Ways To Cope With The Depression Of The Dream Of Pandora Being Intangible.

[ISV Venture Star]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

It is the feeling that something like this existed here on this planet before, that it is something that was lost - unlike floating mountains that never have been on Earth. That feeling of loss and looking around at the "landscape of loss" in this time is what causes a lot of the sadness. It is the loss in all nature, but specifically in the loss in the spirits of one species - our own - that creates a deep longing to get out of here, to change it all and it is the sheer immensity of such a task that lets us feel dispair. :,(

Sorry, I feel a bit gloomy today

I may know what you mean. I wrote something on a sort of similar theme back in January:

I've always fantasized about two things: walking on Mars, and living in the Pleistocene (Earth before the dawn of human civilization). Something about the raw challenge of an untamed world, whatever the context, really gets to me. I walk, I hike, I climb, I scuba dive.

But it never really feels right. I always get the feeling I'm doing the equivalent of sleeping in a tent outside my house. There are barely any real untouched wildernesses. Although some may appear pristine, in most parts of the world these tiny fragments are denuded of the megafauna (most are long dead) that would give them the true stamp of authenticity.

I wonder if this is something universal in us, a desire to return to some imagined world, a clean fresh sandbox without the tell tale signs of millions of other humans on it.

We know that the lives of hunter-gatherers are and were unpleasant. Death in infancy, death from disease, murder. All common. But still we feel the pull.
I think that we yearn for this because a hunter-gatherer lifestyle (as nasty as it was) is the one evolution primed us for. Before the dawn of agriculture all humans on Earth lived like this. That was about 10,000 years ago, which seems like a hell of a long time until you realize that it's just a few hundred generations past. At most, only a few hundred ancestors separate you from people who lived (sort of) like the Na'vi. In evolutionary terms that's almost nothing. Civilization sprang up overnight and we're pretty much still primed for making stone tools and hunting woolly rhinoceros.

I also wonder whether the story of Eden, the unspoilt wilderness of the Abrahamic religions, arose from some ancient oral tale about the world before farming, the world before bread and rice and cities. Did they feel the pull as much as we do?

I think that the imagery Avatar shows us of a beautiful (if fictional) Edenic state of being could well become the template for all of our wilderness dreams.