Unobtainium - Contemporary Popularization

Contemporary Popularization

As of 2010, the term has diffused beyond engineering, and appears in the headlines of mainstream newspapers, especially to describe the commercially useful rare earth elements (particularly terbium, erbium, dysprosium, yttrium, and neodymium). These are essential to the performance of consumer electronics and green technology, but the projected demand for them so outstrips their current supply that they are called "unobtainiums" within the ore industry, and by commentators on the US Congressional hearings into the "supply security" of rare-earths.

"Unobtainium" has come to be used as a synonym for "unobtainable" among people who are neither science fiction fans nor engineers, to denote an object that actually exists, but which is very hard to obtain either because of high price (sometimes referred to as "unaffordium") or limited availability. It usually refers to a very high-end and desirable product; for instance, in the mountain biking community, "These titanium hubs are unobtainium, man!" Old-car enthusiasts use "unobtainium" to describe parts that are vanishingly rare or no longer available.

In maintaining old equipment, unobtainium refers to replacement parts that are no longer made, such as parts for reel-to-reel audio-tape recorders, or rare vacuum tubes that cost more than the equipment they are fitted to (especially true of certain vacuum tubes, such as the 1L6, used almost exclusively in American battery-powered shortwave radios or the WD-11 used in certain early 1920s radios).

There have been repeated attempts to attribute the name to a real material. Because of the long-standing usage of the term "unobtainium" within the space elevator research community to describe a material with the necessary characteristics, LiftPort Group President Michael Laine has advocated assigning the term as the generic name for cables woven of carbon nanotube fibers, which seem to satisfy the requirements for this application. Since he claimed that sufficiently long nanotube cables will be prohibitively expensive to develop without inexpensive access to microgravity, these cables would still be close enough to unobtainable to meet the definition. However, this usage does not seem to have become widespread. The eyewear and fashion wear company Oakley also frequently denotes the material used for many of their eyeglass nosepieces and earpieces, which has the unusual property of increasing tackiness and thus grip when wet, as unobtanium.

Frequent Sunday night/Monday morning host of Coast to Coast AM George Knapp usually opens his show mentioning unobtainium. As a play on the word, Obtainium is an album by Skeleton Key, released in 2002 by Ipecac Recordings.