Avatar: The ISV Venture Star

In the Platonic sense, the essence of a star ship from within the universal fire may be thus, but Id rather they had something other than "Unobtanium" as a key ingredient.

Its a fuckin cartoon gunga.

'Unobtanium' bothered me as well. Nonetheless antimatter reaction is the only thing within the framework of current knowledge which would suffice for a star ship and you'd need some way to contain the stuff. They have that much of it right.

They didn't spend much time in the movie showing or talking about the Venture, so I didn't really think much about it until you mentioned it. There seems to be more information on the Wiki page than there ever was in the film.

The technology for moving the ship across interstellar distances seems theoretically reasonable, with the exception of matter/anti-matter containment with the magical "unobtainium". Then there's also the "magic" of cryosleep, which we can't yet achieve.

havent seen the flick so I have no idea about the physical and chemical properties of unobtanium. DId they mention a stable atomic number?

You're right. Avatar is by no means a work of hard science fiction. AS science fiction films and television series go, it isn't the first to mention antimatter into the travelling equation. It isn't the first to speculate about cryogenic storage for its passengers either. It doesn't even really bother to explain either functionality either.

Considering unobtanium is as speculative as the antimatter fueled engines of the Star Trek universe and its dilithium crystals.


Nope. Jurassic Park had more scientific explanation in its infilm elementary-school level science film on genetics then Avatar did in its entire film.

I think the atomic number was undefinium.

There are several problems with Avatar not least of which are the left-wing theological ideas it contains. Nonetheless nobody should be holding his breath waiting for Republican scifi movies in today's world. Avatar is as much of a step forward in scifi flicks as Star Wars and Alien were in 77 and 79.

The thing is more of a vision than a movie and I'd recommend it despite any misgivings I might have.

I'd be interested to hear what you think the script would look like for a Republican Sci-Fi movie!

For one thing, a right of center scifi flick would have to talk about Mars, and Cydonia, and about trying to find any descendants of the people who might have gone out into the near stars to escape whatever rendered Mars non-habitable. They would not have had any way to know whether or not anything in this system would remain habitable and at least some of them would have at least tried to get out.

That of course is anathema to leftists and yuppies who earn their livings in what passes for science these days. Allowing for any sort of a solar-system wide catastrophe within the time of anything intelligent living in our system more or less ruins the giant time frames thought to be needed for evolution and evoloserism.

Cydonia? What the hell is that?