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*** It's the latter, and it has a highly complicated structure. Your logic is on par with "oil can't be economically synthesised, so it shouldn't exist".
*** And if it is the former, synthesizing it in Sol system is only possible if it is not much heavier than the heaviest actinides. Otherwise, the lack of sufficiently stable precursor atoms will make synthesis impossible. In fact, that is the major barrier to the discovery of so-called super-heavy elements.
** See objection for how long we've been mashing our collective head against Pandora--it's vastly ''in''convenient. It's probably been more than twenty-seven years (one run there and back, and another--and probably more considering both the death rate and constraints on the mass ratio). And how many thousands of people have been sent out there with little to show for it? [[Sci -Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale|Then again...]]
*** Considering the Earth has a population of 20 billion, I don't think the intrinsic moral value of a human matters much anymore to deem a high death rate as a deterrant from exploiting Pandora. Unobtanium had uses besides making interstellar travel a lot simpler and is worth a ton back on Earth because of this, which is why the RDA were so motivated to mine all of it.
** It would have worked better if they setup a self-sustaining colony in Pandora's system and built the expensive suff in system so they didn't need to ship it. They could have done it in less time and for less money than the film's approach. In this scenario Pandora would be the hub of interstellar travel and Earth would be the capital and scientific/cutural center of the human space empire. Of course that implies humans plan on taking over Pandora's system entirely, which means the Navi are dead no matter what happens. But if we did things logically then Cameron couldn't have his aseops.
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** I can accept the rule of lucky for the above ones, if there is one, but really, about the shuttle just failing after losing one engine: The first rule in air transportation is redundancy. This is made so that the one bird that gets sucked into the jet intake doesn't bring down the whole 747, and the single failure in the hot air balloon's balloon doesn't cause a catastrophic failure.
*** The redundancy argument is only true in a very limited way, especially with regard to navigational aids. Apart from that, the general rule in aircraft design is to keep it as light as possible, i.e. NO redundancy. A 747 has 4 engines not because of redundancy, but because there weren't any bigger engines at the time. Nowadays most new planes are twin-engine ones; partially for (limited) redundancy, partly due to symmetry requirements. Helicopters don't have even that; any damage to the tail or main rotor is likely to end catastrophically.
*** 747s use the engines only for forward movement, which is what creates the lift over the wings that keep it from cratering. A better analogy would be a [http://en.[wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrier_Jump_Jet:Harrier Jump Jet|Harrier]], although the impression I had of the shuttles was that they were not combat shuttles, just transport. A 747 has multiple engines and even if all of them went poof at once, it would work as a glider. The shuttle was hovering on the four engines and not moving anywhere near fast enough for aerodynamic lift. Losing the left-forward engine would mean it would pretty quickly nose-down and roll to the left; they may have thrown full power to the remaining three engines which, by the time humans could react, would have shoved it in an unexpected direction, and thus into the big trees which would make things worse...
*** If you look closely, the shuttle did upright itself shortly after loosing the engine. Only by the it had drifted towards one of those nasty flying rocks..
*** The [http://en.[wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191:American Airlines Flight 191|DC-10 whose engine came off]] crashed not because it lost an engine, but because the damage also ruptured the hydraulic lines that controlled the wing slats. A similar situation could have occurred with the damaged shuttle in this movie; if an engine gets destroyed, there are probably other systems near the engine that got damaged as well.
** A missile chopped into pieces by a fast-spinning lift fan is going to chew up the fan, which depends on being balanced and having a smooth airfoil to function properly. If you look at the damage that a [http://en.[wikipedia.org/wiki/:File:JT8D_Engine_after_Bird_StrikeJT8D Engine after Bird Strike.jpg |bird]] [http://en.[wikipedia.org/wiki/:File:Jet_engine_damaged_by_bird_srikeJet engine damaged by bird srike.JPG |strike]] does to a jet engine's compressor blades, you can get an idea how much more damage would be done by dropping metal shrapnel, rather than meat, into a jet engine, or tossing an aluminum pipe into a spinning helicopter rotor.
** Also, damage in a jet engine and/or spinning propeller has very often caused large pieces of fast-moving metal to slice through the attached aircraft, with disastrous results, due to severed control lines, hydraulic systems, or fuel tanks. Hell, the crash of the Air France Concord jet in 2000 was due to a flung piece of * rubber* from a blown tire puncturing a fuel tank and an electrical cable, starting a massive fire.
** Another example of the fuel being more dangerous than the ordnance is Kursk disaster. It was not the torpedoe warheads that caused the disaster, the torpedoes did not have warheads, they were exercise shots. The explosions were caused when the Hydrogen Peroxide fuel leaked and came into contact with metal, and went boom.
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