Why mine on Pandora?

[tm20]

i think there's a possibility that the main objective was to search for extraterrestrial life and they did, but with a huge project like this you definitely will have all sorts of scientists like biologists, climatologists, geologists etc.. and the geologists just happened to find this interesting grey rock called unobtanium (soon discovering its great potential) and so the operation soon got taken over by business people who only were interested in unobtanium :( there could be other moons with unobtanium but i guess it's easier to just stick with 1 moon at a time. also, the other moons may not be habitable compared to Pandora. the atmosphere is bad enough so having to live in sealed off areas is a hassle, but it could be worse (imagine trying to live on a moon like Io.....you couldn't >_< it's too hot)

[Wanderlust]

And explosive and messy and extremely high radiation. Ios average temp is -143 deg celceus but it can get up to 1500 degrees Celsius near the volcanoes.

[HufweMakto]

And explosive and messy and extremely high radiation. Ios average temp is -143 deg celceus but it can get up to 1500 degrees Celsius near the volcanoes.

Speaking of Io, I once saw a Discovery channel special where they were talking about the moons of our solar system and mentioning something about having to outrun the lava flows of Io would require a fast moving vehicle, since trying to outrun them on foot would be nigh impossible because of viciousity or something like that. I don't remember why, but it was quite interesting when I saw it.

[ScottWashburn]

I find it unlikely that Unobtainium is totally unique to Pandora. Just seems wildly unlikely. Even so, the fact that humans can exist on Pandora with just an exo-pack rather than in space suits would make it vastly cheaper to mine there than on some REALLY hostile world.