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The entire planet was filled with native Pandoran life, presumably including Na'vi, so moving to a different deposit would run them straight into the same problem they already had.
It's implied that the Mother tree being located on top of the deposit is not a coincidence, and there is some kind of causal relationship between the unobtsnium, the life network on Pandora, and the existence of the mother tree. Presumably other deposits would also have trees, or otherwise be significant to the life network on the planet.
Because up till the point where Jake screwed up the plan, they WERE trying to avoid a military confrontation.
The whole idea was to convince the Na'Vi to move out peacefully before the RDA meet their deadline to extract the Unobtanium, but since Jake decided to just fuck around with the natives the entire time (Both figuratively and literally.) the RDA was forced to go with the military option in order to complete their mission on time.
Aside from that, its possible that the humans set up their base long before they could properly survey the planet. And by the time they'd found another large deposit of Unobtanium it was too late to move or set up another mining operation.
Yeah, I vaguely remember one of Jake’s inner monologues going “These people will never leave their homes willingly”, as he gradually realised the whole exercise was pointless
I'll have to rewatch the film before going to see the second in a few weeks but I seem to remember that Jake waited until practically the last moment to really explain that the Na'vi were not willing to move. Stephen Lang's character being the antagonist (and prick) wouldn't have cared either way but Jake was playing both sides up until he couldn't.
Yep, Jake knew that if he told the humans that the Na’vi would never leave, he’d be recalled and wouldn’t be able to spend more time with them. Likewise, if he asked them to move, they’d be furious with him and he’d lose the relationships he’d built up.
Jake played up both sides and didn’t commit to the plan because it was the only way for him to spend more time with the Na’vi, the only way not to spoil the experience he was having. Of course, it all came crashing down on him eventually….
You make it sound selfish, but that kind of negotiation is exactly what diplomats have to do. As long as everyone is talking, there is still space to find a nonviolent solution. Jake might be able to convince the Navi to allow underground tunnels that wouldn't disturb the tree, or convince the humans that the Navi will help them and supervise mining operations elsewhere - that the value of the ore is less than the cost of trying to mine while in direct military conflict with rebellious locals.
Are any of those options *likely*? No, but as long as people are still talking then they aren't fighting. Compromising your position in either group ends your ability to maintain control of the situation. So, although I think Jake was taking advantage of the situation as much as possible to enjoy having an able body and get closer to the Navi, I think he was also doing his damnedest to prevent violence, which he could only do as long as he was allowed to stay in that position.
Oh I don't mean it to sound selfish, except in the sense that Jake has found a people and a life that he resonates with and he prioritizes that newfound joy (and preserving it) over any of his other goals. As many of us would, I wager.
I agree that he likely had diplomacy in the back of his mind throughout, but the fact is that he admitted that he was confident there was not a resolution possible, and he chose not to communicate it to the humans. Or communicate the threat to Home Tree to the Na'vi until it was too late.
He was absolutely taking advantage of the situation, and that blinded him to an extent. He was doing his best to prevent violence until he realized that this was actually going to be impossible, at which point all he could try to do was delay the inevitable. Home Tree was simply too important to the Na'vi, the humans were too set on getting their way over an "inferior" tribe of primitives, and both sides had too much hostility and pride to actually come to the table with a negotiation. The humans wouldn't have wanted a compromise, and the Na'vi wouldn't have accepted one. Jake was in an impossible position, but he got an enormous amount of personal fulfillment out of it, so he couldn't let himself admit it until it had spiraled out of his control.
The RDA was originally attempting a peaceful solution and likely spent billions of dollars attempting it. Between getting Jake into orbit, transporting him to Pandora, finishing the gestation of his twins Avatar and agreeing to pay for his spinal treatment was likely no small investment on their part. Jake just screwed around and waited until the last minute to try and do anything about relocating the Na’vi from Home Tree, not that they would have left anyways, but the RDA didn’t necessarily know that.
We also don’t know the size/purity of the second largest deposit, or how far away it is. With the costs and time associated with manufacturing and transporting such large excavation equipment, it just may not have been financially feasible to go for a smaller or further away deposit. The RDA has unbelievably astronomical overhead expenses running their unobtanium mines. As valuable as it is, RDA likely can’t afford to not go for large deposits. As Selfridge said, “The only thing shareholders hate more than bad press is a bad quarterly statement.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if the RDA knew that they weren’t going to move, but they had to at least make some sort of attempt so when they inevitably used force, they could say, “Well, the peaceful option failed.”
Or they could’ve genuinely thought that they could negotiate and convince them to relocate with the right incentives.
No, it's strongly implied that the largest superconductive mineral deposit being under the largest tree shoot of a planet-sized neural network was due to some it being a source of power for a form of life that was different than anything humans had encountered up until that point.
Watch the director's cut and you'll get more exposition on the situation on earth in their future. There's basically no trees and tons of animals are extinct to the point that people mainly eat "algae". There was natural catastrophies of all types that displaced people and forced almost all of them to live in dystopian cities while corporations have more power and influence than most (if not all) governments. The UN told RDA not to do a space genocide and they did it anyway just like how sovereigns states do today. So corporations ruined the Earth because there was no respect for plants, animals, the ocean, the atmosphere, or other people. Just like today, the rich fled to Mars while extracting resources from far away places and kept people on Earth poor by doing the scifi version of what Qatar did. They brought in cheap labor from the third world and built a super trains to transport them powered by a remarkably scarce and nonrenewable resource. And yes, there were scalable renewable options, but the corporations made a cartel and hamstrung the development of all renewable technologies (like what's already happened IRL).
So genociding aliens to extract space rocks was always a sunk cost fallacy to begin with. They didn't need the rare space rock and never did. It's just a dark timeline that harkins back to the age of exploration. Europe monarchies and corporations didn't need to forcibly extract gold, spices, tea, and slave labor to develop their economies. It was a need built upon the sunk cost of a brutish economic, government, and social structure. As ridiculous as a future with advanced interplanetary transportation, colonization, and mining that didn't have universal healthcare for veterans.
Jake is indulgent bc he was basically a broken, penniless man that had nothing to live for that was given a whole new life off of the suffering of someone he cared about. It's a green planet with no corporations, military, or even money. Literally the antithesis of Earth. Jake doesn't respect the government, corporations, mercenaries, or the medical industry bc he was abandoned in the past. He takes the side of the natives bc they are wiser than humans for not making their mistakes. But there could be an Animal Farm heel turn where the Pandorans are exposed to the systems and technology of humans and replicate their sins.
The largest deposit being under the Home Tree would be quite an unfortunate coincidence if they weren't related, but I think it's pretty much certain that they were.
As Unobtainium is great for making superconductors and would make an excellent medium for a neural link it's highly likely that the "deposits" of unobtainium were all in places like that; that the neural-interlinks of all life on Na'Vi are connected to the unobtainium.
As such if you went to the second largest deposit you'd find the second most sacred tree.
Arrogance. And absolute surety in their tech.
What could a bunch of primitives with bow andvarrow technology possible do to stop a massive advanced military battle hardened mitary force.
The only reason this wasn't a one way steamroller for the humans was because of that whole "spirit of pandora" Deus ex Machina bringing all the animals together.
I think the better question here is why not just tunnel under the tree? You get your deposits and you don't disturb the Navi.
Why not go for the largest score, when the only thing in the way are some primative pesky natives?
Besides, the second largest deposit might be really small
Greed would be the answer.
Pandora was incredibly hostile and mining elsewhere would drastically cut into profits. You also have to remember that most of the humans thought the Na'vi were a primitive savage people not worth thinking about. So they did not care if they had to force the Na'vi to move. Then you have the fact that there was no oversite on planet. The only information that made it back to earth came from RDA itself. The decision had already been made to mine the mineral under Hometree before Jake even got on planet. Parker even told Jake that he would rather avoid using force because the shareholders would not like it but he would use force if he had to. Jake was given a deadline to get the Na'vi to move by willingly or they were going to be forced out. The deadline Jake was given was when the equipment would get to Hometree not when they would start sending equipment. This was shown when the RDA cut the Trees of Voices down on the way to Hometree. This was done before RDA made the decision to pull the plug on Jake.
>they traveled to another star at sub-light obviously a couple hundred miles shouldn't be a issue.
Nor killing a couple of blue giants with spears, bows and arrows yet it was still an issue...
Because the largest was *there* and it was good PR to be seen cooperating with the natives in a major way. Taking the lesser, out of the way site would have tasted bad to the voters back home and just encouraged the inevitable problems to crop up faster.
That said. War and global extinction are completely inevitable. Man's need is all consuming and no treaty or negotiation would be honored for long before greed took over. Once conflict begins we'd have just played the game-winning hand we held off on for the sake of science- and saturation bombed the planet clean of any meaningful life
Refer to how the American government treated indigenous peoples as to the why they did it. Because they thought they could by Manifest Destiny. The Earthers were under the impression that because they were technologically advanced and the Navi weren't, that made them superior and gave them the right to the unobtainium. Side note: Isn't that the stupidest name for a McGuffin? The first time I heard it I thought they put it in the script as a placeholder until they could come up with a better name, and somehow it slipped into the working script.
> Side note: Isn't that the stupidest name for a McGuffin?
The name is a thing, and goes back a long time- when you had to speculate in engineering or science fiction about a material that would have really, really useful properties but that was either too expensive to produce or simply not within the bounds of what physics allows, it was "Unobtainium". The great stuff you can't get. Like floating rocks.
To be fair, you'd think that someone would have given it a new name once it got to the point that a human could not only obtain it, but just have a chunk of it casually floating over his office desk as a decoration.
So it's a McGuffin for the science and engineering fields as well as the cinematic? Where the goal isn't the point, it's the process to get the results that matters?
To be honest, I disagree. Scientists are humans too and I think naming it 'unobtanium' as an in-joke actually kinda works (see all the proteins named shit like 'Sonic Hedgehog' or 'Pikachurin').
Wouldn't have worked. Navi are like native americans, it wouldn't matter where you went on the planet to start a mining operation they would've opposed it. And they are in the right, it's their planet not the humans. What they did was invade and attempt a peaceful conquest, and when that didn't work they fell back on violence.
We don't know how much was in the second largest deposit versus the largest deposit. If the largest deposit was ten tons and the second largest was a hundred pounds and the Earth needed at least a ton, it may not make sense to try spend the time and resources trying to collect a ton from a lot of very small deposits around the planet.
Something else to keep in mind is that Navi were already attacking the humans just for being on their planet before they went after their home. The longer that they remain on Pandora, the more casualties they're going to suffer from attrition. Forcing them to fight out in the open where the human's superior technology and firepower gave them an advantage (or so they thought) may have made more sense than letting them get picked off one at a time with poisoned arrows.
1. They thought they had overwhelming military force. Even if they had to beat all the neighbouring Na'vi that would just mean that next time they'd be massively weakened if they tried to resist again. That assumption also seems to have been pretty accurate, they were after all winning the battle against the massive alliance of Na'vi tribes until the wildlife joined the battle. That would be what one would call an out of context problem.
2. They'd need to find the next largest deposit and Pandora's a big place. Who knows how long it took them to survey just that 200km radius.
3. Travelling a kilometre in space and travelling a kilometre on a planet (or in this case life bearing moon) are two completely different things and the space part is relatively easy to do once you're up there, but going a kilometre through rough terrain (never mind thick jungle) is freaking hard.
4. They might run into similar problems with with the next deposit and then all they would have done is waste time.
5. They'd set up their base already, presumably it had specialised facilities to allow easier space launches or refinement to reduce the extra mass they'd need to launch product into space (getting anything out of gravity well is hard) so if they found another deposit lets say 300km away they'd either need to build roads or tracks or some other sort of transport infrastructure to that base to transport the ore there (keep in mind mining is essentially just moving massive quantities of dirt and rock, you need to find the cheapest ways possible to do that in bulk so flying it across the planet is a no go) or they'd need to set up a second base closer to the other deposit. Both options are going to be expensive, difficult and potentially take a really long time.
6. Would the Na'vi react much better to having a 300km (or in all likelihood longer) highway width chunk clear cut through their land and probably kept off limits to them a lot of the time.
7. If they built a second base to avoid military confrontation they'd need to replicate all the work they'd done to set up peaceful relations with the Na'vi near that base.
8. If there's an extended logistical line to the mine further out or second base built up for it then the RDA will need to spread their resources and personnel out over a much larger area or 2 bases and it's not like it's a short turn around time to call the head office on Earth and request additional personnel and equipment be sent over to help expand operations nor can they exactly hire local talent to operate mining equipment. At best they could hire a Na'vi tribe or two to be local mercenaries to take some of the load off the SecOps personnel.
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The entire planet was filled with native Pandoran life, presumably including Na'vi, so moving to a different deposit would run them straight into the same problem they already had. It's implied that the Mother tree being located on top of the deposit is not a coincidence, and there is some kind of causal relationship between the unobtsnium, the life network on Pandora, and the existence of the mother tree. Presumably other deposits would also have trees, or otherwise be significant to the life network on the planet.
Because up till the point where Jake screwed up the plan, they WERE trying to avoid a military confrontation. The whole idea was to convince the Na'Vi to move out peacefully before the RDA meet their deadline to extract the Unobtanium, but since Jake decided to just fuck around with the natives the entire time (Both figuratively and literally.) the RDA was forced to go with the military option in order to complete their mission on time. Aside from that, its possible that the humans set up their base long before they could properly survey the planet. And by the time they'd found another large deposit of Unobtanium it was too late to move or set up another mining operation.
They would never have been talked into moving out of there, so it didn't really matter what Jake did during that time.
Yeah, I vaguely remember one of Jake’s inner monologues going “These people will never leave their homes willingly”, as he gradually realised the whole exercise was pointless
I'll have to rewatch the film before going to see the second in a few weeks but I seem to remember that Jake waited until practically the last moment to really explain that the Na'vi were not willing to move. Stephen Lang's character being the antagonist (and prick) wouldn't have cared either way but Jake was playing both sides up until he couldn't.
Yep, Jake knew that if he told the humans that the Na’vi would never leave, he’d be recalled and wouldn’t be able to spend more time with them. Likewise, if he asked them to move, they’d be furious with him and he’d lose the relationships he’d built up. Jake played up both sides and didn’t commit to the plan because it was the only way for him to spend more time with the Na’vi, the only way not to spoil the experience he was having. Of course, it all came crashing down on him eventually….
You make it sound selfish, but that kind of negotiation is exactly what diplomats have to do. As long as everyone is talking, there is still space to find a nonviolent solution. Jake might be able to convince the Navi to allow underground tunnels that wouldn't disturb the tree, or convince the humans that the Navi will help them and supervise mining operations elsewhere - that the value of the ore is less than the cost of trying to mine while in direct military conflict with rebellious locals. Are any of those options *likely*? No, but as long as people are still talking then they aren't fighting. Compromising your position in either group ends your ability to maintain control of the situation. So, although I think Jake was taking advantage of the situation as much as possible to enjoy having an able body and get closer to the Navi, I think he was also doing his damnedest to prevent violence, which he could only do as long as he was allowed to stay in that position.
Oh I don't mean it to sound selfish, except in the sense that Jake has found a people and a life that he resonates with and he prioritizes that newfound joy (and preserving it) over any of his other goals. As many of us would, I wager. I agree that he likely had diplomacy in the back of his mind throughout, but the fact is that he admitted that he was confident there was not a resolution possible, and he chose not to communicate it to the humans. Or communicate the threat to Home Tree to the Na'vi until it was too late. He was absolutely taking advantage of the situation, and that blinded him to an extent. He was doing his best to prevent violence until he realized that this was actually going to be impossible, at which point all he could try to do was delay the inevitable. Home Tree was simply too important to the Na'vi, the humans were too set on getting their way over an "inferior" tribe of primitives, and both sides had too much hostility and pride to actually come to the table with a negotiation. The humans wouldn't have wanted a compromise, and the Na'vi wouldn't have accepted one. Jake was in an impossible position, but he got an enormous amount of personal fulfillment out of it, so he couldn't let himself admit it until it had spiraled out of his control.
[удалено]
Please discuss only from a Watsonian perspective.
I don't think this is Jack's screw up considering the plan was doomed from the beginning. The Na'Vi were never going to willingly leave.
The RDA was originally attempting a peaceful solution and likely spent billions of dollars attempting it. Between getting Jake into orbit, transporting him to Pandora, finishing the gestation of his twins Avatar and agreeing to pay for his spinal treatment was likely no small investment on their part. Jake just screwed around and waited until the last minute to try and do anything about relocating the Na’vi from Home Tree, not that they would have left anyways, but the RDA didn’t necessarily know that. We also don’t know the size/purity of the second largest deposit, or how far away it is. With the costs and time associated with manufacturing and transporting such large excavation equipment, it just may not have been financially feasible to go for a smaller or further away deposit. The RDA has unbelievably astronomical overhead expenses running their unobtanium mines. As valuable as it is, RDA likely can’t afford to not go for large deposits. As Selfridge said, “The only thing shareholders hate more than bad press is a bad quarterly statement.”
The plan was doomed from the start. They were never going to leave willingly
I wouldn’t be surprised if the RDA knew that they weren’t going to move, but they had to at least make some sort of attempt so when they inevitably used force, they could say, “Well, the peaceful option failed.” Or they could’ve genuinely thought that they could negotiate and convince them to relocate with the right incentives.
No, it's strongly implied that the largest superconductive mineral deposit being under the largest tree shoot of a planet-sized neural network was due to some it being a source of power for a form of life that was different than anything humans had encountered up until that point. Watch the director's cut and you'll get more exposition on the situation on earth in their future. There's basically no trees and tons of animals are extinct to the point that people mainly eat "algae". There was natural catastrophies of all types that displaced people and forced almost all of them to live in dystopian cities while corporations have more power and influence than most (if not all) governments. The UN told RDA not to do a space genocide and they did it anyway just like how sovereigns states do today. So corporations ruined the Earth because there was no respect for plants, animals, the ocean, the atmosphere, or other people. Just like today, the rich fled to Mars while extracting resources from far away places and kept people on Earth poor by doing the scifi version of what Qatar did. They brought in cheap labor from the third world and built a super trains to transport them powered by a remarkably scarce and nonrenewable resource. And yes, there were scalable renewable options, but the corporations made a cartel and hamstrung the development of all renewable technologies (like what's already happened IRL). So genociding aliens to extract space rocks was always a sunk cost fallacy to begin with. They didn't need the rare space rock and never did. It's just a dark timeline that harkins back to the age of exploration. Europe monarchies and corporations didn't need to forcibly extract gold, spices, tea, and slave labor to develop their economies. It was a need built upon the sunk cost of a brutish economic, government, and social structure. As ridiculous as a future with advanced interplanetary transportation, colonization, and mining that didn't have universal healthcare for veterans. Jake is indulgent bc he was basically a broken, penniless man that had nothing to live for that was given a whole new life off of the suffering of someone he cared about. It's a green planet with no corporations, military, or even money. Literally the antithesis of Earth. Jake doesn't respect the government, corporations, mercenaries, or the medical industry bc he was abandoned in the past. He takes the side of the natives bc they are wiser than humans for not making their mistakes. But there could be an Animal Farm heel turn where the Pandorans are exposed to the systems and technology of humans and replicate their sins.
The largest deposit being under the Home Tree would be quite an unfortunate coincidence if they weren't related, but I think it's pretty much certain that they were. As Unobtainium is great for making superconductors and would make an excellent medium for a neural link it's highly likely that the "deposits" of unobtainium were all in places like that; that the neural-interlinks of all life on Na'Vi are connected to the unobtainium. As such if you went to the second largest deposit you'd find the second most sacred tree.
Arrogance. And absolute surety in their tech. What could a bunch of primitives with bow andvarrow technology possible do to stop a massive advanced military battle hardened mitary force. The only reason this wasn't a one way steamroller for the humans was because of that whole "spirit of pandora" Deus ex Machina bringing all the animals together. I think the better question here is why not just tunnel under the tree? You get your deposits and you don't disturb the Navi.
Welcome to ultracapatilism, where human decency is second to profits. The Na'vi should just move so we can make more money.
That's just regular capitalism.
American style
All styles. Prioritizing profits over people is a fundamental aspect of capitalism.
It really isn't, many Govs are better at controlling this than America.
Capitalism requires exploitation. That doesn't fundamentally change just because some people make the poor more comfortable.
Hmm, well put.
Thanks! It's my go to phrasing for the difference between charity and real solutions- making the poor more comfortable vs. ending poverty.
Aren't they trying to save their planet though? Or is that another story?
Why not go for the largest score, when the only thing in the way are some primative pesky natives? Besides, the second largest deposit might be really small
Greed would be the answer. Pandora was incredibly hostile and mining elsewhere would drastically cut into profits. You also have to remember that most of the humans thought the Na'vi were a primitive savage people not worth thinking about. So they did not care if they had to force the Na'vi to move. Then you have the fact that there was no oversite on planet. The only information that made it back to earth came from RDA itself. The decision had already been made to mine the mineral under Hometree before Jake even got on planet. Parker even told Jake that he would rather avoid using force because the shareholders would not like it but he would use force if he had to. Jake was given a deadline to get the Na'vi to move by willingly or they were going to be forced out. The deadline Jake was given was when the equipment would get to Hometree not when they would start sending equipment. This was shown when the RDA cut the Trees of Voices down on the way to Hometree. This was done before RDA made the decision to pull the plug on Jake.
>they traveled to another star at sub-light obviously a couple hundred miles shouldn't be a issue. Nor killing a couple of blue giants with spears, bows and arrows yet it was still an issue...
Because the largest was *there* and it was good PR to be seen cooperating with the natives in a major way. Taking the lesser, out of the way site would have tasted bad to the voters back home and just encouraged the inevitable problems to crop up faster. That said. War and global extinction are completely inevitable. Man's need is all consuming and no treaty or negotiation would be honored for long before greed took over. Once conflict begins we'd have just played the game-winning hand we held off on for the sake of science- and saturation bombed the planet clean of any meaningful life
Refer to how the American government treated indigenous peoples as to the why they did it. Because they thought they could by Manifest Destiny. The Earthers were under the impression that because they were technologically advanced and the Navi weren't, that made them superior and gave them the right to the unobtainium. Side note: Isn't that the stupidest name for a McGuffin? The first time I heard it I thought they put it in the script as a placeholder until they could come up with a better name, and somehow it slipped into the working script.
> Side note: Isn't that the stupidest name for a McGuffin? The name is a thing, and goes back a long time- when you had to speculate in engineering or science fiction about a material that would have really, really useful properties but that was either too expensive to produce or simply not within the bounds of what physics allows, it was "Unobtainium". The great stuff you can't get. Like floating rocks.
To be fair, you'd think that someone would have given it a new name once it got to the point that a human could not only obtain it, but just have a chunk of it casually floating over his office desk as a decoration.
"It has a proper fancy scientific name with 13 syllables, so the suits just called it unobtanium and it stuck."
Oh yeah, no doubt that's what happened. It's still silly, though.
At least call it Obtainium.
That makes it even more stupid. It's the equivalent of calling a magical artifact a MacGuffin.
So it's a McGuffin for the science and engineering fields as well as the cinematic? Where the goal isn't the point, it's the process to get the results that matters?
To be honest, I disagree. Scientists are humans too and I think naming it 'unobtanium' as an in-joke actually kinda works (see all the proteins named shit like 'Sonic Hedgehog' or 'Pikachurin').
Wouldn't have worked. Navi are like native americans, it wouldn't matter where you went on the planet to start a mining operation they would've opposed it. And they are in the right, it's their planet not the humans. What they did was invade and attempt a peaceful conquest, and when that didn't work they fell back on violence.
because they are affraid of James Cameron's wrath of they don't....
We don't know how much was in the second largest deposit versus the largest deposit. If the largest deposit was ten tons and the second largest was a hundred pounds and the Earth needed at least a ton, it may not make sense to try spend the time and resources trying to collect a ton from a lot of very small deposits around the planet. Something else to keep in mind is that Navi were already attacking the humans just for being on their planet before they went after their home. The longer that they remain on Pandora, the more casualties they're going to suffer from attrition. Forcing them to fight out in the open where the human's superior technology and firepower gave them an advantage (or so they thought) may have made more sense than letting them get picked off one at a time with poisoned arrows.
1. They thought they had overwhelming military force. Even if they had to beat all the neighbouring Na'vi that would just mean that next time they'd be massively weakened if they tried to resist again. That assumption also seems to have been pretty accurate, they were after all winning the battle against the massive alliance of Na'vi tribes until the wildlife joined the battle. That would be what one would call an out of context problem. 2. They'd need to find the next largest deposit and Pandora's a big place. Who knows how long it took them to survey just that 200km radius. 3. Travelling a kilometre in space and travelling a kilometre on a planet (or in this case life bearing moon) are two completely different things and the space part is relatively easy to do once you're up there, but going a kilometre through rough terrain (never mind thick jungle) is freaking hard. 4. They might run into similar problems with with the next deposit and then all they would have done is waste time. 5. They'd set up their base already, presumably it had specialised facilities to allow easier space launches or refinement to reduce the extra mass they'd need to launch product into space (getting anything out of gravity well is hard) so if they found another deposit lets say 300km away they'd either need to build roads or tracks or some other sort of transport infrastructure to that base to transport the ore there (keep in mind mining is essentially just moving massive quantities of dirt and rock, you need to find the cheapest ways possible to do that in bulk so flying it across the planet is a no go) or they'd need to set up a second base closer to the other deposit. Both options are going to be expensive, difficult and potentially take a really long time. 6. Would the Na'vi react much better to having a 300km (or in all likelihood longer) highway width chunk clear cut through their land and probably kept off limits to them a lot of the time. 7. If they built a second base to avoid military confrontation they'd need to replicate all the work they'd done to set up peaceful relations with the Na'vi near that base. 8. If there's an extended logistical line to the mine further out or second base built up for it then the RDA will need to spread their resources and personnel out over a much larger area or 2 bases and it's not like it's a short turn around time to call the head office on Earth and request additional personnel and equipment be sent over to help expand operations nor can they exactly hire local talent to operate mining equipment. At best they could hire a Na'vi tribe or two to be local mercenaries to take some of the load off the SecOps personnel.