In engineering, fiction, and thought experiments, unobtainium is any fictional, extremely rare,
costly, or impossible material, or device needed to fulfill a given design for a given
application.
The properties of any particular unobtainium depend on the intended use.
For example, a pulley made of unobtainium might be massless and frictionless; however,
if used in a nuclear rocket, unobtainium would be light, strong at high temperatures, and
resistant to radiation damage.
The concept of unobtainium is often applied flippantly or humorously.
The word unobtainium is derived from unobtainable + -ium.
It pre-dates the similar-sounding IUPAC systematic element names, such as Ununoctium.
An alternative spelling, unobtanium, is sometimes used, based on a parallel construction to
metals such as titanium.
Engineering origin Since the late 1950s, aerospace engineers
have used the term "unobtainium" when referring to unusual or costly materials, or when theoretically
considering a material perfect for their needs in all respects, except that it does not exist.
By the 1990s, the term was in wide use, even in formal engineering papers such as "Towards
unobtainium [new composite materials for space applications]."
The word unobtainium may well have been coined in the aerospace industry to refer to materials
capable of withstanding the extreme temperatures expected in reentry.
Aerospace engineers are frequently tempted to design aircraft which require parts with
strength or resilience beyond that of currently available materials.
Later, unobtainium became an engineering term for practical materials that really exist,
but are difficult to get.
For example, during the development of the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane, Lockheed engineers
at the "Skunk Works" under Clarence "Kelly" Johnson used unobtainium as a dysphemism for
titanium.
Titanium allowed a higher strength-to-weight ratio at the high temperatures the Blackbird
would reach, but the Soviet Union controlled its supply and was trying to deprive the US
armed forces of this valuable resource.
In the 1970s, bicycle magazines, such as Bike World, sometimes referred to exotic lightweight
bicycle parts as being made of unobtanium, although while expensive they were commercially
obtainable.
In the same period, driver & engineer Mark Donohue claimed unobtainium was used in the
construction of Penske race cars.
Contemporary popularization As of 2010, the term has diffused beyond engineering,
and appears in the headlines of mainstream newspapers, especially to describe the commercially
useful rare earth elements.
These are essential to the performance of consumer electronics and green technology,
but the projected demand for them so outstrips their current supply that they are called
"unobtainiums" within the ore industry, and by commentators on the US Congressional hearings
into the "supply security" of rare-earths.
"Unobtainium" has come to be used as a synonym for "unobtainable" among people who are neither
science fiction fans nor engineers to denote an object that actually exists, but which
is very hard to obtain either because of high price or limited availability.
It usually refers to a very high-end and desirable product; for instance, in the mountain biking
community, "These titanium hubs are unobtainium, man!"
Old-car enthusiasts use "unobtainium" to describe parts that are vanishingly rare or no longer
available.
In maintaining old equipment, unobtainium refers to replacement parts that are no longer
made, such as parts for reel-to-reel audio-tape recorders, or rare vacuum tubes that cost
more than the equipment they are fitted to.
There have been repeated attempts to attribute the name to a real material.
Because of the long-standing usage of the term "unobtainium" within the space elevator
research community to describe a material with the necessary characteristics, LiftPort
Group President Michael Laine has advocated assigning the term as the generic name for
cables woven of carbon nanotube fibers, which seem to satisfy the requirements for this
application.
Since he claimed that sufficiently long nanotube cables will be prohibitively expensive to
develop without inexpensive access to microgravity, these cables would still be close enough to
unobtainable to meet the definition.
However, this usage does not seem to have become widespread.
The eyewear and fashion wear company Oakley, Inc. also frequently denotes the material
used for many of their eyeglass nosepieces and earpieces, which has the unusual property
of increasing tackiness and thus grip when wet, as unobtanium.
Frequent Sunday night/Monday morning host of Coast to Coast AM George Knapp usually
opens his show mentioning unobtainium.
As a play on the word, Obtainium is an album by Skeleton Key, released in 2002 by Ipecac
Recordings.
Science fiction Unobtainium can refer to any substance needed
to build some device critical to the plot of a science fiction story, but which does
not exist in the universe as we know it.
A hull material that gets stronger with pressure in the film The Core was nicknamed unobtainium,
but the concept under different names can be seen in the anti-gravity material cavorite
and the super-strong material scrith from Larry Niven's novel Ringworld, which requires
a tensile strength on the order of the forces binding an atomic nucleus together.
More recently, it was the ore mined on the moon Pandora in the movie Avatar, where the
compound was described as key to human space exploration and survival, though it was spelled
"unobtanium" in that setting.
Unobtainium can also refer to any rare but desirable material used to motivate a conflict
over its possession, making it a MacGuffin.
Unobtainium can be used in a disparaging context or a hypothetical one.
In real life Element 66 is named dysprosium, from the Greek
word dysprositos meaning hard to get.
One altcoin is named Unobtainium, based on Bitcoin's code source.
Similar terms The term handwavium is another term for this
hypothetical material, as are buzzwordium, impossibrium, hardtofindium, flangium, and,
less commonly, phlebotinum.
The term eludium has been used to describe a material which has eluded attempts to develop
it.
This was mentioned in several Looney Tunes cartoons, where Marvin Martian tried to use
his "Eludium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator" to blow up the Earth.
Another largely synonymous term is wishalloy, although the sense is often subtly different
in that a wishalloy usually does not exist at all, whereas unobtainium may merely be
unavailable.
A similar conceptual material in alchemy is the philosopher's stone, a mythical substance
with the ability to turn lead into gold, or bestow immortality and youth.
While the search to find such a substance was not successful, it did lead to discovery
of a new substance: phosphorus.
See also List of fictional elements, materials, isotopes
and atomic particles Materials science in science fiction
Notes
References
External links A Note on Unobtanium
World Wide Words — Unobtanium Going Up?
Private Group Begins Work on Space Elevator Unobtainium at TV Tropes
Unobtanium Cryptocurrency Official Webpage