Cesario wrote:Ah yes, the old chant that technology is evil, and only by going back to the days before having clean water, food avalible during the winter season, and prenatal care, can we truly be enlightened and decent people. All advocated over the most advanced computer network mankind has ever created, mind you.
Check your reading comprehension. I did not say that technology was evil. I said that for the kind of person who fawns over military warmachines, somehow they find the concept of the Na'vi and others like them - people living in communion with a nature spirit actually made manifest - somehow horrible, disconcerting, frightening or loathsome or terrible. And I think this is very interesting.
Let me present a sequence of events for you.
That is nothing remotely like the situation in Avatar. You conflate Selfridge's comments on the market price of unobtanium, and some imagined dialogue or information never even mentioned in the movie, to concoct your terminal sickness and rare disease cure analogy when in the movie, unobtanium was not once ever stated to be the cure for anything.
It's more like "you have terminal sickness and need a rare bone marrow transplant, Shroom may or may not have that same type of bone marrow, so you abduct Shroom and... steal his kidneys. then a village or two get bombed".
Even IF unobtanium was vital for humanity's survival despite this never being mentioned in the movie. They could've still mined unobtanium elsewhere without firebombing people's population centers,.
I don't know if you noticed this, but at the start of the story, the Na'vi had kicked out the nice scientists who were on their side running that school, who continued to be on their side, even to the point of dying for them over the course of the story. (Also note that they had to use Avatars in order to even get that much talking in. World-tree forbid they talk with these sky demons when they aren't the right skin color.)
Uh, the school had a trailer, which humans could live in. It's more like "They had to use Avatars in order to walk freely outside in an environment where the air is freaking ammonia, without having to bring gas masks and shit, and also to ease interactions with aliens and make them feel more comfortable and also not get crushed by these huge guys."
Did the Na'vi evict the humans from that school? As in, forcefully or otherwise, tell them to get out? Or is this another one of your imaginations? Or was the school merely abandoned because the Na'vi stopped going there, because they got pissed that the humans would not take "no we won't give up our homes for your stripmine" for an answer?
Because, uh, Jake and Grace and Michelle Rodriguez were able to work in that trailer in that school freely - and this was before they allied with the Na'vi. I think the Na'vi didn't force anyone out. I think the Na'vi just stopped going to school.
So... according to you
Not only is "This rock is expensive" = "THE FATE OF THE WORLD AND SURVIVAL OF OUR SPECIES"
But also "We're not going to the humans' school anymore" = "WE DONT NEED YOUR EDUCATION HEY TEACHER LEAVE THOSE KIDS ALONE" *blue skinned Pink Floyd attacks humans*
The chemical weapons that you so decry? They were to flush the Na'vi out of Hometree so that when they blew it up, they could minimize the casualties. This was supposed to be a symbolic act, not a genocidal one. Destroy things so you can bring the other guy back to the negotating table while killing as few people as you can.
It was a violent act that still ended up with their homes, and god knows how many people were stuck inside there, exploded and killed or crushed in the tree-fall.
The importance to earth's survival can be derived from the repeated references to earth being a dead world, and people contniuing to emphasise how important the unobtanium mining is in the same breath.
Sully was the only one who talked about the dead world. Selfridge didn't mention any ecological whatevers, he just prattled on about unobtanium's market value.
Sully's breath in saying "dying world" was a different breath from Selfridge's breath that said "it costs mucho dineros". Unless, you're imagining once more off-screen, that Sully gave Selfridge some mouth to mouth and breathed some air into Selfridge's lungs while sticking his tongue inside Selfridge's mouth for some hot lengua luchadore wrestling, it cannot literally be the same breaths.
As to the possibilities of deposits away from major population centers, I imagine not. The Unobtainium was likely just as artificial as the ecosystem, so it's highly probable that the home trees were either dependent on the resource to grow or were part of the process of creating it. But we'll never know, since efforts to talk to these people about what we know about the mineral and try to cross-reference it with what the natives know about the land don't work so good when the natives refuse to talk to you at all.
You mean to say, there are no deposits away from major population centers? Are you implying that the pre-existing RDA mining operation was also done on another population center that they evicted?
