Unobtanium!



Unobtanium (pronounced un-ub-TAIN-e-um) is a highly valuable mineral found on the moon which humans mine to save the Earth from its energy crisis.

It is a room temperature super-conductor for energy, which makes it very valuable: it is worth $20 million per kilogram (about 2.2 pounds) unrefined (worth $40 million per kilogram refined) on Earth. However, It is prohibitively expensive to mine on as humans are unable to breathe in the Pandoran toxic atmosphere. Because of this, all personnel are required to wear a Exopack which is very cumbersome. Humans transport Unobtanium on trucks called Hell Trucks from the mines back to Hell's Gate for refining.

Unobtanium proved to be the most baffling of scientific discoveries in the area of superconductors as it had an extremely strong magnetic field, reversing prior knowledge that all superconductors repel magnetic fields. Furthermore, unlike the fragile crystals of human-created superconducting compounds, the substance found on was a stable quasi-crystal with its atoms arranged in a never-repeating but orderly pattern with fivefold symmetry. This structure was not only structurally rugged but also has microscopic voids in the quasicrystalline structure that contain the magnetic flux lines (see [1]). Unobtanium has a unique magnetic field and properties of superconductivity, causing it to levitate in magnetic fields under the Meissner Effect.

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