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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).
The reason we didn't send a manned mission back is that there's really no point - a realization they came to on the first trip. The people in the sub can't directly interact with the environment in any way. They have to look at the world through cameras, and all work is carried out by robotic arms. Essentially, all you've done is take the control room for a remote vehicle and send it down with the robot. It's a lot of engineering work and no small danger for basically zero gain.
Doesn't just being the deepest point in the ocean make it worth exploring?
Maybe not. I mean, yeah, I'll probably stare in awe at Cameron's video footage of the seafloor, thinking of the 10,900 meter water column above and of how this is the single patch of seafloor that endures a higher water pressure than any other patch of seafloor anywhere else. But from a scientific standpoint it might have been better if he'd visited some place that's only, say, 8,000 meters deep, but is located in the vicinity of some deep-sea volcano, hydrothermal vent or other geologically interesting feature, thus making it more likely to find many living creatures or other interesting things there.
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.
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.