Unobtainium

In science fiction, unobtainium is any hypothetical, fictional, or impossible material. It can also mean a tangible but extremely rare, costly, or reasonably unobtainable material. Unobtainium can refer to any substance that is needed to build some device.

About Unobtainium in brief

Summary UnobtainiumIn science fiction, unobtainium is any hypothetical, fictional, or impossible material. It can also mean a tangible but extremely rare, costly, or reasonably unobtainable material. Unobtainium can refer to any substance that is needed to build some device critical to the plot of a science fiction story but which does not exist in the universe. An alternative spelling, unobtanium is sometimes used based more closely to the spelling of actual materials such as titanium or uranium. The term was also used in James Cameron’s 2009 movie Avatar as a substance that was a super-strong material.

In Frank Herbert’s novel Dune, a substance required for interstellar travel and is by far the most valuable commodity in the known universe. The Core, a hull material that gets stronger by absorbing heat and converting it into energy in the film The Core was nicknamed unobium. The same concept can be seen in the anti-gravity material cavorite in the 1901 novel The First Men in the Moon, as well as the superstrong material scrith-strong from Larry Niven’s novel Ringworld, which requires a tensile strength on the order of the force binding an atomic nucleus to the nucleus.