Scientists design James Cameron’s Unobtainium

Remember that floating rock in “Avatar” that was the root cause of the conflict between humans and the Na’vi? They called it “unobtainium” for lack of a better name. Clearly, audiences were meant to infer that the material was not supposed to be found on Earth — that this was why we were sending a huge expedition to another star.

Well, it took less than a year for science to catch up to science fiction. Perhaps without knowledge of Cameron’s “Avatar”, NASA engineers have engineered a true unobtainium, a composite material that cannot occur naturally (at least here on Earth). And this composite is actually a composite of composites.

Perhaps a whole new science has just been opened up, where engineers design a material through computers and math first, designating what properties they want, and then they set about fabricating it. So what do we call this science, Materials Fabrication? Supercomposites Engineering? I’m sure something suitably cryptic will be proposed in the scientific literature soon.

But now Cameron — if he cares enough about resonating with the real world — has to think about whether he wants to say in the “Avatar” franchise that his unobtainium is also NASA’s unobtainium. And if he goes down that route, does he want to suggest it occurs naturally or is there perhaps something else at work on Pandora (the moon where “Avatar” is set)?

This is the sort of idle speculation that percolates up in the mind when one browses science Websites on a daily basis, I suppose. Maybe James Cameron couldn’t care less about what NASA chooses to call an artificial material that was molecularly engineered for space-freezing temperatures. He just wants to tell a good story, right?