As it is, I was deeply affected by the first film and watch now and then still. I shall be going to the next in the IMAX or whatever they call them now, preferably in 3d.
The whole ethos of the first film struck me personally for the obvious connection between the fictional planet and what is happening here.
A *lot* of people were. There were many news stories about people who basically lost their minds; some driven to near-suicidal despair that they couldn't live on Pandora. It was madness. And then... *POOF* "Avatar" vanished from the public consciousness like a fart in the wind. It's amazing that a movie that monumentally successful, that impacted people so deeply, seemed to utterly disappear from the public giveadamn.
Indeed. A bunch of damn dirty hippies making a hash of things, but sooner or later the more technological people will realize that the antimatter engines on their starship makes one hell of a space-to-surface death ray and will burn the blue monkeys to ash and then go back to their jobs, unhindered by arrows and bitey critters.
Yes, the attention span of a flushed substance springs to mind, perhaps part of the instant gratification nation. The phylosophy of the Na'avi resonates with the original tribes, no idea what the PC term is these days it seems to change with the weather.
The constant as you rightly point out, is that there will be those with fewer morals than the afore mentioned substance so if consistancy is the key to progress, humanity is properly placed to bugger the ecology of any planet we drop in on.
"Greed" in "Avatar" is what pushed humanity to the stars. Going to the stars means:
1) Terraforming dead worlds into living ones
2) Grinding asteroids and comets into raw materials with which to built habitats capable of paradise-level living for millions each
3) Spreading life of all kinds to the far ends of the galaxy, the greening of the accessible universe.
What would the Na'avi *ever* accomplish? Yay, they sit around, navel gaze, communing with some trees. First decent cometary impactor comes along, or their sun burps out a good size flare, or their moon drifts a *little* closer to the gas giant... and not only are *they* gone, but so is every other living thing that evolved with them. The Na'avi and cultures like them are evolutionary dead ends.
It's greed that will allow carrots and cats and bunnies and asparagus and, yes, even space hippies to flourish long-term.
The technology humanity demonstrates in Avatar means that terraforming Mars, the moon, Venus are almost certainly well underway, with habitats being manufactured on an industrial scale. The moons of Jupiter and Saturn will be home to millions; plans to terraform Saturn are doubtless underway. Humanity may be "buggering" the ecologies of those worlds... but they didn't have an ecology to begin with, so screw 'em.
Technology is what allowed humanity to rise above cave-dwellers. It is what allowed us to go from a population measured in at most the hundreds of thousands to about 8 billion, with billions of quintillions to come. Technology, and it's required father, science, is what allowed us to go from worshipping rocks and dead ancestors and invisible sky daddies to actually understanding how stars works and what causes disease. Only someone who hates not only humanity but *all* life disparages technology.
Yes, and? Try to get along without it, like the Na'avi. They will forever be nature's bitch, until they unplug themselves from their navels and adopt not only the scientific method but also technological development. A species that remains forever non-technological will forever be trapped on one, doomed target. They will be a minor, likely un-noticed blip in the history of the galactic civilization.
The Na'avi stand at the brink of extinction... not because their sun's about to explode, or the Borg are on their way, or the galactic Empire is gonna come and Base Delta Zero their grotty little moon. No, they stand on the brink of oblivion because they irritated a *corporation.* One of that companies cargo vessels could blast them off their world in the course of a lazy afternoon.
You know, destruction of any exology for the profit of a few is against logic I suppose? Just because humanity is capable of doing it, does not mean it should. I get that you love being contrary and arguing ad infinitum but frankly it is without reward because arguing something is so, on either side of the looking glass, is illogical when someone does not care about reason, logic or sense. Just doing it for the heck of it. I wish you well mate, one day you may find the muse that quiets the monkey on your back. Peace out.
Yes, they are, so long as they don't buckle to whackadoodle ideologues and stick to what they're good at: making money by making the things that make life better.
Your reasoning is lacking. Let's say that we find there is some remnant archaic lichen still hanging on under the sands of Mars, or some form of weird algae lurking at the tops of the clouds of Venus. And we have a choice: we could terraform those worlds and make them lush and living and green, or leave them alone. Where is the logic in leaving dying worlds to turn to dust when you could *massively* populate them with uncountable individuals of all manner of species? Keep the native bugs in a zoo somewhere and turn the rest of the dead world into a paradise.
I'd like to see your logic explained about why that approach would be a bad one.
I wish you well mate, one day you may find the muse that quiets the monkey on your back.
Making things better means different things to different people. Getting your head whacked in by a junkie phone thief might hurt you (BAD! for YOU!) but is a GOOD for the junkie, cuz that gets him his next fix.
Bless his heart.
Explain to me how bringing a dead world to life is a bad thing. Explain to me how spreading life throughout a dead universe is a bad thing.
You might not like modern technology, but it is what has allowed our species to prosper. There are 8 billion of us living better than any other time in human history. In a century, if technology is allowed to expand outwards, the popualtion of Earth could perhaps be reduced... and yet, total human population could be vastly greater. There will come a time when the popualtion of Earth is a comparatively tiny speck. The sun could explode and kill all the trillions of people - humans, uplifted dolphins, AI, whatever - in the solar system... and the *bulk* of civilization will no more notice or care than if news broke that a tornado wiped out a few huts in Tanzania.
We disagree. You put words into my mouth I never said. That is your problem.
I dislike SOME technology.
Avatar is not about bringing a dead world to life.
It's about bringing *billions* of dead worlds to life. "Pandora" is just one step along the way, a minor diversion. But the resources there - resources that the natives don't use, don't understand, don't care about and apparently don't even *know* about - are apparently a vital part of the process. Sucks for them... but once again, they are an evolutionary dead end.
It sucks that the dodo went extinct. But if the extinction of the dodos was the price we had to pay for, say, the industrial revolution... sucks for them, industrialization is vastly more important.
Can we not just stick to discussing the not-very-interesting-to-me sequel to a (IMHO) meh film I'd largely forgotten rather the geopolitics of interstellar colonisation?
Can we not just stick to discussing the not-very-interesting-to-me sequel to a (IMHO) meh film I'd largely forgotten rather the geopolitics of interstellar colonisation?
Yeah, but... interstellar colonization is what the movie is *about.*
As you say, in retrospect, apart from the visual spectacle the movie is not terribly interesting. All that it really has going for it is neato technology.
I thought Cameron said the Na’vi might head to space themselves.
They didn’t need technology much because they had a biological equivalent of what our tech makes. With their mounts, who needs Jeep’s or planes?
They may even have been seeded.
But Earth tech might spark an idea to push a floating mountain into an asteroid ship. They were content with their forms of transit but may now look outward.
Eco-political fiction was what you saw with MONUMENT and Star Trek Insurrection—which may have inspired James.
INTRODUCTION My starship designs are influenced by many things, but the most influential are a small number of science fiction illustrations done in the 1970’s and 1980’s. This was the …
That would make them *less* likely to progress. Their critters are never going to be much more than they are; you're not riding to orbit on the back of a halfassed dragon. So if they bail on technology because their beasts of burden are "good enough," then they will be forever planetbound.
Progress comes from a *lack* of "good enough," not an adequacy of it. If your people can be convinced that what they have is all they need, and all they want... that's all they'll ever have.
If the "Avatar' series wants to show the Na'vi having any sort of future, it'll show at least some of them joining on to the human cause, adopting science and technology.
Actually anyone. Organic tech is just plainly inefficient. Flapping wings may looks great, but in fact - they are much less efficient than propeller. And legs... essentially the Nature admitting "I couldn't do rotary movement". The leg is enormously complex system of shafts and joints, covered with counter-acting muscles - and all this only to do something as simple as movement!
So, organic tech is not efficient. And with inefficiency - we have consumption. To put it simply, to feed a flock of man-carrying Ikrans, you need to produce enormous amount of food. Since they are predators, they need a huge supply of livestock, and this livestock needed a large fields to graze upon. And the soil productivity is limited. Without advanced industrial cultivation, large-scale use of artificial fertilizers and pesticides, you would need a HUGE areas for livestock.
Basically, a Na'vi society could work only as long as their numbers are very low. If they moved into something like hundreds of millions range - the devastation their organic tech would wreck on Pandora would be literally enormous.
If the "Avatar' series wants to show the Na'vi having any sort of future, it'll show at least some of them joining on to the human cause, adopting science and technology.
Basically the whole conflict of the movie was "the RDA went too greedy, and did not want to invest into bulding underground mines, instead preferring to annoy the aborigens with surface excavations"
Basically, a Na'vi society could work only as long as their numbers are very low. If they moved into something like hundreds of millions range - the devastation their organic tech would wreck on Pandora would be literally enormous.
Not sure they'd get that numerous. High population growth is a result of improved food production and availability; so long as they stay technologically primitive hunter-gatherers, they are at their limit of food access. And additionally, it seems they are enslaved to the "tree hive mind;" it would probably knock their population back if they started getting too numerous. Cause them to fight each other, or turn off their sex drives, or turn the fricken' frogs gay, whatever.
Basically the whole conflict of the movie was "the RDA went too greedy, and did not want to invest into bulding underground mines, instead preferring to annoy the aborigens with surface excavations"
A combo of underground mining *and* full automation would seem called for if the humans don't want to nuke the site from orbit. Scoop out all the unobtainium with robots, fill the mines back in, take off and leave the blue monkeys to wonder "WTF was *that?*" Since the Na'vi aren't useful as miners, and they and the humans share no food... there's no reason to interact with them at all. The humans arguably should have shown up like a force of nature, done what they needed to do, then leave. If the Na'vi actually progress, in thousands of years their archeologists and mythologists and TV presenters will argue back and forth about Ancient Astronauts who came and mined *something,* we don't know what. There will be vague legends about the weird goings on that lasted for a century or so... a century that, according to myth, started off with floating mountains and ended with said mountains slowly settling to the ground as the unobtainium was siphoned away.
Nope. Have heard of the dragons of Pern, having read all the books years ago. But the Na'vi aren't going to genetically engineer their dragons to be able to teleport...
As inefficient as flapping is-their mounts work well enough...unobtainium rich bodies helps in getting airborne. If there is a field effect there...it might be modified. Head canon, being gravity assembled the planet, but heating, chemistry and radioactivity "turned on" the substance...plutons eroded free and you have skybergs. Perhaps if used like Cavorite-and maybe a super-gravity opposite-they could use the skybergs for in-atmosphere slingshots. If unobtanium always had its effects, no planetary assembly is possible.
“Spare us your pity, alien. You gush about your connection with nature, your primal wisdom, but what has it brought you? “Where are your marvels of engineering? Your voyages of discovery? Your great insight into the nature of the universe? Even at our basest, when we dressed as you do, dwelt as you do, hunted as you do, lived as you do, we did more than merely survive. We built wonders. We made great journeys. We forged epics. You have not. “You speak so proudly of the plugs dangling from your skulls, little realizing that they are but strings and you puppets. What little you have accomplished you attribute to the wisdom of your goddess, who is nothing but the voices of your dead echoing for all eternity. She moors you to the past, serving as a leash that keeps you as little better than apes, sad parodies of civilization that lack that special spark to become something more. “We have come to your world in search of resources. Whether your actions drive us back or we take what we want and move on, the outcome is the same. We will depart from your wretched planet, leaving you behind. And in a thousand years, you will not have changed from this contact with another world. You will remain in your trees, hunting your prey, communing with your goddess, until your sun burns out and your world dies. “And above your tomb, the stars will belong to us…“
Progress comes from a *lack* of "good enough," not an adequacy of it. If your people can be convinced that what they have is all they need, and all they want... that's all they'll ever have. .... "
Human technological progress tends to be driven by LACK. Lack of consistent food sources ... lack of protection against horse nomads stealing horses ... er stealing food.
... lack of grain because rats ate it all ... enter cats to solve a human problem.
etc.
Consider how human civilization only developed where they faced seasonal food shortages or water shortages in the Tigris and Euphrades River Valleys. They needed an extra priestly class to manage grain silos to cover for periods of poor harvests. They also needed large kingdoms to manage large irrigation systems (dams, canals, etc.) for areas where rain fall did not match growing cycles of crops.
Humans only progress when faced with food shortages.
That was certainly the conclusion drawn in the past but it is quite outdated. Civilization arising to address food shortages is a 'just so' story. And words like 'progress' and 'civilization' need to be carefully defined when reviewing ancient peoples. Modern analyses of paleo-climates puts paid to the notion of civilization springing from seasonal food shortages in the Tigris/Euphrates. no longer holds.
For example, we now know that monumental architecture predates 'civilization' - witness Göbekli Tepe (and similar 'temples). Debates still rage about the nature of such sites but the rise of your "priestly class" seems to predate "grain silos" by almost 5,000 years. The building of Göbekli Tepe, etc., also coincides with the height of a regional climate crisis precipitated by the cooling and desiccation of the Younger Dryas. We can't know what the exact nature of Göbekli Tepe-style sites was but the beginnings of centralized power seem to predate both farming and 'civlization'.
Your "horse nomads" comment is interesting and shows how prehistoric time tends to compress. Anatolian cites like Göbekli Tepe are dated to 12,000-to-10,800 years ago. So, twice as far back in time as when horse cultures like the Yamnaya begin to spread out from the central Asian steppes (5,300-to–4,600 ya). Only after the Yamnayan culture had faded out did Equus caballus become available to the city-states of southern Mesopotamia (4,100-3,800 ya).
To be fair, earlier ideas about the emergence of civilization had to be based largely upon inference. Fortunately, we now have much better information on paleo-diets. Previously, paleoanthropologists had to rely upon analysis of tooth microwear patterns and preserved bone pathologies to hint at diets. Those 'foodprints' are still essential for truly ancient fossils but burials from the Neolithic are now another matter. Enamel analyses provide near-complete (and chronological) dietary details in well-preserved teeth. Beyond enamel, well-preserved fossilized calculus (tartar) has also been analysized going back at least the start of the Mesolithic. -- https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-26045-9
Anyway, such analyses confirm that our paleolithic hunter-gather ancestors ate a varied and, in many ways, superior diet to us modern grain-eaters. Ignoring trendy 'paleo-diet' nonsense, it is beyond dispute that Meso- and Neolithic hunter-gathers were healthier and ate far better than those first Mesopotamian farmers (victims of 'good enough'?). The onset of the Younger Dryas caused a food crisis first addressed by the Early Natufians shifting from settled hunter-gathering to proto-farming. Those Natufian adaptations were later formalized in Mesopotamia. Then comes the chicken or egg stuff ... which came first: grain storage or the priestly class? Or put another way, is 'civilization' predominantly a story about food supply or about establishing control by a new ruling class (first priests, then warrior/kings)?
Consider the coelacanth. Popular mythology holds that it's unchanged from the Mesozoic but in fact Latimeria are the lucky and very much changed survivors of a diverse group of fish (there were even freshwater species). Still, they never colonised or 'aquaformed' the land. The descendants of those lobe-finned fish that did colonise the land don't look or act like fish and in fact arthropods did much better at colonising the land. Those vertebrates that returned to the water only looked superficially like fish because of the needs of hydrodynamics.
I propose three principles of interstellar colonisation, should it actually be possible (and we have no evidence that it is):
1. You can't get there from here. Or, canned monkey doesn't travel well. Interstellar space is not a ditch you hop over, it's an environment you must endure for millennia. Whatever organism or cyborg superorganism-system that traverses interstellar distances will have to be adapted to that environment, culturally and physiologically. It will not resemble, culturally or physiologically, anything that flourishes on earth now.
2. There is no there there. Why regress? The resources of planets are ridiculously inaccessible compared to those in open space in the form of comets, asteroids, or even gas and dust. On earth, technologically advanced travellers never replicated the caves their ancestors lived in and that was in environments almost identical to those they left. If you can thrive in space, why create what amounts to Pliocene Park and restrict yourself to its rules? Let alone turn yourself back into a fish or even an ichthyosaur.
3. You can't go home again. See 2. Also, obviously, relativity, also thousands or millions of years, see Stephen Jay Gould's essay, 'The Panda's Thumb', blah blah blah.
Now think of the humble Latimeria, having been told of the concept of 'land', now imagines a civilisation of fish conquering the world, building fishy environments, doing fishy things to fishy ends, essentially unchanged, forever. An especially imaginative one might think of climbing Mount Everest and constructing a pond there to live in. I don't think that it would be a reliable prophet.
1. You can't get there from here. Or, canned monkey doesn't travel well. Interstellar space is not a ditch you hop over, it's an environment you must endure for millennia.
2. There is no there there. Why regress? The resources of planets are ridiculously inaccessible compared to those in open space in the form of comets, asteroids, or even gas and dust.
In "Avatar," the humans aren't colonizing Pandora. They're not terraforming the place. It's not shown whether the humans are converting the asteroids and comets of the Alpha Centauri system into a bajillion Island Four habitats; they're only on Pandora in order to mine unobtanium.
There *are* good reasons to terraform alien worlds, so long as you don't have to fight off alien civilizations to do so:
1) A planet is more rugged than any reasonably likely habitat.
2) A planet is far larger than any reasonably likely habitat. Sure, humans might be happy with a few hundred square kilometers of mixed terrain on the inside of a can... but herds of buffalo might not. Birds and butterflies that migrate for thousands of miles annually might not. And whales will almost certainly not be all that thrilled to be stuck in bodies of water little larger than lakes and little deeper than swimming pools.
We're doing all this not just for us, but for all life. Habitats will be, until we can make them larger enough to contain continents and oceans, individually biologically rather non-diverse.
If we develop practical interstellar travel, yes, we'll convert distant Oort clouds and asteroid belts into habitats to house quadrillions per system. But we'll also convert vaguely Earth-like planets into Earth-like planets. Why? Why wouldn't we. Hell, we'll convert Venus-like worlds into Earths. We'll put roofs over Luna-like worlds and make them into low-gravity theme park worlds. We'll built platform-worlds over Saturn-like gas giants. Why? Because we can, and because why wouldn't we.
I loved the first AVATAR film.
I also liked the way it hinted at the plot of the sequel. During AVATAR 1 they worship the tree of life and how it is inter-connected with all forms of life .... sort of like the internet.
Yes, the tree of life is damaged during AVATAR 1, but could its network re-build itself around a new center ... or a dispersed center(s)?
Admittedly I'm looking at the general issue and not the film as the thread topic has it. However, Avatar is not a documentary.
Hibernation and cryonics are not guaranteed by any means. Larger animals don't hibernate like small ones as they can't lower their core temperatures enough, so they enter a state known as torpor. This is actually what bears do and what humans potentially could do (there are some recent findings that suggest Neanderthals did this: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0003552120300832 ) and this is what NASA is researching. However, torpor and even true hibernation do not prolong life significantly, making them handy for interplanetary travel but useless for interstellar travel. Cryonics is at best hypothetical. There's a native New Zealand insect called the mountain stone weta that can freeze solid over winter and thaw out and live again but while it's a giant among insects it's still only the size of a mouse.
Getting an 80+ kg mammal to freeze solid, thaw out and revive presents challenges not only of magnitude but fundamental quality - thawing such a mass means that some parts will be rotting while other parts are still solid and the weta has some sort of chemical feature to prevent ice crystals rupturing cell walls, which we don't have. Maybe some extensive genetic modification and/or cyborgisation could allow it but I'd say that takes us into posthuman territory. Once you make such changes, why stop there? Radiation resistance would be damned useful, and maybe the ability to eat plastic as some bacteria and insect larvae can (if we're using sf films as examples, check out Cronenberg's latest, Crimes of the Future). There's nothing wrong with that as far as I'm concerned but it will result in a being with different sensibilities along with its different biology.
1) A planet is more rugged than any reasonably likely habitat.
2) A planet is far larger than any reasonably likely habitat. Sure, humans might be happy with a few hundred square kilometers of mixed terrain on the inside of a can... but herds of buffalo might not. Birds and butterflies that migrate for thousands of miles annually might not. And whales will almost certainly not be all that thrilled to be stuck in bodies of water little larger than lakes and little deeper than swimming pools.
Seems like a good reason to terraform earth. Starting from scratch is no simple task. The joke about the difference between a mechanic and a surgeon is that the surgeon has to keep the motor running while they fix it. Ecosystems are the same, even more so. To create an environment to support a whale will mean creating a food pyramid and resource chains for it. If it's not impossible then it's a very long and complex process. You have to assume a culture that can handle such a task. Not impossible, but like the body that can survive interstellar travel, it's one that we might not recognise or understand from our current perspective.
Like a coelacanth climbing Mount Everest to construct a pool at the summit? Something with superpiscine abilities - which would be necessary for such an adventure - won't have piscine desires. I'm descended from a creature not unlike a coelacanth but I don't feel any great urge to swim around in cold dark water. Instead I'm interested in and enjoying things no fish could imagine that emerged in my evolutionary history along with the ability to walk and breathe air.
I don't think that interstellar travel and settlement are impossible, but our descendants will have to adapt to be able to do it and that adaptation will bring fundamental changes in outlook and culture. Our distant posthuman descendants might build synthetic biomes on planets but it's likely to be according to motives and ends we can't presently imagine.
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