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on December 23 2009 17:26:38
Me and Torellion had a discussion relating to this after watching Avatar. During the day I wondered that I've actually heard it someplace before, and well turns out Cameron wasn't cheesy after all, but instead used a preferred engineering term
Engineers have long (since at least the 1950s[2]) used the term unobtainium when referring to unusual or costly materials, or when theoretically considering a material perfect for their needs in all respects save that it doesn't exist. By the 1990s, the term was widely used, including in formal engineering papers such as Towards unobtainium [new composite materials for space applications]. [3]
The word unobtainium may well have been coined within the aerospace industry to refer to materials capable of withstanding the extreme temperatures expected in reentry. Aerospace engineers are frequently tempted to design aircraft which require parts with strength or resilience beyond that of currently available materials.
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The term has been used in science fiction for materials that have incredibly strong properties. For example scrith, the fictional material forming the foundation of the Ringworld in Larry Niven's novel of the same name, requires a tensile strength on the order of the forces binding an atomic nucleus together. Since no such material is thought to be possible, a ring world is therefore said to be built out of unobtainium. |
on December 25 2009 05:01:31
is a humorous name for any extremely rare, costly, or physically impossible material
Them using the name Unobtanium is to me like seeing an economist in a movie using the term "Umpteen Bajillion dollars" with a completely straight face.
To each his own I guess |
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