COULD WE BUILD... AVATAR'S LINK UNIT?

Projecting our consciousness into other bodies and walking on alien worlds might not be such a far-flung concept

- SCOTT DUTFIELD

What will the world look like in 2154? Will we have depleted resources here on Earth and need to board interstellar spaceships to hunt for new ones, much like the Resources Development Administration (RDA) in James Cameron's record-breaking movie Avatar? Journeying to the fantastical landscape of Pandora, a fictional moon found in the very real Alpha Centauri system around 4.3 light years away, the RDA seeks out a rare and highly coveted material called unobtanium.

In Cameron's cinematic universe, unobtanium is a room-temperature superconductor. On Earth, superconductors are used to make powerful magnets and computer chips. In normal metals, flowing electrons collide with metal atoms and lose their energy, referred to as electrical resistance. In a superconductor, those electrons couple up to form what's referred to as 'Cooper pairs', which prevent collisions for the most efficient power transmission and generation of magnetic fields. However, real-world superconductors need to be cooled close to absolute zero at -269 degrees Celsius to have zero electrical resistance. While Earth boasts many different superconductors, such as rare-earth barium copper oxide, one that offers zero electrical resistance at room temperature does not yet exist. But we are getting closer to making one. In April 2025, a group of international researchers found a new superconducting state called Cooper-pair density modulation. The phenomenon shows areas where there are 'energy gaps' in possible materials that could one day be exploited to make superconductors.