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James Cameron Begins His Deep-Sea Dive
James Cameron is on his way down. The director's long-planned trip to the deepest spot on Earth — the Mariana Trench's Challenger Deep — is in progress; by the time you read this, if all goes well, Cameron will be navigating around in depths unvisited since 1960. National Geographic's coverage of the dive is excellent as well, as is the BBC's (with video).
I can't decide if I hope it all goes well because of Terminator and Aliens, or if it's a complete failure because of Titanic and Avatar.
One of my "If I was a billionaire" fantasies was a documentary trip back to the trench. Amazing that it's taken this long to get back.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
I personally think that deep trenches are at least as interesting as outer space, if not even more so. There is a rich flora and fauna which have evolved to adapt to the high pressure and lack of sunlight and oxygen at such depths, it almost makes them seem like species that are alien to this planet.
Unfortunately, travelling and exploring the the murky depths are prohibitively expensive for the average guy. A small excursion itself would cost about $40,000, so I would imagine that James Camerons trip is going to cost several hundred thousand dollars. Ah, I envy the rich. :)
Anyway, here's to hoping that he gets excellent clips.
Forget Avatar and Titanic... this is the kind of stuff he will be remembered for.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
As far as rich guys hobbies go, this is way cooler than buying a fighter jet or trying to get a monopoly on fighting HIV in Africa.
lucm, indeed.
Awesome. there are still magic (quite a lot) in one of the most, if not the most inhospitable place on the planet apart from Brierley hill.
Tally ho old chap.
We'll Smoke you a Kipper for breakfast
Couldn't do it; I have a pretty severe phobia of pressurized things. That scene from 'The Abyss', where the villain's ship goes down too far and... *shivers* Everyone at work pokes fun at me every time we have to change the fountain soda machine's carbon tanks, because I take off to the side room to steer clear. I came close to whaling on the bosses' son for taking a nearly-empty one, bring it over where I was and spurt out at me.
You want to know how to help your kids? LEAVE THEM THE F*&K ALONE. --George Carlin
Can he take George Lucas with him, and leave him at the bottom?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
like when aristocrats used to fund and participate in science. We're seeing more of this kind of thing now, like this study, or this. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing, but there are definitely parallels to the way science was done during the renaissance.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I hope he can find Ed Harris
How come he hasn't gone to space yet?
What level of sophistication is even required to dislike Avatar, or the Indy-butt-raping scandal that was his last attempt at Indiana Jones, Jumping the Shark?
I just love the fact he took a famous chick-flick and turned it 3D so he could force a ton of guys out there to take women to see that movie all over again, at prices greater than the original ticket price. Although, in that situation there could be a silver lining.
I can't believe the last time we were there was 1960. May God go with you, Mr. Cameron. Apologies to you atheists for that last one ;^)
And if it works well he will use it to film Titanic 2.
The rich men are at it again. Some are going into outer space. Some are going under the ocean. I can't wait for the earth explorers, digging down deep into the crust.
Although, in that situation there could be a silver lining.
Dumb people reproducing?
He made a movie that had a lot of elements that the masses enjoy. (action, etc)
He created a sci fi world with at least some effort at plausibility. (not all of it, but some details were there, for instance Jake suffering muscle weakness after prolonged time in the tank)
The reason the "indians" won was because the entire planet was a biological entity that could defend itself, by mobilizing all resources against the human invaders. It was never actually an underdog story : the planet has vastly superior technology and numbers to the human invaders (the brain transfers shown at the end of the movie were obviously extremely high tech), but the humans couldn't perceive it.
Anyways, sure it ripped stuff off, but compare it to the competition. And, the film did use some of the best visual effects ever seen. Stop being a snob : would you rather all movies were some low budget indie film that tries to "make a point" but it's hard to figure out what it is because the movie was made in someone's garage? To make a movie with an enormous budget, an enormous number of people have to watch it, and you have to make the story accessible to them.
Did you see it? They said it was hauled from the Challenger Deep, but I'm positive that beast never swam in terrestrial waters until a week ago...
Can an ego that big go that deep??
He tweeted it about 45mins ago. https://twitter.com/jimcameron/status/184036733959143425 An amazing achievement!
Does this mean that Titanic is no longer the lowest point in James Cameron's career?
Kinda interesting, but I understand he chose the spot of the seafloor he's visiting simply on the basis of it being the deepest point in the ocean, not because of something that's there and that's worth seeing/exploring. So chances are that all he'll find is... um, a seafloor, made of a lot of sand. I hope I'm wrong.
I'm smart and I don't like his movies, therefore the hundred's of millions of people who do enjoy his movies must be tasteless morons. /sarcasm
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
...the movie was made in someone's garage?
Wayne's World! Party on!
WTF? Cameron has nothing to do with Indiana Jones. That's all Lucas and Spielberg's doing.
Without those shitty movies he wouldn't be able to do things like this...
We're leaving him down there, right?
Someone go down with him with a squirt gun and right as the sub reaches the depth squirt some water on the back of his neck and scream Oh my God a leak!
I just love the fact he took a famous chick-flick and turned it 3D so he could force a ton of guys out there to take women to see that movie all over again, at prices greater than the original ticket price. Although, in that situation there could be a silver lining.
Silver lining indeed! If that dude who bounces off the propeller in the original gets a little special treatment in the 3D version (including the curiously satisfying distant "PONGG!" sound when he hits it), it might just be worth the (inflated) ticket price.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
would you rather all movies were some low budget indie film that tries to "make a point" but it's hard to figure out what it is because the movie was made in someone's garage?
And worse, if it does make a point, the point is something as inane as, "we are all different" or "life is pain" or "sometimes endings aren't happy." Rare to find real insight in art, even if it is Indy.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
He created a sci fi world with at least some effort at plausibility.
Oh, c'mon! Where the frig in the Periodic Table does one find "Unobtanium"? Seriously? I heard that, and gave up on the flick from that point on.
The reason the "indians" won was because the entire planet was a biological entity that could defend itself, by mobilizing all resources against the human invaders
Entity, meet biological warfare (easily possible, given the ease with which the DNA was replicated) and a gaggle of large asteroids being flung at the surface just for good measure (also possible, given the massive energy require to go FTL (or was it near-light?) speeds in the first place). There's at least half a dozen ways, given that story's tech, in which to destroy the inhabitants without harming the material, endangering a single human being, and basically turning the place into an airless rock that can be strip-mined.
Seriously... good visual effects (easily give it that), but the story had more holes in it than a sieve.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
You make a good point regarding unobtainium. There's no way among the trillions and trillions of planets out there that even one could contain an element unknown the human race.
I'm sorry you didn't get it - but that name shows a reasonable amount of science/engineering cred.
And the movie also gave good reasons why they didn't do this stuff: in the movie's universe there was already PR problems emerging. It would make sense that they'd want to break the resistance while killing as few of them as possible, not killing them all with some superweapon.
I saw the movie once, when it was released, and wasn't a huge fan. But your comments make it clear you aren't an engineering geek, and that you can't follow plot at all.
Honestly, I found the name "Unobtainium" no less plausible than a number of the heavier elements in the periodic table. Comparing "Unobtainium" to, say... "Promethium", "Ununoctium", "Berkeluim", "Californium"; not to mention a number of the proposed names for the current temporary ones... How does "Unobtainium" defy logic any more than those do?
Or are you claiming that because we haven't discovered it yet, it doesn't exist? In a science fiction movie. Really? Really?
As for orbital bombardment... That's probably the part the Cameron didn't show. Humans go down to the surface and try to strip-mine politely because of politics. Think of the PR win that it would be for the (then current) administration if they can convince these primitive creatures to live/act like humans! But now that we're kicked off planet, time to warm up the nukes.
Reminds me of one Michael Caine's most brilliant ripostes. When asked about what he thought of Jaws 4, he replied "I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
That movie would be Primer, and it was better than Avatar.
sci fi world with at least some effort at plausibility. (not all of it, but some details were there, for instance Jake suffering muscle weakness after prolonged time in the tank)
'Cause a culture capable of interstellar travel couldn't eliminate muscle weakness or fix nerve damage.
The reason the "indians" won was because the entire planet was a biological entity that could defend itself, by mobilizing all resources against the human invaders. It was never actually an underdog story : the planet has vastly superior technology and numbers to the human invaders (the brain transfers shown at the end of the movie were obviously extremely high tech), but the humans couldn't perceive it.
I remember writing that story in the early 90s and everyone who read it told me it was cliched back then. I seem to remember it was also a Star Trek episode in the 60s?
The best I can say about Avatar was that the last hour was really funny. I just wish we hadn't had to sit through the previous six hours to get there.
There's at least half a dozen ways, given that story's tech, in which to destroy the inhabitants without harming the material, endangering a single human being, and basically turning the place into an airless rock that can be strip-mined.
As was explained in the film, "killing the indigenous looks bad."
'Cause a culture capable of interstellar travel couldn't eliminate muscle weakness or fix nerve damage.
They could. Jake was going to get taken care of when he got back. If you remember, it was just a matter of cost. He couldn't afford it on his pension.
Cuz the name 'Unobtanium' is cliche and just plain gay when it comes to science fiction cred. The OP speaks the truth. I was even buzzed, and I thought the movie was lame, unoriginal, and made for children. It was all gay and feel-goody by having a love story and the underdogs winning. C'mon, how many times to I have to see a story like this? The visuals were 'interesting,' but I miss the good old days where everything wasn't fucking CG. I remember when explosions were real and looked real. If they wanted to do something in the movie, they had to actually do it in real life, making it look real. The days of that are over. Everything is just green screened now. I've given up on movies in the past 5 years, as producers try to take existing films and remake them in a worse way or they take a topic, integrate it with one 3 potential plots, and poop out a turd for a movie that they are sure some of the masses will come to see. Sigh, a good movie is hard to come by.
Look, I did not like Avatar. I am not being a snob though. My question was serious. What level of sophistication is even required to dislike Avatar?
Saying it does require sophistication is snobbery. I have liked maybe 5 of Cameron's movies in total. Those were Terminators, Aliens, and True Lies (which was just goofy).
You don't have to be sophisticated to dislike a movie. That was my point.
Oh, c'mon! Where the frig in the Periodic Table does one find "Unobtanium"? Seriously? I heard that, and gave up on the flick from that point on.
I figured Unobtainium to be some sort of ClarkeTech-level meta-material, much like the Cavorite in A Deepness in the Sky. In that story, Cavorite was a mineral discovered by the native Spider civilization, possessing miraculous anti-gravity properties Yet it was composed of nothing more than common elements, mostly diamonoid carbon, that should have yielded an unremarkable pile of dust. In that story, it was insinuated that the material was not naturally occuring, but the legacy of some hyper-advanced intelligence or civilization.
The implication being that the Na'vi were not a primitive pre-industrial society -- but a primitive post-industrial one. The planet-wide bio-net and cooperative defense system doesn't make sense from a Darwinian evolutionary standpoint, but it might have made sense if it was designed that way. And those Unobtanium "ore" formations? Perhaps the remains of some ancient server farm or energy storage-facility... or garbage dump.
Entity, meet biological warfare (easily possible, given the ease with which the DNA was replicated) and a gaggle of large asteroids being flung at the surface just for good measure (also possible, given the massive energy require to go FTL (or was it near-light?) speeds in the first place). There's at least half a dozen ways, given that story's tech, in which to destroy the inhabitants without harming the material, endangering a single human being, and basically turning the place into an airless rock that can be strip-mined.
In the aftermath of Avatar's release, I found similar viewpoints all too common among my fellow nerds. It bothers me to think that we can consider genocide to be the "obvious" solution, and that not resorting to total war at the get-go as being the mark of a plot hole.
The corporate managers in Avatar weren't actually evil, but merely self-serving and cynical. They told themselves it was ok because they weren't really doing anything evil -- just moving some stubborn natives somewhere less inconvenient. I'm sure after the orders were given, they told themselves that it was the natives who forced them to act as they did, their superstitious and ignorant natures prevented the savages from listening to reason.
In any case, we often forget that the humans were employees of a corporation, not a sovereign military force. The soldiers were the equivalent of some Blackwater mercenaries. Regardless of how powerful corporations sometimes seem, it is government who still holds the leash, being jealous entities that hold the best goodies (like WMDs) for themselves.
Well. They could fix nerve damage but it was expensive. Apparently the world does not become a socialist hell hole in the future.
If you don't like naming them after places, why single us out? Ytterby, Sweden has four elements named after it.
(Posted from Berkeley).
.: Semper Absurda
+1 - Sensible.
There is certain "herd logic" on /. that makes no sense to me, "Avatar Sucks!!!" being one.
It was over-hyped, and maybe too expensive to make, but I don't really care about that - I ignore the hype and if Hollywood wants to risk that kind of money, that's their business.
Looking at the end product of Avatar, its story, scientific accuracy and entertainment value were no worse than any number of "good" science fiction movies, it was a little too heavy on the Vietnam parallels for me, but what the hell, it's his story, let him tell it.
Tell you what, if Avatar Sucks, tell me why AND name 3 movies that both did it (your point) better, and were better movies overall.
He created a sci fi world with at least some effort at plausibility.
Oh, c'mon! Where the frig in the Periodic Table does one find "Unobtanium"? Seriously? I heard that, and gave up on the flick from that point on.
Unobtainium: well, why not call it Carbon, formed in large quantities into some kind of useful room-temperature superconductor (or other highly valuable commodity) by processes unique to the formation of Pandora. Sure you could synthesize it, but it's cheaper to go dig it up. The miracle of Unobtainum was irrelevant to the plot beyond the fact it was valuable and they had to take down HomeTree to get it. Any time wasted explaining what Unobtainium was good for is just pandering to a very small percentage of the audience, a small percentage with relatively little influence over ticket buyers, apparently.
The reason the "indians" won was because the entire planet was a biological entity that could defend itself, by mobilizing all resources against the human invaders
Entity, meet biological warfare (easily possible, given the ease with which the DNA was replicated) and a gaggle of large asteroids being flung at the surface just for good measure (also possible, given the massive energy require to go FTL (or was it near-light?) speeds in the first place). There's at least half a dozen ways, given that story's tech, in which to destroy the inhabitants without harming the material, endangering a single human being, and basically turning the place into an airless rock that can be strip-mined.
Seriously... good visual effects (easily give it that), but the story had more holes in it than a sieve.
Yeah, and the U.S. could have nuked Afghanistan and Iraq into oblivion, as well as any upstarts like Iran or North Korea who would have chirped about it. Maybe, just maybe, there were political implications back home that prevented waging all-out war on obviously sentient beings that are absolutely no threat to us, and whose only crime is sitting on something valuable.
sci fi world with at least some effort at plausibility. (not all of it, but some details were there, for instance Jake suffering muscle weakness after prolonged time in the tank)
'Cause a culture capable of interstellar travel couldn't eliminate muscle weakness or fix nerve damage.
I've had minor nerve damage twice, no, we can't fix it, and we're not likely to figure out how anytime soon. All this brain-machine-interface crap is just that, literally two-bit crap - when compared to actual nerves containing hundreds of thousands of fibers.
If you want to kvetch about the tech in the movie, go after the Avatar link - as if lag, even light-speed lag, and other factors wouldn't make that wholly unworkable... I was also a little disappointed that they could make this magical link, and yet be unable to run a simple tracer to find Jake when he got lost in the jungle... but, those are both "suspension of disbelief" points central to the storyline.
If you want realism, watch a PBS documentary.
Actually I only have a couple complaints with the tail end of the film.
#1: Norm
So Norm is out there fighting and he gets shot. We cut back to the science lab and Norm is crawling out of his linking device, clutching the area where he was shot. It's a, "I saw myself get shot! I'm dead! No, I'm not--my avatar is. Whew!" type of moment. Cut back to the air battle going on. Trudy has reached the end, her helicopter is shot up, and she says her emotional goodbye, "Sorry, Jake," just before a missile slams into her helicopter and blows it to pieces. A scene or two later, we see Norm exiting the lab with his air mask on, machine gun in hand, angry and determined look on his face, going...
Where the fuck are you going, Norm?!
Now it was pretty obvious that there was something between Norm and Trudy, even though most of the scenes were cut (but take a look at the deleted scenes on the DVD for the true meaning of "Norm's attitude is improving." Classic!). But Norm was off-line when Trudy was blown up, thanking his lucky stars that he wasn't killed. His radio was on his dead avatar. So he doesn't know that Trudy is now in little tiny pieces. But even if he does, where is he going? To find the pieces?! Is he going to stand with the Dragon Lady at the Tree of Souls? Then why isn't he there when we see her? Is he going to avenge his dead avatar in the forest? Even Norm isn't that stupid.
Of course, we know why Norm is leaving. Because if he sticks around, he'll mess up the big fight scene at the end of the movie.
#2: Jake Sully, Military Strategist
Okay, I'm no military genius. But come on! We've got a line of troops with machine guns and grenade launchers and flame throwers and walking tanks with really big honkin' machine guns. And Jake's strategy? Frontal assault! Even I know that's a recipe for disaster.
So all the folks on the ground are "combat ineffective", running for their lives if they're not dead. By the end, it appears that all his air assets are gone and he's the only one left alive and still fighting. Eywa comes along and distracts the bad guys so he can hit the bomber and destroy it. And, at the end, it appears he's now the leader of the tribe?! I'm sure Eywa's thinking, "Oh great! Now I'm going to have to babysit this schmuck or he'll get everybody killed. Which dead ancestor had this bright idea!?"
If I were a present-day Marine, I'd be kind of offended at how stupid "recon gyrenes" are made out to be in this movie.
Avatar sucks because of:
- No aesthetic coherence (compare Aliens, LOTR, Blade runner, etc.), it look like a big rip-off from every fantasy/sci-fi cliches mixed together in a disgusting pizza. As a 3D designer, I can tell you that there are two kinds of talented 3D modelers, the technically gifted ones and the artistically and technically gifted ones. I can tell you for sure that the people that designed avatar are amongst the former category; the ones always ending up modeling sport cars, mechwarriors and other crap.
- a one dimensional story-line without any nuances, psychological depth to the point that, even when trying to only enjoy yourself at some easy entertainment, you feel insulted. (I'd say avatar's script quality is nearly equal to The Core)
- The lion king effect: all that bonding with nature scenes accompanied with tribal music is just tasteless. Compare with Dances with Wolves, Dersu Uzula.
- The basketball scene was just plain awful.
- Poor acting performances.
- Unoriginal, unimpressive and dull direction.
- etc.
much like the Cavorite in A Deepness in the Sky.
And, in another show of useless pedantry, I have to note that Vinge named his material Cavorite as a homage to Wells who used the name in his 1901 book The First Men in the Moon
Constructed in secret, Cameron's undersea craft is really propelled by a Johnson outboard motor.
Your point is valid, but elements are one of the things we can experiment with fairly well here on Earth, and after a certain point atoms get too large to be stable and break apart almost immediately. Right now, some suspect that there may be some "islands of stability" out there on the periodic table, but after a certain point, while an element is possible, it usually breaks down in a very, very short period of time after creation because nuclear forces start becoming too weak to hold it all together.
So, point is, it's unlikely that an element we haven't heard of exists in large deposits on a terrestrial world. It would have decayed to other elements very quickly after formation, let alone surviving long enough to be part of planet formation.
On the other hand, no one said "unobtainium" needs to be a new element. It could be one of the newly discovered ones we have right now that they just nicknamed because it was very difficult to find or produce.
Unobtanium is a physics/engineering joke, and placeholder term for a material with highly desirable properties but doesn't actually exist. It's a rather common term, and I found it an appropriate and amusing name for the movie's MacGuffin. If you pay attention, it's obviously a room temperature superconductor (Meissner effect), and it's rather common to call such a material unobtanium. Also, it's a literary device, since it proves to be unobtainable.
In the movie, the humans never wanted to exterminate the inhabitants. They just wanted to mine unobtanium, and were likely just equipped for that. They hired mercenaries to protect the miners, but were not affiliated with any military, and thus unlikely to have access to weapons of mass destruction. I also doubt they were permitted to do much against the navi, and likely suffered legal consequences when they returned to Earth. That said, since it's obvious there'll be a sequel, the humans will be bombing the navi again for some contrived reason.
It seems the dive is complete http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/03/120325-james-cameron-mariana-trench-challenger-deepest-returns-science-sub/ and he is back on the surface. A little quicker than expected.
I know, I shouldn't have done it.
"One of the risks of a dive so deep is extreme water pressure. At 6.8 miles below the surface, the pressure is the equivalent of three SUVs sitting on your toe."
Could anyone help me to convert this to "Libraries of Congress per toe" units?
Oh, c'mon! Where the frig in the Periodic Table does one find "Unobtanium"? Seriously? I heard that, and gave up on the flick from that point on.
Shrug, I was buying parts for my R/C cars back when I used to race made out of 'unobtainium'. It was a known variation on titanium and thats not the only place the name is used. I don't know that it was better, in my experience I preferred cheap aluminum because if I hit something going fast that it was going to bend aluminum than its likely going to bend titanium or break carbon fiber so the only solution was to not hit the wall in the first place, but I digress.
Real things are named silly sometimes.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I hope that he's bringing enough ballast to counter his ego.
they had a ship capable of ferrying hundreds of people lightyears across galaxies, but they couldn't go to an asteroid belt and grab a big rock to throw at the planet?
You don't need something as technological as a nuke to wipe out all life on the surface. All you need is a rock the size of a city, which, honestly, are pretty common.
In any case, we often forget that the humans were employees of a corporation, not a sovereign military force. The soldiers were the equivalent of some Blackwater mercenaries. Regardless of how powerful corporations sometimes seem, it is government who still holds the leash, being jealous entities that hold the best goodies (like WMDs) for themselves.
That's not really accurate. You're looking at a fantastically expensive operation that is seeking to get an incredibly valuable substance and which is a very long way from home. There have been such things in the past on Earth (e.g., during the age of sail) though to a lesser extent; Earth just isn't as hostile as all that. The history of such expeditions is that they are not run as democracies, but rather as dictatorships with theoretical overview from back home, though typically as long as the goods are delivered the rulers at home don't care what happens. (Perhaps they should care, but they don't.)
If I remember the fluff right, that corporation is rather closely linked with governments in the solar system, but that doesn't really change my major point: in the space around Prometheus the corporation is the effective government for humans. The film documents the start of a revolt (and given the value proposition of the MacGuffin, I wouldn't expect the corporation to give up; the only thing that would have forced that would have been if they found a way to synthesize it in quantity within the solar system).
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
I have a BAD OMEN, like he's gonna get trapped down there and die and stuff and after one hundred years someone is gonna find his frozen body and revive him and hessgonna be facing a brand new world overrun by replicants and stuff and ....o shit wait ! I have been using Youtube too much !!!!!
Wow, maybe we might even be putting men back on the moon sometime!
'Cause a culture capable of splitting the atom and landing on the moon couldn't eliminate infectious diseases and cancer....
Unobtanium
Unobtanium is a generic term used fairly often for an if-only-we-had-this substance. In this case, the substance is a room-temperature superconductor. It's hardly an uncommon term.
My main beef it the film was that a) the space ships main drive wasn't simply aimed down at the planet to act as a weapon ("Any drive powerful enough to be interesting is automatically a weapon of mass destruction") and b) that the company managed to miss the fact that a planet-wide biological network is of equal or greater value than the Unobtanium beneath a small segment of it.
From http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/03/120325-james-cameron-mariana-trench-challenger-deep-deepest-science-sub/ ..."is to jettison steel weights attached to the sub and shoot back to the surface."
Can't we go anywhere and follow the "Leave No Trace" ethos? What effect will those weights have on the local ecosystem?
- Jasen.
Watch, we get down there and the things 100 feet deep in oil....
There's no way among the trillions and trillions of planets out there that even one could contain an element unknown the human race.
Wrong. We know every element that can possibly exist; yes, we even know those that do not exist on earth. We can create elements that do not exist on earth. Oh ... and we also know why these elements are not stable and why they do not exist on earth or anywhere else for more than a couple of microseconds.
Unobtanium is a physics/engineering joke, and placeholder term for a material with highly desirable properties but doesn't actually exist.
Quite literally. I won't link to TVTropes, as we're already in enough of an economic slump as it is.
The first time I heard them say it in the film, I thought a draft of the script had mistakenly been used in the actual filming. It would be as though they'd said the Star Trek warp core ran on Phlebotinum, or any Indiana Jones movie called the Holy Grail / Pandora's Box / Chamber of Aliens "the McGuffin".
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Jesus H Christ. It's fiction. Fiction usually contains at least some fictional elements. The establishing premise of the story is that a mineral is discovered that is so valuable (a naturally occurring room temperature super-conductor) that it motivates humanity to undertake the incomprehensible expense of mounting an expedition to another star.
Did you hate the mystical golden glowing suitcase in Pulp Fiction too? It's called a MacGuffin, get over it.
Right, run into trouble with the natives, level the fucking planet. Destroy the life-supporting capabilities of an entire habitable world (potentially the ONLY accessible habitable world other than Earth for all we know). Brilliant. Let me guess, you think the Middle East should be turned into a sheet of glass to make it easier for the oil companies?
Plus you know, it's a mining corporation. They brought a small defence force, not extinction-level bioweapons. And your argument that "because they managed to make it to another star, clearly they can throw asteroids around like tinkertoys" is just an assumption on your part that is not supported by anything we've been shown.
That being said, I fully expect Earth to return to Pandora in one of the sequels, and retaliate with far nastier weapons.
The truth is that Cameron puts a lot of thought into his world building, even if a lot of it doesn't make it up on the screen. (Because Cameron understands mass appeal, and that doesn't include technobabble). I've read he's written a multi-thousand page "Bible" that Avatar is based on. The thought that has gone into it is actually pretty fascinating. Ie, ISV Venture Star is a pretty interesting read... especially the part about how is was more economical to have the engines at the front, angled out slightly and "pulling" the crew habitat along, instead of a more conventional, rigid design with the engines pushing the ship. That's a LOT of thought to put into the spaceship design, when you consider it's onscreen for maybe 20 seconds.
(Pandorapedia, btw, is an official 20th Century Fox site, not just some fans making shit up)
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
Cameron is back: and there is nothing to be seen....
Maybe Cameron did it to escape the mess that is Julian Fellowes's version of the Titanic disaster?
Wrong. Look up stuff like strange matter and island of stability.
Also, I don't think we can actually calculate the stability of even the simplest elements, because the quantum mechanical equations describing atomic nucleus are just way too freaking complex. So, anything we haven't actually measured is just extrapolation from existing data.
So, from scientific perspective, science fiction is pretty free to add many different kinds of "unobtainium", it doesn't need much to make it scientifically plausible.
(1) Mariana Trench
(2) South Pole after the big 1911 race
(3) The Moon looks like at least 50 years (40 already)
Unobtanium.
21st Century Renaissance Man
"would you rather all movies were some low budget indie film that tries to "make a point" but it's hard to figure out what it is because the movie was made in someone's garage? "
Yes.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
No, the US can't nuke any country (no matter how obnoxious) because Russia and China would object and it would result in a full scale nuclear war. None of the big nuclear powers want to allow that precedent to be set, and I'm sure that has been clearly communicated by secret channels even if it is not public. Those countries would have to piss off all the nuclear powers in order to get nuked, and even the craziest ones are careful to maintain friendship with at least one of them.
Yeah, and the U.S. could have nuked Afghanistan and Iraq into oblivion, as well as any upstarts like Iran or North Korea who would have chirped about it. Maybe, just maybe, there were political implications back home that prevented waging all-out war on obviously sentient beings that are absolutely no threat to us, and whose only crime is sitting on something valuable.
These guys are Indians used to living in harmony with nature because on this planet, the "gods" they pray to are an actual tangible entity that controls nature. They aren't going to know military strategy either, to them, a frontal assault might make sense. In nature, when males vie for dominance, they usually make a lot of noise and "frontally assault" the other male.
And so the way the story goes, the natives are about to get slaughtered when it turns out that the "gods" the natives worship are not an intangible entity at all (look up ghost dancers for the historical parallel) but in fact some kind of planetary defense system.
that with a head as swollen as his, he would keep rising to the surface
I understand what you're saying, but I don't buy it.
You'd be 100% correct if the Indians were planning this themselves. However, they had Jake "Taruk Maqto" Sully in charge--a guy who knows all about the bad guys and their capabilities. This is their leader. So why didn't he suggest that the ground forces, say, try to take out a few of those tanks from a perch up in the trees? I mean, he's the man chosen by Eywa herself to lead them. You think he'd suggest the strategy but the dumb ignorant savages would say, "Hey, screw you, we're gonna yell and scream and ride our horses right at 'em!"
I mean, I understand why they all had to be killed--so that the audience would see how evil these people are and so that Eywa could make her presence known. But I agree with Trudy when she said, "We're going up against gunships with bows and arrows." Even with some intelligent strategy, they were going to do little but delay the inevitable.
When did the final S fall off the Marianas Trench and associated Islands?
Even this site http://www.fws.gov/marianastrenchmarinemonument/ seems to lose its S part way through.
Not to mention the other question arising - What is the world is the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service doing in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?
--
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
Honestly, when I heard the term, I thought the character was joking. It dawned on me a few minutes later that perhaps that was intended to be the actual name of the stuff, but I was too busy watching blue people ride dragons through canyons to be upset about it.
It is not amusing, it is stupid. Unobtainium, by definition, doesn't exist. If you give that name to something that does exist (albeit in a fictional universe), then you don't understand the term and shouldn't have used it in the first place. It is an insult to those that do understand it.
"the brain transfers shown at the end of the movie were obviously extremely high tech"
Evolution is sorta the opposite of technology. They were extremely low tech.. sticks and horses and such.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?