I’m far to habituated to things like thinking, listening to music other than chants, and watching simplistic but engaging movies like “Avatar,” to revert to being a hunter-gatherer. I’m also getting a little old, and I don’t know how the Na’vi treat their seniors (though it’s probably better than the US, but I digress…)
I also find the idea of a scientifically verifiable deity to be disquieting. Eywa is apparently able to command any animal (other than, perhaps, the Na’vi) to go into a homicidal rage in response to a heartfelt prayer. She also chooses a brain-dead hybrid with a technologically imposed Cartesian mind to be her messiah, which shows questionable judgment. And what, exactly, is eternal life in the Eywa network like? I’m not sure I’d want to take the risk of finding out.
So I would not like to be a Na’vi (Na’vus?). As a human, I might like to spend a season there if a) the Na’vi were taking really good care of me, and b) 22nd century earth technology could come up with a bit less clunky breathing apparatus. It is a pretty place, after all. But I would not get on an Ekran unless they put seatbelts on the thing. They’re more dangerous than quidditch.
If I were a paraplegic human who got to trade in my busted up ass for a fully functional cat-man suit? I’d give it some serious thought.
But as things are right now, I have enough trouble keeping track of reality without being able to plug in to the collected consciousness of an entire planet’s history. Screw that, I’d be leaping off a cliff within a week.
You seem to be confused, Qin, so let me take a moment to clear things up:
Custer was the bad guy at the Little Bighorn.
Black Africans betrayed by their countrymen and sold into slavery to whites, and then sold again, were not, in fact, being treated gently for their benefit.
Bringing “civilization” to “savages” is, more often than not, an excuse to rape, steal, and murder.
Thanks for the answers everyone, lots of food for thought, but this does raise another aspect of the movie-universe I wondered about. It’s implied that all the Na’vi have access to a real and verifiable afterlife, but whats the means of entering it? I imagine that if someone is dying of old age or sickness they are connected to the soul-trees via their headlink-thingie (technical terms, bare with me) so their memories and personality are uploaded into Eywa.
But what happens in a sudden or unexpected death? If someone is stabbed or falls to their death and they don’t have time for a physical connection, is their ‘soul’ lost? Or does Eywa have a wifi equivalent and plucks it from the ether without a physical connection?
If so if anyone dies on Pandora not being in Eywa’s good graces they could be in trouble…
Sure. But ideally, not while I’m around to watch it happen. The point being, Pandora, at the end of the movie, is entering into what’s certain to be an extremely turbulent and violent period in its history, and when it emerges - if it emerges - its going to look nothing like what we saw at the beginning of the film.
I’d not move to Pandora either, but I feel obliged topoint out that you may well live in a society that is heading for a long walk down a short pier. Anybody may well. The bloke in Pandora knows it, is all.
George RR Martin hypothesized that any civilization that found a deity would become content and stagnant. I think this is disconnected enough not to be a spoiler-
“We’ve got the only tower on their planet!”
“They’ve got the only god in our universe!”
And in his story And Seven Times Never Kill Man (non spoiler) he writes of a god faced with an invasion that finds a far more effective tactic than Eywa.
Well, if it makes you feel better, go ahead, but I’m not sure what the relevance is. On a long enough time line, every society is doomed. You can still hope that you get live your allotted span during a period where there are no great wars, or famines, or natural catastrophes. The odds of being able to do that on Pandora are pretty fucking long.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Skald the Rhymer View Post
Aren’t all societies doom to evolution or extinction anyway?
Maybe so, but not necessarily in my lifetime. I think the heavy implication is that things will change very soon on Pandora. Whether that’s a good thing or not depends on your point of view.
Eywa would just destroy any bioweapon; one of the commercial draws of the planet is that soon after humans landed all the diseases they were carrying with them were destroyed by the biosphere.
And as for orbital bombing and other genocidal attacks I doubt that’s politically acceptable. To use a modern analogy, despite the wars over oil outside of a few loonies no one suggests nuking everyone in the Middle East so we can steal their oil.
First, we share a biosphere with the Middle East. It is beyond our technological capabilities to nuke them without serious consequences to ourselves. Pandora is a distant world. We could nuke it and harvest the unobtainium without worrying about fallout etc.
Second, the Navi are sentient beings but they are not human beings. To many people, this is a huge difference.
Third, nuking them from orbit comes to mind because of the great line from Aliens. However, we need not actually use thermonuclear weapons. Conventional explosives could be used from orbit. The chance of genocide is greatly reduced.
Finally, nobody of consequence seemed to object to destroying a Navi village including its senior citizens and children. Why should the commanders be afraid to pursue similar actions on a larger scale?
ETA- Thing number 5. Unobtainium is apparently several orders of magnitude more valuable than oil.
However, the look rather human and even cute; that matters to people. We aren’t talking about killing sapient slugs. And on top of that they are the first nonhuman intelligence we’ve met; that will get some people worked up. Despite American capitalist mythology, not everyone on the planet is a one dimensional profit making machine.
Because that can be covered up, or portrayed as provoked by the Na’vi; you can’t plausibly claim that hunter gatherers forced you to use orbital bombardment. And because they were specifically forbidden from doing so, and don’t want to spend life in prison upon returning to Earth.
I recommend reading Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee. It tells how the American government took the land of the Indians. All kinds of horrible things were done- to other human beings and over the protests of many Americans. All this for land and occasionally gold.
Given that unobtainium is considerably more valuable than gold, that the average human has never heard of Pandora, and that the Navi are not human I see humans responding with overwhelming force and taking what they want from Pandora.
Christ, the orbital bombardment crap again? Really?
Aside from the fact that as presented in the movie, orbital bombardment is not an option because the Earth needs Pandora’s biosphere info to repair Earth’s biosphere (hence, why the biologists were there, at all). And it’s entirely possible that the biosphere creates the stuff in the first place - they certainly don’t know what else could do so.
But, they’re mining a low-temperature superconductor. With deposits just underground or floating around in air. Turning the entire planet into a firestorm that’ll heat up the low-temperature superconductor?
It’s a high-temperature superconductor, meaning it still works at room temperature. Low-temperature superconductors are easy.
And it’s certainly plausible that the stuff might break down at high temperatures, but they didn’t really worry about that in the attack they did make. They could just use all the same weapons they used anyway, but from orbit.
