GuppyShark wrote:NecronLord wrote:Why? There is no reason whatsoever that science must be accompanied by ecological destruction. The fact that the Na'vi have a preexisting equivalent to the motorcar (giant lizard things they can ride by connecting mind-tentacle, one bonded to every adult) would vastly reduce any ecological impact of technological development. They have no need for roads, and all the fossil fuels that go with.
As we have the horse and other servant animals. There's no reason to believe their mounts will not have the same flaws (tire, be inconvenient to care for, not be strong enough to haul bulk goods, etc etc) that led us to replace ours.
Do you not comprehend how many orders of magnitude superior a banshee is to a horse?
What's more, of those, the first is only dubiously relevant; the vast majority of people rarely need a vehicle (if they do at all) for more than short journeys. It's a couple of months since I travelled more than a handful of miles per day.
Inconvenient to care for, are you kidding? It fucks off and looks after itself until you call for it. A car is actually
more inconvenient to care for. A banshee grooms and feeds itself. Your car needs cleaning and maintenance.
And you're assuming it has no advantages; it fucking flies. Flies. Allow me to restate that for the third time. It flies. It can pick you up, go in a more or less straight line where you want, and drop you off. A car is limited (usually) to where there are roads. A banshee needs a suitable landing site at origin and destination.
Bulk haulage of goods is indeed a fine point, and if they were being compared to eighteen wheelers, you'd have a point. As it is, though, they're not. The motorcar is a personal conveyance. When the Na'vi come to require bulk transit, doubtless they will rapidly progress to using the clean eco trains that the RDA supposedly uses that unobtanium to make.
You also missed out the obvious one of comfort, which can of course be countered by pointing out that riding one of them things is doubtless much more fun than driving is, an advantage likely to offset the disadvantage.
Furthermore, we as a species never "replaced our horses." We, unlike the Na'vi, have never been a species that had one horse (or camel) per adult, and with the exception of nomadic cultures like the Mongols, very few individual cultures could sustain such a level of horse ownership, and where they did, it was immensely difficult. However they do it, the Na'vi manage to have sufficient Banshees that you just need to creep up on an unclaimed one and grab it. The motorcar did not replace the horse in most people's lives, it simply came in on its own. At the beginning of the C20th, most people could not afford a horse unless their business (such as rag and bone men, handsome cab drivers, etc.) was dependant on having one. Horses take an immense amount of work to look after, and are therefore expensive. A banshee just fucks off and does its thing until wanted.
Unless their population expands along with their scientific progression, there's no reason for them to run short of these exceedingly useful aerial beasties. To predict whether or not this would happen, we would need to know more about their birth and death rates, and what factors into them. If as has been claimed, Pandora is such an idyll that disease and starvation are unknown, there would not necessarily be significant population expansion {Demographic Transition} due to technological advance.
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- PeZook