Saying 'the extinction rate is orders of magnitude higher' is false logic.
Higher than when?
It's higher than some and lower than others.

Yes, seawater IS an excellent source of deuterium and a lesser source of tritium, but still a source. He-3 is also abundant on the moon. Once again you ignore facts - fusion reactions are run today, they do not need some mythical material you claim does not exist. Nobody said anything about being free except for you - something being free works entirely against the concept of supply and demand.

Once again you deliberately misunderstand the singularity. People are not going to start disappearing in some mythological crap - it is the point at which understanding becomes unlimited - that means benefits for the environment.

Anyway, if people can't keep this thread on topic and certain people want to turn it into rant number 500 about how much they hate things, it has become unrecoverable. The original post was about Avatar, and NOT about ridiculous romanticised views of 'anyone but us is automatically good'.

speaking of eywa, I think I need to run into the woods, and keep running till I'm to tired to run anymore again. That is the best.

No, I dont know what she wants, but obviously Eywa does keep Pandora in balance, supports life and the people and does not take it lightly if sky people come and destroy that. I do not know why this should inherently happen with a "Posthuman god" really.

My point was to say that humans are NOT like gods that can walk around in Avatars (in the original meaning you referenced), even if they think they are. I think that was literally one of the messages of the movie, that humans did think they are like gods, created Avatars (like in the Hindu mythology) to walk on Earth. They are even blue, just like in some of those old myths. And the end of the story is that this illusion is shattered, that humans after all are NOT god-like but "just humans".

And processing plants and enrichment facilities and catalysts, electrodes, magnets,...

But that is again my point - up to now there was no progress in that it got getter and better all the time, that the impact was less and less over time. I am operating on reality, on what is and has been, not on what might, could or should be. Maybe you can do bioprinting meat or make meat from sewage or algae - it remains to be seen what the implications of those theoretical ideas will be. Fact is that up to now, better technology and more efficiency usually lead to an increased demand and usage. This was described a long time ago and still is valid under the name of Jevons paradox.

So you think there is some heaven in the sky that is seperate from Earth and in which posthuman people will exist without impacting the Earth? Just saying by using that vocabulary that this again sounds a lot like christian mythology.
And seriously, I do not even understand what you are talking about. This is total science fiction. I can make up a story, too if I like to - about some future that could happen if.... that is however fiction - maybe it is probably or possible fiction, but still it is fiction.

Oh definitely they had data in the past. People starving is a good data to indicate there is not enough food, deforested landscapes in Europe or on the Easter islands or in Japan certainly got people to think about the implications of taking too much wood and so on. There always was an awareness of the impact of civilization on humans and the Earth, it was chosen to ignore this and move on. And this time is no different. And if the hopes rest on a technologcal saviour, the future will not be different either.

Higher than in geologic history. One can pretty well estimate the extinction rates in the fossil record. The periods that match todays extinction rate exist of course, they are called "Mass extinction events"...

... I did not say free, I was replying to Clarkes claims. Fusion if it is possible will be just another energy source, cost money, materials, fuel that has to be processed and so on...
And the mythical material that is missing yet is the one that can actually capture the energy emitted. What they maanged as of now is to sustain a few seconds od fusion - the rest of the technology is as of now missing

The original post was about how we on this planet have our own connection to something that one might call "Eywa". This world, our Earth is a living being. The essence of life flows through all the places on Earth. The energy is given by the sun and passed on and shared by the living beings on this world. The connectedness and interdependence of all living beings, all individuals, each ant and bug and bear and sturgeon and butterfly and human takes part in that whole ensemble. My point is that this whole relationship is alive, that the Earth is alive, that we are part of something bigger that one may call Gaia or Eywa or Earth or Eairth. And that even though we do not and possibly cannot know if there is sentience in it, there is more to it than parameters, DNA codes, nutrient flows. And I would even say that I personally can imagine that this world is sentient, but that it is so on a different level. Consider that on Pandora, the people do not hear a voice of Eywa. They see signs, hear their ancestors, get feelings and by those phenomena they listen to Eywa. They do not have scientific evidence, because they do not need to have it. Why should we expect to hear a voice or see electric currents running between trees? Why should we limit ourselves to that narrow perception of sentience or intelligence. Some days ago, I had the opportunity to stand by the newly born Ammer river in the mountains and look at it, feel it, touch it, see the trees, feel the coldness of the rocks under my bare feet and the warmth of the sun, smell the pines, listen to the water splashing over rocks, look up at the marvellous colors in the sky at the sunset behind the huge mountains patterened in dark green and white and grey and brown. That communiction of this world with me is way more coplex than the feeble words I write here can express. The Earth talks to us, synergestically, not in words, but in sounds and light and patterns and touch - it invokes emotions and thoughts by that, just like when I talk to a human being. :awesome:
I know that some people do not see this, want to describe this all as a matter of mechanistic physics and programmed reactions. But what is the human brain but a network of cells that exchange electrical signals - all physics and simple biology, how can that be alive and sentient. And yes, that was a bit sarcastic, because of course I realize that humans are sentient, but I do not see why the ability to take something back to its physical and chemical roots diminishes its value as a being that is sentient. So the physical world around us communicates with us all the time - how dare we say that this is nothing, that this is not the product of a living, thinking, feeling entity? Just because we have forgotten to listen, to SEE and to feel. Like the infamous three monkeys we stand in a world full of voice and color and ignore the communication towards us and refuse to communicate back.
And it is this world, that communicates to us that my allegiance is with. This is why I am getting into a rant if I meet people who ignore this, who diminish the value of this communication and existence, who claim to be superior, god-like, creators and think they are entitled to determine how everything should be because they are the only ones who understand, who are sentient and intelligent, who are powerful and who are alone in that, while in fact the consequences of that thinking ruin the beautiful being that is our planet, just as the bulldozers ruined the place that was shown in the first post. :'(

Because you're an ant trying to understand the Internet? That's roughly the scale differential involved. :P

Yeah, and it's specifically mentioned in the backstory that the RDA held themselves back because of the politics involved. Defeating the Na'vi and the animals is not that difficult when you basically have access to artificial meteor strikes. Or bioweapons. Or fusion bombs. Or electromagnetic disruption weapons.

Like I said, the RDA did not utilize the resources available to them and/or were limited by PR. Taking a mass of rock is not that difficult now, let alone with 140 years of robotics technology. The Na'vi can do absolutely nothing about unmanned robotics.

What is there to enrich? And wait, what? Catalysts? In a fusion reaction?

You start with seawater and your actual fusion reactor. You electrolyze it, sort out by mass, and that gives you your deutrium. You stick that into your reactor, fuse it, and sell off the resulting helium. (Sorting by isotope if people are pansies. :P) That's a theoretical energy gain of 110x. In practice, it'll probably be 10-20x.

I didn't know about the Jevons paradox, so I looked it up, and learned that it only applies in the case of elastic demand, which I doubt applies to the meat industry. Additionally, I'm not talking about a mere increase in efficiency with bioprinting; it'd be a complete paradigm shift. If someone implemented bioprinting, demand for meat is irrelevant, since you are no longer using land to grow food for the animals; you're just growing animal out of relatively raw material.

Of course it's not there right now; the posthumans build it, because they want energy and computing power, and they noticed the astronomical fusion reactor on our doorstep.

It is speculation, and although that is technically fiction, it's quite clearly not what you mean by the word. Nobody's been able to produce a convincing argument as to why it can't be done, (though I'm sure there's plenty as to why it shouldn't be done) so it's not Star Trek. The sort of future-technology I'm talking about is based on extrapolating known science, not making science up to get a cool machine out the other end. It's a possibility, and IMO, one we should definitely strive towards.

Not in the 19th century when most of the "dirty" tech was actually invented/introduced. Ozone pollution could not possibly be detected until after the Space Age, let alone in 1900 or so when you'd have had a chance to actually get rid of coal-powered technology. We simply did not have the chemistry or ecology knowledge to step in before the inertia set in.

Last time I checked, mass extinction events usually last a few thousand years, at minimum. (Though it seems experts' opinions vary.) This one has lasted, at the very most, 150.

Incidentally, we can't get free fusion power with known technology; the other ingredient is literally Unobtanium. (Since the major obstacle is resistive losses in your transmission lines.) That's why I said breakthroughs. :P However, that doesn't mean that fusion power itself is impossible with current tech.

The engineering isn't there. There aren't any technological issues, AFAIK. It appears to be possible to do with known materials and technology, we just don't know exactly which ones. (and we obviously want to get it right first time)

You're anthropomorphizing. Earth isn't a thing; it's hundreds of trillions of things all acting together, and the only organization is evolution. Ideas that don't work get brutally destroyed. Nature is incredibly nasty by modern standards.

Ewya is orders of magnitude more organized than Earth's systems. You need that sort of organization to be communicative.

Clarke, I will put the replies to the offtopic stuff in a seperate post.
Ok, you put off my attempt to return on topic by that short reply with reference to simplistic, mechanistic Hobbesian or Dawkinsean worldviews? That makes me sad :( - I think the mere fact that there are these trillions of living beings (they are not "things") all acting together is wonderous and marvellous and requires an incredible amount of organization and communication. It is vastly complex, intertwined and reactive. To say that "the only organization is evolution" is reductionist at best. Firstly we do not know if that is the only organization and certainly it does not only work on a biological level. Other beings have cultures, there are options and possibilities in these beings that are expressed as a reaction to other beings, there is communication happening everywhere. Yes certainly things that do not work will die out eventually - is that so wrong, that those ideas that are better will be continued? After all that is the same principle the modern world also operates on. But that was not the point anyways - if evolution as a rule is brutal or not. Organization was the topic and communication. As in Eywa or Pandora as a whole. I think even on Pandora, species will change, some will go extinct, others created. The NA'Vi evolved from the lemures in the trees. Living beings die and are born, species die and are created. That is a natural cycle - on Pandora as on Earth. All that Eywa does - and for that matter our Earth version - is to provide a kind of balance. An environment in which that can happen. "Eywa does not take sides", neither does "Mother Earth".
Why is it so hard to draw a comparison between the two - in that in both cases the world is alive, communicating and reacting. If people go and cut 50 trees in the forest, the living world reacts, creates grass and bushes and eventually trees. If people cut more, maybe the trees do not return and it will be a savannah or grassland - in any case it is a reaction of life. I think people are too hung up on electrical impulses as a means of communication. In analogy to your words before, I could say that a human brain is not "a thing" - it is a multitude of things all acting together, and the only organization is evolution and the only means of communication is electrical impulses. After all humans are also a product of evolution and even within the brain, those neural connections that are unused will (brutally?) wither and die while new ones are created. Yet what comes out of it is more than the sum of its parts - a human being, a human mind, a wealth of knowledge, learned behaviour, self awareness, consciousness. What is the basis of denying the living world this feature, that the sum of its trillions of parts is not all there is. In fact I would go further and say that human brains are even limited int hat they only use electrical impulses. The living world we are inside of is not that limited. It can use light and sound and smell and touch to communicate. The color of a tree, the sound of a bird, the smell of a flower carry far and fast and are perceived by others, who may reacto upon them. And humans participate in that crescendo of communication by speaking and creating colors and artwork and music, by touching and interacting with other beings. And at the same time we ourselves are free - our very individual reaction to these communications, our actions take part in that whole. And it saddens me deeply, that a lot of the communication of humans is only with other humans or with the objects that are shaped by humans. Its like an enclosed part of the world that has lost communication with most other parts. We need to communicate again, listen to what the world around us has to say to us. Just like the NA'Vi on Pandora cannot "plug in" and talk to Eywa, so can we not do this here. Just like them, we have to rely on other forms of communication. Eywa talks to the people by the bahaviour of animals and plants, by the appearance of seeds of the sacred tree, by the colorful Auroras in the sky, by the shapes of the arches, by the glowing of the bioluminescent forest. Earth talks to the people by similar but distinctly different means. The change in color of the leafs of the trees talk about the coming winter, the shape of the clouds in the sky tell a story about the coming rain, the appearance or disappearance of animals or plants from a place are mysterious but meaningful. Science sometimes deciphers one of these messages, but these are always only bits and pieces.

Now to the more boring part of hickhacking on offtopic stuff ;) :

Clarke, you seem to be quite hung up on what I would call a religion of technology, that not much can convince you. The point I was trying to make is that you as well as many others who think that way are operating on hope and speculation. You take current technologies and some short time trends and cook up a future that is near perfect. With spacefaring posthumans that are wise and enlightened and have immense capabilities but are showing great stewardship and compassion and all that. That is a nice SciFi fantasy, but it compares to the idea of heaven in religion. You even use the same rhethoric:

These are exactly the same words I hear from religious fanatics - you cannot disprove that god exists given that god is defined as invisible and that everything happening in the world is gods will anyways.

So i will give you that this is a possible future maybe - but it is lunacy in my opinion to operate under the assumption that this is what will happen. What counts is what is and learning from what was, but to create possible futures in the mind and then assert that this is what is going to happen is hybris. We cannot know the future. And I think it is explicitly dmaging to create such a future by only projecting technology into that timeframe and just apply wishful thinking to the social and behavioural aspects. I am pretty sure that people in 13th century Europe would, if told the technological "advances" that have happened since then would certainly have thought that this must be a wonderful world. A world without poverty, without the need to work, with plenty of leisure time and time for festivals and dances and song. A world of freedom. Yet what happened was that technology changed, but society took a different route. There are more people living in poverty, more inequality, not really less work, more depression and so on. The people in the 1960ies thought if the trend goes on, by the year 2000 robots would do the work and the father of the family who brings in the money will have to work less hours for the same money. Instead now his wife works the same hours as he does and still the money barely pays the bills. The problem I have is that despite all technological changes, society, economics, politics and behaviour in general operates independent from that. Technology is a result of these behavioural systems much more than it is creator of them - and certainly it is not a net positive force - it is a reenforcement instead. It fortifies the behaviour and sociology that created it. A liberating technology comes from a liberal society. Technology is not some outside force, like a god, that makes society or people better, more moral, more just - it is a product of human society and thus it is a reflection, an echo of that society.

To hope (or pray) for it to create a heaven, a paradise - even if that requires a rupture called singularity after which the reign of a highly moral and ethical bigger-than-us power rules, a power we feeble humans are unable to understand but that we are supposed to cherish - is a faith based pseudoreligious behaviour. There is nothing wrong with that - I accept religious faith and people who follow it in most cases, but I am annoyed by the attempts from people who believe in this kind of faith to keep telling me that it is the truth (TM), that this is what is real, what will happen - and that it is of course more real than other faiths. And my annoyance is universal in that I could not stand the same from other religions either.

Science is a tool, a way to view the world. It can observe and interpret the world. In that it is a real thing. Technology that exists now is a set of tools, that we can look at and see what it does or does not and what effects it has. But that is it. Do take the future and claim that all problems will be gone in the future because of improved technology and science is faith and hope and to base present day activities on faith and hope seems awfully un-scientific to me.

For electrolysis, you need catalysts, you need pure and actually delsalinated water, "sorting them by mass" is called enrichment (as in "water enriched in ²H"). Please do me the courtesy of at least reading a bit on a topic you want to advocate. So all that is possible, but my argument was that it will not be cheap.

Jevons paradox - I think the implications of that go beyond consumption of meat. Think about energy for example.

And where does that raw material come from? Most likely plants or algae, right?

The 19th century people were ACUTELY aware that the soot and pollution is harming people and their land. They were very well aware of the social implications. The Luddite movement in England was very outspoken about the potential of people ending up as unskilled conveyor belt workers instead of free craftsmen. Yes, some effects are unforseen - we now do not yet even begin to understand what the effect of present day technologies will be - if genetic engineering or nanotechnology will maybe in 20 years time be recognized as something similar to the ozone hole - or not. Who knows. The knowledge is always incomplete but there is always enough knowledge to conclude that something should be done - and most of the time that is ignored or, as you do, put off into the future and into the hands of future generations, a god int he sky or "new breakthroughs in technology".

It was about the speed of extinction, not about the duration.

Sorry, I'll get to the other post in a moment. I can't digest the big wall of text ATM.

God is untestable. Physics and engineering is not.
Which is why I'm not suggesting that it's what will happen; it's what should happen.

They'd just think of it as fantasy. If you actually brought an example back with you, they'd burn you as a witch. :P Some of the concepts taken for granted in the 21st century would be completely inconceivable in the 19th, let alone the 13th. Getting a text message around the world in 80 milliseconds, let alone 80 days? Completely inconceivable before the invention of the telegraph. High-resolution film? Are you completely mad?

I think you have a slightly skewed view of the 13th century, but I don't have the energy to cite anything for that.

Economics certainly does not operate independently from technological growth. Have you ever heard of high-frequency trading?

But in a society as gigantic as ours, innovation means that we are constantly coming up with new and better ways to do things. Advancing technology opens up those options and so shapes behavior. For instance, spa(AAAAAAAAAAAA)ce travel revolutionized communications with satellites.

What possible catalyst could even be useful in electrolysis? You're talking about one of the simplest molecules there is, after all.

There are methods of gathering energy that are functionally limitless, i.e. nuclear fusion, solar power.

Farmed algae?

And they didn't... because the robots came along a little while later. :P They might have known that the pollution was harmful in some areas, but they simply didn't have the data to see it in others.

We're probably not going to make the same mistakes with grey-goo or genetic engineering as we are with the Industrial Revolution because we know what we're doing this time. (mostly) We know that that there are things we don't know about how Earth works.

That's the major problem. We don't know what should be done, and we need MOAR DATA to find out. :P

But it's not just life. There's the weather, the long-term climate, natural disasters, etc. The actual set isn't really relevant, other than the absurd scale.
My point is that there is no all-directing overseer, in contrast to what we see of Eywa's abilities. (How else would the Na'vi get hammocks made of webbing? :P) All the creatures across the world just look out for themselves, (which usually involves eating smaller creatures) and it's amazing we get any sort of stability at all, really. It's not guaranteed, again apparently in contrast with Eywa.

The deeper point is that nobody cares, because there is no overseer. More accurately, was no overseer until fantastically recently. If humanity went extinct, then evolution could continue until the Sun expands and nothing would care about all the dead ideas.

But evolution would disrupt the balance of nature, however slightly. Depending on the evolution involved, it might even completely destroy all existing life.

There is no balance on Earth. The fact that we can have this conversation at all is proof of that. When the most powerful meta-meme of all appeared and spread, nothing stepped in to stop it. We hit the "singularity" of natural evolution about 10k years ago; nothing in Nature has been able to keep up with us since then, and unless something very bad happens, nothing will be able to keep up with us, or stop us ever again. A human can out-think almost everything on this planet, by orders of magnitude. (Only running into issues when faced with multiple creatures, or a particularly chronic lack of data.) That's pretty much the opposite of "balanced." :P

If you cut down 50 trees on Pandora, every predator within 10 miles attacks you immediately. :P On Earth, life falls back to equilibrium. On Pandora, that equilibrium is actively, intelligently restored and nature-as-a-whole will retaliate. No such retaliation is possible on Earth.

And that's the key difference: evolution is not the only organization. There is a section of the brain dedicated to analyzing and discarding ideas and memes intelligently, and that intelligence has meant we've "evolved" in ideas in years, rather than millennia. The difference between generations of humans is astronomical, to the point where any given person will have a huge amount of trouble surviving in his grandparents' or grandchilds' society. That timescale does not apply to pretty much any other animal, whose lifestyles vary over centuries, rather than individual years.

It does, however, work as a multitude of things interacting together. :D

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Bandwidth is bandwidth, IMO. It doesn't really matter if you're using 30 different methods of communication if my one has a rate 100x faster.

But only other humans can understand most of it.

You've not noticed the gigantic amount of social statistics analysis going on by various people? Individually, we're mostly free, but averaged, peoples' behavior in immensely predictable.

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I'm fairly sure it was implied that that was exactly what Jake did do in the scene just before the big battle with the bulldozers. :P

Needz moar data. :P Science can't tell you exactly how the system works, but the best that any other way of looking at the world can tell you is an imprecise, unrigorous, mostly useless "explanation" that's only slightly better than "the gods are angry."

Clarke - I am very reluctant to reply at all. That tendency to fragment posts into bits and pieces and refuse to reply in a more coherent matter annoys me. I guess it is your nature, your worldview that facilitates that. The reductionist approach, to divide the world into little pieces and analyze them seperately. By that you miss the point of the arguments I make by taking single sentences out of context and even reply to some of them with a completely independent argument that was not part of the original discourse.

I just wrote a lengthy reply, but I deleted it, because I think it is rather pointless. You picked out tiny details of my argument and start to debate about failures in my metaphors or thought experiments, that I just used to illustrate something else. I am not willing to discuss the reaction of a 13th century person that is given a piece of 21st century technology when the argument I was trying to make with that whole paragraph was something else altogether, namely the potential of any time, including our own to solve its problems and shortcomings with other means than technological development and that the expectations to technological development are overestimated, distracting from reality and taking energy and motivation away from creating real change here and now instead in some distant future.

But I guess you are more interested in nitpicking than actually debating over the philosophy of these things, the same is true for the second part, in which I was trying to explain a philosophical way how to see the world as a living being rather than a stupid rock tumbling through space that just was lucky enough to have life long enough for humans to evolve, the great species that will finally bring order to the world and establish a balance.

You nitpick at my statement that Jake did not talk to Eywa and so we here cannot talk to "Gaia" by saing that he did in fact do so. Did he get an answer? No.There is no two way vocal or mental communication in that way.

Processing power is about speed not bandwidth? Not really - parallel processing is very powerful.

There is a section in the human brain that processes ideas? How does that change the point I was making that even these parts are on a biological level "just cells connected by neurons". The point is that by looking only at the dissected brain, you cannot see ideas or thoughts. So by looking at only the material parts of Nature in a statical way, you can also not see her thoughts and ideas.

But as I said, these ponderings are more philosophy than science and are coming from a thinking that is more holistic, encompassing and connecting rather diametrally opposite of what you look for - chopping things up in bits and pieces, seperating them all from each other and then make claims from that fragmented world.

This could be an interesting debate comparable to Goethe and Newton with very different understandings of natural sciences, but the style of debate you try to use - taking a reply and analyzing it sentence by sentence - is not one I am willing to follow neither do I have the time to clarify each misunderstanding you have about each of these sentences that would make sense if you read and comment on the whole paragraph.

So I will leave it at that, unless there is interest by others to explore the idea of a sentient Earth, a really existing Eywa on our planet.

Parallel processing has a limit, not to mention the law of diminishing returns. When each parallel process is reduced to a single logical operation, you can not get further than that.

By looking at a brain, data IS represented neurochemically. For that matter, it is only by understanding a basis that you can build up a conclusion in the first place. An argument can not be considered if its constituent points are unable to stand on their own - excessive verbosity and combining points only serves to make it harder to parse with an intent to counter.

Why is reducing to single logical operations a progress? The human brain does use only one set of signals - electric impulses. And they are not even at the maximum speed - bacteria can do better by forming nanotubes. The natural world can use many different types of signals - from electromagnetic (including lights and colors) to chemical and more. Some messages may travel faster, others less fast. I dont deny that this would probably all even be faster and more reactive overall if it was all about fast travelling messages, but it does not need to be so. Maybe the "processing power" is not as incredible as it would be for some other scenario one can imagine - so what?

Why? Why can I only claim to have an understanding of anything if I understand the basis? I think I can understand that people go hungry and die without knowing how biology works to let them die. I can udnerstand species going extinct by deforestation without knowing if it was the lack of trees or the soil erosion that got them. Certainly it helps in some cases to know the details, to understand some of the basic underlying principles, but it is not really needed to draw a conclusion. Most things we do and use are built without understanding everything about them.

Also I am not trying to make a scientific point here. If you want to talk about the science of the existence of Eywa or something similar on Earth, then that is a short discussion - there is no peer reviewed study that has proven that something like that exists. Case solved. But I think that is limiting ones possibilities to only look at the conclusion one way of learning knowledge provides and only to look at what it has provided up to now. I am not making a claim that there conclusively is something like Eywa on Earth, but I want to explore the possibility in a more nature-philosophical way. On Pandora, it was a bit easier for Grace, she could poke needles into trees and take a reading. But even for her, the existence of a planetary consciousness was only a theory. It could not be proven. She did not manage to conclusively lay proof that the network of trees is anything but a dumb connection of individual plants by which they exchange simple information about predators or insects attacking. She believed that there is more (and was called basically a pothead for that), but the only way she got to know that it really is so was when she experienced it herself, when she died, when she could finally say "she exists".
So I dont know how it is on Earth, but I desire to consider the possibility, maybe ina more philosophical way, though I also look for science as a tool to describe the interactions we see. One could also go to other cultures. Many indigenous cultures when you ask them how they know about the healing properties of a plant will tell you that the natural world, or the plant itself told them so. They claim a communication there, that allowed them to find among millions of rainforest plants the one that helps against some sickness. Maybe they are all superstitious liars, but I would not put this off that easily, as Grace did not put off the claims of the NA'Vi that there does not just exist a connection and communication between plants and animals, but that there is something behind or within that connection.

Now about argueing or debating:
So you'd like me to post a two-post reply answering to each of the fragments, maybe create some more fragments by tearing apart these again? And by that clutter this topic full of bits and pieces? I think you do not want that, so I did not do it.
I dont even mind to argue each point and describe why it is able to stand on its own, but I am tired of making a point and then be nitpicked upon semantics or the metaphors I was using to describe them. Like that point about telling 13th century people about the possibilities our time has and analyzing what their expectations would be if they are given that possibilities. Instead of argueing against or with that analysis, the reply goes on about how they would surely not believe it or how someone showing them a piece of technology would be burned as a witch. That is totally besides the point and draws the argument from social expectations, utopian thinking and hopes for future developments into possible reactions of individual people to some time traveller. That way my arguments and conclusions are not just broken down in parts, but each part is then derailed and 3 posts later I am facing myself debating over something that has zip to do with the original topic, which has gotten lost and not really argued against. This is for me not a fruitful debate then.

Re: reductionism, I've got a really simple example here: pure water being wet. Water's wetness is a consequence of a whole bunch of phenomenon, like surface tension, viscosity, and density. (This becomes more obvious when you start dealing with superfluids, which have no viscosity.) However, all of those phenomenon are a consequence of exactly one thing: electromagnetism. Even the shape of the water molecule itself is a consequence of this single force. However, electromagnetism cannot be studied in any practical way by considering the water as a continuous object. It must be torn apart into its component phenomena to produce any sort of rigorous picture of its workings. That isn't to say all these "high-level" things about water don't exist, but that they are merely consequences of more fundamental interactions. The high-level phenomena can be inferred and demonstrated from the low-level fundamentals, but the reverse is AFAIK nigh-impossible. Reductionist science works, in the end, and it works far more effectively than any other method ever devised. It is not infallible, but no other system of study rivals its ability to arrive at conclusions that reflect reality.

Re: 13th century people, I'm sorry for not elaborating on what I was going for, which was your objection to the "magical" technology proposed earlier. This also links into the concept of First World Problems: there will be problems in 50, or 100, or 500 years, but they will appear inconceivably minor to us. IMO, neither of us can possibly predict what the world will be like in 50 years, let alone 100, since we will probably understate development. Look at Avatar itself: we've cracked biological engineering, we can mix human and alien genetics with impunity! ...yet, the Earth is still polluted. How? This is pretty similar to an Asimov story where a man is given a fully sentient, fully humanoid robot to operate a mechanical typewriter. :P Neither author caught on to the other ways that the technology, or its prerequisites, could be used, and so their worlds break down under scrutiny. Obviously, RL does not break down under scrutiny, and so it is incredibly likely that neither of us can possibly imagine the problems being faced by 2050, let alone 2150.

The 13th century people would not be entirely correct in their utopian vision of the 21st century, but they'd be largely right in that it has more freedom, more wealth, and more leisure time. (Keeping in mind that world population is 8 or so times larger than it was then) Even the predictions of the 1960s were partially right; humanoid robots don't do our work for us, but machines do. Consider this: a family car is equivalent to group of about 300 slaves, in terms of effort. That's entire villages of people, per family, (or even per individual!) just for carting us around from place to place! And we pay "them" a few hundred dollars a year, when actual humans are (in the US) paid tens of thousands of dollars a year! Imagine if you told Julius Caesar that you had 300 slaves just for carting you around. :P If he believed you, he'd probably think (quite accurately) that you were wealthier than the entire Roman Empire put together.

Re: holinism, what does it gain? What predictions does it make, and what solutions does it present? Looking at Gaia as a single communicative entity is completely useless if it doesn't tell us anything about it. There is (possibly) a problem with the way the world is running ATM, but reductionist science doesn't have the data to concoct a confident solution, and holistic philosophy doesn't seem to say anything other than "Leave it alone," with no reasoning behind why that would be beneficial. What is the point of holistic thinking, when reductionism will, eventually, produce a solution?

On Past, Present and Future... (p1)
 

On Past, Present and Future... (p1)
Exactly - but for the people living then, they will be important. This basically is along the lines of what I tried to say, that throughout history and into the future, there is sort of a constant in human perception when it comes to a couple of things. One is happiness and another I would say is the ability of technology to deal with the problems that time faces. Happiness increases when standard of living increases, but disappears when that standard stays the same. That is the illusion of material happiness. To gain this kind of happiness, one has to get more and more and more. Other ways to get happiness do not require this and this is what I am saying - that material wealth and "progress" is never satisfying - that other things are more important and that the focus should be on these things.
Like freedom from opression, self sustainability, real friendship, community. These do not depend on technology. They can happen at any time. People could have great communal living with friendship, good food, adequate health, low working hours and the freedom to travel everywhere - no matter if that community lives on medieval farming and travel happen by horse or if the community is programming software and travels by airplane. What makes people happy are not the airplanes or the computer programming and they are not required either. And that is my point - not that it may not also work with planes and computers and that this leads to other ways people relate but that it is not REQUIRED. So new technological development may be good or bad or fun or whatever - they are not required however to make people happier or to solve the problems of this world at this time.

I think both authors used that seemingly discrepancy with intention, not out of lack of imagination. It is an element of the narrative. Just look at other mid 20th century stories that teem with overstatement of technological solutions. The famous rocket cars, plutonium driven ovens and all that crap that never came.
Good Science Fiction is also not at all about predicting the future correctly. It is about showing the present in a different light. This is especially true for Asimov but also for Cameron. The story of Avatar was not that of how space travel will be, it was about how people are, how they act in certain situations, it is about indigenous struggles, about people looking at the natural world in terms of resources instead of life, about capitalism, about community and connectedness. Technology in good Science Fiction is used as a narrative tool. Of course, some SciFi specifically tries to interpolate social or technological developments into the future - either to warn of potential negative developments or to create some fascinating utopian dreams.

So if nobody now can predict the problems faced by 2050, as you said, then I think one thing remains and that is that we know the problems of the present. And because we not only do not know the problems of the future, but also not the solutions of the future, we have to work with the solutions we have at our hands now to solve the problems we have now.

This is not entirely true for once - especially keeping in mind the 7 billion people. For starters, there are now more people nearly starving than back then in absolute numbers, more people are enslaved than ever in worlds history and so on. So maybe better use relative numbers than absolute? Then still the majority of people on this world live not exactly in great conditions. Most are poor, most have to work incredible hours under bad conditions. This happens not so often in the places we live in (though especially in the US this is even true locally), but in other countries - countries on whose "cheap" production our nations thrive. Our wealth is built upon the slavery abroad. We here are the elite, the aristrocracy, the burgeois upper class of the medieval times and the people in Pakistan and Ethiopia and China are to a large part the peasants. But even beyond that sad truth, did you know that in medieval times, people had about 120 days a year on which they did not work for religious reasons, the working time often depended on natural events, so on some days there was a lot of work on others not so much. But I dont want to be apologetic - there was a lot of opression and wage-slavery in that time, but I would say similar things are true in the 20th century (the industrial workers even had worse conditions) and up to the present times. The perspective to sit for 9-10 hours a day in a concrete block in front of a writing tool or a coffee machine or a beeping noisy cash register or to work for 12 hours a day in a stressful financial business job may not be that appealing to a person who spent his working time in his own workshop adjacent to his home and family, making shoes. Certainly many things are objectively better, others are worse but my point was that given the prospect of present day technologies, no one would have expected for people to work as much as we do now. People die of work related stress for god sake. I could dwell into the reasons for that now, they are connected to theories about overproduction, capitalism and so on, but thats too much now.
And the 300 slaves to pull that cart - they are just wasteful, because the same task - transporting a person and some goods from one place to another can be done by walking or by a horse cart just as well - the additional input is not a requirement, but a luxury (and one that only 5% of the world population have access to).

On Holism, Gaia and Reductionism.... (p2)
I do not say it does not work. Obviously it works - the world is beeing killed because it works, because by using it, people could invent pesticides and nuclear bombs. Also obviously if you want to study the parts of something, yes, you have to look at the parts, though the use of the words "tear apart" has to me the connotation of forceful discovery. This is not mere semantics - its not merely about twisting your mind now to use a different word - the language used is however an expression of how you think about the world - as something that has to be ripped apart to look inside. Obviously that is not your fault really - this attitude is the one our culture operates on and our language is deeply influenced by it. This is why Goethe used the word "Mitwelt" instead of "Umwelt" to express that we are "with the world" and not "surrounded by the world". Today we use the second word and say that we are surrounded by our environment. Again, this is not "just language" - language is an expression of how we think.
Back to your example - to learn about water, you can look at these electromagnetic effects for sure, the tiny bits, the little ones. You can learn about water in another way too though - you can describe its properties and behaviour without using electromagnetics. Of course you would miss some things. This is why Goethe - and I agree there - said that materialistic and reductionist science is supposed to be a part of natural science - the most crude tool we have. It breaks apart things into bits and pieces and then looks at the pieces. What is important though, and often forgotten is that it was not these bits that we were interested in the first place, but that we started looking at the thing that was originally whole. So holistic thinking then, or holistic science means that one looks at the whole again and keeps the whole of it in mind. The information one gets by the little bits may contribute to it, but they are not all there is. modern science has turned natural science into only that tool, it is all about reductionist, tearing-apart brute force discovery (and application) and dropped the other part that originally were part of natural philosophy (or natural science as we would call it today). It does not mean one has to "believe in a sentient Gaia" or something, but it means that one should consider things that we would call philosophy more.
In the model of university studies in Germany up to fairly recently it was possible and students were encouraged to participate in many fields. This follows an ideal of a science that goes beyond a single field. Scientists used to be not just biologists, but also were interested in history, anthropology, palaeontology and maybe astronomy. They might also take a look at philosophy or linguistics. Later on, and in the US earlier on, this disappeared and was replaced by an increasing specialization. Again I think this "works" - people spend all their time studying just one field and become "better" in it. But better to what end - to me it seems the target is not anymore to gain knowledge, but to find application and means to manipulate the world. It is not about exploring but about controlling. And this is why I think a more holistic approach to science is urgently needed, because the way science and technology works now is leading to devastation.

I think holistic science tells us a lot about "it" - about the world, about global events and processes. And really to leave it alone may in some times be a better strategy than to mess with it without knowing enough. But back to Goethe - he said that both types of science have to work together if things are to go in a good way.
And just as a final remark - the statement that "reductionism will, eventually, produce a solution" is a bold claim - one that I cannot refute I guess because you put it into the (distant?) future. But that was one of my main points in the whole discourse here, that this kind of thinking is damaging - that to use the future as a foundation for actions in the present makes no sense. Its like building a house upside down, hoping or claiming that once we are finished, certainly we will find a way to build its foundations into the thin air.

Sadly, this post was again off topic largely, I tried to return to the topic with previous posts, but I guess the views expressed by searching for "Eywa on Earth" are too controversial to just leave it at that topic :(