The Nightstar Zoo

Right, BUT:
Why?

In twelve years time, when they get back to Pandora, there won't be a giant cluster of enemy troops massing for assault at the Internet Tree. It'll just be a tree, with a few "priest" types hanging around maybe. Yes, it's one of Eywa's nerve clusters or something, but they don't much know that. Selfridge outright laughed at the concept and dismissed it. All the humans know is that they went to bomb the cluster of troops, and they got ambushed by a bunch of guys on Dragons, and then a stampede happened and everyone died.

Choosing to strike the internet tree from orbit when they came back would be like if America fired an ICBM at a Church in Vietnam in 1987.

Do we know that they don't know about the Tree, though? They did have (and possibly still do have) access to Sully's video blog (or whatever you want to call it), where it may have been mentioned.

And on a related note, why the heck weren't they recording the transmissions between the avatars and their "drivers"? There was obviously 2-way communications, unless I'm missing something and they actually transferred the driver's mind in totality to the avatar (which makes no sense if popping the pod and waking the driver makes the avatar drop offline).

But then again, if the antagonists were smart, they wouldn't mesh with the inscriptions on the anvils Cameron was trying to drop on the viewers' heads.

Yeah, it's a simple case of sending too much mass of "Bad Ass-Colonels" and "Nature loving-hippie scientists" and not enough mass of "pre-positioned orbital kinetic impactors", also, way too much mass in "roving sawmill" and not nearly enough spent on "actual equipment used for mining stuff"

In fact, I don't remember seeing a single mine of any sort, whether open-pit, traditional, or even just boreholes. This super-valuable stuff that funded the mission: have they been on the planet for like a decade, not counting the initial transit time, all on spec over the ore under the hippie tree all this time? There should be huge equipment that is clearly designed for mauling *rock* visible (I think there were dump trucks shown, though.) and most importantly, there should be equipment for getting bulk product into orbit cheaply. On a planet with lower gravity than earth, that's a no-brainer, orbital cannon. Which would double quite handily as a paris gun if need be.

But I digress. When you plan to take a resource that is literally located under the ancestral homes of a native population, you have to plan for the worst. Well, the second worst, really, if genocide is considered not worse than not taking the resource. And if you're planning a genocide and you're coming from space, the logical solution is to plan an economical genocide using a resource that's eminently available to you: your position.

Well, you sure didn't watch the movie.

Right at the start, as the shuttle was flying in, there were two giant bits of mining equipment sitting in a huge open pit mine. You know, with those big "stair" walls and everything? It was entirely iconic of a mine, and the gear was big enough to scare the hell out of this guy.

Furthermore, no, they have NOT been after the stuff under Hometree all along. Presumably it's only been recently that they've recognised how much cheddar is under hometree. They've been mining elsewhere for decades, profitably. But the stuff under the tree is WAY more concentrated, and so Selfridge figured it'd be a new way to make himself look good and make money.

Nobody, not even Quaritch had signed up for genocide. He was there to keep them alive. They never brought orbital weapons with them on the six year journey, and if they had, they would have been tried and sentenced before they left. Also, weight costs money. They did have to get by with what they could bring until the fabrication gear was online, and even then, it's not a universal constructor.
When the most remarkable and unlikely thing happened and the pesky animals formed an army, only then was Genocide a "valid" option, and so they had to improvise a little. Dropping a pallet of mining explosives out the back of the only craft large enough to carry it, from close enough range that you can't miss, seems sound to me. It would have worked just fine if they didn't stumble into an ambush and anger a planet-sized god.

Please watch the movie and stop talking about orbital weapons. It's getting old.

Chill, stonefish. The fact that you're on the Schlock Mercenary forum and asking people to stop talking about orbital bombardment should be a clue that things are getting heated.

So I was assigned to do a film review of Avatar with two of my amateur journalist colleagues. They liked Avatar. Things went downhill fast when one asked why the Na'vi stone age society would need anything from the humans. I guess they're fine with a hunter-gatherer society's infant mortality rate - what's that, one out of six, one out of seven? Presumably it's being in harmony with nature.

Face it, nature's a right *****. The only way a tech-free people could be in peace with nature was if they lived in rainbow-squirting Fairyland where apple juice falls from the sky and diseases are as extinct as mosquitoes. Even if the Na'vi don't have that dead babies problem, I expect some of them would be interested in firearms, given how they fight deadly animals decade after decade to survive.

Now, we're probably getting way off the narrative, but I don't think the assumption that the Na'vi have zero disease is all that bad of an assumption.

There are a lot of hints that the entire biosphere of that planet is genengineered, either by a predecessor, or by an outside party, for some purpose. Possibly related to the extraction or manufacture of wonderflonium. In which case, there would be no need for many of the difficulties faced by natural stone age societies.

I mean, I can think of no reason why the megafauna on the planet all had an organ whose sole purpose is to allow other organisms to control it. It doesn't seem likely as an evolutionary strategy, unless that evolution was directed. Or skipped.

Of course that leaves one question completely unaddressed by any of the characters in the story we saw: If the biosphere was engineered, what will the engineers think of the human presence when they inevitably return? Getting kicked off by the natives might very well be the best thing that could've happened.

Note that I also don't think that it's a flaw in storytelling. For one thing, It can simply not have even occurred to any of them for a variety of reasons, but also it was unnecessary to address for the story Cameron wanted to tell. It's just some geeky sugar for people to think about.

Earth had a child mortality rate of Pretty Damned High back in the day.

Earth didn't have a sentient ecosystem.

Are you sure that's not one out of seven that survived?

I particularly liked this take on things.

No, I'm not, but one out of seven kids surviving would require every adult woman to bear an average of fourteen of them. If you have any concrete numbers, please elaborate.

I do like the idea of Pandora being an engineered world. Don't get me wrong, such massive, plausible, yet unmentioned background facts are wonderful. I hope to be able to write such things myself one day. The Na'vi being artificial does go far in resolving the problems of stone age societies, and I admit that includes child mortality (good catch!), but not quite as far as the magical singing mushrooms at the gates of Fairyland, where they would want for nothing. Not when they hunt dangerous animals to live. There are tons of things that they could use, such as binoculars, agriculture, refrigeration, or just sharper sticks. So why are we explicitly told that "There's nothing that we have that they want"?

It's entirely possible that they might refuse useful human inventions as being contrary to their way of life, but since nobody in Smurf Village shows any injuries from killing big ugly beasts up close a lot, their way of life makes no sense anyway. Most likely, we have nothing to offer because someone sneaked in and erased all the downsides and costs associated with their way of life. Artificial or non-artificial, it's established that animals attack Smurfs instead of lying down and telling them which body parts are the most tender. Even if the Smurfs really were superior and contact with the humans was an all-around horrible idea, having them all know it and act accordingly would be implausible. I won't accept sentients who don't do really stupid things, not anywhere near this easily.

My colleague suggested that the Na'vi might be very good at healing injuries. I pointed out that this would be unlikely to work on lost limbs, so he suggested that the Na'vi might kill crippled tribe members. As amusing as this would be, the main character mentions nothing negative or unsettling during his introduction to Night Elf culture, the one that gets both shown and narrated at some length. The Spartan way would've raised his eyebrows.

...

Let's back up. The Italians are weird for putting salt on their tomatoes. I think nothing of stripping naked in mixed company and clambering onto wooden benches in a small room with a 100°C temperature and a near-100% humidity, although I generally don't take the extra option of whipping myself with bundles of leafy birch twigs. The Na'vi are mesolithic cat-people from another planet, and the establishing shots of their culture show no customs, values or beliefs that would be offensive, or at least cryptic for any length of time.

Yeah no.

Even Dances With Wolves showed that the Lakota killed white men for being in the wrong place, and were not inclined to do so quickly, which sucked regardless of all other factors.