Xon wrote:Superconductors are the holy grail of material sciences, something like unobtainium would completely revamp how everything from computers, power generation and distribution, transportation and even medicine is done.
The question is not what unobtainium is used for, but what isn't it used for because there isn't enough of it.
You mean room-temperature superconductors right? I could have sworn that superconductive materials already existed, but only at near-absolute-zero temperatures.
Suffering and dying because of it? Does that somehow justify the sheer extent of "American foreign interest" in places like the Middle East, propping up inhumane regimes and true fuckers and funding proxy wars, just because some commodity becomes so useful that America's fatasses become too dependent on it that losing it would become an inconvenience? How many atrocities can "item X's" value justify? Would it be justifiable to put the Na'vi in reservations? Enslave them to pick unobtanium from the cotton fields? Put them in ovens? Or blow the crap out of them from orbit?
Assuming Earth pulls a miracle out of its ass in this hypothetical dependency situation and everybody instantly agrees to stop using Unobtanium in future products, it's still going to take years to wean off it, to recover from companies going out of business because of it, economic fallout etc. People don't work that way of course.
The other thing we've got to consider is whether Pandora, specifically, was vital to the continuation of Earth's socio-cultural wellbeing. Is it just a situation where they were getting more, better, faster from Pandora, or was it like the only place they were getting reasonable quantities of it?
To answer your question more directly, going Cold-Turkey on a super-commodity like this isn't feasible, and if they suddenly stop getting shipments from their most lucrative mine there will be serious repercussions. Whether it's justifiable or not can be determined by evaluating how many Na'Vi lives would be lost by a forced relocation, and compare this with the number of lives lost, ruined etc on Earth by the fallout of this. We can only estimate obviously, but if there's a clear advantage to doing it, it should become apparently. There are added complications too, like "is one Na'Vi life equal in value to one Human life?"
which you regard as vital to your civilization (when even this is debatable)
It's a "what if", as far as I can tell we've established that it's probably not.
justify the immoral act of killing?
It's a determining the lesser evil situation. Economic collapses aren't cushy.
A private individual can own an airplane with a planetkiller drive jet engine. If you use maths, a planetkiller drive jet engine probably has more raw energy than a mecha/helicopter/Quarritch machine gun. I mean, geeze, you could fly a jet airplane into the Home Tree Trade Center and killfuck three thousands of Na'vi or something. But today, people CAN own and operate jet aircraft but are NOT allowed access to assault rifles.
Are you implying that private companies don't have access to assault rifles?
You're familiar with PMC's aren't you? Various private security firms probably do, as well.
Presumably this has something to do with goddamn Democrats, and I presume Avatar has Space Democrats which is why Quarritch didn't throw a Tunguska at the Na'vi - as "unrealistic" as this is.
They probably have Space-Obama in power, too, and his space-healthcare reforms were destroyed by additions and compromises made by space-special interest groups and space-Republicans. You can tell because the government clearly isn't footing the bill for Jake's space-surgery to repair his spine.
Also, the obvious reason why you wouldn't throw an improvised RKV at them (aside the ethical ones) would be that it would totally ruin your mining site and kill all your crew on the ground.
Those in-situ factories are NOT Star Trek replicators. They're not a no-limits-fallacy. Did the RDA bring with them blueprints for more advanced and specialized weapons systems? Probably not. Why would they have to? If there's government regulation, don't you think there'd also be regulations on what kind of blue prints and designs the RDA could bring with them? Lol, perhaps their in-situ factories are even programmed to obey Space EPA and Space Californian state carbon emissions standards.
Well they brought a whole bunch of military equipment with them that they shouldn't have if somebody sane was planning a mining operation (armed gunships, mechs with massive machine guns, etc), and it's not implausible for them to have some kind of blue-print database on hand. I ain't sayin' that they necessarily did, but if they'd wanted to build them they could have requested the schematics, or brought them with them when they came. As I said before, the most likely reason is that they never fathomed that they would ever need such a thing. By all rights, helicopter gunships and mechs should have been enough to slaughter the Na'Vi, human turncoats or no. I can't fault them for not realizing that they were the villains in a dances with wolves remake.
)
"
[
