• qyron@sopuli.xyz
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    23 days ago

    So… We manage to master space travel. We manage to master interstellar travel. We eventually find a planet with suitable environment for sustaining our species. And we just overlook it.

    Can someone explain me the reasoning behind this?

    Sci-fi to the side, there are more minerals available - readily - on asteroids and barren planets than anywhere else. Why go hopping around looking for habitable planets, to the reason of 1 out of who knows how many, to then strip mine it?

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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      23 days ago

      The resource being extracted on the avatar planet was unobtanium.

      It was only available on that planet, precisely so intelligent people like you can’t say “why not mine barren rocks instead”?

      • qyron@sopuli.xyz
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        23 days ago

        There are exactly zero minerals available inside planets that are unavailable on asteroids.

        Sci-fi will be sci-fi but can we go back to the time it was at least well thought? Can’t hurt. If the objective of the movie was to make social criticism, it didn’t need to go to such lenghts.

        And it was a boring movie; failed to captivate me.

        • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nz
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          23 days ago

          There are exactly zero minerals available inside planets that are unavailable on asteroids.

          Crystallised urea

          • qyron@sopuli.xyz
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            23 days ago

            Nice to cross paths with you again!

            I’ll grant that but what use for crystalized urea is there? Urea I know a few. And if we already know how to cultivate diamonds and other artificial gems, why bother mining for that?

            • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nz
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              23 days ago

              Drag was making an allegorical point. Perhaps Unobtanium results from an organic process. In the second movie, the capitalists are killing whales for a substance in their brains that makes people immortal. Can’t find that on an asteroid.

              • qyron@sopuli.xyz
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                23 days ago

                We can save mental effort and just go for the Dune series at this point. What is the point in that? In considering the advances in modern chemistry, there are ever few organic compounds that can not be synthesized.

                I fall back to my original thought: is well thought sci-fi so hard to achieve nowadays? If seems there is a fixation about misery and destruction nowadays.

                • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nz
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                  23 days ago

                  Avatar does have some good science fiction like the idea of a planetary hivemind being worshipped as a god. The Na’vi religion is literally true, it just seems false to humans who don’t know anything. That’s very different to Dune, where the Fremen religion is true because people like Paul’s mum make it true.

                  • qyron@sopuli.xyz
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                    23 days ago

                    I’ll grant that waffer thin idea as a good attempt of putting something akin to good sci-fi into an otherwise solely for visuals work, although I disagree with the notion of deifying something that is tangible, as in the setting put forward in the movie.

                    And I mentioned Dune because of the immortality mention. The spice is also irreplaceable and unique, produced only in a single planet, through a rather complex organic process, harvested at great risk and cost, then to be synthesized by the tons.

                    That was good sci-fi, with sound social and religious criticism in it.