Do Avatar's ISV's Break the Canon? 

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One thing we know is that when Venture Star left Pandora in 2154, there were like a half dozen more ISV's already on their way to Pandora. So they had to have either abort the trip or done a flyby abound Pandora and head back to earth. When the dozen or so ISV's return in 2169 multiple were seemingly retrofit with fusion engines that also work in atmosphere to deploy those prefab base cores. I thought the sequence was amazing and an innovative way to get a beachhead on Pandora again. I love the ISV's and their lore/capabilities.

I'd say a bit of both. Corporations are not built around being generous and humanitarian, and there has to be genuine demand for a project the size of Pandora's operation.

"Unobtanium" is what engineers call "fantasy materials", stuff that doesn't exist but has properties that fulfill some specific use. I think if the material from the movie was discovered, it would be an appropriately punny name, just like many before it.

Well, unobtainium is used to make generators, it's not a fuel that is consumed. So even if there's an energy crisis, it would make sense to spend some of that energy to get the resources to up the rate of energy production/reduce the degree of wastage, which will pay for itself after a while.

It's actually canonically the first one. There's an official bit of supplementary lore called the "Activist Survival Guide" that's basically a guide to Pandora with little notes in the margins from political activists back on Earth that canonises the idea that the supposed vital need for unobtanium is actually RDA propaganda to line their pockets because no one can really tell them to shove it.

The best idea I heard about Unobtainium being named that way is because that's exactly what a mega corporation would call it. You can imagine the focus groups coming up with the name and it being passed around board rooms for maximum marketability.

Knowing _Avatar_ and hollywood sciencefiction in general, there was probably a logical explanation somewhere in development which was cut because the executives thought it'd confuse the viewers too much.

There's the rub: earth can't have energy problems if it's capable of fast interstellar travel. Literally every method of harnessing energy that allows you to accelerate a large spacecraft to a significant fraction of c in a short time can be used to eliminate even the most monumental energy shortage on earth.

IIRC, the ISV issue was addressed in the canon, in that the first ISVs were *much* less efficient due to the lack of unobtainium, and it was only once the mines on Pandora came on stream that the current ships could be built. I believe that the 12 ships mentioned include both the older and newer ones, which are still used alongside each other. Whether or not the early ones did still rely on anti-matter as part of the engine fuel cycle, or wether they also had to use a different altogether I'm not sure. It is mentioned they were *much* more massive, which implies, perhaps, a nuclear impulse type propulsion system was used (maybe a "Medusa" style sail/chute design, given the newer ISVs use sails as well). The maglev train system was a weird bit of world building IMHO. You could explain it as the maglev was built using regular materials (since that is entirely possible) but that as a result is horribly inefficient and complex (which is 100% true when it comes to maglevs IRL - hello, Japanese maglev project!), and that Unobtainium will be a big help in improving it, as well as the other issues. But yeah, it was a weird way of doing it - when the *desire* to build one would provide an extra motivation for the RDAs colonial shitshow. To be fair though, the desire to simply secure a monopoly on it and screw over the entire planet for corporate gain would be entirely believable based on how real-world monopolies with massive lobbying and regulatory capture do behave right now. Not that any of this detracts from Avatar 2009 in my opinion - I absolutely adore the Avatar universe, and the 2009 movie had a huge impact on me, and even with second movie now out, and the comics as well, 2009 is still my favourite of the lot by a long way.

Didn't know avatar had space ships, I always thought it was about bending the four elements....

It was short sighted world building. What most writers don't realize is that fusion power is one of those technologies that once mastered can bring humanity to being a post scarcity civilization. It is cheap abundant power from easy to source fuels and with such cheap power it is easy to smelt or synthesize whatever you need to build whatever you want. With fusion power plants it would be easy to build as many O'Neal cylinders as you could ever want to house the human population, especially with the level of automation the humans have. It would be way cheaper than sending people to colonize a world with a toxic atmosphere in a different solar system. Hell the very war over energy that Jake lost his ability to walk over would likely not have even happened as fusion would make fossil fuels absolutely redundant. I normally consider Cameron to be pretty smart but it is a pretty big oversight it you really think about it.

RDA wouldn't be the first company to prolong the existence of a problem as a side effect of the method they use to try to solve that problem. Ultimately what matters is that Earth gets its hands on as much unobtainium as possible, so it can be used for more productive things than making mountains float on a distant moon.

I still think Unobtanium is perfectly named. The IRL term literally means "substance that does exactly what we need for a given purpose". It's a science joke. Like Encabulators.

Can you imagine how insecure an employment environment it must be to live six years' travel away from your head office? By the time your next shipment gets back to Earth, someone may have discovered a more abundant and easily-accessible source of floaty-metai elsewhere, or a way to synthesise it back on Earth, or the whole company may have gone bust.

Virgin airdrop 500lb mining explosive from a civilian shuttle 500ft up Chad nuke em from orbit Thad rod from god Lad literally just cycle your main engines to full power for 30 seconds

Which do I think is more likely? Cameron is known for his ridiculously extreme attention to detail, so I'd say "corporate profiteering in-universe" is the answer, rather than "out of universe mismatch".

Please do videos about the new vehicles introduced in Avatar: The Way of Water, such as the Aerospatiale SA-9 Kestrel, the AT-101 Sea Wasp, the SMP-2 Crabsuit, the S-76 Sea Dragon, the Matador speedboat, the Picador speedboat, and the Mako Submersible.

I think there had to be a different ship class in the first mission or missions and the ISVs require unobtanium for their engines and reactors that they would have built with what they brought back. Maybe something in between used a lightsail on both branches of the journey with a much longer deceleration.

I know which is more likely but I also know which is more compelling, and the supercorp that is sucking back all the available power on earth so it can mine a planet is absolutely a fun one

Human civilization as shown in the movie does not seem to have energy problems, nor (as far as I recall) is energy crisis ever mentioned as a problem by any character in the film. It does seem more likely that what plagues Earth is overpopulation, pollution, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, food-web collapse (and most importantly greediness gone awry)

I've watched enough Isaac Arthur to wonder why(if you're having power problems) you'd build an interstellar spacecraft instead of a fleet of solar power collectors around the sun.

You would not need particle accelerators to make antimatter. Just have a generation station in the Lagrange point between Io and Jupiter and pull the Anti-protons from the flux tube. Also positrons are a byproduct of fusion itself so you catch them.

I mean judging by how the second movie says that they don’t really care about unobtanium anymore and everything is now about that liquid that stops human aging it seams that maybe they didn’t have an energy problem after all.

It does make you think, if energy consumption was the issue, wouldn't it be simpler just to build a dyson swarm and beam the energy back to earth with the same laser technology they used to propel the ISV?

Cameron definitely likes to explore corruption in government entities and corporations, so I could see that little hiccup maybe being on purpose with him.

While the corruption/ego issues that lead to things like that are real, I think a lot of writers underestimate the shear cost of sending things to and from another system, even one as close as Alpha Centauri. I think an FTL system in low multiples with less energy intensity requirements would have worked better. Or, some kind of gravity manipulation ore to allow for gravity acceleration.

It's possible that Cameron and co. realized the problem because in Avatar 2, the wonder resource of Pandora is an extract from a brain of a Pandoran whale which provides eternal life.

I think that the antimatter production issue could at least partially be mitigated by using magnetic collectors in orbits, say Jupiter or Saturn for our solar system and Polyphemus for Alpha Centauri B, as there is a relatively decent amount trapped in their magnetic fields and Unobtanium would also play a big part in simplifying the collector's designs and scales.

As I know, in the world of Avatar unobtanium is used to solve Earth's energy crisys as a material for fusion reactros and many other vital economic spheres. So I think despite how many recorses RDA spends on unobtanium mining, it completely worth them.

Could the antimatter have been used to jump start a standard fusion reaction? I mean as I recall, the movies were not exactly dripping explicit or even a lot of implicit world building...

Well the ISV wouldn't work anyway. It's engines would vaporize most of your ship. Look at how much the exhaust on the Saturn V spreads out in the upper atmosphere vs at ground level. The exhaust from the ISV's engines would be spreading out *WAY* to fast to be mounted on the front. Plus metals like steel, aluminum, and Tungsten have better compressive strength than tensile strength.

Earth's problems being corporate propaganda works be a perfect plot point with the movies' themes

There's tonnes of resources needed to power the big super lasers and manufacture antimatter, betting they all need superconductors that are hard to maintain and extremely expensive. Then here's unobtanium, a relatively cheap, low maintenance alternative to the expensive, high maintenance superconductors. Meaning everything they need to sustain them that was once expensive is now cheap at the expense of the Na'Vi But that's just my 2¢.

The second is more likely, but the first would be an amazing plot point to explore and I hope they go that direction.

I would imagine that future humanity's power grid would be many orders of magnitude larger than our current one. For a civilisation that has likely mastered fusion (thanks to the unibtanium no doubt), the energy requirements for star-hopping is likely peanuts.

4:00 exactly my thoughts, it is strange that a "dying civilization" with problems with energy supply has so much energy and materials to spare and send to a far away planet, it even contradicts the existence of the "whalers" in the second movie which only go to pandora to extract the yellow thingy from the whale like giant alien fishs for money, we don't know for sure, but maybe there is a bigger plot going on? I hope so.

In Gurps Transhuman [RPG] there are antimatter manufacturing facilities located on Mercury, taking advantage of the massive constant supply of solar energy that's easy to collect. They produce enough antimatter that is viable to be used for high performance spacecraft that need that level of fuel efficiency with thrust output, but it's not viable as a power supply for Earth - and imagine the issues with trucking it down to the Planet, screw up a shipment decent and that's a multimegaton clean nuke that's just impacted. It's a bit like AVgas, you can run a airfleet on it, but as a baseload power station it's not really economic. As for using room temperature superconductors on Earth, they wouldn't just allow efficient Maglevs and lossless power transmission around the globe (still incredibly useful, have giant solar farms in deserts and a Planet spanning energy grid), they would most likely allow a lot of new technologies that we don't have. More advanced computers that allow bypassing the _'current'_ restrictions, medical tech … Sully could get his legs fixed _if he had the money_ plus there's very advanced brain scanning that allows avatars and personality downloading¹ [Avatar 2]. There are so many theoretical drawing board ideas that would be enabled by room temperature superconductors, that if the material was somehow 🪄 developed in the near future it would revolutionise the World. ¹ Avatar 2 skips over some game changing technological changes on society, _immortality and backups._ The 'whale juice' stops aging, so the mega rich will not grow old [dying of old age is the only way some powerful people will be removed …what if?]. And then colonel Quaritch _mark 2_ and his team show that you can have backups made of yourself that can then be downloaded into a new body (if they can do it into a Nav'i, that can do it into a Human body). And why just stop at a replacement for when you die? If you're a egomaniac you could have multiple copies of yourself to assist you - just how would someone who _wants to do that_ be able to get along with themselves though? A megalomaniac couldn't co-operate with themself … but a talented individual that a organisation wanted more of could be duplicated. But it would completely change what it means to be Human, however it's treated.

I feel it is like in WW2 when we were rationing metal, but we were pumping out Liberty Ships daily

I'm not a big enough expert on solar sails, but could an array of solar mirrors work instead of a laser, or in support of one? Thinking of the Troy Rising novels, lots of small mirrors directing light to larger mirrors that direct it to a small number of still larger mirrors, which then can focus a massive amount of light onto a target. Free energy from the Sun (yeah, Earth's energy problems could be solved with that, too, so RDA conspiracy).

Well regarding the refueling at Pandora they are supposed to be harvesting nautrally occuring anti-matter from the atmosphere of Polyphemus (the gas giant Pandora orbits) using shuttles that are left in orbit when they leave. Regarding earth's energy crisis, given RDA is supposed to be blocking the development of synthetic alternatives its highly likely that yes they are overstating the issue.

Given how little consideration the films seem to give the supposed energy crisis, it's probably the second. They could easily have made it the focal point of the humans' motivations and given them a more grey motivation rather than the black-and-white "humans want to destroy the environment so they're evil" treatment they're given in the first film. Also, that level of industrialization and the massive tech disparity should mean the humans could stomp all over Pandora super easy, if it weren't for the absolutely absurd amounts of plot armor the protagonists have. If they framed the energy crisis as an actual existential threat, it would be easy for them to justify a Desert Storm-style military operation that would end in a massacre for the Pandorans (like, seriously, no air superiority? It's like James Cameron has never heard of what a modern missile can do)

What I got stuck on...was that the superconductors maybe more valuable for creating antimatter

There's another "BIGGER" problem, "Transmutation of elements." Theoretically, instead of using a combination of antimatter and massive lasers. Unobtainium could be made in breeder reactors, enhanced by the solar laser and antimatter, with no need to leave the solar system at all. Negating the entire plot of Avatar. Also, it has been theorized that anti-matter particles can be trapped by power magnets fields from gas giants. And accumulate over s very long period of time. So, mining anti-matter from Saturn or Jupiter's magnetic field is a theoretical possibility. It's still far from proven, though.

Antimatter can be harvested from space, although it's not a easy task (Jackson & Marshall 2006 NIAC Phase I Final Report “Antimatter Harvesting in Space”). A set of large mirrors in close proximity to the sun could potentially provide a 'laser', or at least power for them, to boost the fleet. None of that deals directly with the supposed Earth energy shortage as that power could just as easily (easier) be used for the planet.

From the ISV, I have thought of ways of how to move between the stars more efficiently without the use of an FTL system. My idea involves the use of electromagnetic sails that not only use the solar wind to accelerate the ship, but to use magnetic phenomena that NASA has be researching, like magnetic explosions or something like that. Plus, the ship is several, like a train.

maybe the power used to move the ships is actually relatively small to the total power consumption of earth. Or the prospect of a potential infinite power generation catalyst is so great its worth the massive amount of power needed.

I actually wasn't aware that Pandora was in the Alpha Centauri system, which kinda works against the worldbuilding I feel. If not only life, but complex organized life not too dissimilar to humans of 10,000 years ago was present in what is effectively our galactic back yard, life must be insanely prevalent in the universe and it's unlikely that we would be the first to find a method to ply the void between the stars in a non-ridiculous amount of time. That would be an oddly anthropocentric view in a movie that seems very much against that line of thinking

Even though it is probably an oversight this would make it way darker. Earth already has a room temperature superconductors but someone somewhare at RDA calculated that transporting them already "grown" from another solar system would be 10% more profitable

Probably a little of both. Tbh this discrepancy is a bit on a level with the ships from The Expanse eschewing radiators. Even with the best science fiction and world building, you can't win them all. Tbh, it's just another bit of suspension of disbelief like the Unobtainium

Similar thought I've had - the timeline seems a little bit too short for this all to be plausible. like pandora is discovered when, visited how much later, unobtainium discovered how much longer after, research into applications (including isv) takes how long in order to produce the first isv, and then to establish and have the rotating fleet in place for jake to appear. 130 years at the most seems a little short to me

Been really interested in your channel lately, subscribing and looking forward to the next video!

Inconsistencies in world building is the more likely explanation. But I think its fair to claim this as a happy accident that adds a bit of unintended depth to the conflict. The best stories always have an element of improv afterall.

The laser propulsion *could* be an orbital solar powered type (that every source isn't necessarily very transportation), but if they've got antimatter initiated fusion on that scale I'm having a hard time believing energy shortages could exist.

Considering that Jack from Titanic was from a lake that didn’t exist yet. I’m going with writing oversight. Which is sad as the ISV was my favorite thing in the Original.

I think antimatter can also be collected in space. I can't remember the details, but as far as I know there are certain altitudes above planets with a magnetic field, where antimatter collection is viable, depending on the strength of the magnetic field. I don't know how much antimatter you get with this, but it's certainly preferable to making it in particle accelerators. Still, if they can collect the antimatter, RDA could use it's energy on earth as well, so the energy crisis is a bit of a stretch either way.

up until an hour ago, the disparity was probably a world building hiccup. now? pretty sure you just gave them a canon explanation as well as the framework for the story of Avatar 3.

One may also wonder about room temperature superconductors in computer systems.

The latter of the two is the most likely. If anything it just underscores the weakness the plot - any civilization that can bridge the interstellar void as a matter of routine is not going to be thwarted, stymied or otherwise inconvenienced by Neolithic-like natives, be they furry Teddy bears or any other embodiment of the noble savage myth. [edited b/c autocorrect is a %^%$#@!]

A laser sail that accelerates at 1.5G would be the same as having a jetpack that worked by firing lasers downwards, wouldn't it? Just a different scale. That's a bonkers amount of power.

I refuse to think that James Cameron half-baked a major prop like that. Go watch Alien Theory's channel and be blown away at how subtle the worldbuilding actually is through the use of props. This guy is next level in planning out his universes.

ISV is probably just something NASA or some other government had lying around that the company just bought or built a copy of. Companies always choose the cheaper easier option over the long term cost saving one that is more expensive now.

I think the second option is way more likely than the first. The movie really has very little interest in earth, apart from to say ‘it sucks.’ They came up with a semi-plausible way to get between earth and Magic Alien Land, and called it a day. Something that few people ever seem to bring up, though, is all the marines/ex-marines. They mostly seem to be combat veterans, so who have they been fighting? They’re all wearing AMerican flags, too, which would seem to imply the earth of that future is much the same as ours, though crappier. Bunches of independent nation states still fighting periodic wars with each other. So if The Company has a dozen ISVs, do any of the other megacorps have ISVs? And if so, where are they going?

It's probably just inconsistency, but I may have a solution. It could be that the lasers used to propel the ISVs consist of pairs of mirrors orbiting close to the Sun that bounce sunlight between them (the Sun's atmosphere being a natural lasing medium) before it ultimately reflects in the direction of the ISV's sail. So why not just shine those lasers on giant solar collectors, you ask? Well, giant solar collectors would require unobtanium, which takes us right back to square one.

The laser sail isn't as much of a plot hole as the antimatter production thanks to the sun. Creating a solar collector powered laser drive makes more sense and the efficiencies of having a continual string of ISVs using a shared fixed drive source also works. As long as the solid angles of the sails don't overlap and the beam is wide enough you could make that process fairly efficient. Solar collectors work for the laser because you can filter and concentrate the solar spectrum to pump your gain medium without costly energy conversion while the accelerators would take photon-electron conversion. Overall I think it's a minor oversight but not as glaring as made out to be.

All these years, and I'm just now learning what 'Unobtanium' is really used for......and it seems kind of silly, really. Yes, room temp super conductors are good, but I was thinking it was probably the 'Dilithium' of the 'Avatar Universe', the Impossible Element that somehow made FTL travel possible (or at least made Near Light Speed Travel possible).

Based on what we learned in the second film, Earth has basically been consumed to death. Seems likely this venture caused a feedback loop of consumption that doomed the planet in order for the corporation to get more and more wealthy. So whether that was the intention during the first film or taken advantage of by the second film, it appears to be intentional at this point.

0:55 Gonna have to disagree. Many people don't realize this, but "unobtainium" is an actual term used in material science and engineering (and as generic scifi term like "MacGuffin" is for writing in general). It refers to any material with qualities/capabilities well-suited for a given application, if not for the fact that it's actual existence is entirely speculative. It also has a sibling term-- "unaffordium" --for any substance that is both ideal for its use AND real to our knowledge, but that is simply too costly or impractical to use. The point is that, in Avatar, the superconductor they found on Pandora was so genuinely miraculous and widely-applicable in its uses that they just went ahead and named it after the catch-all term for such materials. It kinda reminds me of how we named "X-Rays". I could easily see this name being used for real.

How much time took to reach Pandora from Earth, from the time perspective of someone in Earth? I didn't remember Pandora/Polyphemus was in Alpha Centauri ("just in the next door"), I was thinking it was farther away and the ship had some kind of "low level FTL"

Something that struck me as weird is the fact they used these in the second movie as in-atmosphere landing craft.

Imo 2 is more likely but 1 fits real nicely

That's so weird because I just yesterday shared the last video you did on this ship because it came up in conversation. I was talking with my sci-fi writing Discord group about the idea of heat sinks to manage temperatures on spaceships.

Or option 3, probably the least likely, earth has an even greater demand for energy than whatever energy all those antimatter ships use just to get to Pandora.

Fun Fact: The ISV is a Capital Star Class ship. And before unobtanium was harvested, the ancestor ISV classes actually used standard large scale super cool superconductors and had large radiators according to the Avatar wiki

Wait, really? Their planet is only in alpha Centauri? Well I say “only” But that’s right next door, and they’re basically human.

Time out. I can't be the only person with this thought, because it is so obvious. You need dedicated fusion to effectively manufacture antimatter fuel. In order to fuel the massive arrays of fusion plants and antimatter generating colliders, you would require a gas giant. Hear me out. On a planet, or in orbit, fusion is king, and also for powering spacecraft, but, for transit through space, antimatter is king. You don't want antimatter reactors planetside because of all the things which could go wrong with the fuel near population centers, but, fusion is less of a risk. In space there is less risk, so antimatter becomes more useful. Now, we have gas giants providing nearly limitless amounts of fusion fuel and oxygen for spaceflight, so... I don't understand sci-fi premises like this. Sure, lasers, every boost is a good one, but... When there are gas giants in both systems, and both fusion and antimatter are present and used in the story, the most obvious choice for propulsion (given what is provided in the film) would be a combination of antimatter and laser sail thrust each way, not from Earth or Pandora, but from bases orbiting Jupiter or Polyphemus. Additionally, that Earth is having any sort of energy crisis in this film is absolutely stupid beyond words for the same reasons.

A realy flaw for is that they used the ISV's used their propulsion system to clear out a huge arean, why didn't they do this with their all knowing brain tree?

Civilization capable send to a distant star a fleet of ISV's have already solved all energy and lack of resources problems.

I mean a Laser-powered sail isn't really something you have to do with earth-based power. Basically you just put enough mirrors around the sun with gyroscopes on them and you've got it. There was a whole episode of SFIA where we basically discussed how you could just also accelerate a bunch of reflectors themselves and sacrifice them into the target star whose sole purpose is to build waves of sacrificial lasers to slow down your fleet of colony ships lol.

The RDA is greedy The answer is in the first movie “This is why we’re here, because this little grey rock sells for 20 million a Kilo” Not because “this little grey rock is saving humanity” Because it sells well. That should answer our question.

I'm going to argue for corporate stranglehold. The technology and resources used for the ISV could easily be used to begin the construction of a Dyson swarm, especially with the capabilities as stated of the little spider bots in Avatar 2. Once you start on that kind on engineering, power stops being a major issue. This also plays into the nonsense of the second movie claiming earth is setting up Pandora as a new home for humanity as Earth is dying (another issue that could likely be solved with an application of enough energy). You know, the planet with the air that is poisonous to breath is going to be our new homeworld . . . So yeah, I think more is going on than what is stated.

I love how strike 1 was a scene of Jake getting thrown out of the bar. And strike 2 was having his wheel chair chucked at him.

It's bad world-building. Cameron wanted to make a point, and obviously story had to be sacrificed.

Real-world reason IMO is that it was slightly overlooked. I say "slightly" because they seriously did an amazing job at making everything else about these starships believable. But it's such a minor issue that *could* conceivably have an in-universe explanation that perfectly meshes with what we already know about the RDA corporation. So I'm fine accepting the HC of, "RDA is hoarding energy".

Unobtainium is an engineering term. It is usually referenced in theoretical concepts where no material exists that can allow some particular device to function, but if the "unobtainium" did exist then the design would be feasible. I'm sure that I didn't fully explain that right, but hopefully I did convey the general concept.

Any civilisation that has interstellar travel does not have an energy shortage

My theory is, humanity has used more and more energy (exponentially?) per person over time. With an exponentially growing population and an exponentially growing per-person energy use, maybe there is an energy need AND the ships still use a bunch.

4:12 the former might actually be me more likely. #1. It never says what's actually causing the energy shortage, but given how the energy costs of a civilization like ours would be completely eclipsed by those of interstellar colonization, I think it's safe to say that colonization itself is probably what's driving the energy shortage. They might be pushing it through propeganda or total control, but it's just as likely that Earth's controlling powers only agreed to this particular solar system because A: it's our closest neighbor, and B: it's expected to yield an electrodynamic miracle. More to that point-- #2. The room-temperature superconducter they're collecting through energy-intensive space exploration is exactly the thing you'd WANT for energy-intensive space exploration, so the plan was likely to set up a feedback loop with high initial investment that rapidly evens out. They say Earth and its economy was pretty wrecked by the time they arrive at Pandora, so that may very well have been the result of such an investment.

Maybe it's not actually a laser, and is instead just light reflected from the sun and focused until it becomes coherent. Often when people say "laser" they are talking about coherent light, and not the light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.

Love the video but as a music person I love that Xcom 2's music is making it's way onto the channel!

I always read the choice to call it "Unobtanium" as a tongue-in-cheek engineering joke. It's funny how people get so bothered about it.

The energy crisis more likely is coming from issues with transport and usage not from the actual amount generated, especially considering how populated earth would be by that point building power plants near cities or industrial centers is likely immensely difficult if not impossible

well it's true that they need a lot of energy and ressources for the IFV's to work. earth ressources used for the IFV's wouldn't have sustain humanity on the long run anyway so using them now is logical

Not completely. The light sails would get a boost leaving Pandora as they can get light from Alpha Centuri's twin stars much like sailing ships on earth get a boost when traveling with the underwater currents. They would only need to be used at full power once they leave the system and when they return to sol. Also nasa in 2020 used solar winds to increase the orbit of a satellite just by turning the panels into the solar winds. However the experiment would only made the satellite's orbit more oval.

The whole setup is stupid. World wide maglev? Yet the ISVs only transport enough 'unubtanium' to fit in 16 big rigs...from there you have antimatter pumped lasers. How is Pandora a problem exactly? I mean with 24 antimatter pumped lasers how have they not made massive solar mirrors able to generate insane amounts of solar energy? Oh wait, maybe they did and it runs a massive solar pumped laser. The world build makes no sense and is once again the result of people saying and doing things that seem cool without understanding the implications of those technologies.

I don't think it's out of sync. I think your comment about an administrative apparatus that allows a company to have monopolistic control over a resource with extreme strategic and economic value is the more likely explanation. The energy problems of Earth are one of artificial scarcity and disparity in access. For example, is using maglev trains to travel a quarter-way around the planet for a daily commute an efficient use of energy? Heck no! But rather than restructure society to be less energy in-efficient (like say by cultivating talent local to where labor is needed or adopting remote working options where available) they just keep raising the consumption. And if RDA is big enough that it has a monopoly on common maglev travel and a monopoly on power production and a monopoly on the resources that go into both *and* it can rather casually get a garrison of marines to protect its corporate extraction sites... then face it, we're looking at a government that has been effectively captured by a megacorp. And a megacorp has a set of priorities that set its own growth well above that of the general welfare. RDA isn't going to support a plan that would involve shrinking the dependence society has on the things that they make a planet-sized mint off of. As for the ISVs, I doubt that the first ships sent to retrieve Unobtainium were anti-matter powered. Quite probably they weren't and had much slower acceleration and longer trips as a result. But I'm guessing the first technologies that Unobtainium were applied to back on Earth were put toward anti-matter production and an acceleration laser system. Their first priority wasn't easing the immediate burdens of people in general, they were easing the company's burdens of getting more Unobtainium. Once they can produce a sufficient quantity of anti-matter and have a sufficiently powerful laser acceleration system, then they've passed the limiting factor for building new ships and the marginal cost of each ship after that would be low (relatively speaking, I'm sure the ships themselves are plenty expensive on their own.) That in turn reduces the price of Unobtainium and they can start applying it to other things, like upgrading their maglev infrastructure.

If I recall correctly antimatter can be won in the radiation intense Auroras of the gas giant Prometheus. On the Earth side it is more like long game calculation. The energy needed to produce the antimatter is offset by the long-term savings of the Unobtainium applications.

First, THANK YOU for putting out a video on this - it's always been a problem with the film in my mind. As for the reasoning, I fully expect it's the second option: they just missed something in the world building. But, I'm sure Cameron will say it's actually the first: has he ever NOT had a movie where a corporate entity wasn't outright evil?

Cameron like the rest of _Pedowood_ is so hellbent on spreading *THE MESSAGE* of how humans are bad that he just didn't care to glue the pieces of the story logically. So ironic to make a movie that cost billions to crap on capitalism.

If I'm remembering this right, according to the Pandorapedia small amounts of Unobtainium were found on Earth before they discovered it on Pandora. The first ISVs didn't use Unobtainium so they were much, much bigger as they had to use regular materials for the antimatter drive magnetic coils, heat sinks and radiators. It does seem like a plot hole that there would be an energy crisis when they can make antimatter, plus the whale hunting makes no sense if they have the technology to clone and genetically manipulate Pandoran life to create avatars. They would be able to replicate the biochemistry that makes the brain juice. The landing sequence in the second movie was cool though. As Larry Niven postulated in his books, any space drive capable of interstellar flight would be powerful enough to be used as a devastating weapon. Even the interplanetary Epstein drives in the Expanse were too dangerous to be used on planets or near stations.