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alt title(s): Unobtanium
"For the denizens of the galaxy, eezo is like oil, uranium, duct tape and heroin combined. It's just that good."
— Myrme, posting on rpg.net about Element Zero ("eezo") in Mass Effect
Unobtainium is the exotic metal or other material that is needed to make the Applied Phlebotinum work.
Much mad science uses unobtainium, such as imaginary chemicals with impossible properties or machines that can't be built with earthly metals. Aliens frequently use it in their spaceships. Godlike aliens use high-grade unobtainium — indestructible and infinitely strong. Green Rocks are made of unobtainium.
Some forms of unobtainium are based on real physics, but beyond the current scope of human engineering. Room temperature superconductors are low grade unobtainium; they would revolutionize just about every form of technology, but they are not in and of themselves dangerous. Useful sources of Antimatter are high grade unobtainium; though it is just as revolutionary as an energy source, it violently (as in, a microscopic amount = tactical nuclear weapon yield) converts to energy if it comes in contact with any conventional matter.
The most common varieties of unobtainium would be materials so resistant to heat and/or damage as to be Nigh Invulnerable compared to other, similar substances. Materials such as mithril, adamantium and orichalcum (and all variant spellings thereof) are the fantasy version. Thunderbolt Iron is especially popular in fiction(and has some basis in reality - until a few hundred couple of thousand years ago, there was no other source of refined iron).
Following this would be medical and/or chemical wish-fulfillers; Classical real-world alchemy casually referred to carmot, the base substance of the Philosopher's Stone, and Azoth, either the "universal medicine" or "universal solvent". Plato referred to "orichalcum" (Greek for "golden stone") in his description of Atlantis. That makes this trope Older Than Feudalism.
Increasingly common in Science Fiction is whatever stuff makes Faster Than Light Travel possible, closely followed by the stuff that can mess with gravity - if they're not one and the same.
The current buzzword in hard sci-fi is Helium-3 - believed by many to be the fuel of choice for those nifty fusion reactors that should be perfected any time now. Theoretically, it's a safe large-scale energy source with few environmental side effects. But more importantly, though there's extremely little of it on Earth, there's plenty of it on the Moon - and I know I'd like to go there sometime before I die. How about you?
The basic subatomic particle of certain kinds of Unobtainium is the Minovsky Particle.
The term originally comes from aerospace engineering, where it was used to refer to materials that would be perfect for a particular design if not for the inconvenient fact that they were unavailable - either because they were too expensive, or did not actually exist.
Compare Mineral Mac Guffin; that's just stuff people fight over, as opposed to stuff people want to use.
Examples
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Comic Books
- Naturally, the Marvel Universe has adamantium (in multiple flavors; see below), but it also has other "magic metals," like vibranium (of which there are two varieties, Wakandan [which absorbs kinetic energy/sound/vibrations] and Antarctic [which causes other metals near it to liquefy]), Uru (the material of Thor's hammer), promethium (a magical metal found only in Otherplace/Limbo, which can be used as an energy source), and netheranium (the material of Damien Hellstrom's trident). The best example, though, would have to be the infamous "unstable molecules" used to make so many heroes' and villains' costumes. Not to forget Captain America's unobtainable unobtainium shield - completely indestructible, but also a handwavy one-off item.
- A number of stories suggest that Cap's shield is an otherwise impossible vibrainium/adamantium alloy reinforced by American righteousness(as opposed to ''self''-righteousness); making Cap's recent assassination an Anvilicious condemnation of current American politics.
- The "vibranium/adamantium alloy" thing is due to a misprint in one of the Official Handbook Of The Marvel Universe issues. His shield was made from a unique alloy of iron, Wakandan vibranium, and some unknown contaminant. When the metallurgist who had made it tried recreating the alloy (while Cap was frozen), the closest he could come up with is what's known as (true) adamantium, which is slightly weaker than the alloy in Cap's shield!
- Speaking of, adamantium comes in a few flavors. True Adamantium is the nearly-indestructible metal alloy that's bonded to the bones and claws of Wolverine. There's also Secondary Adamantium, which is a lot cheaper to make but is still quite strong. Carbonadium (the stuff covering Omega Red's tentacles) is what the Soviets came up with when they tried to create true adamantium; it's about as strong as secondary adamantium, but is more malleable... and radioactive. Also, in the Ultimate Marvel Universe, adamantium can block telepathy.
- Freakazoid takes a shot at this in "The Island of Dr. Mystico." Freakazoid and a number of superpowered villains are held in a bamboo cage. When Freakazoid tries to bend the bars, Cave Guy says, "It's no use, we've already tried. It's molecular bamboo."
- In the Silver Age DCU, Krypton became a gold mine of unobtainium. Any item, living or not, that originated there would become indestructible under a yellow sun — and would occasionally spawn a new variety of Kryptonite. In addition, promethium is the DCU's equivalent of adamantium, a super hard metal that superstrong superheroes have a tough time damaging, and Nth Metal, or "transuranic iron ore," was the key to Thanagarian technology (as seen frequently in Justice League).
- Irritatingly, promethium is a real metal (element 61), one with no stable isotopes and no special structural properties.
- DC's promethium comes in two flavors. "Raw" promethium can be used as an energy source or a mutagen. When alloyed with titanium and vanadium, it forms a near-invulnerable metal.
- The Tintin adventure The Shooting Star revolves around a mission to retrieve a sample of unobtanium (dubbed "Phostlite") from a fallen meteorite. The only obvious property of the stuff is making mushrooms grow really fast. And other plants. And animals, like butterflies and spiders. Fortunately, germs don't seem to be included.
- The first version of the Legion of Super-Heroes used "inertron" for this purpose, an invulnerable metal.
- Other elements that existed in the Pre Crisis DCU included "Supermanium" (created by Superman) and "Amazonium" (the metal Wonder Woman's bracelets were made from), both invulnerable metals akin to inertron.
- In an early Marvel/DC crossover featuring the X-Men and the New Teen Titans, the villain Darkseid keeps both teams shackled, and states that Kitty Pryde's shackles are made of a rare metal with molecules so tightly packed, not even she can phaze through them.
Film
- In Avatar, refered to by name. They actually call it unobtanium. Although, in this film, the unobtanium is more of a Mineral MacGuffin, especially considering that never once in the movie itself was it even hinted why the mineral was so important. It's mentioned in the website http://www.pandorapedia.com/doku.php, but even there the information is vague or conflicting. Snippets of information given are:
- According to Dr. Grace Augustine, it can be found on a moon orbiting a planet near Alpha Centauri, it's a superconductor, it somehow causes the Hallelujah mountains to float, and is a rare earth mineral.
- The Hometree page says that "Like many sacred sites on Pandora, Hometree sits above a large deposit of unobtanium," so unobtanium has something to do with the Pandora neural network.
- The RDA page says that the creation of global mass-transit systems "led to the current global network of maglev trains that require the superconductor unobtanium for their continued operation." It doesn't say when these trains started needing unobtanium, but considering this is a backstory, that unobtanium has already been called a "rare earth mineral", and that its worth on Pandora wouldn't be recognized unless there was already applications for the mineral on Earth, it seems that unobtanium was discovered or manufactured on Earth, but is either so rare or requires elements so rare that it's prohibitively expensive to make on Earth.
- The ISV Venture Star page says that "It is used in the superconducting magnet arrays which contain and direct the energy of the matter-antimatter annihilation which propels the ship. Without unobtanium, interstellar commerce on this scale would not be possible. Unobtanium is not only the key to Earth’s energy needs in the 22nd century, but it is the enabler of interstellar travel and the establishment of a truly spacefaring civilization" and "The first interstellar ship was over four kilometers long, because of the massive refrigeration system required to maintain the conventional low-temperature superconducting magnets that produced the containment field for the matter-antimatter reaction. It was not until the discovery of the high-temperature superconductor unobtanium on Pandora that interstellar travel and commerce became commercially viable." So voyages to other solar systems would still be possible without unobtanium, but be much more expensive, and take more six years (6.75 without Time Dilation). It also has something to do with "Earth’s energy needs in the 22nd century", perhaps allowing for the creation of efficient fusion reactors or something. With these entries taken together, it's still vague what exactly unobtanium is (ie. naturally occurring mineral, rare elements for manufacturing process) and though it's said to be a superconductor, it's applications seem to fall more into Green Rocks.
- But those properties are not magical, they are consistent with currently-understood laws of physics. Superconductors actually do possess powers of levitation when placed in powerful magnetic fields; and superconducting electromagnets are currently used to contain fusion plasmas in tokamak reactors and to create antimatter in particle accelerators - and could potentially be used to contain antimatter if enough antimatter could ever be made. The film's unobtanium is simply a higher-temperature version of a real-life class of materials. In comparison, today's superconducting magnets, which are made of conventional superconductors such as niobium-titanium alloy, need to be cooled to the incredibly low temperature of 10 kelvin (-263 °C / -442 °F) using liquid helium.
- "High-temperature" superconductors do exist, which only require cooling below a relatively balmy 135 kelvin (-138 °C / -217 °F). But currently they are unsuitable for most practical purposes because they are ceramics instead of metals, and they can't easily be made into wires.
- The Core lampshaded this, calling their Unobtainium Unobtainium, which turned heat and pressure into electrical energy. Perfect for a journey through the Earth's molten core. Extremely practical, as all you had to do was to randomly cut supply wires and casually weld them to the substance in question, and you had an energy source that rivaled a nuclear reactor. There are actually Real Life substances that turn pressure into electricity, known as Piezoelectric substances, although they wouldn't work on such a large scale.
- Of course, piezoelectric materials work by flexing, seeing as how the energy has to come from somewhere. This means your core-ship would generate lots of lovely electricity in the process of crumpling into a ball. This is by no means the first instance of ludicrously poor science in this movie.
- Of course, if a Real Life metallurgist with a sense of humor actually managed to make the damn stuff, they might be sorely tempted to call it "unobtanium" or "impossibilium" or something like that.
- Metallic tritium serves this function in the second Spider-Man film. The Big Bad has to make a Deal With The Devil (requiring him to beat the protagonist) in order to get some.
- Strangely enough, the way the Big Bad is going to use the tritium is a scaled-down version of one way physicists are trying to develop fusion power called "inertial confinement". The basic idea is the same, vaporize an amount of an element with lasers in an attempt to create a miniature sun, only the scale and elements used are different. For more information, this writer's original reference is "Kaku, Michio Ph D. Physics of the Impossible. Doubleday Publishing, 2008. Pages 43-45."
- Parodied in the fifties B-movie homage The Lost Skeleton Of Cadavra with Atmospherium, a super-powerful and poorly-defined element capable of operating spacecraft, resurrecting evil skeletons, and delivering actual advances in the field of science.
- Quantonium in Monsters Vs Aliens. The Big Bad needs it to power his cloning machine so he can execute the Alien Invasion. The only known supply is absorbed into the body of Susan Murphy, who then suffers from some interesting side effects.
- Fluid Karma in Southland Tales. A compound found by drilling in the ocean that apparently can be used to generate electric power. Also, acts as a drug working somewhat like a Green Rock.
- Star Trek XI has red matter, which can make black holes on cue.
- In Outlander, after establishing that Viking swords aren't strong enough to injure the Moorwen, Kainan salvages some hull metal from his crashed starship, and gives this to the local blacksmith to forge some stronger swords.
- Turbinium from Total Recall
- In District 9, the same liquid that powers the aliens ship also has the ability to turn a human into an alien. It unfortunately takes 20 years to collect enough to do either.
- And yet, once you have enough to do ONE, you have enough to do BOTH!
- To be fair, the nanofluid doesn't seem to actually act as a fuel or power source. It seems more likely the stuff is required to activate the alien technology, much like an automobile's ignition key or a magnetic swipe card that opens a security door. Given that the alien weapons can only be fired by living aliens (or a human with alien DNA) it could very well be that the nanofluid is an artificial life-form infused with the alien DNA which might explain the effect it had on Wickus
- In Doctor Horrible, the good doctor powers his freeze ray with Wonderflonium, not far removed from Unobtainium as it has the power to stop time. However it only seems to paralyze or turn to stone a single target, rather then actually stopping time itself.
Literature
- Cavorite from H.G. Wells' The First Men In The Moon.
- Cheddite, from Harry Harrison's 1973 Golden Age SF spoof novel, Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers.
- Melange, also called spice, in the Dune novels, extends life and grants limited prescience, allowing Faster Than Light Travel. And it tastes like cinnamon. Oh, and there are other uses. If it seems like something that would be extremely valuable and important, that's because it is.
- Spice is intended to be a Alternate Company Equivalent to oil. And the Freman are Arabs. Paul is Lawrence of Arabia. Well, somewhat anyway.
- Then again Brian Herbert, who 'confirmed' the above once also claimed on the publisher's site that Dune was written in response to Saddam Hussein's rule in Iraq and the Gulf War. Spectacular considering it was published about fifteen years before Saddam Hussein's rise to power and 25 years before Operation Desert Storm. Maybe Frank Herbert was a Melange user himself.
- Iridium, a natural element that is extremely rare on Earth, is often used in more dramatic Sci Fi stories.
- The German SF/pulp series Perry Rhodan has over the course of its history collected a fair bit of unobtainium in various forms. Classic examples are Ynkelonium, a metallic element that does not react with antimatter and can to an extent prevent such reactions from occurring in its immediate vicinity, and Luurs-Metal, which always maintains a constant temperature of about 3.4 degrees Celsius. Both materials occur naturally in the universe and cannot be synthesized.
- Mithril in The Lord Of The Rings.
- Though, if you look at how it is made, used, and described, it seems more like it is titanium, a real-life element, but in thier world, it glows. This part could be due to the magicks inherent to the series, though...
- Larry Niven's Ringworld has scrith, the material used to make the titular megastructure. It is nearly frictionless, blocks almost all radiation (Which would take about a light-year thickness of lead) and has a tensile strength on the same order of magnitude as the strong nuclear force.
- The unnamed substance the Puppeteers make General Products hulls out of.
- They're actually massive molecules big enough to live in.
- In the Star Wars universe we have bacta, tibanna gas, transparisteel and durasteel (which itself is an alloy of carvanium, lommite, carbon, meleenium, neutronium, and zersium)... Well, let's say there are lots of interesting materials and substances in the Star Wars EU.
- Special mention goes to cortosis, which is lightsaber-resistant. Or in its purest form actually causes lightsabers to short out.
- The Uplift Series by David Brin has a material of the name unobtainium.
- The hyperdrive of Kevin J. Anderson's Saga of Seven Suns is fueled by "ekti," described as "an allotropic isotope of hydrogen."
- Atium, from the Mistborn books. It's only mined in one place, it's extremely rare, and incredibly powerful.
- All of the properties of Atium are ultimately justified by it being made from the body of a god.
- John Ringo's Looking Glass series is so named for the instantaneous transmission portals which were created by what were originally thought to be Higgs bosons. That identification was later corrected, and they were renamed Looking Glass Bosons. The looking glasses of the first book take a secondary role however, after the series takes off into space in a ship powered by a literal black box of alien origin, and when the ship is destroyed in the third book, it is entirely remade by an alien race the ship just saved. This leads to the fourth book where the captain of the ship discovers he is missing a large number of alien made spare parts and lampshades all of this saying, "And now I have to call SpaceCom and explain to them that we're non-mission-capable until a couple of tons of unobtainium parts and tools get found!"
- Practically every book in the old Danny Dunn children's scifi series starts out with the discovery of a new form of Unobtainium. Usually because Danny or a friend of his spilled something in the lab.
- Tanglestone from the Elizabeth Bear book, Undertow, was only found on the planet named Greene's World, and allowed instant data and material transportation across many light years from the colonies to Earth.
- In Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic and The Circle Opens series, there's living metal, which can only be gotten by one character, because it grows on her hand due to an accident involving fire and a staff with a metal top. Later she can make it faster by putting some in a jar and adding some of her blood to it, but she is still the only person who can make it, and thus the only one with consistent access to it.
- Rudyard Kipling's story The Night Mail has airships lifted by "Fleury's gas" energized by "Fleury's ray." The lifting power of the gas can apparently be rapidly adjusted, and is so great that airships are made rigid enough to achieve speeds of two hundred miles per hour without straining the hull or engines. (No real-world airship has ever reached one hundred.)
- In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, industrialist Henry Rearden is introduced as a protagonist by way of his invention of "Rearden Metal," a somewhat vaguely-described alloy of steel and copper which is much stronger and cheaper to produce than industrial-grade steel.
- Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle gives us the Solomonic gold, and Stephenson also goes into a long digression on wootz steel, which is actually real and pretty damn awesome to boot.
- Neal Stephenson's Anathem has a material called New Matter that has drastically different properties than regular matter.
Live Action TV
- Doctor Who - Dalek cases are made of Dalekanium, which makes them Immune To Bullets, although recent episodes showed that they now use a Deflector Shields variant to vaporize bullets before they even reach the case.
- Dalekanium is often called 'bonded polycarbide' when they want it to sound less silly.
- Which basically means plastic. Specifically Kevlar.
- The Doctor states that the TARDIS's door is capable of holding off an army and that absolutely nothing can enter the TARDIS from the outside when it is locked.
- Except that in the last season we find out that a fully stocked and sane Dalek army can simply break in the door like it was normal wood. Never mind that in season two, the doctor is able to enter a Dalek mothership and simply taunt them as his TARDIS shielded him. Apparently the 'sane' factor is important.
- the reason the doctor is protected both flying through space at and inside the Dalek mothership is because he is protected by Blon Fel-Fotch's tribophysical waveform macro-kinetic extrapolator, which Captain Jack Harkness deftly wired in with the TARDIS itself.
- In Stargate SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis, naquahdah is material the Gate is made of. Also, naquadah-enhanced nukes are used to Blow Stuff Up. This is demonstrated magnificently in the season 3 finale of Stargate Atlantis. Its evil twin is naquadriah, which can also be used to Blow Stuff Up, but is "unstable" and has a track record of blowing up its users. The iris on Earth's Stargate is made of a trinium-titanium alloy. Human-form replicators apparently can only be made from neutronium.
- Don't forget the fact that naquadah is also a powerful source of energy (naquadah reactors). Also ZPMs could be seen as a sort of unobtainium given that no one knows how to make them and they're needed to run just about all the Ancient technology in the series (as well as providing a convenient bit of Tim Taylor Technology to the human ships)
- The whole of Star Trek is liberally sprinkled with various types and grades of unobtainium; the original (and most frequently recurring) example is dilithium, used in the reactor core of warp drives as a control medium, but there are many others:
- Corbomite, which doesn't actually exist; it was an Ass Pull by James T. Kirk to bluff an enemy — which means that Trek pulled a Lampshade Hanging on their own tendency to invoke unobtanium in one of its earliest episodes.
- Neutronium. This is a real substance: a type of "degenerate matter" composed entirely of neutrons, thought to be what neutron stars are made of — but since even a thimbleful would weigh millions of tons, its usefulness as a material is rather limited.
- This does not, of course, stop assorted aliens from constructing easily opened doors, buildings on planetary gravity, entire starships and a freaking Dyson Sphere out of the stuff.
- Note also that astrophysicists rarely if ever use the word "neutronium" for this stuff, preferring terms like neutron-degenerate matter.
- Duranium
- Latinum, a valuable liquid metal, used as a form of hard currency due to its rarity and the fact that replicator technology cannot recreate it.
- Tritanium
- Trilithium, less stable than dilithium, but equally magical.
- Baakonite
- Keiyurium, a Shout Out to the original Dirty Pair.
- Vertenium-Cortenide, a compound of two non-existent substances, used in the warp coils themselves.
- Archerite, another Ass Pull, this time by the Andorian Shran when explaining to another alien commander what he was doing in their territory.
- Transparent aluminum. which gets bonus points, given that a normal modern chemist could apparently figure out what it was just by looking at the atomic structure. Naturally, he would still be helpless to reproduce it without a diagram of said structure.
- Transparent aluminum exists now. See here
- Since there are some aluminum-containing crystals (sapphire comes to mind) that could potentially be used for windows and are transparent, this one may be a Justified Trope.
- Cortenide, which comprises Data's skull with duranium, as he describes to a Klingon warrior who almost knocked himself out headbutting him.
- Both versions of Battlestar Galactica relied on a fictional element called "tylium" to power their FTL drives.
- And an episode of Star Trek Voyager had an alien species using the same exact fuel by name!
- In Power Rangers Time Force, Trizirium Crystals are an very powerful energy source that originally won't be discovered about 200 years from 2001, because of the battles between the Time Force Rangers and Ransik, as well as Bio-Lab trying to reverse-engineer the future tech the early discovery nearly sucked the world into time vortices in the "End of Time" three-part finale.
- Power Rangers RPM has flux overthrusters needed to handle advanced zord control stuff. The first one was lost in the wastelands after the plane it was installed in was shot down. The second... well, it's lucky that that's when the bad guys sent a bot capable of Mega Manning.
- The jumpgates and jumpdrives of Babylon 5 relied on an exotic and extremely rare mineral called Quantium-40 to function.
- in Knight Rider (the original series), KITT was built out of a material called either Tri-Helical MBS or Plasteel 1000, which rendered the car almost indestructible.
- Actually, it was only it's paintwork. The car was rendered unoperable a few times and lost some of it's gadgets - of course the one relevant and needed at the time - due to explosions and hard collisions. While it was nigh-immune to small arms fire pretty much anything explosive damaged KITT more or less.
- In the TV series of Honey I Shrunk The Kids, it's revealed that an element Wayne named "Szalinskium" is at the core of all his impossible inventions. In another episode it's revealed that he obtained it from the space alien Arnox.
Manga & Anime
- Orichalcum (or a variant spelling) is a metal with magical properties that makes appearances in several anime, including The Slayers.
- In Digimon, there's Chrome Digizoid (also spelled ChronDigizoid), a super-metal with a silly name that comes in several varieties; Blue Chrome Digizoid, the lightest; Red, the strongest; Gold, which apparently increases a Digimon's offense; and the vaguely described Black Chrome Digizoid. Metal Etemon claims to be made of Chrome Digizoid, but he's silver. Of course, Zudomon's hammer was also made of Chrome Digizoid, so it fast became a moot point.
- The metal Gundanium from Gundam Wing becomes, when alloyed with regular metals, almost indestructible.
- It also has a ludicrously high strength-to-weight ratio, such that a 9-story tall giant robot made from the stuff weighs less than an Abrams Tank. May explain how Gundams are able to stand up under Earth's gravity despite the Square Cube Law. Then again, there's still all the other Mobile Suits made of more prosaic things like titanium...
- Mazinger Z took the "ridiculously high strength/density ratio" thing to a whole new level when Japanium is alloyed into Super Alloy Z. The titular robot, built from the stuff, stands 18 meters tall, yet weighs a meager 20 tons.
- Levistone from Kyouran Kazoku Nikki, a material which makes things hover when electricity runs through it.
- Code Geass has Sakuradite, previously found and said to be the "Philosopher's Stone" in medieval times, and found in large amounts in Japan. It's now valued as a superconductor, being liquid in room temperature. It also explodes rather easily...
- Various evolution-inducing stones aside, in one episode of Pokemon Team Rocket had a mecha composed of "polished unobtanium", which made it immune to Psychic attacks.
- Done with a twist in Laputa where the Levistone (Grade A Unobtainium) is a well-known mineral, commonly found in rocks - however, it rapidly decays when exposed to air and thus serves no practical purpose. The movie's Precursors knew how to refine it and fashion it into durable crystals, with many amazing properties. This technology has been lost and the world's nations will now stop at nothing to lay their hands on the few remaining samples.
- One Piece has seastone, which is apparently "a solidified form of the sea." Contact with it will weaken Devil Fruit users, and drain them of their abilities. It's also apparently harder than diamond.
- Wouldn't "solidified sea" be.... ICE??????
- The series throws in another with Adam, a super-strong type of wood.
- Vizorium is both the Unobtanium that makes warp-drive possible, and the central plot driver of the Dirty Pair Movie Project Eden.
- GEMs in Mai-Otome give Otome their robes (and thus, most of their powers). The Coral and Pearl GEMs used by students are artificially created, but the knowledge of how to create Meister GEMs was lost, making them extremely valuable.
- Outlaw Star has dragonite, used for Faster Than Light Travel.
Myth and Legend
- The oldest example would be Orichalcum (Orichalc, orichalcos) which is part of the Atlantis myth - Plato describes it as somewhat reddish, shiny, and hard, and usable both as armor and art. Conspiracy buffs identify it with an alloy of gold and copper from South America that does, in fact, have these properties.
- Perhaps there were a few ancient European examples of gold-copper alloy? Enough to start a legend, but not enough to be easily found by modern archaeologists.
- Adamant, which has a legendary hardness dating back centuries, being an older name for diamond. Unfortunately, it also shares a name with an adjective, and so tends to be saddled with suffixes. Look for Adamantine, or for that Sci Fi twist, Adamantium. If you ever have the misfortune to see Adamanite, look away.
- The entire premise of ancient and medieval Alchemy was based on the pseudo-scientific search for Unobtainium, usually described as an element which would catalyze the manufacture of gold from base metals.
Real Life
- This is the notational material used in the manufacture of that very important tool or part which you can't seem to find anywhere. For example, at this time, 16 bit PCMCIA cards are one of many peripherals that can be said to be made of Unobtainium.
- During the Cold War, when most of the main producers of titanium were in Soviet territory, aircraft designers sometimes referred to it by this name.
- Also during the Cold War, the US Air Force had a strong desire to develop antimatter bombs, perhaps feeling that hydrogen bombs just weren't apocalyptic enough. Fortunately, there is no known source of antimatter and no practical way to make it.
- Not true, certain science labs have been able to "fabricate" very small quantities of anti-matter for some time now (haven't you ever read Angels And Demons?). However, it is entirely unfeasible at this point to produce large enough quantities for military or industrial application.
- Not entirely unfeasible - you just can't use high energy labs to mass produce it. If you actually made an antimatter factory, you could increase the efficiency a lot. It would still be very expensive, but not entirely impossible to make a weapon. The problem with antimatter bombs is that most of the energy of the antimatter-matter reaction is released in a harmless form - for example, neutrinos, which pass through normal matter like it wasn't even there (well, technically, it isn't... mater is very void space :)) According to TOW, to interact with half the neutrinos produced by Sun, you'd need a lead block a light year thick. That's a LOT. Fission bombs are much, much better at the time and it probably won't change for a while.
- And yet again during the Cold War, a mythic substance known as "red mercury" was used for disinformation purposes by the Soviet Union. This substance was supposedly a high-temperature superconductor, a key ingredient in nuclear weapons, a ballotechnic and a component of certain types of stealth paint. It was apparently successfully used in a number of sting operations, since any organisation or rogue government seeking "red mercury" was clearly up to no good.
- The Spanish Conquistadors actually discovered Cibola, but they didn't realize it at the time. A tribe in the Venezuelan jungle was swimming in platinum ore, which they used as makeup and decoration and crafted jewelry out of. It was so common in this isolated community that the tribe did not view it as especially expensive. Unfortunately, the Spaniards killed off the tribe before learning how to smelt it into pure form, a secret that was lost for another 300 years. They killed the tribesmen by working them in gold mines, where was very little gold was to be had, and the tribesmen kept making up stories of the "real Cibola" to get the Spaniards to look for gold elsewhere (a metal the tribe had little interest in) with no luck. Meanwhile, the Spaniards considered the platinum worthless (it was so rare it had no market value and had never been seen before) and piled the platinum ore in slag heaps. When Spain learned of their mistake many years later, they sent expeditions to try and uncover the abandoned platinum ore with no luck.
- There are many real world examples of unobtainium, perhaps making this one Truth In Television. While the ideas of Mithril and Vibranium actually existing on our earth may be laughable, the idea of a rare but powerful mineral/resource that only occurs in abundance in one or two areas in the world is almost a historical trope. From wood for ships to uranium for bombs our world is filled with examples of unobtanium, with whichever country having the unobtainium having great power over those which don't. America seems to be especially lucky when it comes to unobtainium (though being bigger than continental Europe with a climate temperate enough to get at most of it doubtlessly helps).
- For example, to
smelt electrolyse aluminum from ore requires immense heat - but it can be obtained at (somewhat) lower energy expenditure by dissolving the ore in molten cryolite. Cryolite deposits are mostly limited to Greenland. Fortunately, it doesn't get used up in the process.
- Aluminum processing plants tend to be in areas with major river systems, the reason being that only hydroelectric can provide enough power cheaply enough. In addition, Iceland has a decent-sized aluminum refining industry, due to its volcanic formation providing vast amounts of cheap geothermal power.
- During the Bronze Age, iron was its version of unobtanium, with it being much stronger and durable than bronze.
- Iron ore was fairly common during the Bronze Age, but nobody knew how to make weapon-grade steel from it. See o Larry Gonick's "Cartoon History Of The Universe" series for reference. Tin was the unobtanium, being essential to make high-quality bronze, but fairly rare.
- For much of recorded history, steel was the unobtanium of its time. This was mostly due to then-current technology being unable to make steel cheaply and easily.
- Hence the fascination with Thunderbolt Iron, although this could be a retcon by recent authors unfamiliar with metallurgy, since the impurities in meteoric iron are likely to make it more brittle.
- A major limiting factor in steel production was the supply of carbon. Charcoal was great for steelmaking, but the supply of trees couldn't keep up. Coal could be used, but it often contained impurities that made the steel brittle and unworkable. The Industrial Revolution in Britain was actually founded on a new "reverberatory" furnace, which enabled the production of good steel with Britain's impure coal.
- Wootz steel is a very specific case of this. It's made out of crucible-fired sand consisting of iron and tungsten carbide, which only naturally occurs in a very few places, almost all of them in central Asia. The process for making it was lost for centuries after the ore ran out, and was only rediscovered very recently through chemical analysis (the ore contained trace amounts of vanadium that created an unusual spiky crystal structure in the solidifying ingots). By all accounts, wootz steel is both stronger and more flexible than ordinary steel; back when swords were still used as weapons, Indo-Persian swords were highly valued throughout India and the Middle East because of this.
- This seems a likely origin of the stories about the strength of weapons forged from "Damascus steel."
- The Washington Monument was capped with a pyramidal ingot of pure aluminum, considered priceless at the time. This was before they figured out the method for making aluminum mentioned above.
- Similarly, Napoleon III is said to have had several sets of dinnerware made from aluminum. They were used for his most prestigious guests, with the less important ones having to make do with gold.
- Likewise the statue of Eros in London's Piccadilly Circus. It's safe to say that a time traveller from the 19th century would look at the ubiquity of aluminium in the 21st century the same way we'd look on a world where everything was made of gold.
- Oakley calls the material in their sunglasses' nose pads and temple socks Unobtainium, though there's nothing unobtainable about it; it's simply a synthetic rubber whose tackiness increases as it becomes wet.
- Pandemonium Chloride is the evil, HAZMAT twin of unobtanium, a material of unspecified composition that greatly endangers human life with the smallest spills or leaks.
Tabletop RPG
- Shadowrun, true to its fantasy-scifi-blend form, borrows from myths for its Unobtainium, such as orichalcum, an alloy of copper, gold, silver, and mercury that couldn't even begin to exist if there wasn't magic in the world.
- In Warhammer 40000, almost every race has a form of this, from the psychic wraith bone to the ubiquitous armour plate the humans use on tanks, adamantium. Adamantium's properties are never really explained, though, in the books, it seems to suffer from a mineral variation of The Worf Effect ("How could they cut through X many feet of adamantium that easily?!") another worf effect example is the material used in space marine power armour, Ceramite (often such examples involve either cutting blades, or melta/heat weapons as ceramite is reckoned to be extremely resistant to heat). This also happens a lot with human building materials in that universe, all of which have odd but recognizable names and are supposedly better than what we have now, but which can be reduced to rubble in the first bombardment.
- Obligatory Dungeons And Dragons entry: mithril, adamantine, orichalchum, AND the Philosopher's Stone. Unobtainium overload... and that's the tip of the iceberg.
- Eberron Dragonshards, Khyber Dragonshards, Siberys Dragonshards, Star Metal, Baatorian Steel, Residuum, Arcanite, Byeshk, Ironwood, Bronzewood, Densewood, Soarwood & Riedran Crysteel. Unobtainium overload indeed.
- Exalted features the five magical materials, Orichalcum, Moonsilver, Starmetal, some variants of Jade and Soulsteel. All of these are extremely difficult to obtain and work, Orichalcum only forms when gold touches magma and has to be worked with magma, Moonsilver only forms in the Wyld, where reality is breaking down, Starmetal is made from dead gods and, while working it is theoretically as simple as iron, Fate conspires to make the manufacturing process go wrong in ten thousand little ways, Soulsteel is made from ore from The Labyrinth (under the Underworld) and ghosts, Jade requires hazardous chemicals to work and is used as a currency, admittedly an extremely high-value one. There is even an Unobtainium version of Jade, in rare and unrepeatable alchemical accidents Jade (most normally a mixture of white and green Jade) can be turned into Yellow Jade which is possibly the most coveted magical material out there.
- The "Perfected Metals" of Mage: the Awakening. They have numerous extremely useful properties (perfected iron, for example, is practically indestructible, capable of cutting through diamond when properly sharpened, and can bend like rubber before returning to its original shape, with absolutely no metal fatigue), and can be used to create all manner of useful alloys (such as the anti-magic "thaumium"). There are only seven of them (only alchemical metals can be perfected), and it takes powerful magic to perfect them and alloy them. Perfecting is also a very expensive process, since it requires only naturally formed samples of metal (rather than transmuted or conjured) and only 10% of the mass yields perfected metal, with the rest being completely lost (hence, you perfect 100 grams of metal and only get 10 grams of perfected metal, with the remainder destroyed).
- As well as the lanthanum used in jump drive technology, Traveller features so many varieties of unobtainium that the latest edition lampshades it by including "unobtainium" as a trade good.
- Ghost Rock, which burns twice as long and twice as hot as coal, is used for just about all the weird high tech stuff from Deadlands and somehow stopped the collapse of the Confederacy. Oh, and it looks like coal that has had tortured human faces into it, and it moans faintly when burned. Nightmare Fuel indeed...
- The various essential elements from GURPS: Magic as well as orichalcum and adamantium in Fantasy and hyperdense matter in Ultra-Tech.
Toys
- The Transformers franchise is a pretty good place to mine for Unobtanium, energon being the most frequent and the best example: transformers need it to live, but too much unstable energon radiation can cause shorting out, not to mention other properties too bizarre and diverse to list. Other Unobtanium-like materials include...
- Electrum (A real substance, actually, but given fictional properties)
- Furmanite (Obscure, used only in one Botcon-exclusive comic)
- Nucleon
- Cybertonium
- Destronium
- Bionicle's Matoran world has protodermis (often shortened to just "proto" by the fans), which admittedly isn't really rare because it makes up everything in that world: the water is made of liquid proto, rocks and metal ore are solid proto, and proto even makes up the organic tissues of living beings. Truer examples of Unobtainium that really are hard to obtain include a super-hard variant of metal protodermis called "protosteel" and "energized protodermis": an un-synthesizable liquid that either unpredictably transforms anything it touches or destroys it. Oh, and it turns out energized proto is alive, too.
- Another world, Bara Magna, has its own Unobtainium called Exsidian, though unlike protodermis it doesn't have any special properties beyond better resistance to wear and tear.
Video Games
- Eve Online has an entire player economy built around mining for a rather long list of made up materials. And the rarer types are very hard to get. Bonus points for using "Tritanium", which is the most sought after element in high security space.
- However, most of the asteroids that refined minerals come from are made up of either real-world minerals (such as veldspar and gneiss) or slightly renamed versions of real minerals (like hemorphite and hedbergite).
- Two kinds of unobtainium are mentioned in the game manuals of the Halo series:
- An "unknown alloy" (read as: The writers couldn't think of a cool name) used to make the shields of the Hunters.
- The impressively resistant construction material used to make the Halos and other Forerunner structures, described as being incredibly dense and accurately carved to the molecule. The author of this article from Gamasutra, a PhD., goes to the trouble of calculating just how much unobtanium would be needed to build the Halo , plus other stats you never knew you wanted to know.
- Various one-off missions in the MMORPG City Of Heroes had the player retrieve various Mac Guffins, including one actually called Inobtainium. Fittingly enough, it's an alloy of Yeahritium and Nosuchium.
- Played more straight in the game is Impervium, a metal found as a rare form of salvage (Enchanted Impervium is one of the most valuable drops), which the Vanguard soldiers are said in their profiles to be armored with.
- Orichalcum shows up too, also as a salvage material for crafting.
- A recurring element in the Mega Man series is a metal called "Ceratanium" (in the original Japanese, simply "Ceramic Titanium"). Its exact properties are unknown, but it seems to be involved in making all the Mega Mans' armor, and in Mega Man Zero 4, where you can collect parts and get the engineer to make body armor out of them, the Ceratanium is found once in a fixed spot each stage and goes exactly once into each piece of body armor you can make.
- There's also officially "Bassnium," the power supply Wily says he used to make Bass, which is a bit silly.
- Orichalcum, seen elsewhere in this article, also turned up in Indiana Jones And The Fate Of Atlantis as a power source for the machines of Atlantis and potentially other machines as well. Which is why Indy had to stop the Nazis from getting to it first.
- It also shows up in various Harvest Moon titles (usually used to make gift jewelry). They also feature Mystrle and Mythic Ore - used to give tools semi-magical properties.
- And plain ol' Mythril in Harvest Moon's spin-off title 'Rune Factory'.
- Command And Conquer and its sequels feature Tiberium, an apparently plant-like (in growth patterns and behaviour) but actually crystalline substance of extraterrestrial origin, as a harvestable resource and Global Currency. It's name derives from where it was first encountered - the impact site of the meteor that carried it to Earth at the Tiber River.. ergo, it was called Tiberium. *
The Brotherhood of Nod would like you to note that the quoted name origin was part of a faked discovery story created for anti-Nod propaganda. The true discoverer of Tiberium, the Benevolent and Mighty Kane, named the substance in honour of Tiberius Caesar, but GDI propagandists insisted on altering every detail of the story. It's also terribly, terribly toxic, potentially radioactive (depending on what it leeches or assimilates) and generally so dangerous that it explodes violently if processed properly or stored in large enough quantities.
- It's apparently a crystal that leeches various elements out of anything it touches, and makes more of itself. Certain materials are more resistant to being turned into Green Rocks, but all of them degrade eventually. Of course, with flesh, crystallization happens almost instantly...
- Nevermind the fact there's blue (canonical) and red/orange (semi-canonical) variants that are pretty much Made Of Explodium - as if the green stuff didn't explode enough to begin with. With a bit of SCIENCE, you can turn tiberium (or tiberium-related substances, such as tiberium veins) into a chemical weapon that puts some of the deadliest stuff today to shame, or an explosive that makes a heavy-duty fuel air bomb look like a firecracker.
- Makes a lot more fictional sense if you know that C&C was itself based on the very first real-time 4X game, Dune, which had you harvesting spice out of the ground.
- Cleria, Emelas, etc. in the Ys series.
- Starcraft, likewise, had "minerals" of an unspecified type and "Vespene Gas," which each of the playable races uses in a different way to produce its various units and buildings.
- Neosteel, the material of Terran construction, is another example.
- The first two games of the X-Com series had Elerium, an element that formed in yellow crystals and had an atomic number of 115 (such an element has been actually created already). Since the third game, Elerium could be
manufactured by humans mined on Mars and extrasolar colonies.
- The second game reveals that Elerium-115 becomes inert if submerged in salt-water for too long, and since X-Com 2 is titled "Terror from the Deep", that's a bit of a problem. The new source of power is Zrbite - apparently, an artificial material created through molecular manipulation. Following the victory in X-Com 2, however, the aliens' Molecular Manipulation network collapses, and all remaining Zrbite becomes inert. It maintains its Unobtainium status, however, and Inert Zrbite is later used to build FTL-drive engines (with Elerium-115 as fuel).
- Kingdom Hearts requires the player to collect various exotic metals and crystals such as mythril, orichalcum, lightning stones, power crystals, and serenity gems in order to create items, eventually including the most powerful weapon in the game.
- World Of Warcraft has frightening amounts of Unobtainium, starting out around the time the player starts mining Mithril ore, proceeding through Truesilver, Arcanite, Fel Iron, Adamantium (where have I heard that name before?) and finally Khorium and Eternium. To quote a recent Penny Arcade post on the subject, "What's next? Awesomite?"
- Mass Effect also has its own form of Unobtainium, better known as Element Zero or "eezo" in the Mass Effect 'verse. This material is responsible for basically all of the technology in-game, as it has the ability to manipulate mass, which makes it valuable for propulsion systems, projectile weapons, kinetic force fields, artificial gravity, and a powerful, convenient method of Faster Than Light travel. Indeed, "eezo" is a key element of virtually every advanced galactic technology.
- The Final Fantasy series is also known to have various forms of Unobtainium, such as orichalcum or adamantite. In fact, pretty much every RPG ever made by Square Enix has something like that, often in the same relation as the Kingdom Hearts example.
- Final Fantasy Tactics A 2 lives this trope to the full! Not only has it scores of metallic unobtanium, but also plenty of both chitinous (bones) and dendritious (wood).
- The Crusader games had two.
- Di-corellium, a mineral that is apparently better for use in nuclear reactors than plutonium—to the point that it almost became a metaphor for petroleum, and at the very least for energy crises in general, what with the increasing scarcity of it and power shortages on Earth because of it—and of which vast quantities, about half of all known reserves, are on the moon.
- Polonium—yes, ''that' polonium—an element than in real life is unstable, highly radioactive, and extremely toxic, is used as...body armor.
- The Metroid Prime games feature Phazon, which is a highly-mutagenic, violently unstable, sentient mineral. Being a bit more specific, there is an incredibly resistant metal made from it known as Phazite.
- In addition, visor scans can identify the chemical properties of certain structures. When you see names such as "Talloric Alloy" and "Bendenzium" in the description of a destructible obstacle, it is usually an indication as to which weapon you will need to use to proceed.
- Dwarf Fortress has a rather extensive simulation of real-world geology and metallurgy, including creating simple alloys such as bronze and electrum. It also has Adamantine, an incredibly rare ore that is extremely difficult to come by without cheating, but can be processed into various forms that allow it to be used in almost any type of construction imaginable - weapons, armour, tools, clothing, furniture, building material...about the only things you can't make out of it are beds and food.
- The Myst series has the artificial stones nara and deretheni. There is also a tawny stone found on Riven, used for ornamental purposes.
- The X universe use Nvidium, an evident pun to Nvidia.
- Spice in Spore, as a reference to Dune. It can literally be used for anything - it's a food, dietary supplement, fuel source, cleaning product, narcotic...
- Parodied in the Ratchet And Clank Games, where the material Raritanium is really rare and totally useless (in part one) or easy to get and used to purchase spaceship upgrades (in part two)...
- The Null Fragments in zOMG!, when in use, were like this. These little purple gems could be used to make pretty much anything you could think of, from tattoos, to figurines, to feather boas, to the armor of an alien species, to... you get the idea.
- The browser game Skyrates includes Unobtainium (in fact, portrayed as Green Rocks ) as a trade good, and is also used in role play and player discussion as a reasoning for hard to explain occurrences, jokingly or otherwise.
- A little-known RTS called Submarine Titans has "Corium-296"... which appears to suggest that it is an extremely heavy element. Corium is very important to achieving the advanced technologies in the game, but is not naturally found on Earth: the enormous comet that forced humanity under the seas was made of the stuff, and small deposits (fragments of the comet) are found all over the place.
- In The Legend Of Zelda: Phantom Hourglas, you need the three pure metals (each corresponding to one of the creator godesses) to create a blade that turns the titular hourglas into the Phantom Sword. It's required by the plot, since the Phantom sword is the only thing that can hurt Bellum.
- The names of the Pure Metals are dirived from their color: Crimsonine, Azurine, and Aquanine.
- Psitanium from Psychonauts. High grade unobtanium - a meteorite that grants anything alive psychic powers and is the plot device for any number of absurd things in the game.
- In Golden Sun, there are nine forgeable materials: in increasing order of power, Tear Stone, Star Dust, Sylph Feather, Dragon Skin, Salamander Tail, Golem Core, Mythril Silver, Dark Matter and Orihalcon.
- Master Of Orion 2 invokes this trope in the form of Xentronium. It cannot be invented by the player and must instead be plundered from the Antarans, either by capturing and reverse engineering one of their warships or by defeating the Orion Guardian (both very difficult to pull off, and each only gives you a ~30% chance of acquiring the technology). If you're successful, you're rewarded with the best armor plating in existence (Xentronium edges out the best player-researchable armor by a 5:4 factor).
- Snoopy vs The Red Baron for the Playstation Portable does this bald-facedly. In order to make a superweapon called the Doodlebug, the Red Baron needs, what else? "Unobtainium." Subtle.
- Given the sheer amount of stress it's taken, without being scratched once, Gordan Freeman's HEV Suit is probably made of unobtanium.
Web Comics
Web Original
- Whateley Universe has plenty of Unobtainium. They've stolen adamantium from the Marvel Universe, and they've included some of the mystical variants, including orichalcium and mithril. Oddly enough, at the Super Hero School Whateley Academy, mithril no longer counts as true Unobtainium, because there's a side character (Silver, a girl from India) who sweats mithril. The school has had to set up a mithril brokerage.
- A beautiful example is the wonderflonium of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, so salient it's essentially a lampshade.
- The League Of Intergalactic Cosmic Champions had Plotonium as a generic whatever-the-plot-required supermetal. Also a building block of the universe that allowed people to have superpowers was Nevesytrof (much more stable then the Sub-Reality or Super-Reality of other universes.)
- Protectors Of The Plot Continuum has Generic Surface. A material created when locations and surfaces in fanfics are given little or no description, the Flowers have used it to build PPC Headquarters due to its durability, structural integrity, and the fact that there is a readily available supply to make such a huge building out of.
- Not a metal, but falling under this heading, is Bleeprin and its derivatives. Bleeprin is a mixture of bleach and aspirin, advertised as 'brain bleach', which erases the memory of a bad fanfic and then the headache it gave the agents. Derivatives include Bleepka (Bleeprin and synthetic vodka, a very popular derivative, often used for making cocktails), Bleepolate (Bleeprin and chocolate), and Bleepsinthe (Bleeprin and synthetic absinthe). Bleeprin's only real downside is that it explodes when mixed with real alcohol, hence the use of synthesised substitutes.
- The SCP Foundation has SCP-148, also known as Telekill. This stuff is incredibly useful, but the Foundation hasn't been able to fully analyse it, let alone make more of the stuff.
- The inventions of The Spoony Experiment's Doctor Insano are powered by Raritanium.
Western Animation
- The Powerpuff Girls employs this in the making of the show's namesake heroes. The Unobtainium here is the mysterious Chemical X (a fancy name for the contents of a Can Of Whoop Ass). It also produced the show's biggest recurring villain, and drove several single-episode plots. Demashita Powerpuff Girls Z upgrades it to Chemical Z.
- One arc on Rocky And Bullwinkle involved a search for a mountain full of "Upsidaisium", an anti-gravity metal.
- The Flintstones had an episode featuring Urgonium - a mineral that exploded on solid impact.
- Justice League has Nth Metal, which amoung other abilities is capable of generating electrical currents and disrupting magic.
- Don't forget the meson-graviton inversion. :)
- The first 2009 episode of The Colbert Report's Show Within A Show Tek Jansen has the Big Bad enslaving some tiny doughboy aliens to mine Scarcerarium.
- Duck Dodgers went to Planet X to find Aludium Phozdex, the Shaving Cream Atom, in his classic 50s adventure.
- Spiral Zone has Neutron-90, the rare material that the Zone Riders' uniforms are made from; it protects the soldiers from the Spiral Zone's Mind Control effect. and at the begining of the series, there's only enough of it to make five suits. Later, enough Neutron-90 is discovered to make two additional uniforms, and so Ned Tucker and Ben Franklin are able to join the team.
- The Thundercats' machines were powered by Thundrilium.
- In "Phineas And Ferb's Quantum Boogaloo", Phineas and Ferb need a wood and steel fusing tool, which apparently won't be invented for 20 years.
- In "Vanessassary Roughness," the element "Pizzazium Infinionite" is described as (maybe) having wondrous properties that could be used in the future to power generically-futuristic technology.
- In Teen Titans the thief Red X used a suit that was powered by Xynothium, which was only described as being unstable and crazy dangerous, but was capable of insane things, such as creating explosive projectiles, shields, metallic bands and all kinds of crazy shizz.
- Though the Xenothium itself didn't do all that- it just powered the devices that did.
- Professor Farnsworth once had the crew deliver a single atom of Jumbonium - a tennisball sized "single atom" that doesn't seem to do anything beyond adorn a tiara.
- If nothing else, it's valued for its rarity; that single atom is worth more than $50,000.
- How much more?
- One hundred thousand dollars.
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