Eywa Exists

[Human No More]

It's real in that it's being sensed. That could count with a looser definition.

[Theorist]

What do you mean looser definition?

[Human No More]

Reality isn't strictly defined - to different people it can mean different things. I would say that what is truly real in a physical sense and what is real in terms of being sensed by other means, or imagined, are different things, but they both fulfil a basic definition.

[Theorist]

So woe you say pandora meets one definition of being real in that some of us have sensed it, and reality is just a response to stimuli. But it fails to be "sensed" by sufficient amount of people, and is not easily experienced during 'waking' consciousness, so it fails to be reality by that measure.

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Clarke

Yes, earth science is chaotic, and we don't have the first clue what we're doing with it. But there's only one solution to that, and it was even alluded to in Avatar itself: data.[...] We must continue developing some technologies, so that we have enough data to know that the solution, whatever it turns out to be, is working properly.

More data, that is the scientific mantra. I experienced it many times. And Grace did so, too. Take samples, measure, store data. But a point in Avatar was, that this approach failed. Grace only understood, only was able to SEE when she communicated and was taken up by Eywa - she experienced something that all her data could not really explain or predict.

To explain the world with data requires an utterly reductionist approach. You need to regard similar things as equal in the sense of the rules and models you set up. These models are just that - models. They explain what is happening, maybe predict what is likely to happen. They are basically making a JPG file of the world. But as you possibly know if you know a bit on computers, this is not lossless. But this is how science works ATM. It is unable to store all the data that would be needed to reproduce an ecosystem - it can at the very best try to recreate the model it made, based on a simplified view on that ecosystem. That is included in that word "ecosystem", the assumption that it is a system. In reality, it may be more of a complex interactive relationship between individuals.

The present reductionist system reduces species mostly to DNA, regards them as identical machines with a little bit of irrelevant variation. I say that variation is neither random nor irrelevant but is part of the whole.

If science wants to store an ecosystem in its complete complexity, the amount of data would be too large. The information in the real world is already tightly packed at an atomic level by the configuration of atoms and bonds in space and time. It is maybe impossible to store all that information without actually duplicating that physical reality. The only other way would be to sort of invent a ZIP file system for nature, but I think that is not even seriously considered at that level.

What is possible is - given a huge amount of data collection - to create a physical representation of the model that was makde, the model that had all those losses. Something may come from it, but maybe it will just crash. Biosphere 2 is a prime example of such a failed attempt.

The other thing is that by pushing on relentlessly with the prospect of reaching that point where we can actually make that kind of "backup" of the world, by the time this civilization will be able to do so, more has been lost than can be saved.

So my conclusion is, that this is basically following a salvationist mythology. This really strikes me as odd, as science usually claims to be objective, rational and based on perception. But what people do is actually to add faith into it. The faith that science will eventually be able to explain, resore and do everything. That science basically becomes "god". Given that modern science originated in Christian theology and culture, this is not really a surprise, but I want to point to the problem with that approach. Science is observing, it is looking at what is happening now and what has happened. One can use that data to predict reasonably what could happen if there is evidence that it will. But what people who claim to be rationalists and scientists should not do, is to make unfounded claims of future technologies to do anything that we cannot comprehend yet. It is a fallacy to conclude from a 1950ies persons inability to predict the personal computer to assume that future technologies will be able to do the things we hope for. It may be able to do things we cannot guess yet, but these do not need to be what we wish for! Or what we need.

However, climate change is not an instantaneous thing, and we do have time to push our technology forward to the point where, if whatever solution we come up with doesn't work, reconstruct Judaism not from anthropology, but by resurrecting the Jews themselves.

That makes little sense. Once information is lost, as with some elements of many many cultures and languages in the world, with many species and stories - they are lost. Unless you want to invoke the ultimate mythology of time travel. And while everyone talks about climate change these days, this is merely one out of a multitude of threats and destruction happening. Species go extinct and cultures are lost for many other reasons. I think it was every week or so that the last person speaking a unique language in the world dies and that language is lost. 200 species go extinct every day, their culture, their diversity and their genes irrevokably lost. And many of these die because of globalization, industrialization, agriculture, deforestation, drainage of watersheds, urbanization, toxins, poisons and yes climate change. The pace of it is staggering!

I want to clarify something; you're not objecting to technology, you and I are objecting to industrialization. If we have a couple of scientific breakthroughs, we could make electricity across the globe too cheap to meter. (the main one being nuclear fusion) Technology does not have to equal environmental harm; it only does because we started using it before we learned what it did

I thought so too for some time. But as I said, this is wishful thinking and faith based. The belief that "some scientific breakthroughs" will happen that make everything better is not founded in any reality. And add to that that second problem, that even IF technology and science are neutral (which could be debated another time), the application of it is clearly not. As long as this culture works as it does - on greed, competition, growth, the myth of progress - it will not stop doing these destructive things. If one group of people does not apply a new technology because there are doubts on its impacts, another one will do so in that competitive "arms race" world. New technologies just make the weapons more powerful.

Cheap fusion power - that is a complete illusion either. For once, it will nto be cheap - maybe it can be cheaper than coal or wind or nuclear fission, but it will never be too cheap to meter. The materials and fuel needed for those requires a lot of effort to produce. And even if that would be so, I think a civilization that has limitless energy has the potential to be more powerful. That does by itself not say anything about the intentions and applications of these powers. This is one of the greatest misconceptions of our time that we believe (faith again!) that more technology, more possibilites will by design create a stable system, a good society, happy people that act on behalf of the environment. Why should that be so? History does not show that. Everytime a society grew more powerful in technology it actually created more horrors. The first application of IBM computers was to register Jews for extermiantion in the concentration camps. The idea that at some point there is somehow "enough technology" around that there is a "rapture" and the culture as a whole just turns away from being mean and destructive bears any foundation.

Technoloy is at best a tool that can be used for good and bad. What really has to change then is the user of that tool. I think 500 years before now or 100 years or even 50 years (barely), it would have been possible with the given technology of that time to create an egalitarian, sustainable, live-loving culture that uses the tools of its time for the greater good of humans and nonhumans. Maybe this could even be done today, though overshooting the natural resources makes sustainability pretty much an enourmous taks, but we have the technology to reduce population density among others. So what I am saying is that at any time we do have that possiblity and we always had it and with more technology we will still have it, but that progress does not in itself create that change. This culture has some fundamental beliefs that are destructive and no technology changes that. This culture believes in growth, expansion, progress - in "exploitation" of "resources", in the superiority of humans, in the right to manage the world, in the ability to manage this world - in killing for the greater cause, in dominating others for their own good (or the greater cause), in competition as the means of incentive and of course in a salvation in the future. These myths have to be crushed, because otherwise any advances in technology only make things bigger, faster, tougher - but not by design better.

[Moco Loco]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

The present reductionist system reduces species mostly to DNA, regards them as identical machines with a little bit of irrelevant variation. I say that variation is neither random nor irrelevant but is part of the whole.

Any direct quotes of anyone actually saying this of species? I feel you might be making it sound exceptionally reductionist. I don't know anyone who would word this concept in such a way, and no one said variation is random or irrelevant. Irrelevant? What isn't it relevant to? I know you were on the opposing side of these statements anyway, but I can't see where they are coming from in the first place.

[Clarke]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

More data, that is the scientific mantra. I experienced it many times. And Grace did so, too. Take samples, measure, store data. But a point in Avatar was, that this approach failed. Grace only understood, only was able to SEE when she communicated and was taken up by Eywa - she experienced something that all her data could not really explain or predict.

Eywa is actually a really bad example, because Cameron himself didn't follow through with the science. The concept of a gigantic network is not a new one, and if Grace/Cameron knew that, she would have seen what happened coming miles off.

I'd also argue that if we found (or ended up constructing) anything that resembled Eywa, the correct response is actually "Run like hell." A network composed of 1,000 billion nodes is, naively, 10 times more powerful than any human brain. That means you're talking about an entity tens of times more intelligent than even the smartest human, with access to literally astronomical resources. Scared yet?
(Quaritch made the mistake of softly poking her/it with a blunt pin.)

To explain the world with data requires an utterly reductionist approach. [...] In reality, it may be more of a complex interactive relationship between individuals.

It's true that it's impossible to store everything, but storing absolutely everything is not necessary. We only have to store down to a certain level of fidelity for the "loss" to be negligible. After all, JPG is designed to lose only the information that a human won't even see in normal use.

If science wants to store an ecosystem in its complete complexity, the amount of data would be too large. [...] The only other way would be to sort of invent a ZIP file system for nature, but I think that is not even seriously considered at that level.

See what I said earlier about the detail needed. You certainly don't need detail down to the individual atoms.

Biosphere 2 is a prime example of such a failed attempt.

Biosphere 2 was questionably good science.

The other thing is that by pushing on relentlessly with the prospect of reaching that point where we can actually make that kind of "backup" of the world, by the time this civilization will be able to do so, more has been lost than can be saved.

Thousands of species have been lost since humanity started keeping track, and millions before then. Are you possibly over-valuing single species? Actually, bigger question, and I'm not being sarcastic with this one: Why are single species valuable? Why does it matter, if the system remains viable?

So my conclusion is, that this is basically following a salvationist mythology. This really strikes me as odd, as science usually claims to be objective, rational and based on perception. But what people do is actually to add faith into it. The faith that science will eventually be able to explain, resore and do everything.

It is not science to say anything certainly about the future, but obviously some outlooks are more scientifically backed than others. The "faith" that science will solve all our problems is a relatively good one because there is no known problem that science cannot, in principle, study and solve.

That science basically becomes "god".

Psst, look up the original meaning of the word "avatar."

But what people who claim to be rationalists and scientists should not do, is to make unfounded claims of future technologies to do anything that we cannot comprehend yet. It is a fallacy to conclude from a 1950ies persons inability to predict the personal computer to assume that future technologies will be able to do the things we hope for. It may be able to do things we cannot guess yet, but these do not need to be what we wish for! Or what we need.

Of course it'll do what we want; we're the ones using it.

Also, it's not projected from 1950s sci-fi. It's projected by the completely ridiculous trend in electronics hardware. Alan Turing published his paper on the mathematics of a programmable computer in the 1950s. A few years later, the first programmable computer ran at about 5kHz, and had memory measured in tens of bytes. It weighed 30 tons, and took up a room. One (human) generation on, personal computers weighing a 100th as much, operating a thousand times faster on data a million times bigger are available. Another generation on is now, where a machine smaller than your fingernail can out-perform the computers of the 1980s. A HDD I can buy now is 2 million times larger than one I could buy in 1985. Your guess is as good as mine what I can buy 20 years from now.

That trend obviously can't continue indefinitely, but the only imaginable place it stops is when we hit "computronium:" the single best designs permitted by the laws of physics. I have absolutely no idea when that'll happen, but some people are saying that it'll happen before 2100. IMO, that's not unreasonable.

I thought so too for some time. But as I said, this is wishful thinking and faith based. The belief that "some scientific breakthroughs" will happen that make everything better is not founded in any reality. And add to that that second problem, that even IF technology and science are neutral (which could be debated another time), the application of it is clearly not. As long as this culture works as it does - on greed, competition, growth, the myth of progress - it will not stop doing these destructive things. If one group of people does not apply a new technology because there are doubts on its impacts, another one will do so in that competitive "arms race" world. New technologies just make the weapons more powerful.

The culture now integrates the concept of the triple bottom line; We know the memes, and we have increasing ideas of what can go wrong.

Besides, remember how the quintessential arms race ended: stalemate.

Cheap fusion power - that is a complete illusion either. For once, it will nto be cheap - maybe it can be cheaper than coal or wind or nuclear fission, but it will never be too cheap to meter. The materials and fuel needed for those requires a lot of effort to produce.

The fuel for fusion power is seawater. It doesn't even need to be filtered.

And even if that would be so, I think a civilization that has limitless energy has the potential to be more powerful. That does by itself not say anything about the intentions and applications of these powers. This is one of the greatest misconceptions of our time that we believe (faith again!) that more technology, more possibilites will by design create a stable system, a good society, happy people that act on behalf of the environment. Why should that be so?

Better technology leads to a more efficient process, which means disturbing nature less and less. For instance, I noticed in the organization of the Real Life Na'vi tribe over on LN.org, hunting licenses were mentioned. We only have those because we might disturb wildlife; that's not an issue if all your meat is farmed.

History does not show that. Everytime a society grew more powerful in technology it actually created more horrors. The first application of IBM computers was to register Jews for extermiantion in the concentration camps.

...And the next, far more famous major use of a computer was to crack Enigma. I can give biased examples too.

The idea that at some point there is somehow "enough technology" around that there is a "rapture" and the culture as a whole just turns away from being mean and destructive bears any foundation.

Well, that's almost certainly going to happen at some point, because, unelss we're really careful about what we're doing, we'll get non-human sentient AI sooner or later. (i.e. within the next 1000 years or so.) Once hat happens, ecology is the least of our concerns.

Technoloy is at best a tool that can be used for good and bad. What really has to change then is the user of that tool. I think 500 years before now or 100 years or even 50 years (barely), it would have been possible with the given technology of that time to create an egalitarian, sustainable, live-loving culture that uses the tools of its time for the greater good of humans and nonhumans.

More than 200 years ago, you didn't have a choice; the Industrial Revolution hadn't happened yet. You mostly had to be self-sustaining, because otherwise nature ate your jujubes, in one way or another.

These myths have to be crushed, because otherwise any advances in technology only make things bigger, faster, tougher - but not by design better.

They arguably have been crushed, but the effects are still being seen from 30 years later because nature's processes are incredibly slow. Ideas are similarly incredibly slow, and considering how fast our understanding evolves, IMO, any given idea will be outdated by the time most people believe it.

(Some quotes cut short because I'm limited to 10,000 characters. )

[auroraglacialis]

Hi Moco Loco. What I try to get at is the view science has all too often on ecosystems and the view of beings as "genetic machines". I kind of mixed them together here, as both are linked and many people seem to use both views.
The idea of beings as biological DNA-driven machines is that idea of Dwkins and Co. They expand that a bit by also applying memes in terms of cultures, but basically animals and plants are for them little machines that act according to their programming. To the extent they tried to explain things like altruism with DNA. That's Dawkins and part one of the sentence you quoted.
Part two is the general idea of ecosystems in science when it comes to try and model them. In these models, little variations cannot play a role. A very simple one is a bottle with 3 bacteria which are eating the others in a certain way. The predictions of what happens over time depends basically on the uniformity and identity of the bacteria of one strain. If one would act differently, the model could not predict that. As i said, this is a simple model. But the same things are applied on a larger scale with populations of mammals, fish, reptiles, insects and plants. There animals turn into numbers and individuals have to be reduced to being a member of a certain species with generalized rules of behaviour. So in many situations this may work, but it means to reduce the actual information and diversity present. Trying to recinstruct an ecosystem from that basis likely would fail. It may work for bottles with bacteria, but less likely with more complex beings. And believe me, even creating artificial bacterial ecosystems is far from easy (/me looks at the bottles with dead bacteria in my lab fridge)

[Moco Loco]

In any copy made after something with nonquantifiable information, units must be invented to approximate any measurements, or we sort of have a dichotomy paradox. Information will inevitably be lost, but I don't think that is due to a failing in the way these concepts are thought of in the first place.

[auroraglacialis]

See but if information is lost, then the copy is never really like the original. This is not a problem in linear or self-stabilizing systems. You screw them up a little bit and nothing happens. It can even work in chaotic systems, if the subsection you screwed up is in itself linear and stabilizing. But if you trigger one of the many chaotic points, the whole thing will either collapes or turn into something entirely different. It may still stabilize but not resemble the original.
This is what I think is happening with ecosystems and the attempts to copy them from scratch. A lot of why ecosystems are stable and stabilizing depends on neighboring ecosystems and on that the chaotic points are supported in the right way by the remainder. For example keystone species are not only causing the ecosystem to shift completely when they are lost, but they also are due to this interaction rather well supported. But they may depend on a certain nonliving environment, a certain climate, soil composition etc.
Now if you destroy a local ecosystem, you can have a chance to rebuild it in place - species that are essential may come back from nearby if these parts are still healthy. But even then what you get is never like the original. Some things have changes - some soil got eroded, nutrients washed out or the new ecosystem gets a different start with different species. Starting it from scratch in a barren landscape devoid of the species that originally inhabited these areas (and that includes tiny insects, microbes, funghi) would mean you'd have to make a copy of a chaotic system that cannot rely on a stabilizing neighbors. How can this work?
I think this is a problem, because in a chaotic system, approximations are not acceptable.

And at the moment there is a lot of talk about storing the gene sequences of species to save them. That may work for some, but I think several other parameters are missing in this overly reductionist approach. Like epigenetics, but also cultural/learned behaviour. Not to mention that it is next to impossible to manufacture soil that is identical to any soil we can find. I think a lot of people believe, that if we just store the DNA of a species as a sequence of 0 and1 (and 2 and 3) or if we freeze a sample of a species, then this will enable future generations to resurrect these species. But that is stripping that species of possibly more than is kept. What has to survive are at LEAST living populations inside a working ecosystem. Anything else is quite outrageous because it assumes that humans now or in the near future will completely understand all aspects of these chaotic ecosystems to a degree that allows them to create them or re-create them.

That idea that humans are like gods, that we can create ecosystems or new species and that this will work out because we understand actually what we are doing is pretty far out, I think, given the surprises that pop up in science all the time.

Overall I think we must preserve and heal the ecology of this planet and not go crazy about creating some techno-fix to bring it back in the future. We must prevent the destruction and killing of the planet and not hope (and pray ?) to future generations, to possible scientific breakthroughs and to some kind of technologically induced enlightenment to resurrect Earth in the future. This so reminds of christian mythology with apocalypse, rapture, resurrection, heaven,...

[Moco Loco]

Originally Posted by auroraglacialis

Overall I think we must preserve and heal the ecology of this planet and not go crazy about creating some techno-fix to bring it back in the future. We must prevent the destruction and killing of the planet and not hope (and pray ?) to future generations, to possible scientific breakthroughs and to some kind of technologically induced enlightenment to resurrect Earth in the future. This so reminds of christian mythology with apocalypse, rapture, resurrection, heaven,...

Oh man of course. I think I may have misunderstood what we were arguing about I do believe technology should be a big factor of our future, but I didn't really mean we should throw Earth away in the process. We can just do both, I hope.

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Clarke

A network composed of 1,000 billion nodes is, naively, 10 times more powerful than any human brain. That means you're talking about an entity tens of times more intelligent than even the smartest human, with access to literally astronomical resources. Scared yet?

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.

On "lossless" data storage:

the "loss" to be negligible. After all, JPG is designed to lose only the information that a human won't even see in normal use.

To apply this to the natural world would be anthropocentric. Also I do not see how we are to know which bits are neglibile and furthermore to do that reduction you first have to have the full picture! This is how compression and reduction actually works. You have a processor that has ALL the information and then has rules to simplify this by taking out parts that are not vital. If you take out too much, you will have artefacts, too. But the point is, that without having the full picture, you cannot decide what parts to ignore and what not

Why are single species valuable? Why does it matter, if the system remains viable?

Yes, millions of species died out int he past, but today the extinction rate is orders of magnitude higher. And I do not think humans have the right to determine what species is to live and what is to die out. Especially not if that is not even done as a conscious process but basically by random hit-and-runs.

The "faith" that science will solve all our problems is a relatively good one because there is no known problem that science cannot, in principle, study and solve.

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....

Psst, look up the original meaning of the word "avatar."

Oh and what happened to the human race that thought they could be godlike and use Avatars? They got beaten and returned to being people (pink or blue ones), not gods.

I think you misunderstood my point about predicting future technologies.
My point was not that there is such a progression in development, but that it is hard to predict new technologies, especially ones that are not just continuations of the present ones. A person in 1950 could possibly have predicted personal computers, but most did not. They believed the market for computers would be a couple of them per year. Instead they predicted rocket driven flying cars, all healing atomic pills and nuclear reactors in every household. The predictions made for the future are vague, erroneous and fantastic. Strangely though, the social predictions in "1984" seem to have hit the mark though. The technologies people set so much hope in are far from predictable, some are not even invented yet. Someone in 1950 could have predicted PCs, but maybe have a much harder time envisioning biotechnology and nanotechnology and the various positive and negative impacts of that. My point was that it is lunacy to build a civilization on the hopes and dreams that are in these predictions.

The TBL-"meme" sounds nice enough, but people have known and embraced social justice, equality and various other humanitarian ideals for a long time. Marx has written his work in the 19th century and many people believed in that. The point is not what people hope for, but what actually happens. Ideals have to be followed through and again, at the present I see people valueing one of these over the other for most parts and even the good intentions all too often go wrong. So I am not saying that this meme is a bad one, it sounds good enough, but what matters if and when it truely will be followed, and that is basically my argument, that this has to happen - independent of whatever happens in science and technology - to truely create change that "saves the world"

Besides, remember how the quintessential arms race ended: stalemate.

Not really - the USSR actually collapsed.... and the leftovers of the whole arms race deal are now still lingering about....

The fuel for fusion power is seawater. It doesn't even need to be filtered.

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. The plants will cost an enourmous amount of money and material resources as well as materials that have not even invented yet. The distribution of that power also costs resources. The cost of electricity are not solely in the fuel, but also in the operation, construction, deconstruction and maintenance of the power generation and distribution systems. Fusion power could potentially be cheap, but not "too cheap to meter".

Better technology leads to a more efficient process, which means disturbing nature less and less. [...]hunting licenses were mentioned. We only have those because we might disturb wildlife; that's not an issue if all your meat is farmed.

You are aware of the irony that industrially farmed meat is ghastly and consumes about a third of the US corn production. The "efficiency" is an illusion because to have this farmed meat, actually millions of hektars of land had to be turned into farmland to the point that less than 3 percent of the land in that country is still "wild". The widespread application of the more efficient technology - farming - actually lead to MORE disturbance of nature?

...And the next, far more famous major use of a computer was to crack Enigma. I can give biased examples too.

So what? I did not say its impacts are all negative, just that there always are negative ones and they always are expressed and as a consequence the only thing that happens is that there are more possibilities - how these are used matters much more than to create more powerful possibilities.

Well, that's almost certainly going to happen at some point, because, unelss we're really careful about what we're doing, we'll get non-human sentient AI sooner or later.

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.

More than 200 years ago, you didn't have a choice; the Industrial Revolution hadn't happened yet. You mostly had to be self-sustaining, because otherwise nature ate your jujubes, in one way or another.

Humans started environmental destruction with the advent of agriculture. It was not so devastating maybe as today, but it was there. Also there was injustice and dominance and opression, people were enslaved and wars happened. In all that time, technology increased. New technologies came about that could have changed that world of that time, reverse the degradation and injustice of that time. The invention of the windmill could have been seen as the source for abundant cheap flour for everyone. The invention of the three field rotation agriculture could have resulted in a great food abundance for everyone living on the planet and the discovery of steel could have been applied to give everyone cheap tools for his daily lives. Instead what resulted was population growth, more degradation, more injustice, continued hunger and massive bloodshed with steel weapons. So there was never a technological hurdle to overcome to create a more just society. At any time, people could have said that they would use the steel for better things than war, could have used the surpluses in food to prevent hunger instead of fueling population growth etc. The means to stop what made any period in time destructive for humans and nonhumans existed at that time (less destructive impact, less means are needed). 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.

[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?

[Tsyal Makto]

IMO the solution is two-fold. Science has a place, but humanity must get in touch with it's holistic roots, too. Case in point: The Iriqouis philosophy of Seventh Generation Sustainability. I mentioned it before in other places, but Thom Hartmann is a good author on this topic. "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight" and "Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture" come to mind.

My $0.02.

[auroraglacialis]

Originally Posted by Moco Loco

Oh man of course. I think I may have misunderstood what we were arguing about I do believe technology should be a big factor of our future, but I didn't really mean we should throw Earth away in the process. We can just do both, I hope.

If we can do both, then that is fine with me, but ATM I do not see it. Hope is not enough for me when it comes to Earth. And when it comes to it, I regard the Earth as priority. I'd rather see the application of technology to decline than the Earth dying. Presently the look of people is mostly in the future - in what may or could or is hoped to happen there. The present technologies are destructive, but surely technological development will eventually create some benign ones. As even the ones we considered to be "green" start to show their ugly side now with toxic mines producing the materials needed for electronics, windmills, solar panels, with thousands of hektars of land being put under water for hydropower and with widespread nanoparticles showing their impact in nature - I think this thought is merely something we try to comfort us with. We use hope as an excuse to not act now, we use the look at the future and its technologies as a way to procrastinate.


!! ANYWAYS !!
this is getting somewhat off topic again. The point I was originally trying to make was that preservation of what is now, of our Earth, of what exists here, of what may be our "Eywa" in the here and now is going way over our capabilities to "store and restore". If Eywa exists on Earth, she does so by the totality of biology and ecology on the planet and to destroy that would hurt or kill her. And to think we can then later just restore this is quite an assumption.