Eywa Exists

[Clarke]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

I guess this is what makes a goddess or god in some way. I guess I might be scared if my principles were different from what "she" wants, like if she is authoritarian or making people suffer. Eywa is not depicted that way in the movie, it is depicted as a being that evolved for a long time to be wise, keeps the balance and rarely intervenes.

You don't know what she wants, and it's very likely she knows exactly what you want, better than you do yourself. Like I said, this is not a new idea.

So says the faith. And of course to think otherwise would be heretic.
Try to calculate the state of a particle that obeys quantum mechanics....

"In principle." Unless you have access to an Eywa-sized supercluster?

Oh and what happened to the human race that thought they could be godlike and use Avatars?

They screwed up. They did not effectively use all of the resources available to them. When the technological delta is measured in millennium, there are far more effective ways to get what you want then to go in all stompy-stompy as Selfridge/Quaritch did, but that's even further off topic. The point is that pride has nothing to do with it.

i never heard something like that. AFAIK, these reactors would run on highly processed fuel with Deuterium and Tritium, some concepts also use Lithium and Helium. These can be extracted from seawater, but you cant just put a pipe into the ocean and run the reactor with that.

Well, the additional component you need is electricity, but that's not exactly a scarce resource, considering what you're doing. (The power output of fusion is about 700k as much as you need to separate water from the two hydrogen molecules. One in 6400 or so of those hydrogen molecules will be deuterium. This assumes we can't work out how to fuse protium.)

You are aware of the irony that industrially farmed meat is ghastly and consumes about a third of the US corn production.

We're working on it. Look up "bioprinting."

But that "rapture" does not in any way have the requirement to be salvation for anyone. Yet many people actually think so. Just as many fundamentalist christians look forward to rapture and the final coming of heaven on Earth. Same with the technological version - people actually think that after that "rapture for nerds" called the singularity, there will be heaven on Earth, the ecology of the planet is restored, human society is becoming perfect and there will be harmony and space travel and we and our machine bretheren will live in peace forever. C'mon that is even more insane than the christian version. I am not saying that all people believe that version, but many do to some degree or another.

Well, it does require that fundamental human nature be changed, which none of the other options justify. Also, the version I heard didn't specify "on Earth", which is how it makes the insanity disappear; it says the best idea is to disassemble the inner planets into a virtual reality hypervisor and let Earth deal with itself.

Yet civilized humans insisted that they did not, but instead that "progress" has to happen first to one day create, by advancing technology further and further, a perfect society of harmony, while the privileged ones in that culture, the ones promoting this idea of urgently needed progress already had that paradise as a result of the (mis-)application of the technologies of that time.

Nobody noticed a problem earlier because they didn't have the data. They didn't have the data because they couldn't communicate easily. They couldn't communicate easily because they didn't have... guess what?