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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

"What is that stuff?"
*laughing* "Its real name is thirty-seven syllables long. I call it unobtainium."

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, megaton yield violently) 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 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 only for the fact that they were unavailable - either because of being too expensive, or actually not invented yet.

Compare Mineral Mac Guffin; that's just stuff people fight over, as opposed to stuff people want to use.

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