Avatar is about capitalism

[email protected]

Yes it definitely makes you weird. Turn the brain off and consume the media like a good little sheep (/s if it wasn't obvious)

[email protected]

Difference being the colonists of our world left perfectly habitable areas. In avatar the earth isn't habitable to most and so the colonists are actually kind of sympathetic. The real bad guys never have to leave earth but because it's Cameron it falls on the poors to play the bad guys

[email protected]

The word you're looking for is imperialism, and that's definitely not unavoidable human nature

[email protected]

You know the point I'm making though: there are indeed precious resources that can't be mined from asteroids. It is not inconceivable that there are organic compounds out there with unique properties that can't simply be made in a lab (e.g. ancient wood properties compared to new forest) and exist in a state that is economical for easy extraction.

[email protected]

Avatar is just recycled CGI Fern Gully anyway

qyron

It's not inconceivable but I will insist on the point that technology is the right tool to solve such issues.

It was inconceivable a few decades ago - even a couple of years ago! - several medical advances that are today used routinely.

It is a fun theoretical discussion to entertain but we would reach no real conclusion.

[email protected]

Thx. Thought I missed something

[email protected]

Or when they blast a few square kilometers of forest from orbit to make space for an alien whale refinery. It may say something about us and I hope to understand it one day.

[email protected]

This annoyed me also.

If the Avatar universe has physics like ours, which it looks like it does from the way things move etc..

The protoplanetry disk that the planet formed from, must have had the unobtanium, since it is so evenly spread around the later formed planet.

Yes, there are higher concentrations in various places, which could have come from impact events in the past; if this is the case the impactors are likely from the local asteroid belt or equivalent.

The unobtanium must be available, in a much easier to extract form, in asteroids in the soloar system or the moons of Pandora.

Either way, a mineral is a terrible maguffin for a space faring civilization.

In the second movie, the whale brain juice is a much better maguffin, but still kinda stupid for a technologically advanced species.

Assume that to get interstellar travel, with the suspended animation and brain beaming tech we are shown, humans are a good 200 years ahead of where we are now....given that they can also make fully functional alien bodies from scratch, that can breed and pass on genetic material to what look like viable offspring. The level of synthetic biology expertise must be insane, and they can't make this brain juice....it is just stupid.

[email protected]

[email protected]

Are there even any indigenous people in Tarzan? I haven't read the book, but from the movie I only remember his gorilla buddy and the little elephant. I think Tarzan is more about rebelling against civilization in general, instead of colonization in specific (which James Cameron's Avatar is). It's very post-industrialization in that sense.

[email protected]

That was not a subtle theme...

[email protected]

Tbf, the air on Pandora is toxic to humans. That was the entire point of using the avatars in the first movie... Wouldn't exactly call that suitable for sustaining the life of our species

And that material they found in the planet was some fictional things humans had never encountered before.

[email protected]

Aliens, Mech suits and remotely controlled vat-grown body doubles aren't enough to make it sci Fi?

[email protected]

It's a motif as old as time. Foreign invader getting Stockholm Syndrome with the natives. Another famous example is Dances With Wolves. That film called The Great Wall as well. Some versions of Robin Hood has it. Anthropologists call it Going Native, which is what Carlos Castañeda did.

But they're not all about economic expansionism

[email protected]

Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism.

[email protected]

Pandora was a moon, not a planet.

𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍

Pollution makes their species stronger; this doesn't imply an individual preference.

Idiots walking off cliffs doesn't make the survivors like cliffs; it teaches them to avoid them.

That said, evolution can be a real crap shoot, and you never know what sort of perverse effects you'll get: like us loving sugar so much we eat ourselves into diabetes.

[email protected]

There could be many reasons:

The thing you are mining is actually very rare, and although it could be elsewhere, it's the only place you found it. This is the case in Avatar. The Unobtanium they are mining is not found anywhere else.
It's easier to mine on a habitable planet. You don't have all the extreme difficulty of operating in space or a planet/moon with no atmosphere. In Avatar workers can freely operate without any special equipment, using just a gas mask, and don't need to be astronauts.
You are assuming they found Pandora to mine on it. They probably found it through scientific research, and the mining angle only appeared later when the resource was found.

FuglyDuck

Nope.

Science fiction is an exploration of how science or technology changes society, or how society might respond to stuff, or how a society with a given tech might exist; it’s a form of speculative fiction.

Avatar isn’t that. It’s supposed to be an indictment of capitalist greed.

Just because it has technology doesn’t make it “sci-fi” and the elements that might are just a maghuffin to explain what they’re doing there. It could have just as easily been gold. Or diamonds or alien art.

Take Marry Shelly’s Frankenstein and compare it to say, avengers.