In Avatar, the valuable mineral driving human mining operations on Pandora is unobtanium.
Unobtanium is a fictional room-temperature superconducting mineral found on Pandora. Its enormous economic value motivates the Resources Development Administration to mine the moon, bringing human industry into conflict with the Na’vi and the environment.
The term “unobtanium” is also an older engineering joke for an ideal material that is unavailable, impossible to obtain, or exists only under unrealistic requirements. Avatar turns that playful word into a major plot device and gives it a specific fictional scientific property.
The mineral is not the same as Marvel’s adamantium or Star Trek’s dilithium. Those names belong to different fictional universes. Avatar uses unobtanium to connect the film’s ecological themes with corporate exploitation and resource extraction.