• qyron@sopuli.xyz
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    5 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?

    • dev_null@lemmy.ml
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      4 days ago

      There could be many reasons:

      • The thing you are mining is actually very rare, and although it could be elsewhere, it’s the only place you found it. This is the case in Avatar. The Unobtanium they are mining is not found anywhere else.
      • It’s easier to mine on a habitable planet. You don’t have all the extreme difficulty of operating in space or a planet/moon with no atmosphere. In Avatar workers can freely operate without any special equipment, using just a gas mask, and don’t need to be astronauts.
      • You are assuming they found Pandora to mine on it. They probably found it through scientific research, and the mining angle only appeared later when the resource was found.

      Another important detail is that in Avatar they don’t have any faster than light tech. Pandora is in the Alpha Centauri system, the closest star to the Sun, and it takes years to get there anyway. Sure, there might be lots of better places to choose, but it’s literally the only habitable body in reachable distance from Earth unless you want to spend decades flying in one direction.

      • qyron@sopuli.xyz
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        5 days ago

        You realized I just opted for having a divergent view on the subject, right?

        • Jack@slrpnk.net
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          5 days ago

          It seems more like intentionally missing the main point of the comic.

    • Bronzebeard@lemm.ee
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      4 days ago

      Tbf, the air on Pandora is toxic to humans. That was the entire point of using the avatars in the first movie… Wouldn’t exactly call that suitable for sustaining the life of our species

      And that material they found in the planet was some fictional things humans had never encountered before.