I'm not wishing it will NEVER happen - I just want it to only ever happen when we are ready for it as a species, as a people, if that ever does happen.

i hope it will

Yeah - as I said - civilized humans as they dominate the earth now - I hope they will not go anywhere out there. Only if there is a major shift in peoples minds and the pillars of this culture, this may be a good idea. But to go there to "dominate" space - what a horrible idea.

It would be like Hawkins said about aliens coming to Earth: If such a resource depleting space civilization be it human or alien exists, pray to the universe for mercy for the other life out there...

Or like Avatar with a non-happy ending.

The one hope is that based on the fact that humans will not be the first to develop space travel, there will be species out there who are hopefully more enlightened and with much better weapons than humans, hopefully with the desire to protect places from exploitation by greedy species :D


Back on topic: I would give up everything to become Na'vi in an instant... I really do feel that SOMEHOW, I was born as the wrong species, wrong world, wrong life... :(

As much as I'd like to go, I couldn't. I have to help the people stuck on Earth.

The talk that humans should not venture onto Pandora if found reminds me of a scene from a movie, it was one about a time travler... I want to say it was called The Time Traveler (not joking :P) and I can't remember the year, I saw it a couple years ago, but in one scene, someone was talking about how (after the time traveler went forward a couple years) about how there were people building stations on the moon and such. Then I guess the next day, theres a loud boom, and chaos happens, and someone shouts to the main character, "they drilled too far into the moon!" and the camera shows the moon breaking apart with moon rocks raining down on Earth, and in the chaos, the time traveler gets in his machine, and as he's about to travel through time, a rock comes down and smashes near him, and he's knocked out on the metal frame of the machine, and he travels through time while he's knocked out (he manually controls the machine) and when he wakes up and stops the machine, he looks up and sees the moon and its split in half... a cool picture but the movie has some... questionable pieces, like drilling so far the moon splits, and how quickly the rocks rain down on Earth, but you can see how the movie relates

LOL - that sounds like an awesome movie (though of course not at all founded in reality) :D

Well, Hawkins argument was a bit in the direction that all species who develop space travel are doing that mainly because they exploited their home planet and need to expand - that would not exactly make them good company... But yeah - maybe there are some wise aliens there who are looking out for the benefit of the natural world on other planets - though the question id why did they go out there if not to settle and why settle if not not make that a new home and how to really keep the original ecosystems intact during that.

I was thinking about Pandora. The RDA only took a really small part of the planet - just one hillside, a road and one tree to mine under. Looking at the whole planet that is not much, it is a minute little settlement. Still it is horrible. So even the first factory, the first ten thousand settlers, the first introduction of domesticated plants and animals or the first mining starts the whole process and disrupts local life. Any spacefaring race has to accept that consequence as one resulting from their settlement on new, lifebearing planets.

But speaking of seeking "home" and feeling not to belong here - i had that often. And I keep looking at that image in my gallery that lead to me having a deja-vu kind of feeling on seeing Pandora and I keep thinking of what it means...

Close, The Time Machine (2002), and I loved that movie. Those weird underground aliens (when he goes thousands of years back in time) creeped me out for a while. And that black guy hologram, so awesome. :awesome:

No offense, but I find it hard to imagine being born in a fictional species.

I get that a lot. The way other people are just doesn't seem to click with the way I am.

The Time Machine. Great movie. Has great music too. They were blasting on the moon. I think the guy says something like "20 megaton detonation to make room for lunar leisure living." Or something like that.

One of the things that gives me goosebumps in the movie. Is when Mr. Philby looks at a drawing on Alex's desk that has a crazy busy metropolis with multiple levels of roads, buildings and stuff. And he says "I wonder if we will ever go to far." And Alex says "Nonsense". Later after Alex traveled 800,000 years into the future and looks up at the bits and pieces of the moon that's left and says "You were right, Philby. We did go too far." That just gets me.

Think of it this way. Is it likely that Aliens look at things as we do? See, we think that the only reason anybody would go into space is to take resources or conquer planets. That's the way humans look at space travel. But is it out of the question to think that other species have a totally different mentality about space travel?

Perhaps they believe that the farther they travel the closer to their deity they become. Or the more species they meet they get bragging rights back home. Space travel could be a game or a journey to other species where as to us its territory.

I mean look at all the science fiction movies where space travel is common. What is almost always in the movies is how many planets or systems is in the Alliance, Federation, Empire... That's the way we look at space. Territory.


Yeah, he played that part very well. Great Character and great actor.

Actually, he traveled 800,000 years into the future. Those Ape looking things were actually humans that had lived underground for so many millennium that they evolved into those 'Morlocks' as they are called.

Edit: As to the original post. I would in a heartbeat. The life on Pandora is a life I have dreamed and wanted for so long. Even before experiencing Avatar. I had longed for something very similar to what the Na'vi have.

Courtesy of Mune.

http://i44.tinypic.com/34qu73q.png

if i die here and am born there, yes.
Otherwise, no.

I didn't say I actually WAS... I just feel like Pandora is my true home and that it's how I SHOULD be. There's a difference.
There are MANY things I find it 'hard to imagine' which are true for other people.

Well said :D

Well - Advent adressed this in the wrong way - you are talking about different things. I doubt any of us think they are actually NA'Vi and are born in the wrong species, human, but we feel an alientation with the human species, we feel like "something is not right". It is by the way one of the things, the "Indigo Children"-people also describe a lot, though in their case they think more generally as the people who feel so as beeing "special souls", sometimes "star souls".
One may ponder about spiritual ways of explaining this, but even if one does not go there, I think the reason is, that in our time, in the environment we live in, we naturally feel alienated, as this is not the way our species evolved into. Our species was born into a Pandora on Earth and only later it was transformed into "Environment 2.0" - a mix of concrete, glass, agricultural fields - I dont see how humans cannot feel alienated in that situation.

If one identifies the human species with the way we live now, one can easily and with all right feel alienated and perceive oneself as not belonging to that species. If one then is inclined to think of Pandora, the eternal light, some other planet or the stars as ones "true home" is a matter of personal vision.

Haha - yesterday I saw a documentary on New York. It originally was built in a way like old European cities with the roads and lots following the landscape, twisting and turning. Later it was replaced by a grid of straight lines despite the landscape and the landscape was flattened for that. Talk about "humans vs nature" on a new level there...

Well, that is highly philosophical. Yes, I can imagine other species to be benign and I can think of thousands of motivations to go out into space than conquest. I mean, humans have at least a dozen of them - mostly exploration, curiosity, wanting to know how the universe works, ...
But all this is also accompanied by the downside. We also want to settle there, we want to influence the universe, we want to improve things, we want to get something out of the universe for us as a species.
Speculating about alien species is a futile attempt of course, but I hold it likely that in order to achieve the technology needed to allow space travel, any civilization has to do a number of things which most likely lead to the things we see in our society. One example is resources. For such technology, you need plenty of resources. All planets are finite, all planets are delicate. So to get the resources, you need to have an attitude that allows you to extract the resources from the planet and accept the inevitable damage this does. If that attitude however is part of the culture that builds spaceships, then some members of that culture will express that aspect in space, also.

To explain this in more detail would however bomb this thread ;)

Indeed. I sketched that something 10 years ago: Picture 6 of 7 from My images and it surprised me to see the similarities to Pandora :shock: