell of a lot more horrifying damage than what they were wanting to do.
@@crizznik2312 It looked pretty intentional to me. Most of the human's problems on Pandora came from the local flora and fauna (including the Pandorans). Doing what they did solves a lot of those problems in the immediate area of the new base.
@@randlebrowne2048 The quote I'm responding to is referring to the first movie, where they are going to drop a fuck load of explosives on the sacred site, and the person I responded to said they should have just turned on the main engines for three minutes. What I said was referring to the fact that when they actually did do that in the new movie, it did way more damage than what they were wanting to do in the first movie. I agree, I think in the second movie that devastation was entirely intentional.
You would not need particle accelerators to make antimatter. Just have a generation station in the Lagrange point between Io and Jupiter and pull the Anti-protons from the flux tube. Also positrons are a byproduct of fusion itself so you catch them.
It can be harvested from planetary magnetic fields acting as natural traps.
Not available from that source in the quantities necessary to achieve the performance seen from the starships.
It was short sighted world building. What most writers don't realize is that fusion power is one of those technologies that once mastered can bring humanity to being a post scarcity civilization. It is cheap abundant power from easy to source fuels and with such cheap power it is easy to smelt or synthesize whatever you need to build whatever you want. With fusion power plants it would be easy to build as many O'Neal cylinders as you could ever want to house the human population, especially with the level of automation the humans have. It would be way cheaper than sending people to colonize a world with a toxic atmosphere in a different solar system. Hell the very war over energy that Jake lost his ability to walk over would likely not have even happened as fusion would make fossil fuels absolutely redundant. I normally consider Cameron to be pretty smart but it is a pretty big oversight it you really think about it.
I'll never forget what a heard on a science channel once.
With mastery of fusion power a glass of sea water will produce more power then a dump truck full of coal.
I mean, in real life we grow more than enough food to feed everyone. But people still starve. The entire problem being corporate greed would *absolutely* fit the tone of the setting.
@@keiyakins Most starvation is the result of the actions of totalitarian regimes.
@@acarrillo8277 Food shortages and starvation absolutely happen in capitalist democracies as well tho'?
@@eventua8474 Yes but no where the same magnitude. Take for instance the largest preventable famine in US history 1878-1880 a thousand people lost their lives because of supply issues caused by a railroad strike. However prior to that there was a period of significant drought in the Midwest that caused approximately the loss of ten thousand over five years. Now compare this to millions and millions that were lost in China in the late 1950's and prior to that, in 1920's Ukraine. Of course who can forget the willingness of the Soviets to stop road and rail shipments of food into west Berlin in in the late 1940's which lead to the Berlin Airlift where the US and UK flew in enough supplies to feed half a city for a year. I think history paints a pretty clear picture here.
Can you imagine how insecure an employment environment it must be to live six years' travel away from your head office? By the time your next shipment gets back to Earth, someone may have discovered a more abundant and easily-accessible source of floaty-metai elsewhere, or a way to synthesise it back on Earth, or the whole company may have gone bust.
It might be a deleted scene from 1, but someone does get fired and they get this look on their face like it's a death sentence.
plus at these relativistic speeds they're doing time actually passes way faster on earth than the 6 year travel time...
One need not imagine it, one can simply read some history books. That type of arrangement is more common than not in human history.
IIRC, the ISV issue was addressed in the canon, in that the first ISVs were *much* less efficient due to the lack of unobtainium, and it was only once the mines on Pandora came on stream that the current ships could be built. I believe that the 12 ships mentioned include both the older and newer ones, which are still used alongside each other. Whether or not the early ones did still rely on anti-matter as part of the engine fuel cycle, or wether they also had to use a different altogether I'm not sure. It is mentioned they were *much* more massive, which implies, perhaps, a nuclear impulse type propulsion system was used (maybe a "Medusa" style sail/chute design, given the newer ISVs use sails as well).
The maglev train system was a weird bit of world building IMHO. You could explain it as the maglev was built using regular materials (since that is entirely possible) but that as a result is horribly inefficient and complex (which is 100% true when it comes to maglevs IRL - hello, Japanese maglev project!), and that Unobtainium will be a big help in improving it, as well as the other issues. But yeah, it was a weird way of doing it - when the *desire* to build one would provide an extra motivation for the RDAs colonial shitshow.
To be fair though, the desire to simply secure a monopoly on it and screw over the entire planet for corporate gain would be entirely believable based on how real-world monopolies with massive lobbying and regulatory capture do behave right now.
Not that any of this detracts from Avatar 2009 in my opinion - I absolutely adore the Avatar universe, and the 2009 movie had a huge impact on me, and even with second movie now out, and the comics as well, 2009 is still my favourite of the lot by a long way.
I think there had to be a different ship class in the first mission or missions and the ISVs require unobtanium for their engines and reactors that they would have built with what they brought back. Maybe something in between used a lightsail on both branches of the journey with a much longer deceleration.
The different ship class might be the key. Unobtainium is the key to smaller ISVs, allowing humanity to have a space-based civilization. Without Unobtainium, the ships have to be (IIRC) 4* larger, meaning a power budget at least 4* higher for the same cargo as the smaller Unobtainium-fitted ISVs.
While the corruption/ego issues that lead to things like that are real, I think a lot of writers underestimate the shear cost of sending things to and from another system, even one as close as Alpha Centauri. I think an FTL system in low multiples with less energy intensity requirements would have worked better. Or, some kind of gravity manipulation ore to allow for gravity acceleration.
Human civilization as shown in the movie does not seem to have energy problems, nor (as far as I recall) is energy crisis ever mentioned as a problem by any character in the film. It does seem more likely that what plagues Earth is overpopulation, pollution, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, food-web collapse (and most importantly greediness gone awry)
It does make you think, if energy consumption was the issue, wouldn't it be simpler just to build a dyson swarm and beam the energy back to earth with the same laser technology they used to propel the ISV?
yes, yes it would have been.
woudlnt the scare law make that almost worhtless?
@@RicardoFuertes1990 Inverse square law? Should be fine for a decently collimated laser.
@@RicardoFuertes1990 If that's a problem in that universe the sail acceleration should also be impossible.
Maybe, but maybe it wouldn't have been as profitable for the RDA. It's Canon in source books that they sabotage works to find alternative energy sources to Unobtanium.
I've watched enough Isaac Arthur to wonder why(if you're having power problems) you'd build an interstellar spacecraft instead of a fleet of solar power collectors around the sun.
The second is more likely, but the first would be an amazing plot point to explore and I hope they go that direction.
If that was the case then it should have been clear in the first film . And human should not be colonizing pandora . I always wondered why jamws cammerron decided to add the earth is dead theme in the film because his story would have been better if earth was fine and RDA just was a greedy company looking to extract resources
As I know, in the world of Avatar unobtanium is used to solve Earth's energy crisys as a material for fusion reactros and many other vital economic spheres. So I think despite how many recorses RDA spends on unobtanium mining, it completely worth them.
I think that the antimatter production issue could at least partially be mitigated by using magnetic collectors in orbits, say Jupiter or Saturn for our solar system and Polyphemus for Alpha Centauri B, as there is a relatively decent amount trapped in their magnetic fields and Unobtanium would also play a big part in simplifying the collector's designs and scales.
Anyway, one ISV fuel tank would be sufficient for whole Earth for decades.
I mean judging by how the second movie says that they don’t really care about unobtanium anymore and everything is now about that liquid that stops human aging it seams that maybe they didn’t have an energy problem after all.
or it is solved by the first batch of mining already.
Cameron definitely likes to explore corruption in government entities and corporations, so I could see that little hiccup maybe being on purpose with him.
Good sci-fi looks at technology and science. Great sci-fi looks at economics.
@@Gear3k or sociology, politics, or philosophy. Though the lines between those fields aren't exactly sharp.
@@keiyakins and really great scifi does all that while also managing to have a compelling personal narrative, which is probably why there isn't much really great scifi
It's possible that Cameron and co. realized the problem because in Avatar 2, the wonder resource of Pandora is an extract from a brain of a Pandoran whale which provides eternal life.
Yeah that one has its own major problems - if cloning is widely established technology then why don’t they just clone the organs from the whales that produce the immortality juice? Seems a lot easier than funding interstellar military expeditions.
@@sharksareneat8723 True.
But perhaps they need a certain amount of them because otherwise there wouldn't be enough material to make clones out of.
Or perhaps they haven't fully understood the whale's genome.
@@Kubinda12345 Well, if they can clone Navi bodies why not those whales?
@@stevenmann9769 Because it's easier to murder them and scoop them out of the ocean.
@@stevenmann9769 it is possible that they are cloning the whales and the whales just need a lot of time to reach adulthood. It is also possible that the cloned whales either can’t survive on earth or perhaps they don’t do well in captivity.
In Gurps Transhuman [RPG] there are antimatter manufacturing facilities located on Mercury, taking advantage of the massive constant supply of solar energy that's easy to collect.
They produce enough antimatter that is viable to be used for high performance spacecraft that need that level of fuel efficiency with thrust output, but it's not viable as a power supply for Earth - and imagine the issues with trucking it down to the Planet, screw up a shipment decent and that's a multimegaton clean nuke that's just impacted.
It's a bit like AVgas, you can run a airfleet on it, but as a baseload power station it's not really economic.
As for using room temperature superconductors on Earth, they wouldn't just allow efficient Maglevs and lossless power transmission around the globe (still incredibly useful, have giant solar farms in deserts and a Planet spanning energy grid), they would most likely allow a lot of new technologies that we don't have.
More advanced computers that allow bypassing the _'current'_ restrictions, medical tech … Sully could get his legs fixed _if he had the money_ plus there's very advanced brain scanning that allows avatars and personality downloading¹ [Avatar 2].
There are so many theoretical drawing board ideas that would be enabled by room temperature superconductors, that if the material was somehow 🪄 developed in the near future it would revolutionise the World.
¹ Avatar 2 skips over some game changing technological changes on society, _immortality and backups._
The 'whale juice' stops aging, so the mega rich will not grow old [dying of old age is the only way some powerful people will be removed …what if?].
And then colonel Quaritch _mark 2_ and his team show that you can have backups made of yourself that can then be downloaded into a new body (if they can do it into a Nav'i, that can do it into a Human body). And why just stop at a replacement for when you die? If you're a egomaniac you could have multiple copies of yourself to assist you - just how would someone who _wants to do that_ be able to get along with themselves though?
A megalomaniac couldn't co-operate with themself … but a talented individual that a organisation wanted more of could be duplicated.
But it would completely change what it means to be Human, however it's treated.
Well the ISV wouldn't work anyway. It's engines would vaporize most of your ship. Look at how much the exhaust on the Saturn V spreads out in the upper atmosphere vs at ground level. The exhaust from the ISV's engines would be spreading out *WAY* to fast to be mounted on the front. Plus metals like steel, aluminum, and Tungsten have better compressive strength than tensile strength.
Could the antimatter have been used to jump start a standard fusion reaction? I mean as I recall, the movies were not exactly dripping explicit or even a lot of implicit world building...
You can do that but for fast interstellar travel you need high specific impulse which you won't get with fusion. Initiation of fusion and fission for rockets by antimatter is a real idea though and could be a massive help for in-system travels for example
Their cruising speed of the ISVs is 0.7c, fusion only has an exhaust velocity of 0.1c
@@fiiral5870 even with multiple reactors?
According to the lore, the antimatter isn't used for power gen, but pure thrust.
@@revolverocelot6334 You would get really high Isp, by funneling fusion plasma through magnetic nozzles, which would be powered by the fusion reactor.
4:00 exactly my thoughts, it is strange that a "dying civilization" with problems with energy supply has so much energy and materials to spare and send to a far away planet, it even contradicts the existence of the "whalers" in the second movie which only go to pandora to extract the yellow thingy from the whale like giant alien fishs for money, we don't know for sure, but maybe there is a bigger plot going on? I hope so.
Considering that Jack from Titanic was from a lake that didn’t exist yet. I’m going with writing oversight. Which is sad as the ISV was my favorite thing in the Original.
Didn't know avatar had space ships, I always thought it was about bending the four elements....
This is a sequel on an alternate canon were the Fire Nation travels to Alpha Centauri after unifying the other 3 elements, only to find out that any aliens they encounter are element divided too. Sorry for the confusion, this is a common misconception among fans.
On the third film they’ll eventually meet the T’au for even more comedic timing.
@@ilosada2933 I have made this mistake a few times and can now confirm this is fact.
I heard rumours that they have a contract for another 2 films. Am excite
I mean it would be cool to see a setting with hard magic and hard scifi at the same time. It's kinda like babylon 5, but with bigger emphasis on supernatural aspects
Nah, this is the hippie flick that sued the good one
Don’t you know about Space Bending? 😂
Antimatter can be harvested from space, although it's not a easy task (Jackson & Marshall 2006 NIAC Phase I Final Report “Antimatter Harvesting in Space”).
A set of large mirrors in close proximity to the sun could potentially provide a 'laser', or at least power for them, to boost the fleet.
None of that deals directly with the supposed Earth energy shortage as that power could just as easily (easier) be used for the planet.
maybe the power used to move the ships is actually relatively small to the total power consumption of earth. Or the prospect of a potential infinite power generation catalyst is so great its worth the massive amount of power needed.
I would imagine that future humanity's power grid would be many orders of magnitude larger than our current one. For a civilisation that has likely mastered fusion (thanks to the unibtanium no doubt), the energy requirements for star-hopping is likely peanuts.
What I got stuck on...was that the superconductors maybe more valuable for creating antimatter
There's tonnes of resources needed to power the big super lasers and manufacture antimatter, betting they all need superconductors that are hard to maintain and extremely expensive.
Then here's unobtanium, a relatively cheap, low maintenance alternative to the expensive, high maintenance superconductors.
Meaning everything they need to sustain them that was once expensive is now cheap at the expense of the Na'Vi
But that's just my 2¢.
That's realistic point of view. They want the cheaper way generate energy on Earth.
Also considering humans mastered antimatter, building fusion reactors shouldn't be problem, right? That means almost unlimited power source. This supports your theory that all the Earth is missing are exotic materials to economicaly generate energy for people.
@@111baf Note: they have fusion reactors even miniature ones like on the valkyrie shuttles. also remember fusion reactors are non-renewable effectively like the typically used deuterium and tritium. And theres only a limited amount (unless you could mine like the sun) Edit: Just realised Jupiter is made up off largely hydrogen so yeah, they should have plenty of resources. Unless they need the resources to make the reactors (which unobtanium is very helpful for) like op said
The idea that humans botches their first contact with an alien lifeform just to save some money is kinda realistic
The latter of the two is the most likely. If anything it just underscores the weakness the plot - any civilization that can bridge the interstellar void as a matter of routine is not going to be thwarted, stymied or otherwise inconvenienced by Neolithic-like natives, be they furry Teddy bears or any other embodiment of the noble savage myth. [edited b/c autocorrect is a %^%$#@!]
Actually, canonically it’s the first reason.
One of the books touch on it (and there is a quick line in the first movie that touches on it too)
That's a general problem with all alien invasion movies, requires a lot of suspension og disbelief
Earth's problems being corporate propaganda works be a perfect plot point with the movies' themes
I'm not a big enough expert on solar sails, but could an array of solar mirrors work instead of a laser, or in support of one? Thinking of the Troy Rising novels, lots of small mirrors directing light to larger mirrors that direct it to a small number of still larger mirrors, which then can focus a massive amount of light onto a target. Free energy from the Sun (yeah, Earth's energy problems could be solved with that, too, so RDA conspiracy).
Imo 2 is more likely but 1 fits real nicely
Been really interested in your channel lately, subscribing and looking forward to the next video!
I feel it is like in WW2 when we were rationing metal, but we were pumping out Liberty Ships daily
Um, that was why we were rationing metal. So it was available to the war industry.
Probably a little of both.
Tbh this discrepancy is a bit on a level with the ships from The Expanse eschewing radiators. Even with the best science fiction and world building, you can't win them all. Tbh, it's just another bit of suspension of disbelief like the Unobtainium
There's another "BIGGER" problem, "Transmutation of elements."
Theoretically, instead of using a combination of antimatter and massive lasers.
Unobtainium could be made in breeder reactors, enhanced by the solar laser and antimatter, with no need to leave the solar system at all.
Negating the entire plot of Avatar.
Also, it has been theorized that anti-matter particles can be trapped by power magnets fields from gas giants. And accumulate over s very long period of time.
So, mining anti-matter from Saturn or Jupiter's magnetic field is a theoretical possibility. It's still far from proven, though.
They might have tried to do so on earth, as raw Unobtainium sells for 20 million per kilo. Now if RDA is also sabotaging the experiments to maintain its monopoly . . .
One may also wonder about room temperature superconductors in computer systems.
Given how little consideration the films seem to give the supposed energy crisis, it's probably the second. They could easily have made it the focal point of the humans' motivations and given them a more grey motivation rather than the black-and-white "humans want to destroy the environment so they're evil" treatment they're given in the first film.
Also, that level of industrialization and the massive tech disparity should mean the humans could stomp all over Pandora super easy, if it weren't for the absolutely absurd amounts of plot armor the protagonists have. If they framed the energy crisis as an actual existential threat, it would be easy for them to justify a Desert Storm-style military operation that would end in a massacre for the Pandorans (like, seriously, no air superiority? It's like James Cameron has never heard of what a modern missile can do)
Some of that was explained.
Firstly, the magnetics in the area screw with sensors of various kinds, so doesn't really help much with modern missiles.
And the other part. That isn't actually the military. They are essentially a heavily armed civilian security force.
Which would have (& should have in A2-damn you Cameron for neglecting the implications of YOUR OWN world building) just made things worse. That heavily-armed civilian security force nearly won the war, despite those issues, and the lack of a suitable heavy bomber, hence using that dropship to carry the Eywa-buster. If Earth faced an actual energy crisis, the UEG/UN would have responded by deploying the actual military to Pandora with orders to exterminate the natives, or at least the tribes that fought against mankind and the traitors who sided with them. They've already proven non-receptive to diplomacy, and the planet's Zerg Overmind wants them dead, too.
TL;DR- the Na'vi are (should have been) totally screwed, and the opening minutes of the next war will be a rain of multi-hundred ton nonferrous kinetic strike rods. Or neutron bombs, blasting everything around them with the closest thing to a death ray which is possible under known science. Let's see the meddling tree-devil survive that!
@@praetorurbanus2917 True, but at the end of the day these are movies about a struggle between two forces. Think of it like wrestling, sure the Undertaker could just whip out a glock and blow the other guy away but that would be boring lol
After a certain point the realities of storytelling contrivances must take hold. No one can tell a perfect story. And just watching a torture porn snuff film of blue native American analogs would be really freaking miserable to like 90% of the movie-watching audience... Now that being said, I do wish cameron would include more general battle scenes. That bit with the firing line of AMP suits in the first movie was delightful mecha fan service for sure. And I could watch different variations of that landing scene from the second movie all day long lol
Similar thought I've had - the timeline seems a little bit too short for this all to be plausible. like pandora is discovered when, visited how much later, unobtainium discovered how much longer after, research into applications (including isv) takes how long in order to produce the first isv, and then to establish and have the rotating fleet in place for jake to appear. 130 years at the most seems a little short to me
130 years ago horses were still the primary transport choice and "a car" wouldn't be a thing for another decade.
130 years ago the idea of an electronic computer didn't even exist. When I was born the internet ran on the damn phone lines, and downloading a small video game was hella expensive. Even downloading a picture could take quite a while. Now I can download a full 120 GB game in an hour or two, while streaming on Netflix and playing videogames... While my roommate is gaming and watching RUclips. That is just a 30 year difference.
It's really not that long if you already have a space based infrastructure. And with a pushing laser like that and the anti-matter production it seems they already have that.
My big question is why they didn't build a pushing laser in the destination system to help push the ships back. It seems to me that you would build facilities at the destination like that as eventually the ships will begin to break down and it won't always be in the Sol system that they do. A laser there to help push them back and/ or repair facilities on site would be a must contingency in my opinion.
130 years is nothing.
It’s been about 100 years since cars and planes were introduced. Cars can go full electric. Planes can cross the country in a couple hours. Cross the world is less than a day.
When planes were introduced, boats were still the primary method of crossing the sea.
We launched humans to the moon in the 60s. 50 years later, we’re taking big quality photos of mars.
From the ISV, I have thought of ways of how to move between the stars more efficiently without the use of an FTL system. My idea involves the use of electromagnetic sails that not only use the solar wind to accelerate the ship, but to use magnetic phenomena that NASA has be researching, like magnetic explosions or something like that. Plus, the ship is several, like a train.
With new information, the electromagnetic sails get the Space Train up to speed before particle accelerator engines kick in.
The Avatar ISV already uses electromagnetic sails. For leaving the solar system and entering the Pandoran system, they use a massive solar sail roughly 16km long and wide.
@chingusdingus3359 Electromagnetic sails and solar sails are different.
I actually wasn't aware that Pandora was in the Alpha Centauri system, which kinda works against the worldbuilding I feel. If not only life, but complex organized life not too dissimilar to humans of 10,000 years ago was present in what is effectively our galactic back yard, life must be insanely prevalent in the universe and it's unlikely that we would be the first to find a method to ply the void between the stars in a non-ridiculous amount of time. That would be an oddly anthropocentric view in a movie that seems very much against that line of thinking
Ignoring the assumption that just cause 2 systems have complex life hence very prevelant (may still be semi common). I think the fact that Avatar doesnt use FTL technology makes this far more plossible due to time restriction. Especially if that life cannot (for whatever xenobiological reason) go into a cryosleep.
In truth a lack of viable FTL is a serious handicap. No manned exploration for any race would be realistic beyond a few years. You couldn't return to a world after hundreds of years. You'd be hopelessly out of date. So one way trips only.
And ships themselves would be problematic after a hundred years. Any interstellar trip requires you carry your energy supply with you, and keep the ship functional the entire time.
So without FTL, it is limited to one way colonization at limited range.
The laser propulsion *could* be an orbital solar powered type (that every source isn't necessarily very transportation), but if they've got antimatter initiated fusion on that scale I'm having a hard time believing energy shortages could exist.
It's bad world-building. Cameron wanted to make a point, and obviously story had to be sacrificed.
All these years, and I'm just now learning what 'Unobtanium' is really used for......and it seems kind of silly, really.
Yes, room temp super conductors are good, but I was thinking it was probably the 'Dilithium' of the 'Avatar Universe', the Impossible Element that somehow made FTL travel possible (or at least made Near Light Speed Travel possible).
The laser sail isn't as much of a plot hole as the antimatter production thanks to the sun. Creating a solar collector powered laser drive makes more sense and the efficiencies of having a continual string of ISVs using a shared fixed drive source also works. As long as the solid angles of the sails don't overlap and the beam is wide enough you could make that process fairly efficient. Solar collectors work for the laser because you can filter and concentrate the solar spectrum to pump your gain medium without costly energy conversion while the accelerators would take photon-electron conversion.
Overall I think it's a minor oversight but not as glaring as made out to be.
Based on what we learned in the second film, Earth has basically been consumed to death. Seems likely this venture caused a feedback loop of consumption that doomed the planet in order for the corporation to get more and more wealthy. So whether that was the intention during the first film or taken advantage of by the second film, it appears to be intentional at this point.
ISV is probably just something NASA or some other government had lying around that the company just bought or built a copy of. Companies always choose the cheaper easier option over the long term cost saving one that is more expensive now.
Civilization capable send to a distant star a fleet of ISV's have already solved all energy and lack of resources problems.
The RDA is greedy
The answer is in the first movie
“This is why we’re here, because this little grey rock sells for 20 million a Kilo”
Not because “this little grey rock is saving humanity”
Because it sells well.
That should answer our question.
up until an hour ago, the disparity was probably a world building hiccup. now? pretty sure you just gave them a canon explanation as well as the framework for the story of Avatar 3.
The whole setup is stupid.
World wide maglev? Yet the ISVs only transport enough 'unubtanium' to fit in 16 big rigs...from there you have antimatter pumped lasers. How is Pandora a problem exactly? I mean with 24 antimatter pumped lasers how have they not made massive solar mirrors able to generate insane amounts of solar energy? Oh wait, maybe they did and it runs a massive solar pumped laser.
The world build makes no sense and is once again the result of people saying and doing things that seem cool without understanding the implications of those technologies.
That's so weird because I just yesterday shared the last video you did on this ship because it came up in conversation.
I was talking with my sci-fi writing Discord group about the idea of heat sinks to manage temperatures on spaceships.
Heat sinks work to a point, you still need a lot of radiators
@@revolverocelot6334 or some sort of made up heat absorbent super material. Honestly I feel that this would be a fun writing prompt for a sci-fi series.
Like could this material be used as armor to protect against lasers or if it is still able to radiate heat, the heat could be used if the material can be removed from the ship while hot.
@@Nostripe361 I mean, that's essentially what they used in the Star Wars universe before ship-sized energy shields became a thing. Super conducting armor that spread the heat out and radiated it away.
@@Nostripe361 Well, magic also works if you want it too
@@revolverocelot6334 I mean as long as they give you something. Most sci-fi shows just say the heat was dealt with off screen with no explanation on how.
How much time took to reach Pandora from Earth, from the time perspective of someone in Earth? I didn't remember Pandora/Polyphemus was in Alpha Centauri ("just in the next door"), I was thinking it was farther away and the ship had some kind of "low level FTL"
First, THANK YOU for putting out a video on this - it's always been a problem with the film in my mind. As for the reasoning, I fully expect it's the second option: they just missed something in the world building. But, I'm sure Cameron will say it's actually the first: has he ever NOT had a movie where a corporate entity wasn't outright evil?
I have a little secret about history for you , you are not going to like it, but corporate governance of private resources has been behind the greatest crimes of humanity.
I mean, have you ever seen a corporation that wasn't outright evil in *real* life?
It's probably just inconsistency, but I may have a solution. It could be that the lasers used to propel the ISVs consist of pairs of mirrors orbiting close to the Sun that bounce sunlight between them (the Sun's atmosphere being a natural lasing medium) before it ultimately reflects in the direction of the ISV's sail. So why not just shine those lasers on giant solar collectors, you ask? Well, giant solar collectors would require unobtanium, which takes us right back to square one.
🤣🤣🤣🤣,exactly , Unobtanium that one damn thing everything and everyone needs
Inconsistencies in world building is the more likely explanation. But I think its fair to claim this as a happy accident that adds a bit of unintended depth to the conflict. The best stories always have an element of improv afterall.
Well regarding the refueling at Pandora they are supposed to be harvesting nautrally occuring anti-matter from the atmosphere of Polyphemus (the gas giant Pandora orbits) using shuttles that are left in orbit when they leave. Regarding earth's energy crisis, given RDA is supposed to be blocking the development of synthetic alternatives its highly likely that yes they are overstating the issue.
Love the video but as a music person I love that Xcom 2's music is making it's way onto the channel!
it would have made a lot more sense if the unobtanium had some sort of exclusive benefit, like making FTL possible. Otherwise, it doesn't matter how miraculous the material is, if it's not so direly needed that the trip to pandora can't be made profitable through sheer desperate need, or through serious speculative value.
I refuse to think that James Cameron half-baked a major prop like that. Go watch Alien Theory's channel and be blown away at how subtle the worldbuilding actually is through the use of props. This guy is next level in planning out his universes.
Or option 3, probably the least likely, earth has an even greater demand for energy than whatever energy all those antimatter ships use just to get to Pandora.
well it's true that they need a lot of energy and ressources for the IFV's to work.
earth ressources used for the IFV's wouldn't have sustain humanity on the long run anyway so using them now is logical
I really hope you consider to cover the new vehicles from Way of Water, they were awesome to see and I’m eager to see a breakdown and reaction of them!
I think the second option is way more likely than the first. The movie really has very little interest in earth, apart from to say ‘it sucks.’ They came up with a semi-plausible way to get between earth and Magic Alien Land, and called it a day.
Something that few people ever seem to bring up, though, is all the marines/ex-marines. They mostly seem to be combat veterans, so who have they been fighting? They’re all wearing AMerican flags, too, which would seem to imply the earth of that future is much the same as ours, though crappier. Bunches of independent nation states still fighting periodic wars with each other.
So if The Company has a dozen ISVs, do any of the other megacorps have ISVs? And if so, where are they going?
Wait, really? Their planet is only in alpha Centauri?
Well I say “only”
But that’s right next door, and they’re basically human.
the laser is fine because you can make a gigantic laser using the surface of the sun as your lasing medium, the antimatter is inexcusable though.
Maybe it's not actually a laser, and is instead just light reflected from the sun and focused until it becomes coherent. Often when people say "laser" they are talking about coherent light, and not the light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.
that ship does not look like it's designed to go anywhere that has gravity
My theory is, humanity has used more and more energy (exponentially?) per person over time. With an exponentially growing population and an exponentially growing per-person energy use, maybe there is an energy need AND the ships still use a bunch.
I always read the choice to call it "Unobtanium" as a tongue-in-cheek engineering joke. It's funny how people get so bothered about it.
I don't think it's out of sync. I think your comment about an administrative apparatus that allows a company to have monopolistic control over a resource with extreme strategic and economic value is the more likely explanation.
The energy problems of Earth are one of artificial scarcity and disparity in access. For example, is using maglev trains to travel a quarter-way around the planet for a daily commute an efficient use of energy? Heck no! But rather than restructure society to be less energy in-efficient (like say by cultivating talent local to where labor is needed or adopting remote working options where available) they just keep raising the consumption. And if RDA is big enough that it has a monopoly on common maglev travel and a monopoly on power production and a monopoly on the resources that go into both *and* it can rather casually get a garrison of marines to protect its corporate extraction sites... then face it, we're looking at a government that has been effectively captured by a megacorp. And a megacorp has a set of priorities that set its own growth well above that of the general welfare. RDA isn't going to support a plan that would involve shrinking the dependence society has on the things that they make a planet-sized mint off of.
As for the ISVs, I doubt that the first ships sent to retrieve Unobtainium were anti-matter powered. Quite probably they weren't and had much slower acceleration and longer trips as a result. But I'm guessing the first technologies that Unobtainium were applied to back on Earth were put toward anti-matter production and an acceleration laser system. Their first priority wasn't easing the immediate burdens of people in general, they were easing the company's burdens of getting more Unobtainium. Once they can produce a sufficient quantity of anti-matter and have a sufficiently powerful laser acceleration system, then they've passed the limiting factor for building new ships and the marginal cost of each ship after that would be low (relatively speaking, I'm sure the ships themselves are plenty expensive on their own.) That in turn reduces the price of Unobtainium and they can start applying it to other things, like upgrading their maglev infrastructure.
Unintended consequences in sci-fi writing are really fun because they show what the authors don't really see as contributing to the story being told, and because it can be goofily fun to just 'realistically' go through what a setting would actually be like if realism were more involved.
That said it's 1000% because the writers did not understand that they were accidentally undermining their Space Dances With Wolves story
0:55 Gonna have to disagree. Many people don't realize this, but "unobtainium" is an actual term used in material science and engineering (and as generic scifi term like "MacGuffin" is for writing in general). It refers to any material with qualities/capabilities well-suited for a given application, if not for the fact that it's actual existence is entirely speculative. It also has a sibling term-- "unaffordium" --for any substance that is both ideal for its use AND real to our knowledge, but that is simply too costly or impractical to use.
The point is that, in Avatar, the superconductor they found on Pandora was so genuinely miraculous and widely-applicable in its uses that they just went ahead and named it after the catch-all term for such materials. It kinda reminds me of how we named "X-Rays". I could easily see this name being used for real.
Something that struck me as weird is the fact they used these in the second movie as in-atmosphere landing craft.
Considering that ISV Venture Star and it's newer sister ship, ISV Manifest Destiny use Unobtainium in their construction, and Pandora gravity being only 80 percent of that of Earth, pretty sure the same effect that cause Hallelujah Mountain float, also allowed extremely large vehicle like ISV to descend and hover into Pandora atmosphere without any difficulty while landing it's Large Transport Module where in a spectacular scene, RDA troops, AMP Suit and Bulldozer would get spring into action, quite weird they use bulldozer instead of tanks
The ISV is capable for 1.5 G acceleration for 5 months straight. I'm sure a simple skycrane operation in lower gravity is firmly within the capabilities.
A better question should be :
How RDA build a locomotive and railway in Pandora so quickly?
@@curious5887 Did you watch the movie ? The spider robot thingy.
@@tobz475 i did dude, and what do you mean with "The spider robot thingy"?
Where did that backstory footage at 3:18 come from?
Even though it is probably an oversight this would make it way darker. Earth already has a room temperature superconductors but someone somewhare at RDA calculated that transporting them already "grown" from another solar system would be 10% more profitable
Not completely. The light sails would get a boost leaving Pandora as they can get light from Alpha Centuri's twin stars much like sailing ships on earth get a boost when traveling with the underwater currents.
They would only need to be used at full power once they leave the system and when they return to sol.
Also nasa in 2020 used solar winds to increase the orbit of a satellite just by turning the panels into the solar winds. However the experiment would only made the satellite's orbit more oval.
I mean a Laser-powered sail isn't really something you have to do with earth-based power. Basically you just put enough mirrors around the sun with gyroscopes on them and you've got it.
There was a whole episode of SFIA where we basically discussed how you could just also accelerate a bunch of reflectors themselves and sacrifice them into the target star whose sole purpose is to build waves of sacrificial lasers to slow down your fleet of colony ships lol.
Real-world reason IMO is that it was slightly overlooked. I say "slightly" because they seriously did an amazing job at making everything else about these starships believable.
But it's such a minor issue that *could* conceivably have an in-universe explanation that perfectly meshes with what we already know about the RDA corporation. So I'm fine accepting the HC of, "RDA is hoarding energy".
Fun Fact: The ISV is a Capital Star Class ship. And before unobtanium was harvested, the ancestor ISV classes actually used standard large scale super cool superconductors and had large radiators according to the Avatar wiki
Im seeing movie clips ive never seen before, are these in some extended edition?
Unobtainium is an engineering term. It is usually referenced in theoretical concepts where no material exists that can allow some particular device to function, but if the "unobtainium" did exist then the design would be feasible. I'm sure that I didn't fully explain that right, but hopefully I did convey the general concept.
I think antimatter can also be collected in space.
I can't remember the details, but as far as I know there are certain altitudes above planets with a magnetic field, where antimatter collection is viable, depending on the strength of the magnetic field.
I don't know how much antimatter you get with this, but it's certainly preferable to making it in particle accelerators.
Still, if they can collect the antimatter, RDA could use it's energy on earth as well, so the energy crisis is a bit of a stretch either way.
Would be easier if they said Sol system energy crisis, cause it’s hard to believe all those ships are using antimatter but earth as a whole has an energy problem. If earth, mars, Venus and any other habitat or whatever needed it too then that would be more believable
Time out.
I can't be the only person with this thought, because it is so obvious.
You need dedicated fusion to effectively manufacture antimatter fuel. In order to fuel the massive arrays of fusion plants and antimatter generating colliders, you would require a gas giant.
Hear me out.
On a planet, or in orbit, fusion is king, and also for powering spacecraft, but, for transit through space, antimatter is king. You don't want antimatter reactors planetside because of all the things which could go wrong with the fuel near population centers, but, fusion is less of a risk. In space there is less risk, so antimatter becomes more useful.
Now, we have gas giants providing nearly limitless amounts of fusion fuel and oxygen for spaceflight, so...
I don't understand sci-fi premises like this.
Sure, lasers, every boost is a good one, but... When there are gas giants in both systems, and both fusion and antimatter are present and used in the story, the most obvious choice for propulsion (given what is provided in the film) would be a combination of antimatter and laser sail thrust each way, not from Earth or Pandora, but from bases orbiting Jupiter or Polyphemus.
Additionally, that Earth is having any sort of energy crisis in this film is absolutely stupid beyond words for the same reasons.
4:12 the former might actually be me more likely.
#1. It never says what's actually causing the energy shortage, but given how the energy costs of a civilization like ours would be completely eclipsed by those of interstellar colonization, I think it's safe to say that colonization itself is probably what's driving the energy shortage. They might be pushing it through propeganda or total control, but it's just as likely that Earth's controlling powers only agreed to this particular solar system because A: it's our closest neighbor, and B: it's expected to yield an electrodynamic miracle. More to that point--
#2. The room-temperature superconducter they're collecting through energy-intensive space exploration is exactly the thing you'd WANT for energy-intensive space exploration, so the plan was likely to set up a feedback loop with high initial investment that rapidly evens out. They say Earth and its economy was pretty wrecked by the time they arrive at Pandora, so that may very well have been the result of such an investment.
If I recall correctly antimatter can be won in the radiation intense Auroras of the gas giant Prometheus. On the Earth side it is more like long game calculation. The energy needed to produce the antimatter is offset by the long-term savings of the Unobtainium applications.
The energy crisis more likely is coming from issues with transport and usage not from the actual amount generated, especially considering how populated earth would be by that point building power plants near cities or industrial centers is likely immensely difficult if not impossible
so i think, for the antimatter needs of the ISVs that rda would put "antimatter farms" around the sun, basically a automated particle accelerator and solar panel fields. depending on how many of them rda installed it may only be viable as a fuel source for the ISVs, not to mention the dangers of antimatter losing containment. it could be that there are international laws prohibiting the use of antimatter in earths orbit/atmosphere