Unobtainium

It sounds made up. It is made up. But science hasn’t given up on it yet.

If you remember anything about James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar, it’s probably the giant Smurf-like aliens, the jungle-strewn world of Pandora, or the residual headache that accompanied watching your first full-length 3D film.

Less memorable, perhaps, is the plot device that set the story in motion: an elusive substance known as “unobtanium”. Critics mocked Cameron for the name, a portmanteau they regarded as lazy and overly literal. Ironically, it was the one thing the film actually borrowed from real life.

It’s unclear who coined the term, but people in white lab coats have been referring to “unobtainium”* as a way of talking about hypothetical elements and compounds since at least the ’50s. The first documented use of the word appeared in 1956, in a column in the Marshall, Michigan Evening Chronicle about a group of ballistic missile engineers working on a new metal “so hard to come by that the scientists have devised a lugubriously-humorous name for it. They call it ‘unobtainium’.”

Within a year, the substance had acquired near-miraculous properties. In 1957 Major General William O. Senter told the Zanesville Signal that the U.S. Air Force was looking for a material that was “practically weightless, infinitely strong, [able to] resist any degree of heat,” easy to forge and “available at negligible cost”. Once found, Senter said, “we’ll call it ‘unobtainium’.”

It may not have existed, but unobtainium’s rise was stratospheric. By 1958 the term was officially listed in the Air Force’s Interim Glossary of Aero Space Terms, which defined it as “a substance having the exact high test properties required for a piece of hardware… but not obtainable because it theoretically cannot exist or because technology is insufficiently advanced to produce it”. As the Space Age unfolded, daydreaming scientists of all varieties began thinking up their own unobtainiums, each a silver bullet to an otherwise unsolvable problem.

On occasion, unobtainium has even referred to materials that do exist, but in such small amounts that they may as well not. This was once the case with titanium: during the Cold War, U.S. scientists pined after the aeronautically useful material, which they could rarely get their hands on because the Soviet Union controlled supply. More recently, the plans for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, due to launch in 2018, called for the use of unobtainium that could operate in temperatures colder than the surface of Pluto. Putting its best minds on the job, NASA created a brand new material fit for the task, a process it described as like “building a car chassis without a blueprint or even a list of recommended construction materials”.

Slowly but surely, unobtainium also found its way into other non-scientific (though still quite nerdy) realms. In 2013, a cryptocurrency called Unobtanium was launched. Unlike Bitcoin, Unobtaniums, or UNOs, are relatively scarce: just 250,000 will be “mined” over the next 300 years.

More recently, the term has been applied to so-called “rare earth” elements that, while not especially hard to come by, are so commercially useful that their projected demand easily outstrips supply. The metals that allow your electric toothbrush to spin 62,000 strokes in two minutes are so highly coveted that they were at the centre of a 2010 dispute between China and Japan. With demand for these unobtainiums tipped to rise over the coming decades, some strategists believe geopolitical tensions may increase, too.

Which brings us back to Avatar, whose unobtanium was the source of a fictional feud between Earth and Pandora, as well as the continuation of a real, decades-old naming practice begun by real scientists. Though critics groaned, the name was surely classier than some of the synonyms used by the scientific community, which include the ungainly “wishalloy”, “handwavium” and “eludium”.

* Sometimes spelled without the first “i”.

From Smith Journal volume 23, 2017