IDEA! Avatar 2: Ava-Tarrer

[Stark]

It amuses me that I can't tell which group you're talking about where in this rant.

Its almost like you have no idea what you're talking about!

That'll be a real problem for the Na'vi given the nature of their planet's biosphere.

If they can be sued then they have rights and you can't kill them just to make money.

Wait, I forgot about your advanced moral machoism.

Shroom, this is really similar to what we've seen in other movies that nerds don't like. I've never seen Avatar and have no interest in doing so, but as with those other films the side that nerds can relate to (the milwanker, spaceship, human side) is where the empathy lies, regardless of the narrative. If those people are shown to be bad, misinformed, stupid, etc, that has to be deflected by either saying 'the movie sucks' or 'they were actually moral paragons of a special virtue you don't understand'. Is there really that big a gap between 'OMG Navi are so bad for not taking it up the ass from shareholders' and what we've seen said before? The themes and drama are literally nothing but obstacles to this kind of understanding, and in this sense understanding simply means 'do I agree with the portrayl of the characters I fantasize about'. It isn't just close-minded or defensive, its a positive step against anything that isn't ones own masculine self-image.

It used to be about shared human experience, but now its a miniatures wargame. Who needed drama anyway?

[Shroom Man 777]

A fair point- although, flip side of that, see what I wrote in the thread about Tyranids.

I replied.

I am in the opinion now, after seeing a whole lot of what the discourses and paradigms of those here have to offer, that the perspective of being humbled by things of incomprehensible beauty and magnificence and perhaps destrucity - i.e. the divine - while horrifying and frightening to some, would be refreshing and wonderful to... well, me.

Somehow I think that no one could appreciate beholding an unknowable cosmic being or happening better than people like those physicists working at CERN and such places. And I think those people, more than any other, would enjoy the feeling of encountering something incomprehensible, of something that shatters past preconceptions, and truly appreciate it for the magnificent mystery it is. Of course, they'd go on and immediately try to figure out how the hell it works, but it is those most knowledgeable who feel most awe and exhilaration when they discover just how little they truly know.

[Simon_Jester]

I think we need thesis-antithesis-synthesis on this one, someone break out the dialectic.

What it comes down to is whether all this incomprehensible transcendence is perceived as a creative or a destructive force, or as both.

If the answer is "creative," then yes it can fit in and be a positive and wonderful thing, and we look at it in awe and become more than we ever imagined by absorbing it and being absorbed into it, fine. And the idea that this is the nature of reality, that idea is where most of the positive consquences of human spirituality come from.

If the answer is "destructive," then you are left with a vision of a world that is ultimately bad in any human frame of reference, undesirable and unlivable, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Which is, in its way, an all-devouring machine worse than any technocracy, because at the very least anything humanity does to itself in a technocratic way, it does on human terms.

If the answer is "both," then you have something really weird and deep and possibly neither good nor bad, much as 'gravity' or 'nuclear fusion' are neither good nor bad, and I don't know what to say about it right now.

[Shroom Man 777]

Of course it is both. That's the whole point of it being incomprehensible. Of the coral reef being both beautiful and serene with the most colorful creatures, and then the riptide sucks you out into the open ocean to die or a gleaming chrome barracuda darts in and slits your throat with its serrated fangs. That's precisely why it is so awesome and so humbling and so magnificent and beautiful and terrifying. The rain wets the scorched land, gives moisture for the sproutling plants to subsist on, quenches the thirst of a dying man. Yet when the deluge comes, the flood will wipe out all the plants and the quenched man shall be drowned all the same. And these forces don't know and don't care and they may not necessarily be living or thinking, and if they are living and thinking, their processes are so alien and far and above us that we're but microbes to these great processes. They possess the fundamental power to create and destroy, and yet the process neither ends nor begins with either creation or destruction, and goes on and on. Can it be understood? Should it be understood? Is there even any understanding to be had? Yes? No? Maybe? The fact that we are made to behold these things that are greater than us, allows us to humbly ask these questions and perhaps answer them, or never find any answers at all. It's a zen koan on an existential level.

I'd like to add more to that post of mine in the other thread. Additions more relevant to this thread.

In encountering something greater than yourself, a man is led to ask himself questions - of his place in the cosmos, of the rightness or wrongness of his actions or the actions of that vast greater thing he beheld, of the nature of reality, etcetera. This isn't just about being humbled in a "haha you're not so big now are you, Spacemerican!" thing. It's being humbled in a mental, emotional, psychological, and spiritual sense of being wondered and amazed at realizing that we are all of us living in a much larger, greater world that do not fit inside the confines of tiny claustrophobic preconceptions.

A person who thinks he knows everything, a person who thinks he's so high in the order of things and thus can dictate his will upon supposedly lesser beings, will have to reassess everything or at least something in himself when he encounters this outside context surreality. It will turn his entire paradigm upside down This will make him reassess himself, his awareness, evaluate things. Something. It makes him think and contemplate.

The whole making people react to this, positively or adversely, by awing them with incomprehensible things, by weirding them out with surreal scenes, by disgusting them with atrocities made manifest and making them vomit in their mouths - this isn't strangeness for the sake of strange. This isn't some Hostel Saw Sawstel horror gore fest for the sake of trashy thrills.

No.

This is for those who thinks he knows better than others. For the Ryan Thunders. For the Sarevokerritches. For them to react as you reacted in going I don't know and becoming silent.

And maybe then, these imperialistic "I know better than you" people who couldn't even fathom that there are ways outside of their own methods to live and exist will see something. A crack of light in the wall. A tunnel in the thought-imperialist concentration camp of the soul. Something.

Maybe then they will abandon their presumptions and go live as family men with wives and children happily up in the hills, free of the distractions of the city life, or attain inner peace in a monastery in Tibet and meditate on the nature of the universe in contentment. Or at least realize that there's something else beyond the wall. What is that something? I don't know. But that's the point. Not knowing. We strive harder to be more aware precisely when we know just how lacking and insufficient our awareness is, and if we always sit easy with the assumption that we already know all that is right, that everything has been learned, then we will know only nothing.

Man pursues science, because he wishes to escape his ignorance and embrace universal truths. Men sail beyond the edge of the world, risking monsters and worse, because of the mystery that lies beyond, because he does not know what fate awaits him out there.

Those who presume to know everything and dismiss all that is different have themselves become Pharisees steeped in dogma, be it to a thousands years old childrens' tale or the adoration of violent machineries.

[PeZook]

Actually, the idea in my mind is that life is better than death, and that the lives of the individual people who would die in the transition to a nativist hunter-gatherer culture outweigh the supposed spiritual benefits for the handful of survivors.

It would only result in a massive death toll if we tried tried to do it on Earth. The point is that a culture that lives happily as hunter-gatherers has as much right to live like they want as we do to fly around the cosmos in our antimatter powered starships.

Where did they give humans the oportunity to die? The build a huge cycle of technological reincarnation that causes their consiousnesses to be endlessly recycled until they're suitably brainwashed into happy little Na'vi. The sweet release of death is something your scenario denies humans.

Yes. Humans are abused and forcibly mutated into Na'Vi forms. Their world is taken from them and remade into a "superior" shape by people who say they know better because their whiz-bang technological advancement gives them a broader, better perspective on life, the universe and everything.

Presumably any plucky resistance fighters are also heatrayed from orbit until none are left to simplify the process.

Where did I say the Na'vi should have started industrializing and acting western? I said shutting down diplomacy was a dick move.

It's only a dick move if you do it without provocation, which was obviously not the case here (Even in the not-extended edition, Grace comments how "It tends to happen when you use machine guns on them", and the RDA bulldozes holy sites and just shrugs)

I tend not to spend much time morning the deaths of people I consider pricks. Waste of my admittedly finite ability to give a fuck. As to whether he deserved it, that depends. Did he start mudering the people involved in the development without telling them why their specific development project was something he objected to?

Again you assume the Na'Vi just started arrowing people in the face on Day 1, when the movie implies something completely different - a gradual escalation of violence.

I think we should both be asking one another if we watched the same movie.

Yes, in your movie Selfridge is a Hero Of Humanity out to Save The Earth. In my movie Selfridge is a prick obsessed with meeting the Board's expectations and exceeding mining goals because it gives him sweet, sweet monies.

In your movie the Na'Vi have been murdering RDA personell and destroying their vehicles from Day 1. In my movie they attended Grace's school and learned english, going to war after someone plowed bulldozers through a holy site of theirs.

In the meantime hostilities are slowly escalating due to various incidents.

Mostly because there's no point demonstrating that was the case here if you don't accept the principle to begin with. No point wasting my time proving something you find trivial and irrelevent, wouldn't you agree?

I do accept the principle. Now go and prove Unobtainium was necessary to save vast amounts of people from starvation and you might have a point.

I actually preffer using this quote method. I stopped doing it on this board because I got complaints. I'll happily resume it at your request.

Thank you, it makes it easier to follow the conversation.

Because he spent so much time harping on PR when every one of commander psycho's plans was presented.

He harped about relations with the locals, but it was obvious this was only relevant as long as the locals did what he wanted. Environmentalism never even entered the picture. He didn't even know the basics of Grace's research about the forest, that's how little he cared. Which is doubly stupid since the entire operation is affected by the environment and the forests. But why listen to your science team? There's money to be made!

Trouble is, you (or someone anyway) was treating the chemcial weapons like an agrivating factor, when they were obviously an attempt (appearances or otherwise) to force an evacuation that the Na'vi were too stuborn and stupid to institute on their own.

The gas is perhaps not an aggravating factor, but Quarritch does not deserve any special kudos for using it, either.

The civilians matter. Their belongings don't. People versus property. That's what this entire disagreement between us boils down to. I care more about the lives of te 20 billion people back on earth, you care more about the property rights of the blue space elves.

If the lives of 20 billion people were actually at stake due to unobtainium shipments reducing in volume (Selfridge didn't say the hometree was the ONLY deposit within a 100 kilometres, just the BIGGEST one), you would have a point. All we know from the movie is that the rock is valuable as all hell, but by that standard, corporate mercenaries abusing workers in African diamond mines are also 100% justified.

When the actual offer was "anything you want that our entire interstellar race can possibly provide for this unique resource that you aren't doing anything with anyway that could potentially save our civilization", and the response is "nothing I need from you white devil, so fuck off and die", yes, I call them unreasonable.

Selfridge was ready to offer them whatever they wanted. The Na'Vi didn't need or want any of that, so the corporation got frustrated. Now if Earth was actually in the danger of having a mass die-off when unobtainium shipments stopped, they might've been somewhat justified.

But there's no evidence of that being the case. A room-temperature superconductor is obviously tremendously useful, but Earth was perfectly capable of building interstellar ships without any, and no character in the movie ever makes so much as a peep about the critical importance of the mineral to Earth's survival, nor to mass starvation, malnutrition or any other shit like that.

Also, is it that much of a stretch to think that Selfridge might have been right about "you can't throw a stick around here without hitting some sacred fern!"? There are a lot of cultures on earth that consider litterally everything sacred, and have a deeply religeous understanding of every interaction with those things.

So? Even if he was right, he was still dismissive and clearly did not think much of "the blue monkeys". So how could he have possibly negotiated in good faith? He (and you, obviously) felt the Na'Vi should've accepted our technological whiz-bangs. If they didn't, they were unreasonable and rightfully massacred, but that only works if Earth is actually in danger of having a mass die-off if unobtainium shipments are reduced.

It was exactly like Europeans buying lands from Indians in exchange for glass beads, and shooting them dead if they refused.

No, I think this incident does change a great deal about the conflict and goes a long way towards explaining why the humans in this film are supposed to be the bad guys.

It also raises further questions. Why was this not in the original version? Why is all mention of this incident restricted in screentime enough that it could have been cut entirely that easily? This should have flavored every interaction between the Na'vi and the humans, and yet, all we get from the Na'vi in the entire rest of the film is how they think we're arrogant pricks for not being at one with nature. No other mention of the butchered children. Do the Na'vi just value their children so little? Did anyone on earth know about this? If they did, why did this not drastically change how things were being done on Pandora? If nothing changed on Pandora after this incident, why were they worried about PR, since this incident demonstrates they can slaughter children with no lasting PR consequences?

I have no idea why the incident wasn't mentioned in the original movie, but arguably we had enough information to know that relations were going sour and that the Na'Vi were angry at the mining operations and that the RDA didn't really give a shit about the local culture or environment. What more do you need?

If you want to know why people tend to jump to the "why don't the RDA just dust off and nuke them from orbit?" thing is that the RDA are supposed to be the cardboard cutout, imperialist villains here. When your villain has an obvious doomsday device and doesn't use it, and instead keeps getting killed by trying conventional tactics, people start to question why the villain isn't just using his "I win" button. The Na'vi survive soely because the humans in this universe don't want to kill them, so the "humans are evil" thing gets a bit taxing.

Yes, not all humans in the movie are evil. There are PR attempts made because some people think getting unobtainium is not worth massacring the locals. This just further shows that Earth is not, in fact, desperate for unobtainium.

Either way, the point of the OP was to see how people who think the RDA should have just destroyed Pandora would react if a bunch of aliens decided to do the same to Earth, for equally arbitrary reasons.

[Cesario]

The Na'vi survive soely because the humans in this universe don't want to kill them, so the "humans are evil" thing gets a bit taxing.

There are farmers here in the Philippines who protest against the government because rich land owners aren't returning their land to the farmers. The government and rich landowners send goons to kill some of the farmers, mostly the activists and leaders. Those farmers are also not mowed down indiscriminately and systematically eradicated because the landowners and government don't care about genocide, but just care about getting their land and fucking over some farmers. So... "the landowners and government are evil greedy corrupt vile thieving murderous shits" doesn't really get taxing because it's an apt description.

Don't those philipeno land owners need the farmers to work the land?

Ah yes, exactly what the film needed. An "as you know" moment where characters point out the painfully obvious to eachother. They both knew earth was dying. Their disagreement was in the form of what the best way to save it was.

Stop avoiding the point. You're still leaping from "this rock is very expensive" to "earth is dooooomed without it."

It's like:

Brace Hagustine: "You shouldn't mine there. That is the home of the oompa loompas."

Elfridge: "We need to mine there. The chocolate we will extract from the ground will be worth billions."

You: "Earth needs chocolate to survive! For us to live, Willy Wonka must subjugate the Oompa Loompas!"

To be fair, from the descriptions, it sounds like Loompaland was a worse place to live than Pandora.

Selfridge going "what the hell woman, this mineral can save the Earth" would still be a better counterargument than "mang I will make muchos dineros with this". Since Sigourney can't really answer the former, while the latter can get a reply of "you're a greedy fucker".

Grace never struck me as the reasonable type, to be honest.

Were the antagonists also in on your God-mandated conspiracy to make the humans look bad? Like how God hardened the Pharoah's heart and made him oppress the slaves?

Just commander psycho, and only because he was pushed to the point of having a breakdown in the face of all this.

If that's all the humans cared about, the Na'vi would have been dead. Period. End of story. The humans obviously had goals that included not genociding the blue people, since otherwise there was no reason not to nuke this death world from orbit, or invest their bioengineering dollars into a plague instead of the fancy diplmatic tool that was the Avatar project.

If that's all the Americans cared about, the Natives would have been dead. Period. End of story. The Americans obviously had goals that included not genociding the red people, since otherwise they wouldn't have allowed the Natives to go walk down that trail all tearfully?

Unless the humans don't actually see themselves as mustache twirling villains and think they're just doing a job? Selfridge was never going to take a "don't mine from our tree" for an answer, yet he was still shocked and aghast and silent when he saw the firebombing of the Home Tree.

The people might've deluded themselves into thinking that they could just evict the tribe with some tear gas or hokey trade agreements, despite the fact that that was the Na'vi's own land and ancestral home and they've been living there for thousands of years.

We know people can easily go "the ends justify the means" and shrug "collateral damage" off to allow themselves to sleep at night.

What weapons did the European colonists have that they didn't use on the native population? They used bio-weapons on them, after all.

I see no evidence that if they had an instant "I win" button that would let them wipe out the natives with no casualties on their side, that they wouldn't have used it.

Which is odd, since Jake was there for precisely that reason, and it was Grace who they kicked out who was on their side from the start. The Na'vi only respected Jake because he was a warior. They respect professional killers, not teachers or scientists, apparently. Guess the humans' main mistake was not sending commander psycho out to talk to the Na'vi from the get-go. Surely the man who happily ignored being on fire and suffocation for the sake of continuing a battle would have impressed the Na'vi at least as much as Jake did.

The Na'vi had their children shot at by the RDA mercenaries. The Na'vi know the RDA and its mercenaries are plowing towards their Home Tree, and they know the RDA and its mercenaries won't take no for an answer.

So, how is it wrong for them to observe one of the soldiers/warriors of the RDA?

Observe and use for intelligence is reasonable. Accepting him into their society and treating him better than they did the people who weren't in the faction that was trying to kill them is somewhat less so. Not listening to the person you're keeping around as an intelligence asset when he tells you about an immenent attack is just unforgivably stupid.

And I have an alternative theory as to why Jake eventually became accepted while the scientists were not.

Try imagining Jake, not as the "professional killer" but as "crippled human who gets to walk and run and fly as a Na'vi Avatar and ends up feeling more alive as a Na'vi Avatar than as a human". That's why he was different from the pointdexter scientists asking questions while having all sorts of scientific preconceptions in their heads, that's why he was different from all the other RDA commander psychos. When he lived with the Na'vi, he was more sincere and all that than any of the other Avatar pilots and/or humans. For all the other scientists, their Avatars were just remote controlled bodies. For Jake, his Avatar body was more real than his human body. For Jake, his life as a Na'vi was more real than his life as a fucking cripple.

That was the whole point of having the main character as a paraplegic.

Yeah, how dare those evil scientists have actual ideas and knowledge, and ask questions based on what they know? That isn't the Na'vi being anti-science. It's just...?

And in both cases, the chemical weapons aren't an agrivating factor. If they're a factor at all, they're a midigating one in light of the real problem: the firebombing and machinegunning respectively.

Uh, yeah. I think we're all kind of focusing on the fact that humans had no problem blowing up their homes rather than mining somewhere else without population centers to murder.

Nice to see that finally cleared up.

Now if only the Na'vi were willing to tell the humans where they could mine that wouldn't lead to them openly killing the miners. We could have avoided all this. Instead, with every option that yields the unobtainium likely to result in the Na'vi taking offense and trying to murder the miners, they went with the option that they thought might scare the Na'vi into backing off. Intimidation isn't pretty, but it's got advantages over extermination.

Why should the Na'vi know where the unobtanium is? Do they have sonographic lithometric surveying machines? And how did the RDA find out the unobtanium reserve it was already mining at the movie's start? By dowsing?

I was going to suggest the humans might tell them, possibly show them a geological survey map, but then I remembered that the Na'vi don't talk to the humans, have nothing to learn from the humans, and are thus fully justified in remaining willfully ignorant of something that could prevent the loss of their own peoples' lives.

They have an interstellar space ship. They can move shop on the same planet a lot more cheeply than they can ferry soldiers and weapons from another star system. War is expensive even when you're not conducting it in a star system where you're cut off from your resources.

They only had two space shuttles and one heavy-lifting C-130 esque Dragon gunship and a bunch of Space Hueys. Relocating their entire mining operation to a further site, after their original mine was exhausted, might not have been an option.

This is not the first time human greed, short-sightedness, stupidity, bad information, delusion, lack of awareness, machismo bullshit warmongering aggression, and the like resulted in mass suffering.

Problem is, this strategy goes against greed. Greed says you don't bother to hire private armies and transport military hardware across the universe if you have a peaceful option avalible to you. Especially when that peaceful option is the trivially easy "move the mining site that we'd have to move anyway to a place other than the one we originally planned on".

Except the whole point of this exercise in petty revenge fantasy is to point out the paralells. For that to happen, you have to understand the original situation you're trying to paralell. In your situation, both times humans are faced with an intractable opponent who Absolutely. Refuses. To. Talk. The better paralell would be for the humans to get huffy and self-suprior at the Pandoramakers and refuse to negotiate with them in the face of their massively advanced technology and them offering us litterally anything they want in exchange for our burned out ruin of a planet.

As long as it ends in us getting liquificated due to our own faults and remade into a parapsychic meta-biotech-induced recreation of the Hindu and Buddhist cycles of death and rebirth, sure.

Whatever turns you on.

There are reasons to dislike the Na'vi that don't require you to adopt a might-makes-right philosophy or a human supremacist viewpoint. After all, in the movie the Na'vi won. Wouldn't that make them obviously superior to a might-makes-right philosopher? Is not their exploiting the emotional weakness of the humans to acheave their goals a testiment to the Na'vi's superiority over the pathetic humans who were too weak to order the death of any member of a species they see?

I don't know. Zulus, Somalis, Viet Cong, they all sent technologically superior forces running. Yet you don't see Henry Kissinger go on about how Ho Chi Minh was a great warrior chieftain who bested him in might-righting.

Might-makes-right philosophers or human supremacists don't have to be entirely rational, and their philosophies and the stuff they espouse may just be nonsense to help them cope with their own prejudices and sleep soundly at night.

Sounds to me like you don't respect or understand the people you're ranting about. Makes sense why you didn't understand that my reasons for disliking the pompous blue space elves were different from theirs.

The problem is that the imperialists weren't acting particularly imperialistic. They were acting restrained and diplomatic for some reason, which significantly muddies the waters.

Dude, that's probably only if you somehow conflate Selfridge's "it's worth a lot of cash" statement with "the fate of earth is at stake" and somehow thought the tear gassing mere seconds before the firebombing was an act of gentlemanly ladylike graciousness.

Probably?

Point is, I don't expect imperialistic villains to hold back when they have an obvious advantage. Here they do it constantly.

Ah yes, the masacre that they never mention again anywhere in the movie but was in the deleted scene they re-added for the special addition.

Honestly, I only knew about that when Necron Lord mentioned it in this thread. My original idea was that the Na'vi were fuckoff pissed when the humans couldn't accept "don't bulldoze our homes", cause you know, if you go "don't destroy my house/nation/country/land" and some guys tell you to fuck off and leave, you'd also get pissed. So, yeah, the whole children being massacred actually makes it even worse.

Except no one was bulldozing their homes when Jake arrived, and the Na'vi were already in kill-on-sight mode.

Your Grace Augustine whispering evil to the Na'vi is even loopier than the whole Selfridge's money statement = fate of humanity whatevers.

Why? She's obviously of the opinion that the RDA are evil imperialists exploiting Pandora and the Na'vi. Why is it such a stretch that she might say something to that effect to the Na'vi themselves?

It amuses me that I can't tell which group you're talking about where in this rant.

Its almost like you have no idea what you're talking about!

Reading it over again, you're right. We don't know for sure the Na'vi use currency-based economics.

That'll be a real problem for the Na'vi given the nature of their planet's biosphere.

If they can be sued then they have rights and you can't kill them just to make money.

And? Was this in contention?

Wait, I forgot about your advanced moral machoism.

Shroom, this is really similar to what we've seen in other movies that nerds don't like. I've never seen Avatar and have no interest in doing so, but as with those other films the side that nerds can relate to (the milwanker, spaceship, human side) is where the empathy lies, regardless of the narrative. If those people are shown to be bad, misinformed, stupid, etc, that has to be deflected by either saying 'the movie sucks' or 'they were actually moral paragons of a special virtue you don't understand'. Is there really that big a gap between 'OMG Navi are so bad for not taking it up the ass from shareholders' and what we've seen said before? The themes and drama are literally nothing but obstacles to this kind of understanding, and in this sense understanding simply means 'do I agree with the portrayl of the characters I fantasize about'. It isn't just close-minded or defensive, its a positive step against anything that isn't ones own masculine self-image.

It used to be about shared human experience, but now its a miniatures wargame. Who needed drama anyway?

"Masculine?" So we're going into man-bashing while we're at it? *sigh*

Just because you didn't see the movie is no excuse for jumping into this argument without knowing what was in the movie.

Actually, the idea in my mind is that life is better than death, and that the lives of the individual people who would die in the transition to a nativist hunter-gatherer culture outweigh the supposed spiritual benefits for the handful of survivors.

It would only result in a massive death toll if we tried tried to do it on Earth. The point is that a culture that lives happily as hunter-gatherers has as much right to live like they want as we do to fly around the cosmos in our antimatter powered starships.

Yep. Isn't it a shame that the Na'vi spend so much time judging humanity for not doing this on Earth?

Where did they give humans the oportunity to die? The build a huge cycle of technological reincarnation that causes their consiousnesses to be endlessly recycled until they're suitably brainwashed into happy little Na'vi. The sweet release of death is something your scenario denies humans.

Yes. Humans are abused and forcibly mutated into Na'Vi forms. Their world is taken from them and remade into a "superior" shape by people who say they know better because their whiz-bang technological advancement gives them a broader, better perspective on life, the universe and everything.

Presumably any plucky resistance fighters are also heatrayed from orbit until none are left to simplify the process.

How do you get a plucky resistance fighter if you've turned everyone deemed unworthy into fish and squirels?

Where did I say the Na'vi should have started industrializing and acting western? I said shutting down diplomacy was a dick move.

It's only a dick move if you do it without provocation, which was obviously not the case here (Even in the not-extended edition, Grace comments how "It tends to happen when you use machine guns on them", and the RDA bulldozes holy sites and just shrugs)

Except we don't know whether the machinegunning came before or after the Na'vi started pelting the RDA with arrows. Grace is hardly an impartial observer.

Also worth noting that everything on Pandora is tougher than humans. Stopping a Na'vi or a direwolf is going to require hardware that would be considered excessive when used on a human.

I tend not to spend much time morning the deaths of people I consider pricks. Waste of my admittedly finite ability to give a fuck. As to whether he deserved it, that depends. Did he start mudering the people involved in the development without telling them why their specific development project was something he objected to?

Again you assume the Na'Vi just started arrowing people in the face on Day 1, when the movie implies something completely different - a gradual escalation of violence.

What were the Na'vi's specific list of grievences as stated in the film?

I think we should both be asking one another if we watched the same movie.

Yes, in your movie Selfridge is a Hero Of Humanity out to Save The Earth. In my movie Selfridge is a prick obsessed with meeting the Board's expectations and exceeding mining goals because it gives him sweet, sweet monies.

Actually, in my movie, Selfridge is a prick obsessed with meeting the board's expectations who also happens to be saving humanity in the process.

In your movie the Na'Vi have been murdering RDA personell and destroying their vehicles from Day 1. In my movie they attended Grace's school and learned english, going to war after someone plowed bulldozers through a holy site of theirs.

The bulldozing a holy site happened after the movie started. The murdering RDA personell started before that point.

In the meantime hostilities are slowly escalating due to various incidents.

All of which can be attributed to the evil imperialist humans in your movie?

Mostly because there's no point demonstrating that was the case here if you don't accept the principle to begin with. No point wasting my time proving something you find trivial and irrelevent, wouldn't you agree?

I do accept the principle. Now go and prove Unobtainium was necessary to save vast amounts of people from starvation and you might have a point.

No, you see that "might" means you're reserving the right to reject the principle if you don't like how well I've presented my case for how vital the Unobtainium is.

I actually preffer using this quote method. I stopped doing it on this board because I got complaints. I'll happily resume it at your request.

Thank you, it makes it easier to follow the conversation.

I agree. It's been quite a pain trying to put together posts which address everything without providing context quotes.

Because he spent so much time harping on PR when every one of commander psycho's plans was presented.

He harped about relations with the locals, but it was obvious this was only relevant as long as the locals did what he wanted. Environmentalism never even entered the picture. He didn't even know the basics of Grace's research about the forest, that's how little he cared. Which is doubly stupid since the entire operation is affected by the environment and the forests. But why listen to your science team? There's money to be made!

Like I said, my suspension of disbelief is taxed when a corrupt corperate executive is making a stupid decision to the detriment of profit. Making a stupid decision in pursuit of profit I can buy.

Trouble is, you (or someone anyway) was treating the chemcial weapons like an agrivating factor, when they were obviously an attempt (appearances or otherwise) to force an evacuation that the Na'vi were too stuborn and stupid to institute on their own.

The gas is perhaps not an aggravating factor, but Quarritch does not deserve any special kudos for using it, either.

And thus the "TEYH UZED CEMIKAL WAPONZ!!!1" as a reason the RDA was evil argument is officially defeated. It's been a pleasure.

The civilians matter. Their belongings don't. People versus property. That's what this entire disagreement between us boils down to. I care more about the lives of te 20 billion people back on earth, you care more about the property rights of the blue space elves.

If the lives of 20 billion people were actually at stake due to unobtainium shipments reducing in volume (Selfridge didn't say the hometree was the ONLY deposit within a 100 kilometres, just the BIGGEST one), you would have a point. All we know from the movie is that the rock is valuable as all hell, but by that standard, corporate mercenaries abusing workers in African diamond mines are also 100% justified.

True of False: Earth in this film is facing a resource crisis.
True of False: Earth's biosphere is effectively dead.
True or False: The artificial means of food production being used to feed 20 billion people on earth require resources.

Once we know how much you already know or believe about this film's universe, I'll know where I have to start educating.

When the actual offer was "anything you want that our entire interstellar race can possibly provide for this unique resource that you aren't doing anything with anyway that could potentially save our civilization", and the response is "nothing I need from you white devil, so fuck off and die", yes, I call them unreasonable.

Selfridge was ready to offer them whatever they wanted. The Na'Vi didn't need or want any of that, so the corporation got frustrated. Now if Earth was actually in the danger of having a mass die-off when unobtainium shipments stopped, they might've been somewhat justified.

I argue more than "somewhat".

But there's no evidence of that being the case. A room-temperature superconductor is obviously tremendously useful, but Earth was perfectly capable of building interstellar ships without any, and no character in the movie ever makes so much as a peep about the critical importance of the mineral to Earth's survival, nor to mass starvation, malnutrition or any other shit like that.

What do you think the "people on earth are grey" referred to, exactly?

Also, is it that much of a stretch to think that Selfridge might have been right about "you can't throw a stick around here without hitting some sacred fern!"? There are a lot of cultures on earth that consider litterally everything sacred, and have a deeply religeous understanding of every interaction with those things.

So? Even if he was right, he was still dismissive and clearly did not think much of "the blue monkeys". So how could he have possibly negotiated in good faith? He (and you, obviously) felt the Na'Vi should've accepted our technological whiz-bangs. If they didn't, they were unreasonable and rightfully massacred, but that only works if Earth is actually in danger of having a mass die-off if unobtainium shipments are reduced.

It was exactly like Europeans buying lands from Indians in exchange for glass beads, and shooting them dead if they refused.

Is the only thing earth had to offer technological whiz-bangs? We do have more than that, recall. We have spiritual texts from a thousand different faiths if the Na'vi are interested in exploring new ideas about one's relationship to the divine. We have centuries of acccumulated litterature, whether they're interested in light entertainment or exploring new worlds through imagination. We have interstellar spacecraft if they want to explore new worlds bodily.

We actually do have wonders to satisfy desires both gross and subtle.

But the Na'vi want none of it, need none of it.

Hell, given the Na'vi's warlike culture, we could offer to sell them weapons to let them dominate their neighbors.

No, I think this incident does change a great deal about the conflict and goes a long way towards explaining why the humans in this film are supposed to be the bad guys.

It also raises further questions. Why was this not in the original version? Why is all mention of this incident restricted in screentime enough that it could have been cut entirely that easily? This should have flavored every interaction between the Na'vi and the humans, and yet, all we get from the Na'vi in the entire rest of the film is how they think we're arrogant pricks for not being at one with nature. No other mention of the butchered children. Do the Na'vi just value their children so little? Did anyone on earth know about this? If they did, why did this not drastically change how things were being done on Pandora? If nothing changed on Pandora after this incident, why were they worried about PR, since this incident demonstrates they can slaughter children with no lasting PR consequences?

I have no idea why the incident wasn't mentioned in the original movie, but arguably we had enough information to know that relations were going sour and that the Na'Vi were angry at the mining operations and that the RDA didn't really give a shit about the local culture or environment. What more do you need?

I don't generally think people who don't give a shit about others or the environment have crossed the line of deserving to be murdered on sight. Apparently we disagree on this point.

If you want to know why people tend to jump to the "why don't the RDA just dust off and nuke them from orbit?" thing is that the RDA are supposed to be the cardboard cutout, imperialist villains here. When your villain has an obvious doomsday device and doesn't use it, and instead keeps getting killed by trying conventional tactics, people start to question why the villain isn't just using his "I win" button. The Na'vi survive soely because the humans in this universe don't want to kill them, so the "humans are evil" thing gets a bit taxing.

Yes, not all humans in the movie are evil. There are PR attempts made because some people think getting unobtainium is not worth massacring the locals. This just further shows that Earth is not, in fact, desperate for unobtainium.

Or that the situation is not yet despirate enough that they feel obligated to at least try to do this right.

Either way, the point of the OP was to see how people who think the RDA should have just destroyed Pandora would react if a bunch of aliens decided to do the same to Earth, for equally arbitrary reasons.

I only think the RDA should have destroyed Pandora if they're going to be the actual villains of the piece. Since they weren't, it's fine that they didn't destroy Pandora.

Thus the Pandoramakers would be fine destroying earth the same way, if they were the villains of the piece.

[Starglider]

It's a trend you see in science fiction in general too. Gene Rodenberry's vision of the future, of explorating the stars and encountering wonders and miracles, gone and replaced by transpositioned Marines and soldiers in space gunning down and killing crude facsimiles of America's past, present or future enemies likewise transplanted into the science fiction setting.

Well, I agree that right now we need more of this and less of this in science fiction, however

And look at what it has become now. Gigatons and kilojoules. Mandalorians. Karen Travvisties. Meesa meesas.

this site was explicitly founded to debate the gigatons and the logistics of two fantasy militaries duking it out. So I'd hardly be surprised that such a message is not terribly popular on SDN.

A cosmic object far greater than he is, far greater than anything that can be quantified, something magical, mystical, fantastic. Majestic. Terrific. And it does not deride him. It does not ridicule him for his primitive ways. It embraces him. Insinuates into his very essence. Makes him transcends his rational limitations and conceptions and allows him to become something in-conceivable.

Have you ready any of the sequels? It's somewhat quantified in 2010 and pretty thoroughly demystified in 3001. Which is reasonable, since you'd hope that over 1000 years our understanding would improve dramatically.

There's an actual engineered sentient world-spirit that can symbionize with the animal kingdom, that is capable of transhumanistic singularity Stargliderian consciousness transferences (that the Na'vi even know the rituals to!)

Yes, this is a study in effective marketing. If you do a flash-upload the sensible way, cyro-freezing the brain and then destructively scanning it to the molecular level with a high-power laser, they will be all up in your face with 'continuity flaws' and have all this annoying pointless existential agnst and have to be medicated. But if you hire some extras to chant tribal stuff, drug them up a little first, do the procedure outdoors prefaced with a ton of spiritualist mumbo jumbo, you can get away with using bioengineered plant to do a very sloppy approximate copy and they will have no objections at all. Jenkins, I want that developed into a 'soul cleansing resurrection experience weekend' by next tuesday.

biotechnological evolutionary miracles and phenomenons that we can't even imagine. And when confronted with the question of "does this not match, or even exceed, our own lifestyles", people automatically go "our way is better" because they have smoke-belching factories, ocean-bleaching refineries, and devices that shoot pieces of metal into other people's faces, and economic systems that subsist on the rape of unfortunate and poorer peoples and nations for the excessive gluttonies of the so-called "developed" countries.

Yeah, I'm not sure you'd be wondering at Pandora so much if it was fractal ice wastes filled with tesselated banshee-slicers and chromium crystal people, even if that had just as much systemic complexity and interesting alien culture. Avatar looks like an exagerrated idealised cartoon jungle with idealised tribal peoples to tap into enviro-luddite fantasies as much as it taps into milwanker ones. Sure you'll condemn space marines blowing up photogenic blue catpeople and pretty jungles, but would you support cancelling mining because a group-mind of sentient crystaline microbes live in a desert planet's water table?

[PeZook]

Actually, the idea in my mind is that life is better than death, and that the lives of the individual people who would die in the transition to a nativist hunter-gatherer culture outweigh the supposed spiritual benefits for the handful of survivors.

It would only result in a massive death toll if we tried tried to do it on Earth. The point is that a culture that lives happily as hunter-gatherers has as much right to live like they want as we do to fly around the cosmos in our antimatter powered starships.

Yep. Isn't it a shame that the Na'vi spend so much time judging humanity for not doing this on Earth?

Boo hoo, stone-age tribesmen living four light years away from Earth have no idea what the situation on Earth is like, and probably wouldn't understand its full complexity even if someone tried explaining it to them. HOLY CRAP,that makes them primitive and disgusting and repulsive!

Yes. Humans are abused and forcibly mutated into Na'Vi forms. Their world is taken from them and remade into a "superior" shape by people who say they know better because their whiz-bang technological advancement gives them a broader, better perspective on life, the universe and everything.

Presumably any plucky resistance fighters are also heatrayed from orbit until none are left to simplify the process.

How do you get a plucky resistance fighter if you've turned everyone deemed unworthy into fish and squirels?

It's great how you concentrate on nitpicking irrelevant details of this scenario in an obvious attempt to dodge the crux of the issue, which is that Pandoramakers impose their preceonceptions and judgements on us and their way of life.

Where did I say the Na'vi should have started industrializing and acting western? I said shutting down diplomacy was a dick move.

It's only a dick move if you do it without provocation, which was obviously not the case here (Even in the not-extended edition, Grace comments how "It tends to happen when you use machine guns on them", and the RDA bulldozes holy sites and just shrugs)

Except we don't know whether the machinegunning came before or after the Na'vi started pelting the RDA with arrows. Grace is hardly an impartial observer.

Oh, so now we actually don't know when it started to happen, but obviously it's the Na'Vi who are dicks here (because they're the 'other' and are warlike and thus must've fired first!)

Of course, in light of the school incident it doesn't really matter if some RDA guys were killed: machinegunning a school full of kids (and shrugging afterwards) was a clear escalation and entirely justifies the Omaticaya going to war, no matter the universe you currently reside in.

Also worth noting that everything on Pandora is tougher than humans. Stopping a Na'vi or a direwolf is going to require hardware that would be considered excessive when used on a human.

Yes, Jake even commented that the helicopters carried some unusually heavy ordnance around for routine flights.

I tend not to spend much time morning the deaths of people I consider pricks. Waste of my admittedly finite ability to give a fuck. As to whether he deserved it, that depends. Did he start mudering the people involved in the development without telling them why their specific development project was something he objected to?

Again you assume the Na'Vi just started arrowing people in the face on Day 1, when the movie implies something completely different - a gradual escalation of violence.

What were the Na'vi's specific list of grievences as stated in the film?

At the start it was obviously environmental destruction and encroachment upon their territorry, but relations were good enough that weird spirit-people could live amongst them and teach them English, bulldozers and giant open-pit mines notwithstanding.

Then it turned out the humans considered vandalism grounds for massacring civilians (you know, you do criticize that exact attitude later in your post...), so the situation escalated into war in all but name.

But look there: when the humans sent another emissary, they were willing to let him in!

In essence, they gave the humans another chance.

Then the humans bulldozed a holy site and firebombed a major population center, and look - war! This is totally strange and unreasonable

Actually, in my movie, Selfridge is a prick obsessed with meeting the board's expectations who also happens to be saving humanity in the process.

Which is based on nothing whatsoever...

The bulldozing a holy site happened after the movie started. The murdering RDA personell started before that point.

Actually, how do you know that? Who said they were losing people to the Na'Vi?

The only comment we get from Quarritch is that Na'Vi are hard to kill and they dip their arrows in neurotoxins, none of which require any RDA personnell to have died in the fighting. He spends way more time talking about the wildlife than the locals during his safety brief.

All of which can be attributed to the evil imperialist humans in your movie?

Why do all incidents need to be the RDA's fault for them to be evil pricks?

No, you see that "might" means you're reserving the right to reject the principle if you don't like how well I've presented my case for how vital the Unobtainium is.

What the fuck?

I accept that sometimes it is justified to do bad things in the name of the greater good.

Obviously it means you need the establish the justification first!

Like I said, my suspension of disbelief is taxed when a corrupt corperate executive is making a stupid decision to the detriment of profit. Making a stupid decision in pursuit of profit I can buy.

Look, he pursued the biggest unobtainium deposit in the area because it means his limited mining equipment can get the most bang for the buck.

You see, starting a mining operation with the sort of limited resources the RDA had has to be difficult and expensive. It's doubly so if you need to move the base, along with all its technical facilities and the gigantic refinery.

By gunning for the largest deposit he could find, Selfridge saves tremendous costs over time (because he won't have to plow another road through the jungle in 5 years to get to another deposit). The Omaticaya are a comparatively minor obstacle in his mind, because he doesn't really consider them a threat, more an annoyance. And once those dozers are one their way, he's comitted: either the Omaticaya move, or he makes them move.

Why is this decision stupid, when considered from the profit perspective? It's only stupid if you assume PR concerns were actually more important for Selfridge than profit and mining goals and pleasing the Board, rather than a way to get those annoying environmentalists on Earth off his back.

And thus the "TEYH UZED CEMIKAL WAPONZ!!!1" as a reason the RDA was evil argument is officially defeated. It's been a pleasure.

Yes, it is defeated. They were evil merely because they firebombed a population center.

True of False: Earth in this film is facing a resource crisis.

They built gigantic interstellar starships before they even knew unobtainium existed, purely for exploration, so...probably not.

True of False: Earth's biosphere is effectively dead.

It's heavily damaged, but "mean bush" still exists in Venezuela at the least.

True or False: The artificial means of food production being used to feed 20 billion people on earth require resources.

They do require resources.

I argue more than "somewhat".

That's just semantics.

What do you think the "people on earth are grey" referred to, exactly?

Whoa, one symbollic line is all you need to come to sweeping conclusions about the situation on Earth? That's pretty awesome

Is the only thing earth had to offer technological whiz-bangs? We do have more than that, recall. We have spiritual texts from a thousand different faiths if the Na'vi are interested in exploring new ideas about one's relationship to the divine. We have centuries of acccumulated litterature, whether they're interested in light entertainment or exploring new worlds through imagination. We have interstellar spacecraft if they want to explore new worlds bodily.

We actually do have wonders to satisfy desires both gross and subtle.

But the Na'vi want none of it, need none of it.

Hell, given the Na'vi's warlike culture, we could offer to sell them weapons to let them dominate their neighbors.

Okay,look, that's exactly the problem. You obviously think of the Na'Vi as just blue humans. Worse, you think of them as blue XXI century humans, and thus think you can negotiate with them in the same way that you would negotiate with Russia, and if they don't play by these rules, they are unreasonable and thus worthy of nothing but contempt.

That's just projecting your own attitudes and desires upon a people who live on an alien world. There's both a civilizational and environmental gap between them and us, and assuming they will have the same ideas of fair exchange or the same desires or the same attitudes as a wall street CEO is just...stupid. I can't find a better word to describe this.

You presume they'd want to study our religions, when they don't even have a concept of religion. You presume they are interested in dominating their neighbors, when their concept of war is possibly quite different than ours. You also assume the RDA was willing to give them literally anything, including rides to other worlds on their hugely expensive starships, which is stupid both in the above context and our quiant Earthly XXI century one.

And, lastly, you presume each of these items is fair trade for their ancestral lands, which is a value judgement you made, in your mind, based on your own preconceptions, because it's not your ancestral home you would have had to give up. How easy do you think it would be to get Poles to abandon Warsaw, forever, with all its landmarks and museums and centers of government, and let it be turned into an open pit mine? Do you think they'd agree to it if they got weapons or philospophical texts from an alien civilization?

I don't generally think people who don't give a shit about others or the environment have crossed the line of deserving to be murdered on sight. Apparently we disagree on this point.

So if someone plowed a bulldozer through your house with all your belongings inside and then declared that plot of land was now his, you wouldn't be angry?

Or that the situation is not yet despirate enough that they feel obligated to at least try to do this right.

So what is it, then? Malnutrition and tethering on the edge of mass starvation, or merely a threat of future decline?

I only think the RDA should have destroyed Pandora if they're going to be the actual villains of the piece. Since they weren't, it's fine that they didn't destroy Pandora.

Why do you think there are no other considerations for the RDA? Corporations can send their mercenaries to rape, beat up and abuse workers in diamond mines while also presenting a nice and happy outside image to shareholders.

They won't send their mercenaries to outright genocide locals due to PR concerns, but that doesn't make them virtuous.Just liars.

[PeZook]

Yeah, I'm not sure you'd be wondering at Pandora so much if it was fractal ice wastes filled with tesselated banshee-slicers and chromium crystal people, even if that had just as much systemic complexity and interesting alien culture. Avatar looks like an exagerrated idealised cartoon jungle with idealised tribal peoples to tap into enviro-luddite fantasies as much as it taps into milwanker ones. Sure you'll condemn space marines blowing up photogenic blue catpeople and pretty jungles, but would you support cancelling mining because a group-mind of sentient crystaline microbes live in a desert planet's water table?

Well, I would. And not just because it's wrong to murder sentient beings ; There's a significant self-preservation context to that decision. In a universe where we discovered sentient life, wrecking things we don't understand with abandon can backfire more horribly than we can imagine. It could be receiving sanctions from Space UN, it could be outright destruction by holier-than-thou Pandoramakers, or something comparatively more mundane like a nanovirus released by the crystals in self-defence.

Interestingly enough, there were several sci-fi stories which handled that exact question - even Stargate did that in a couple episodes!

Of course, since it's so damn hard to sympathize with sentient crystals, I'm sure the fraction of people going "fuck them, humanity FUCK YEAH" would be far, far higher than what happened with Avatar.

[Starglider]

Interestingly enough, there were several sci-fi stories which handled that exact question - even Stargate did that in a couple episodes!

Of course; I was thinking of Trek when I wrote that (TNG : Home Soil) and I'm sure the story was done in 1930s pulp sci-fi at some point.

Of course, since it's so damn hard to sympathize with sentient crystals, I'm sure the fraction of people going "fuck them, humanity FUCK YEAH" would be far, far higher than what happened with Avatar.

Actually I'm not so sure. Ersatz-US Marines vs ersatz native Americans instantly ignites tribal loyalties and racism, and blue spear-chucking giants are a direct physical and psychological threat to first-world audiences (even moreso when they can seduce our marines as well as kill them!). Sentient crystals is pretty abstract and even if they have the ability to shoot death rays they wouldn't register as the same kind of threat. I mean sure a lot of people would be fine with destroying them for short-term profit, but I wouldn't expect them to get so ho-hah about declaring war on sentient crystals vs declaring war on a more humanlike enemy.

[Darth Hoth]

I don't think you're saying anything controversial there. The belief of Darth Hoth et al is that all intelligent species should do their utmost to enslave and exterminate all other intelligent species, because anything else is weak and unnatural.

That would not quite be an accurate summary of my position, at least. (I would not know who else you seek to address, here.)

They would not call aliens trying to exterminate humans immoral, on the contrary they might afford them a little grudging respect if they hate humanity as much as the xenophobes hate them (plus of course mutual hate makes recruiting easier).

I do not hate aliens. I simply do not value them, their lives or their happiness on any level close to that of humans. Similarly, I value humans vastly more than I do other plants and animals native to our own island in the cosmos. (Hence why I am able to eat in good conscience, even though by doing so I bring about the death of other organisms.)

You are operating in a moral paradigm that tries to generalise, seek fairness and ignore (or even cherish) superficial differences. They are operating in a paradigm that defines humanity (and most likely a small national and/or genetic subset of humanity) as the apex of all creation a priori, and actively rejects generalisation.

I am operating in a moral paradigm that does not generalise humanity outside humanity. Thus I am not a militant vegetarian who believe animals should have human rights, for example. Or aliens. I fail to see how this connects to any notion of racism. My argument is precisely that even as humanity (in all its various races) has its differences, we also have so much more in common that we all fall within the same standards. (Perhaps with exceptions to be made for certain ill or extremely maladjusted individuals.) Even as animals, plants or aliens do not.

While strictly all goal systems are arbitrary, in human terms this is still a pathetic humanist rationalisation of atavistic fear of the unknown and primal racist & religious urges.

As opposed to transhumanists like yourself, who feel that poor sinful humanity should be replaced by your preferred Übermensch breed of superior, computerised, perfect Frankenstein's monsters?

I always stop and frown at the sheer disconnect between actively promoting transhumanism on the one hand, and then hypocritically blasting me in every vaguely alien-related thread and calling me a sociopath. I am not the one of us who believes our entire species should (or "must" inevitably, according to some pseudoreligious idea of "progress") be replaced by computers.

[Darth Hoth]

The man's communion with a divine... thing. A cosmic object far greater than he is, far greater than anything that can be quantified, something magical, mystical, fantastic. Majestic. Terrific. And it does not deride him. It does not ridicule him for his primitive ways. It embraces him. Insinuates into his very essence. Makes him transcends his rational limitations and conceptions and allows him to become something in-conceivable.

Is that spelled out clearly in the novelisation? Because when I finally got around to watching the film (mostly just to see whether it really lived up to all the hype; and predictably, it did not), all I got from that horribly drawn-out ending sequence of bizarre shots juxtaposed with psychedelic lightshows was, "2001 Monoliths cause really bad acid trips in humans who approach them too closely."

[PeZook]

Is that spelled out clearly in the novelisation? Because when I finally got around to watching the film (mostly just to see whether it really lived up to all the hype; and predictably, it did not), all I got from that horribly drawn-out ending sequence of bizarre shots juxtaposed with psychedelic lightshows was, "2001 Monoliths cause really bad acid trips in humans who approach them too closely."

"Novelisation"

The Star Child represents the success of the experiment of the mysterious, transcendent aliens who seeded the monoliths to support development of the mind. Its appearance means the first human has transcended the need for tools, much as the first, primitive men transcended their dependence on blind vagaries of the universe.

The book ends with the Star Child casually destroying nuclear warheads launched at it, realizing it has power that was unimaginable before, and wondering what to do with it now. Much like the primitive humans at the start of the book realized the sort of power gained by picking up a stone and using it as a projectile, which really was a similar leap in the development of the mind.

[Darth Hoth]

"Novelisation"

From what I know, Clarke based it on the screenplay he co-wrote with Kubrick when they developed the film together. The film was the original work, the novel the derivative. Hence, calling it a novelisation would appear appropriate to me.

And, yes, that seems to be rather clearer than what the film indicated for the ending. Thank you for the info.

[Number Theoretic]

When i saw the Avatar movie, it struck me as somewhat odd that the humans didn't consider mining the Unobtanium under the Home tree from underground. Sure, underground mining is way more expensive, but i'd argue the costs would be comparable to the cost of that military operation they put together to attack the Home Tree. And generally speaking, if i would land on a planet to mine some Unobtanium, why would i artificially limit my mining technology options to pit mining? Especially if it is a jungle world.

[PeZook]

When i saw the Avatar movie, it struck me as somewhat odd that the humans didn't consider mining the Unobtanium under the Home tree from underground. Sure, underground mining is way more expensive, but i'd argue the costs would be comparable to the cost of that military operation they put together to attack the Home Tree. And generally speaking, if i would land on a planet to mine some Unobtanium, why would i artificially limit my mining technology options to pit mining? Especially if it is a jungle world.

How is it comparable in cost to the military operation? It requires entirely different machines, construction of mining shafts, elevators (for people and raw material), walking bracings, plus of course things like methane sensor systems, additional survival/rescue equipment for the miners...

If you want to get at the unobtainium under the Home Tree from your base, you will need to mine a hundred kilometer long horizontal tunnel, working with equipment that has to be made and maintained using local means, limited fabricator time and uncommonly spare parts from Earth, that cost some million Space Dollars per kilogram to ship, with a lead time of ten years.And it still doesn't guarantee you won't fuck things up, like causing a massive cave-in that will destroy the Home Tree.

Sorry, but pit mining is trivial compared to that. There's a reason why it was the first mining method to be used, ever.

[starfury]

Actually I'm not so sure. Ersatz-US Marines vs ersatz native Americans instantly ignites tribal loyalties and racism, and blue spear-chucking giants are a direct physical and psychological threat to first-world audiences (even moreso when they can seduce our marines as well as kill them!). Sentient crystals is pretty abstract and even if they have the ability to shoot death rays they wouldn't register as the same kind of threat. I mean sure a lot of people would be fine with destroying them for short-term profit, but I wouldn't expect them to get so ho-hah about declaring war on sentient crystals vs declaring war on a more humanlike enemy.

That is a interesting thought, I thought Shroom said that Navi filled the same threat role that the Xenomorphs of the old aliens trilogy did, but since the latter and are outright slavering monsters, they didn't bring out nearly this kind of response and people actually blamed Weyland-Yutani Corporation for poking around and stirring up this potential deadly threat without looking first.

[Number Theoretic]

How is it comparable in cost to the military operation? It requires entirely different machines, construction of mining shafts, elevators (for people and raw material), walking bracings, plus of course things like methane sensor systems, additional survival/rescue equipment for the miners...

They already have unmanned, remote-controlled mining equipment for their pit mining operation, so why not use robots for deep mining as well?
It would substancial lessen the security requirements for the tunnels.

If you want to get at the unobtainium under the Home Tree from your base, you will need to mine a hundred kilometer long horizontal tunnel, working with equipment that has to be made and maintained using local means, limited fabricator time and uncommonly spare parts from Earth, that cost some million Space Dollars per kilogram to ship, with a lead time of ten years.And it still doesn't guarantee you won't fuck things up, like causing a massive cave-in that will destroy the Home Tree.

Drilling a tunnel all the way from home base to the Home Tree depot would be somewhat silly, i agree. But suppose the RDA mining engineers have designed their equipment to do some limited underground mining if necessary, they could just plow their way up to 10 or 20 kilometers near the Home tree and start deep mining from there. Of course this would require securing the tunnel entrance but it shouldn't stretch the military capabilites of the RDA harder than attacking the Home tree.

Concerning spare parts, i still fail to see a unsolvable problem here. After all, they used a starship to get to Pandora in the first place, which may require spare parts far more sophisticated than spare parts for typical mining equipment. After all, it seems to me that they either must produce the anti-matter required to accelerate the starship to 0.7c locally or they must have brought it from Earth (which could easily be more expensive than bringing an orbital anti-matter factory once to Alpha Centauri, especially if they plan to mine the place and thus visit it more than once). Plus, their pit mining machinery is already at least at Garzweiler Bagger 288 level which also require not exactly trivial spare parts.

Sorry, but pit mining is trivial compared to that. There's a reason why it was the first mining method to be used, ever.

The Unobtanium must be really profitable if mining it justifies interstellar transport. Compared to that, the additional costs of deep mining seem trivial to me. Bottom line: underground mining isn't totally out of the reach of RDA's technological capabilites and it wouldn't be the biggest cost factor on their operations bill (Interstellar transport would be).

[Simon_Jester]

I do not hate aliens. I simply do not value them, their lives or their happiness on any level close to that of humans. Similarly, I value humans vastly more than I do other plants and animals native to our own island in the cosmos. (Hence why I am able to eat in good conscience, even though by doing so I bring about the death of other organisms.)

But why would you assign Marvin the Martian a low moral value simply because you place a low value on wild beasts? I can see clear, non-hypocritical reasons for not caring much whether a cow lives or dies. But when we're talking about a being that has as much claim to intelligence and culture and a future with potential in it as you do... how does that work, exactly?

And where do you draw the line? Suppose there were two related quasi-human on the planet Earth, both descended from homo erectus, both about equally intelligent, but if they could interbreed, they would produce only sterile hybrids- about as closely related as lions and tigers, or horses and donkeys, in other words.

Would you regard members of the other species as being as something to be slaughtered out of hand like so many malarial mosquitoes if they became inconvenient?

As opposed to transhumanists like yourself, who feel that poor sinful humanity should be replaced by your preferred Übermensch breed of superior, computerised, perfect Frankenstein's monsters?

I always stop and frown at the sheer disconnect between actively promoting transhumanism on the one hand, and then hypocritically blasting me in every vaguely alien-related thread and calling me a sociopath. I am not the one of us who believes our entire species should (or "must" inevitably, according to some pseudoreligious idea of "progress") be replaced by computers.

...What the hell are you talking about, Darth? I literally cannot remember Starglider ever asserting that "our entire species should (or must inevitably) by replaced by computers." I think he expects it to happen, but that's no more a moral claim than "one day we will have the atomic bomb" means "one day we should have the atomic bomb."

If you're going to have a vendetta, at least don't make up idiot bullshit or keep bringing up years-old grievances against someone over something they said on an Internet forum god knows how long ago and haven't said since.


As to the rest, [waves hand], hi. I am not anything you could sanely call a Singularitarian. And I think your take on the rights of aliens is at best incoherent and foolish, and at worst actively horrible. So how about you quit trolling Starglider and take it up with me?

How is it comparable in cost to the military operation? It requires entirely different machines, construction of mining shafts, elevators (for people and raw material), walking bracings, plus of course things like methane sensor systems, additional survival/rescue equipment for the miners...

They already have unmanned, remote-controlled mining equipment for their pit mining operation, so why not use robots for deep mining as well?
It would substancial lessen the security requirements for the tunnels.

The problem is that a tunnel collapse will still stop output from the mine for a long time. The longer the tunnel, the greater the risk of a collapse somewhere along its length. And if a man like Selfridge has to choose between "underground mine that will, statistically speaking, extract one ton of ore per day and be working during the 90% of the time that there are no cave-ins along a hundred kilometer tunnel" and "open pit mine that will extract two tons per day and work all the time," he'll choose the latter.

The unobtainium is so valuable that if you're willing to kill people to get it, you'd have to be out of your mind not to kill people to get it. Because you can recoup the costs of the bullets you fired during the killing with a few milligrams of the stuff.

[Darth Hoth]

...What the hell are you talking about, Darth? I literally cannot remember Starglider ever asserting that "our entire species should (or must inevitably) by replaced by computers." I think he expects it to happen, but that's no more a moral claim than "one day we will have the atomic bomb" means "one day we should have the atomic bomb."

Perhaps I misread the smugness in his prophesying about it as him actively wishing for it to happen? His consistent posting about how limited and barely sentient the human mind is and how flawed our basic cognition is (or whatever along these lines) also contributes to that impression. To be sure, it can be difficult at times to determine how much of his "mad scientist" act is a joke (as in his user profile), and how much of it is actually his real opinions.

If you're going to have a vendetta, at least don't make up idiot bullshit or keep bringing up years-old grievances against someone over something they said on an Internet forum god knows how long ago and haven't said since.

So I am the one pursuing a vendetta? Last I checked, I was not I who was going around in random threads where he has yet to show his face posting stuff to the effect of, "Those moronic primitives like Starglider think [Insert-here], the logical response is to keep them away from any kind of authority."

I might think Starglider's ideology is sociopathic and morally bankrupt, but I am hardly the one of us obsessing over the other. I came into this thread to comment only specifically because he made reference to me in his first post. Otherwise I would have left it well enough alone.


As to the rest, while the topic is interesting, at the current time I have little enough time getting into what easily becomes a long and time-consuming discussion. I realise in hindsight that with that in mind, I might have done well not to post at all. Yet now I have. Still, I must ask you for a rain check on the matter, seeing holidays are upcoming and my immediate future will be rather busy in real life. My apologies.

Oh, and Merry Christmas to everyone.

[Cesario]

It would only result in a massive death toll if we tried tried to do it on Earth. The point is that a culture that lives happily as hunter-gatherers has as much right to live like they want as we do to fly around the cosmos in our antimatter powered starships.

Yep. Isn't it a shame that the Na'vi spend so much time judging humanity for not doing this on Earth?

Boo hoo, stone-age tribesmen living four light years away from Earth have no idea what the situation on Earth is like, and probably wouldn't understand its full complexity even if someone tried explaining it to them. HOLY CRAP,that makes them primitive and disgusting and repulsive!

Kinda does make them primitive. What makes them disgusting and repulsive is their judgemental additude towards anything not them, and their arrogant belief that they know the best way of life for everyone.

Yes. Humans are abused and forcibly mutated into Na'Vi forms. Their world is taken from them and remade into a "superior" shape by people who say they know better because their whiz-bang technological advancement gives them a broader, better perspective on life, the universe and everything.

Presumably any plucky resistance fighters are also heatrayed from orbit until none are left to simplify the process.

How do you get a plucky resistance fighter if you've turned everyone deemed unworthy into fish and squirels?

It's great how you concentrate on nitpicking irrelevant details of this scenario in an obvious attempt to dodge the crux of the issue, which is that Pandoramakers impose their preceonceptions and judgements on us and their way of life.

Something the humans in this film didn't do to the Na'vi. And yet you think it's a paralell.

And I'd hardly call imposing a fate that cannot be escaped even in death an irrelevant detail.

It's only a dick move if you do it without provocation, which was obviously not the case here (Even in the not-extended edition, Grace comments how "It tends to happen when you use machine guns on them", and the RDA bulldozes holy sites and just shrugs)

Except we don't know whether the machinegunning came before or after the Na'vi started pelting the RDA with arrows. Grace is hardly an impartial observer.

Oh, so now we actually don't know when it started to happen, but obviously it's the Na'Vi who are dicks here (because they're the 'other' and are warlike and thus must've fired first!)

More like, why would a company as PR focused as the RDA be machinegunning civilians in a first strike? It's out of character for them. But the warlike Na'vi, who spend a lot of time lecturing people about things they don't understand, even to the point of ignoring their own intelligence asset, seem precisely the type to start shit.

Of course, in light of the school incident it doesn't really matter if some RDA guys were killed: machinegunning a school full of kids (and shrugging afterwards) was a clear escalation and entirely justifies the Omaticaya going to war, no matter the universe you currently reside in.

Or it would if there were any indication that the Na'vi cared about those kids. How often would you bring something like that up if it happened in your neighborhood?

Again you assume the Na'Vi just started arrowing people in the face on Day 1, when the movie implies something completely different - a gradual escalation of violence.

What were the Na'vi's specific list of grievences as stated in the film?

At the start it was obviously environmental destruction and encroachment upon their territorry, but relations were good enough that weird spirit-people could live amongst them and teach them English, bulldozers and giant open-pit mines notwithstanding.

Then it turned out the humans considered vandalism grounds for massacring civilians (you know, you do criticize that exact attitude later in your post...), so the situation escalated into war in all but name.

But look there: when the humans sent another emissary, they were willing to let him in!

In essence, they gave the humans another chance.

Then the humans bulldozed a holy site and firebombed a major population center, and look - war! This is totally strange and unreasonable

You do realize that the entire point of having emissaries is that they let you talk to eachother. You tell them what we're about, they tell us what they're about. Jake wasn't in a position to tell them a damn thing about what the humans were about. The one time he tried, they shut him down, shut him up, and ended up dying like animals because they weren't listening.

Maybe we can put a lot of this up to Jake's incompetence at this job. He obviously was incompetent at this job. But the Na'vi weren't really meeting anyone halfway on this whole "talking to people who are different than you" front.

Actually, in my movie, Selfridge is a prick obsessed with meeting the board's expectations who also happens to be saving humanity in the process.

Which is based on nothing whatsoever...

We cover what this is based on elsewhere.

The bulldozing a holy site happened after the movie started. The murdering RDA personell started before that point.

Actually, how do you know that? Who said they were losing people to the Na'Vi?

The only comment we get from Quarritch is that Na'Vi are hard to kill and they dip their arrows in neurotoxins, none of which require any RDA personnell to have died in the fighting. He spends way more time talking about the wildlife than the locals during his safety brief.

Why bother to warn the RDA about the neurotoxin dipped arrows if he knows no one's ever been shot with one?

All of which can be attributed to the evil imperialist humans in your movie?

Why do all incidents need to be the RDA's fault for them to be evil pricks?

They need to all be the RDA's fault for the Na'vi to be the pure space elves resisting the evil alien invaders that the movie is pushing them as.

No, you see that "might" means you're reserving the right to reject the principle if you don't like how well I've presented my case for how vital the Unobtainium is.

What the fuck?

I accept that sometimes it is justified to do bad things in the name of the greater good.

Obviously it means you need the establish the justification first!

"Bad things" is fairly nonspecific. Do you believe it is ever justified to do what the RDA in this film did? If the lives of 20 billion people really were at stake, do you believe the RDA's actions would be justified in that case?

I see no point establishing that this was the case if you're not going to accept the lives of 20 billion filthy humans as justification for despoiling the pristine landscape of Pandora without the consent of the magical native ammerican analogues.

Like I said, my suspension of disbelief is taxed when a corrupt corperate executive is making a stupid decision to the detriment of profit. Making a stupid decision in pursuit of profit I can buy.

Look, he pursued the biggest unobtainium deposit in the area because it means his limited mining equipment can get the most bang for the buck.

You see, starting a mining operation with the sort of limited resources the RDA had has to be difficult and expensive. It's doubly so if you need to move the base, along with all its technical facilities and the gigantic refinery.

By gunning for the largest deposit he could find, Selfridge saves tremendous costs over time (because he won't have to plow another road through the jungle in 5 years to get to another deposit). The Omaticaya are a comparatively minor obstacle in his mind, because he doesn't really consider them a threat, more an annoyance. And once those dozers are one their way, he's comitted: either the Omaticaya move, or he makes them move.

Why is this decision stupid, when considered from the profit perspective? It's only stupid if you assume PR concerns were actually more important for Selfridge than profit and mining goals and pleasing the Board, rather than a way to get those annoying environmentalists on Earth off his back.

It's stupid because if he doesn't provoke the natives while cut off from earth on an alien death world that he happens to be trapped on, he won't have to bring over a private army in the first place, and can dedicate that cargo space on the ludicrusly expensive interstellar spaceship to more mining equipment.

True of False: Earth in this film is facing a resource crisis.

They built gigantic interstellar starships before they even knew unobtainium existed, purely for exploration, so...probably not.

Okay, so you're of the opinion of the other poster that earth is in posession of effectively infinite energy and mineral resources due to being able to go interstellar, and thus any pursuit of further resources of any kind is nothing but greed. Just so we are sure we're on the same page.

True of False: Earth's biosphere is effectively dead.

It's heavily damaged, but "mean bush" still exists in Venezuela at the least.

Where Jake faught, yet was too ignorant of jungle environments to not touch anything that glowed at him like a first grader?

True or False: The artificial means of food production being used to feed 20 billion people on earth require resources.

They do require resources.

Okay, so you accept one out of three. Now I know how much educating we'll have to do.

I argue more than "somewhat".

That's just semantics.

No it isn't.

What do you think the "people on earth are grey" referred to, exactly?

Whoa, one symbollic line is all you need to come to sweeping conclusions about the situation on Earth? That's pretty awesome

I realize it must seem that way to a lesser intelect. Talk about how humans' diet is causing them to all look like crap then making the leap to some form of malnutrition isn't something everyone is capable of. Must seem like magic.

Is the only thing earth had to offer technological whiz-bangs? We do have more than that, recall. We have spiritual texts from a thousand different faiths if the Na'vi are interested in exploring new ideas about one's relationship to the divine. We have centuries of acccumulated litterature, whether they're interested in light entertainment or exploring new worlds through imagination. We have interstellar spacecraft if they want to explore new worlds bodily.

We actually do have wonders to satisfy desires both gross and subtle.

But the Na'vi want none of it, need none of it.

Hell, given the Na'vi's warlike culture, we could offer to sell them weapons to let them dominate their neighbors.

Okay,look, that's exactly the problem. You obviously think of the Na'Vi as just blue humans. Worse, you think of them as blue XXI century humans, and thus think you can negotiate with them in the same way that you would negotiate with Russia, and if they don't play by these rules, they are unreasonable and thus worthy of nothing but contempt.

You're right of course. Thinking of them as people who could potentially be worthy of respect as people is a bit of a leap. Especially in light of their suacidal smugness and self-superiority in the face of all evidence to the contrary.

That's just projecting your own attitudes and desires upon a people who live on an alien world. There's both a civilizational and environmental gap between them and us, and assuming they will have the same ideas of fair exchange or the same desires or the same attitudes as a wall street CEO is just...stupid. I can't find a better word to describe this.

Actually, I think they know what they want, and that when offering them anything, they ought to be able to articuate something they want. Instead they claim they want litterally nothing. Maybe that's true and they're living an absolutely perfect existence by their own standards, but that raises even more eyebrows than the already contrived Pandora biosphere.

Parachutes to keep their children from dying when they fall off their banshees seem like something they could use. But then, how much they value the lives of those children is something of an open question given how little the masacre is mentioned.

You presume they'd want to study our religions, when they don't even have a concept of religion.

I point out that if they have no interest in the material, we have things to trade other than the material.

You presume they are interested in dominating their neighbors, when their concept of war is possibly quite different than ours.

We see their wariors. We see how the Na'vi act when they go to war with the RDA. This is not that alien a thing.

You also assume the RDA was willing to give them literally anything,

Because that was what was presented. Another point I used to arrive at my "unobtainium is really fucking imortant to humanity" conclusion.

including rides to other worlds on their hugely expensive starships, which is stupid both in the above context and our quiant Earthly XXI century one.

You think it's stupid that a race that values interstellar travel and exploration would want to share that gift with another civilization when they're encountered?

And, lastly, you presume each of these items is fair trade for their ancestral lands, which is a value judgement you made, in your mind, based on your own preconceptions, because it's not your ancestral home you would have had to give up. How easy do you think it would be to get Poles to abandon Warsaw, forever, with all its landmarks and museums and centers of government, and let it be turned into an open pit mine? Do you think they'd agree to it if they got weapons or philospophical texts from an alien civilization?

There you go assuming the Na'vi are just like us again.

Actually, given litterally anything an alien civilization can offer, their prospective on the universe, the knowledge to work wonders unimaginable to us before, the possibility of seeing worlds beyond with our own eyes, even for a few of us. In exchange for my home town being bulldozed and turned into a pit mine, I'd call that a trade I got the better of. But then, maybe I have more imagination about the things a massively technologically superior civilization can offer than you or the Na'vi do.

In which case, Grace just did a really poor job communicating just how far beyond them technologically earth was.

I don't generally think people who don't give a shit about others or the environment have crossed the line of deserving to be murdered on sight. Apparently we disagree on this point.

So if someone plowed a bulldozer through your house with all your belongings inside and then declared that plot of land was now his, you wouldn't be angry?

If he didn't try to talk to me first, or let me name my own price, or give me time to move my stuff, yes, I would be upset. Otherwise, we don't have much of a problem.

Or that the situation is not yet despirate enough that they feel obligated to at least try to do this right.

So what is it, then? Malnutrition and tethering on the edge of mass starvation, or merely a threat of future decline?

Malnutrition and tetering on the edge of mass starvation, but with the projection that we can probably avoid more than a billion people dropping dead in the streets before things get so despirate that we're willing to accept that the imperialists were right after all. Like I said, the humans in this movie are acting better than I would ever expect humankind to act.

I only think the RDA should have destroyed Pandora if they're going to be the actual villains of the piece. Since they weren't, it's fine that they didn't destroy Pandora.

Why do you think there are no other considerations for the RDA? Corporations can send their mercenaries to rape, beat up and abuse workers in diamond mines while also presenting a nice and happy outside image to shareholders.

They won't send their mercenaries to outright genocide locals due to PR concerns, but that doesn't make them virtuous.Just liars.

Again, don't the corperations need the workers in those diamond mines alive in order to get the diamonds out of the ground?

Yeah, I'm not sure you'd be wondering at Pandora so much if it was fractal ice wastes filled with tesselated banshee-slicers and chromium crystal people, even if that had just as much systemic complexity and interesting alien culture. Avatar looks like an exagerrated idealised cartoon jungle with idealised tribal peoples to tap into enviro-luddite fantasies as much as it taps into milwanker ones. Sure you'll condemn space marines blowing up photogenic blue catpeople and pretty jungles, but would you support cancelling mining because a group-mind of sentient crystaline microbes live in a desert planet's water table?

Well, I would. And not just because it's wrong to murder sentient beings ; There's a significant self-preservation context to that decision. In a universe where we discovered sentient life, wrecking things we don't understand with abandon can backfire more horribly than we can imagine. It could be receiving sanctions from Space UN, it could be outright destruction by holier-than-thou Pandoramakers, or something comparatively more mundane like a nanovirus released by the crystals in self-defence.

Interestingly enough, there were several sci-fi stories which handled that exact question - even Stargate did that in a couple episodes!

Of course, since it's so damn hard to sympathize with sentient crystals, I'm sure the fraction of people going "fuck them, humanity FUCK YEAH" would be far, far higher than what happened with Avatar.

I'm more concerned with the people who can't seem to sympathise with humanity.

Interestingly enough, there were several sci-fi stories which handled that exact question - even Stargate did that in a couple episodes!

Of course; I was thinking of Trek when I wrote that (TNG : Home Soil) and I'm sure the story was done in 1930s pulp sci-fi at some point.

Of course, since it's so damn hard to sympathize with sentient crystals, I'm sure the fraction of people going "fuck them, humanity FUCK YEAH" would be far, far higher than what happened with Avatar.

Actually I'm not so sure. Ersatz-US Marines vs ersatz native Americans instantly ignites tribal loyalties and racism, and blue spear-chucking giants are a direct physical and psychological threat to first-world audiences (even moreso when they can seduce our marines as well as kill them!). Sentient crystals is pretty abstract and even if they have the ability to shoot death rays they wouldn't register as the same kind of threat. I mean sure a lot of people would be fine with destroying them for short-term profit, but I wouldn't expect them to get so ho-hah about declaring war on sentient crystals vs declaring war on a more humanlike enemy.

I think you may have a point there. The Na'vi are so human, people like me have no problem judging them by human standards.

When i saw the Avatar movie, it struck me as somewhat odd that the humans didn't consider mining the Unobtanium under the Home tree from underground. Sure, underground mining is way more expensive, but i'd argue the costs would be comparable to the cost of that military operation they put together to attack the Home Tree. And generally speaking, if i would land on a planet to mine some Unobtanium, why would i artificially limit my mining technology options to pit mining? Especially if it is a jungle world.

How is it comparable in cost to the military operation? It requires entirely different machines, construction of mining shafts, elevators (for people and raw material), walking bracings, plus of course things like methane sensor systems, additional survival/rescue equipment for the miners...

If you want to get at the unobtainium under the Home Tree from your base, you will need to mine a hundred kilometer long horizontal tunnel, working with equipment that has to be made and maintained using local means, limited fabricator time and uncommonly spare parts from Earth, that cost some million Space Dollars per kilogram to ship, with a lead time of ten years.And it still doesn't guarantee you won't fuck things up, like causing a massive cave-in that will destroy the Home Tree.

Sorry, but pit mining is trivial compared to that. There's a reason why it was the first mining method to be used, ever.

Under those circumstances, it seems very odd indeed that they'd waste precious space on their ship that could be spent on better mining equipment on useless things like marines and combat mech suits.

Also if we accept that the non-futuristic weapons are an artificial limitation imposed on the corperation restricting them from using truly modern military hardware, I'd expect them to be using the full force of their sci-fi mining equipment, which ought to make options other than slash and burn feasable.

I do not hate aliens. I simply do not value them, their lives or their happiness on any level close to that of humans. Similarly, I value humans vastly more than I do other plants and animals native to our own island in the cosmos. (Hence why I am able to eat in good conscience, even though by doing so I bring about the death of other organisms.)

But why would you assign Marvin the Martian a low moral value simply because you place a low value on wild beasts? I can see clear, non-hypocritical reasons for not caring much whether a cow lives or dies. But when we're talking about a being that has as much claim to intelligence and culture and a future with potential in it as you do... how does that work, exactly?

And where do you draw the line? Suppose there were two related quasi-human on the planet Earth, both descended from homo erectus, both about equally intelligent, but if they could interbreed, they would produce only sterile hybrids- about as closely related as lions and tigers, or horses and donkeys, in other words.

Would you regard members of the other species as being as something to be slaughtered out of hand like so many malarial mosquitoes if they became inconvenient?

Marvin the Martian lost all claim to human compassion when he decided to casually blow up an inhabited planet rather than wait until it moved out of the way of his view of Venus.

How is it comparable in cost to the military operation? It requires entirely different machines, construction of mining shafts, elevators (for people and raw material), walking bracings, plus of course things like methane sensor systems, additional survival/rescue equipment for the miners...

They already have unmanned, remote-controlled mining equipment for their pit mining operation, so why not use robots for deep mining as well?
It would substancial lessen the security requirements for the tunnels.

The problem is that a tunnel collapse will still stop output from the mine for a long time. The longer the tunnel, the greater the risk of a collapse somewhere along its length. And if a man like Selfridge has to choose between "underground mine that will, statistically speaking, extract one ton of ore per day and be working during the 90% of the time that there are no cave-ins along a hundred kilometer tunnel" and "open pit mine that will extract two tons per day and work all the time," he'll choose the latter.

The unobtainium is so valuable that if you're willing to kill people to get it, you'd have to be out of your mind not to kill people to get it. Because you can recoup the costs of the bullets you fired during the killing with a few milligrams of the stuff.

Sorry, but fighting a war against an intrenched population living on a death world is expensive as hell. The choice between moving the mining site (which we'll have to do anyway, since we're currently moving it to home tree) versus fighting that war means the only way you make the choice to have the war so far away from your resource base is if you're too stupid to realize that the war will be expensive, or if you're bloodthirsty enough to put killing ahead of profit.

[Simon_Jester]

If you're going to have a vendetta, at least don't make up idiot bullshit or keep bringing up years-old grievances against someone over something they said on an Internet forum god knows how long ago and haven't said since.

So I am the one pursuing a vendetta? Last I checked, I was not I who was going around in random threads where he has yet to show his face posting stuff to the effect of, "Those moronic primitives like Starglider think [Insert-here], the logical response is to keep them away from any kind of authority."

I don't care, Darth. I have my own opinions about your own opinions, but it takes two to start a shit-flinging contest. And since you're the one who actually took the trouble to show up in the thread and express your opinion that if we meet intelligent aliens who present an inconvenience we should feel little guilt about exterminating them. All he did was make a stupid and obnoxious wisecrack.

I might think Starglider's ideology is sociopathic and morally bankrupt, but I am hardly the one of us obsessing over the other. I came into this thread to comment only specifically because he made reference to me in his first post. Otherwise I would have left it well enough alone.

You think he's a sociopathic fuck, he thinks you're a sociopathic fuck, so why don't you quit trading the damn insults, let him have his childish digs, and move on with your life?

As to the rest, while the topic is interesting, at the current time I have little enough time getting into what easily becomes a long and time-consuming discussion. I realise in hindsight that with that in mind, I might have done well not to post at all. Yet now I have. Still, I must ask you for a rain check on the matter, seeing holidays are upcoming and my immediate future will be rather busy in real life. My apologies.

All right- but why don't you try to quit wandering around looking for fights with Starglider? It makes you look dumber than it makes him look, by and large.

But why would you assign Marvin the Martian a low moral value simply because you place a low value on wild beasts? I can see clear, non-hypocritical reasons for not caring much whether a cow lives or dies. But when we're talking about a being that has as much claim to intelligence and culture and a future with potential in it as you do... how does that work, exactly?

And where do you draw the line? Suppose there were two related quasi-human on the planet Earth, both descended from homo erectus, both about equally intelligent, but if they could interbreed, they would produce only sterile hybrids- about as closely related as lions and tigers, or horses and donkeys, in other words.

Would you regard members of the other species as being as something to be slaughtered out of hand like so many malarial mosquitoes if they became inconvenient?

Marvin the Martian lost all claim to human compassion when he decided to casually blow up an inhabited planet rather than wait until it moved out of the way of his view of Venus.

...Taking Looney Tunes seriously. Not knowing a rhetorical device when you see it. You really are too literal-minded for your own good, you know that?

Well, that or you're a troll with more time than usual on his hands- PeZook, you sure you want to keep up with this guy? I get the feeling he can trade hours of free time with you on a one for one basis and come out ahead.

The problem is that a tunnel collapse will still stop output from the mine for a long time. The longer the tunnel, the greater the risk of a collapse somewhere along its length. And if a man like Selfridge has to choose between "underground mine that will, statistically speaking, extract one ton of ore per day and be working during the 90% of the time that there are no cave-ins along a hundred kilometer tunnel" and "open pit mine that will extract two tons per day and work all the time," he'll choose the latter.

The unobtainium is so valuable that if you're willing to kill people to get it, you'd have to be out of your mind not to kill people to get it. Because you can recoup the costs of the bullets you fired during the killing with a few milligrams of the stuff.

Sorry, but fighting a war against an intrenched population living on a death world is expensive as hell. The choice between moving the mining site (which we'll have to do anyway, since we're currently moving it to home tree) versus fighting that war means the only way you make the choice to have the war so far away from your resource base is if you're too stupid to realize that the war will be expensive, or if you're bloodthirsty enough to put killing ahead of profit.

...That makes no sense at all. The point of the damn exercise is that unobtanium is so valuable it makes economic sense to fly it back from Alpha goddamn Centauri in starships. Even a few hundred kilos a day of the stuff will be worth any financial price you could possibly have to pay to get it.

And if you're willing to spend blood as well as money to get it- well, basically the only limit on how many people you'd be willing to kill to get it is your own ruthlessness and bloodthirstiness. Someone like Stalin would probably be willing to kill a million people to keep an unobtanium mine going, given how valuable that material is- and it would be worth it, if you look at lives as being interchangeable with money.

So unobtainium forces us to answer the question: are there things it is never right to do? Or are there only things it is only wrong to do until someone dangles a big enough carrot in front of your nose? That's the real moral question at the heart of the movie, which you are trying desperately to obscure. Is RDA right to be willing to kill and dispossess and destroy what they don't understand, in exchange for a near-infinite amount of money? Because if any amount of money can make it acceptable to do that, then unobtanium is probably worth that amount of money. If no amount of money can make it acceptable, if you would need actual lives to be directly at stake, then no, the unobtanium is not worth it, whatever you may say.

It's interesting that you say "we-" that you identify with RDA that much, or failing that regard them as the point men of the collective human endeavour... rather than as Space Rio Tinto. You seem to have very little basis for this, except random inferences you pull practically out of thin air.

[Xess]

Just to be clear here Cesario, exactly what part of the movie are you getting "Earth has no plant life and everyone is slowly starving" bit? From what you've posted I think you're talking about the part when Jake plugs into the Tree of Souls to beg for help. A scene where it can hardly be claimed he is speaking of the literal facts of physical life on Earth as opposed to spiritual life on Earth.

Of course in the extended edition we get a few scenes on Earth. They're set in a very built up city, it looks very depressing. However when we see Jake get into a bar fight we don't see that all the people in the bar drinking Budweiser are starving. They certainly don't look "gray". Mostly they set up the fact that Jake really hates his life on Earth. I suppose from them you can claim that life as a poor person in a city isn't very good, but hell that goes for today too.

[Cesario]

If you're going to have a vendetta, at least don't make up idiot bullshit or keep bringing up years-old grievances against someone over something they said on an Internet forum god knows how long ago and haven't said since.

So I am the one pursuing a vendetta? Last I checked, I was not I who was going around in random threads where he has yet to show his face posting stuff to the effect of, "Those moronic primitives like Starglider think [Insert-here], the logical response is to keep them away from any kind of authority."

I don't care, Darth. I have my own opinions about your own opinions, but it takes two to start a shit-flinging contest. And since you're the one who actually took the trouble to show up in the thread and express your opinion that if we meet intelligent aliens who present an inconvenience we should feel little guilt about exterminating them. All he did was make a stupid and obnoxious wisecrack.

I might think Starglider's ideology is sociopathic and morally bankrupt, but I am hardly the one of us obsessing over the other. I came into this thread to comment only specifically because he made reference to me in his first post. Otherwise I would have left it well enough alone.

You think he's a sociopathic fuck, he thinks you're a sociopathic fuck, so why don't you quit trading the damn insults, let him have his childish digs, and move on with your life?

As to the rest, while the topic is interesting, at the current time I have little enough time getting into what easily becomes a long and time-consuming discussion. I realise in hindsight that with that in mind, I might have done well not to post at all. Yet now I have. Still, I must ask you for a rain check on the matter, seeing holidays are upcoming and my immediate future will be rather busy in real life. My apologies.

All right- but why don't you try to quit wandering around looking for fights with Starglider? It makes you look dumber than it makes him look, by and large.

I haven't been paying enough attention to know who's in the right here, but that's still stupid advice.

But why would you assign Marvin the Martian a low moral value simply because you place a low value on wild beasts? I can see clear, non-hypocritical reasons for not caring much whether a cow lives or dies. But when we're talking about a being that has as much claim to intelligence and culture and a future with potential in it as you do... how does that work, exactly?

And where do you draw the line? Suppose there were two related quasi-human on the planet Earth, both descended from homo erectus, both about equally intelligent, but if they could interbreed, they would produce only sterile hybrids- about as closely related as lions and tigers, or horses and donkeys, in other words.

Would you regard members of the other species as being as something to be slaughtered out of hand like so many malarial mosquitoes if they became inconvenient?

Marvin the Martian lost all claim to human compassion when he decided to casually blow up an inhabited planet rather than wait until it moved out of the way of his view of Venus.

...Taking Looney Tunes seriously. Not knowing a rhetorical device when you see it. You really are too literal-minded for your own good, you know that?

Well, that or you're a troll with more time than usual on his hands- PeZook, you sure you want to keep up with this guy? I get the feeling he can trade hours of free time with you on a one for one basis and come out ahead.

So you came into a moral debate, brought up a figure who's okay with casually genociding an entire planet because it offends his view, and don't realize that wasn't the best choice for an alien that we should feel compassion for? And I'm the troll for pointing out the fact that you made a stupid call. Got it.

And I love the "you're obviously a troll with no life" barb. Check out DW's front page for the obvious answer on that one, dipshit.

The problem is that a tunnel collapse will still stop output from the mine for a long time. The longer the tunnel, the greater the risk of a collapse somewhere along its length. And if a man like Selfridge has to choose between "underground mine that will, statistically speaking, extract one ton of ore per day and be working during the 90% of the time that there are no cave-ins along a hundred kilometer tunnel" and "open pit mine that will extract two tons per day and work all the time," he'll choose the latter.

The unobtainium is so valuable that if you're willing to kill people to get it, you'd have to be out of your mind not to kill people to get it. Because you can recoup the costs of the bullets you fired during the killing with a few milligrams of the stuff.

Sorry, but fighting a war against an intrenched population living on a death world is expensive as hell. The choice between moving the mining site (which we'll have to do anyway, since we're currently moving it to home tree) versus fighting that war means the only way you make the choice to have the war so far away from your resource base is if you're too stupid to realize that the war will be expensive, or if you're bloodthirsty enough to put killing ahead of profit.

...That makes no sense at all. The point of the damn exercise is that unobtanium is so valuable it makes economic sense to fly it back from Alpha goddamn Centauri in starships. Even a few hundred kilos a day of the stuff will be worth any financial price you could possibly have to pay to get it.

And if you're willing to spend blood as well as money to get it- well, basically the only limit on how many people you'd be willing to kill to get it is your own ruthlessness and bloodthirstiness. Someone like Stalin would probably be willing to kill a million people to keep an unobtanium mine going, given how valuable that material is- and it would be worth it, if you look at lives as being interchangeable with money.

So unobtainium forces us to answer the question: are there things it is never right to do? Or are there only things it is only wrong to do until someone dangles a big enough carrot in front of your nose? That's the real moral question at the heart of the movie, which you are trying desperately to obscure. Is RDA right to be willing to kill and dispossess and destroy what they don't understand, in exchange for a near-infinite amount of money? Because if any amount of money can make it acceptable to do that, then unobtanium is probably worth that amount of money.

Which again leads back to the question of why not just nuke the damn planet from orbit and make the process even cheaper? Why is the villain not doing this when he has the power to do so, would make more money more easily that way, and would experience a lower cost in lives and in bringing along useless military equipment and personel who can't help extract the precious substance from the ground? We're positing that the RDA is pure evil, so why not do precisely this?

If no amount of money can make it acceptable, if you would need actual lives to be directly at stake, then no, the unobtanium is not worth it, whatever you may say.

Except there are lives at stake. 20 billion of them.

It's interesting that you say "we-" that you identify with RDA that much, or failing that regard them as the point men of the collective human endeavour... rather than as Space Rio Tinto. You seem to have very little basis for this, except random inferences you pull practically out of thin air.

Space travel in Avatar isn't casual enough that they can do this without the support and assistance of the rest of the human race. The RDA's hands being tied by regulations from people who are actually trying to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past is a plot point. Like it or not, the RDA here do represent humanity, and they're conducting themselves far better than I would have imagined in any universe short of utopian ones like Star Trek.

Just to be clear here Cesario, exactly what part of the movie are you getting "Earth has no plant life and everyone is slowly starving" bit? From what you've posted I think you're talking about the part when Jake plugs into the Tree of Souls to beg for help. A scene where it can hardly be claimed he is speaking of the literal facts of physical life on Earth as opposed to spiritual life on Earth.

Of course in the extended edition we get a few scenes on Earth. They're set in a very built up city, it looks very depressing. However when we see Jake get into a bar fight we don't see that all the people in the bar drinking Budweiser are starving. They certainly don't look "gray". Mostly they set up the fact that Jake really hates his life on Earth. I suppose from them you can claim that life as a poor person in a city isn't very good, but hell that goes for today too.

Why does Grace need to adapt Pandora life to restore the earth's biosphere if the earth's biosphere doesn't need restoring?

[Simon_Jester]

So you came into a moral debate, brought up a figure who's okay with casually genociding an entire planet because it offends his view, and don't realize that wasn't the best choice for an alien that we should feel compassion for? And I'm the troll for pointing out the fact that you made a stupid call. Got it.

"Marvin the Martian" was a generic stand-in, used in a throwaway illustration of concept, mostly because it rhymes. Only you seem to want to get down to details of Looney Tunes plots, rather than address the question it was meant to illustrate.

You're missing the forest for the trees. Which seems to be a habit for you- rather than look at arguments of substance, you look at the details. This is the mark of someone who seeks to waste other people's time.

...That makes no sense at all. The point of the damn exercise is that unobtanium is so valuable it makes economic sense to fly it back from Alpha goddamn Centauri in starships. Even a few hundred kilos a day of the stuff will be worth any financial price you could possibly have to pay to get it.

And if you're willing to spend blood as well as money to get it- well, basically the only limit on how many people you'd be willing to kill to get it is your own ruthlessness and bloodthirstiness. Someone like Stalin would probably be willing to kill a million people to keep an unobtanium mine going, given how valuable that material is- and it would be worth it, if you look at lives as being interchangeable with money.

So unobtainium forces us to answer the question: are there things it is never right to do? Or are there only things it is only wrong to do until someone dangles a big enough carrot in front of your nose? That's the real moral question at the heart of the movie, which you are trying desperately to obscure. Is RDA right to be willing to kill and dispossess and destroy what they don't understand, in exchange for a near-infinite amount of money? Because if any amount of money can make it acceptable to do that, then unobtanium is probably worth that amount of money.

Which again leads back to the question of why not just nuke the damn planet from orbit and make the process even cheaper? Why is the villain not doing this when he has the power to do so, would make more money more easily that way, and would experience a lower cost in lives and in bringing along useless military equipment and personel who can't help extract the precious substance from the ground? We're positing that the RDA is pure evil, so why not do precisely this?

There are degrees of evil- the RDA is not Stalin, and unlike Stalin they are presumably accountable to legal authorities back home. "We" are not positing that the RDA is pure evil; "I" am positing that they are like mining companies throughout history only IN SPACE, while "you" are positing a wall of whatever nonsense lets you carry on the debate.

If no amount of money can make it acceptable, if you would need actual lives to be directly at stake, then no, the unobtanium is not worth it, whatever you may say.

Except there are lives at stake. 20 billion of them.

"Whatever you may say," I said.

You say there are lives at stake. 20 billion of them. I say there aren't. Now where are we? Where's your positive evidence for this, and where's the explanation that deals with the mountain of negative evidence, things would expect to see, but don't see, if unobtainium is really all that's keeping mankind from going extinct? Like, say, government oversight of RDA's operations? Or for that matter an actual government-run mine to keep a single corporation from owning a total monopoly on a mineral humanity needs to stay alive?

It's interesting that you say "we-" that you identify with RDA that much, or failing that regard them as the point men of the collective human endeavour... rather than as Space Rio Tinto. You seem to have very little basis for this, except random inferences you pull practically out of thin air.

Space travel in Avatar isn't casual enough that they can do this without the support and assistance of the rest of the human race. The RDA's hands being tied by regulations from people who are actually trying to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past is a plot point. Like it or not, the RDA here do represent humanity, and they're conducting themselves far better than I would have imagined in any universe short of utopian ones like Star Trek.

You have a remarkable lack of imagination, except when imaginative thinking would let you avoid admitting a mistake.

Just to be clear here Cesario, exactly what part of the movie are you getting "Earth has no plant life and everyone is slowly starving" bit? From what you've posted I think you're talking about the part when Jake plugs into the Tree of Souls to beg for help. A scene where it can hardly be claimed he is speaking of the literal facts of physical life on Earth as opposed to spiritual life on Earth.

Of course in the extended edition we get a few scenes on Earth. They're set in a very built up city, it looks very depressing. However when we see Jake get into a bar fight we don't see that all the people in the bar drinking Budweiser are starving. They certainly don't look "gray". Mostly they set up the fact that Jake really hates his life on Earth. I suppose from them you can claim that life as a poor person in a city isn't very good, but hell that goes for today too.

Why does Grace need to adapt Pandora life to restore the earth's biosphere if the earth's biosphere doesn't need restoring?

Earth could have a biosphere of algae and jellyfish and so on, and people could be living on algae soup and jellyfish and pollution-tolerant rice cultivars and so on, with most species being extinct or very very endangered in the wild. Grace could be interested in Pandora life mostly for its own sake, with a side order of being interested in various experimental gene-splicing techniques, without humanity being in danger of actual extinction. It would suck, but it wouldn't mean humanity doomed to mass die-offs without the unobtainium.

Frankly, I can't think of a reason why unobtainium would make the difference between survival and death for a heavily overpopulated humanity. How did we feed all those people before there was unobtainium? How did we feed them while building giant starships to go mine it? What, exactly, does the unobtainium do that is so damn critical to the basic minimal ability to feed people? You'd think this would be fairly important to the plot of the movie, if they were really trying to make it look the way you say it looks.