The Science of Avatar

by Stephen Baxter

  An interesting review in the April 2010 issue of the journal Nature summed up the decade since the first full decoding of the human genome, all one hundred thousand genes, the “blueprint of life.” Progress in using genetic data in medicine has actually been slower than expected, because of the complex genetics behind many diseases, apparently exaggerated claims after a few early successes in the 1990s—and the death of a patient in 1999, after a severe reaction to attempts to give him repaired genes. At the time of writing, no patients have actually been cured of common genetic diseases by gene therapy.

  And then there are ethical and other doubts about the technique, as with so many other areas of modern medicine. For instance, babies can be “screened” in the womb for genetic conditions, possibly treated, or, perhaps, aborted if the parents choose. Many people will have doubts about where to draw the line in terms of such choices. Then there is the question of inheritance. There are two basic types of gene therapy. You can insert the therapeutic genes into the somatic cells of the patient—that is, the non-reproductive cells of the body. In this case any effects will be restricted to the patient only, and not passed on to any offspring. Or you can insert genes into germ cells—that is, reproductive cells, sperm or eggs. These changes would be heritable and can be passed on to future generations. These techniques are so controversial that in many countries, including the UK, tampering with the human germ line is a specific criminal offence.

  One very unpleasant offshoot of gene therapy research could be “smart” biological weapons. You could target a specific group or individual with a particular DNA pattern, and trigger a natural or engineered disease. It must be hoped that this doesn’t occur to any SecOps think tanks on Pandora—but it is a possibility, since we know from the creation of the avatars that humans have to some extent mastered Na’vi genetics as well as their own.

  The medical treatments discussed here are more or less at the experimental stage today. Perhaps the successful ones will be routinely available by the mid-twenty-second century. But it seems likely they will be costly. Aside from the evident cost of fixing Jake’s spinal injury, we see scientist Max Patel wearing glasses! If you can build an avatar, you’d think you could fix short-sightedness—but, obviously, only at the right price.

  Another technological advance obvious in Hell’s Gate is computer technology.

  Consider the Hell’s Gate Ops Centre control room. (Avatar’s creative team visited such locations as a real-world oil rig, the gigantic Noble Clyde Boudreaux in the Gulf of Mexico, to use as a model for interiors like this.) We see large-scale wraparound screens that respond to the touch and movement of the operator. In another instance, in the avatar lab, Max Patel swipes one tablet-like screen over another, taking an image to carry away with him to show Grace Augustine, as easily as he might pull a piece of paper from a pin-board. Three-dimensional displays are the norm, and there is an emphasis on graphic and tactile interactions, in an environment saturated with computing. These scenes recall recent experiments in “ubiquitous computing,” in which computers become embedded in the surroundings. Nokia’s Ubice is one prototype. In Microsoft’s Lightspace system, surfaces in a lecture room become screens for displaying documents and images; like Max you can pick up a virtual item from one display and move it to another.

  The Ops Centre also features a holotable, with a continuously updated summary of conditions across RDA’s operations on Pandora. This is a very impressive, fully searchable holographic display, which Jake is able to reach into, tracing for Quaritch the internal structure of Hometree with his hands. Holography, the science of 3-D projection, is quite an old technology. The principles on which it is based were first set out in 1947 by the British physicist Dennis Gabor, who got a Nobel Prize for his trouble. Information about the amplitude and phase of light waves—that is, how intense they are and how they relate to each other—are stored as patterns of interference. Computer programs “ray-trace” back from these interference patterns to recreate the light rays that gave rise to those patterns, and so give the illusion that the object that emitted or reflected the light in the first place is present. Indeed, that “object” might only ever have existed in the electronic imagination of a computer.

  Human-machine interaction (HMI) is the academic study of the interaction between people and computers. It is the intersection of a number of fields, from ergonomics and human factors to computer design. It arose partly because of bad examples of human-machine interfaces leading to calamity—for instance, it is thought that the Three Mile Island nuclear accident was partly due to operators struggling with a poor and confusing interface. HMI practitioners develop theories of interaction, come up with design methodologies and processes, and invent new kinds of interfaces and interaction techniques. A long-term goal is to minimise the barriers between a human’s cognitive model of what she wants to accomplish and the machine’s understanding of the task.

  This makes sense in terms of what we see of the computer interfaces in Avatar, which seem a logical development from modern technology, our tablets and smart phones, with their applications which respond to touch, and can sense physical movements such as tipping and shaking thanks to internal accelerometers and GPS positional awareness. All of this builds an illusion that the computer applications are part of our physical world.

  But if the human interfaces look familiar, current trends would suggest that we ought to anticipate huge advances in computer power by 2154.

  “Moore’s law” is an empirical observation that thanks to technological advances and commercial pressure the speed of computer systems (as well as other parameters such as memory storage and relative cheapness) is growing exponentially. This was first described by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who in 1965 noted that the number of components in integrated circuits had doubled every year since the invention of such circuits in 1958. The doubling is cumulative, like compound interest, so in ten years the increase (two multiplied by itself ten times) would be over a thousandfold.

  Similar studies based on other ways to calculate computing power give different values for the doubling time, but all of the same order of magnitude. Futurologist Ray Kurzweil has claimed the law has been working since the mechanical calculating machines of the early twentieth century. And it’s still working today, nearly half a century after Moore’s original paper. As of November 2010, according to the “TOP500” list that keeps a rank of such things, the most powerful non-distributed computer system in the world, a Chinese supercomputer called the Tianhe-1A (“the Milky Way”) was capable of around twenty-five hundred trillion elemental mathematical calculations per second (2.5 petaflops, in the jargon). The TOP500 list, maintained since 1993, confirms a version of Moore’s Law based on the big machines’ processing speeds, with a doubling time of fourteen months.

  But Moore’s Law makes even mighty machines look dumb very quickly. With a fourteen-month doubling the Law should ensure that a laptop, presumably available for the same kind of comparative price as today, will pass the power of that big Chinese machine in a mere fifteen years. I won’t depress you here by telling you when the supercomputers, or indeed your phone, will become more powerful than your brain. We’ll consider that stuff in Chapter 32; it would certainly help with the tricky business of linking Jake to his avatar to have the whole process buffered by computers much more powerful than either brain.

  Moore’s Law must have a limit beyond which it breaks down; in the end it will come up against fundamental physical limits. But by Avatar’s mid-twenty-second century the world will surely be utterly saturated by extremely advanced computer technology. Just as today it’s in your TV and car and phone, by then we must anticipate that it will be everywhere, in your clothes, your home, in every gadget you use—even in the very fabric of your body, which might swarm with tiny smart medical-repair nano-robots.

  For much of the movie’s running time, however, humans are occupied with another sort of intelligence—the Na’vi’s—and on waging war agai
nst it.

  20

  APOCALYPSE SOON

  War-making features heavily in Avatar, both on Pandora and on Earth. Quaritch and Jake as serving soldiers saw action in theatres such as Nigeria and Venezuela. This is all too plausible. In Chapter 2 we saw that war doesn’t seem likely to vanish from our world any time soon, thanks to pressures from resource depletion and climate change.

  And, in Avatar’s future, we have proudly exported war-making to the stars.

  RDA needed weaponry on Pandora long before their dispute with the Na’vi started. As Quaritch warned his newbies, the animal life on the moon, from charging hammerheads to pack-hunting viperwolves to plunging mountain banshees, is ferocious enough. But the focus of the movie is the battle with the Na’vi.

  The military strategy RDA and SecOps play out on Pandora has some parallels to the recent conflicts in the Gulf and the occupation of Iraq. These contemporary parallels are deliberate on the part of the movie-makers, as signalled for example by Max Patel’s use of the resonant phrase “shock and awe” to describe the assault on Hometree. We see a mixture of the constant threat of aggressive force with efforts to win over the “hearts and minds” of the local people using the avatars.

  And, just as in Iraq, privately employed soldiers, like Miles Quaritch of SecOps, a military contractor working under RDA, are a significant part of the Pandoran landscape.

  Today, private soldiering is an industry worth globally a hundred billion dollars. Don’t call them “mercenaries,” however. Nowadays they are known by terms like “private military contractors” (PMCs). Many of them are ex-regular service, like Quaritch; indeed the recruiting pool was boosted by the discharging of military personnel in the 1990s following the end of the Cold War.

  Around two dozen PMC firms currently supply services to the Pentagon. They are employed to provide supplementary services to regular forces in theatres of operation around the world. In Afghanistan they have been used as guards to the Afghan president. In many parts of the world they are used to support peacekeeping operations in the absence of regular western troops, or to provide training for local forces.

  PMCs are also used by private corporations and international and non-governmental organisations. For instance the Irish company Integrated Risk Management Services provides security protection for Shell Oil operations in Bolivia. Thus the use of SecOps by RDA in Avatar to secure mining operations on Pandora is quite realistic.

  There are issues around the use of PMCs, including the fact that under some regulatory systems the soldiers could be considered “unlawful combatants,” without the right to prisoner-of-war status, if they use offensive force in a war zone. The position of the Geneva Convention on this seems unclear to me, if only because in 1977 a revising protocol was not ratified by the United States. Still, an officer going rogue like Miles Quaritch—and indeed the PMC firm which tries to mount a coup against the U.S. government in the seventh season of the TV show 24—are surely, hopefully, never going to be typical.

  If the use of PMCs to guard the RDA mining operation on Pandora is realistic, the military technology we see deployed there is thoroughly realistic too.

  The scenes of war fighting in Avatar, especially the assault on Hometree and the cataclysmic final battle over the Tree of Souls, are memorable and disturbing. And the depiction of the use of flying vehicles is visually very striking.

  Quaritch’s warriors ride into action in a variety of specialised aircraft. The craft shown are all capable of VTOL flight (vertical take-off and landing, including the ability to hover). VTOL would work better in Pandora’s lower gravity and thick air than on Earth, in fact. And the use of VTOL was a realistic choice by the designers in tactical terms; VTOL craft would be highly useful for operations in an environment of dense jungle without landing strips.

  Some of the aircraft are “rotorcraft,” analogous to modern helicopters, though using ducted fans rather than conventional rotors. The rotorcraft have two contra-rotating rotors in each rotor pod. This stops the craft as a whole spinning in response to a rotor’s turning; single-rotor craft need tail rotors to keep them stable. Meanwhile the Valkyrie space shuttle hovers by swivelling its turbo engines, rather like a Harrier “jumpjet.”

  The use of rotorcraft in warfare has developed since the Second World War. Helicopters were used in that war for some medical evacuations, but it was the Korean War that saw their application on a major scale. The rough terrain in Korea made ground evacuations difficult, and the use of helicopters like the Sikorsky H-19, together with mobile army surgical hospitals—the “M.A.S.H.” made famous in the TV show—dramatically reduced fatal casualties on the battlefield. Later, in Vietnam, craft like the AH-1 Cobra attack helicopter, the UH-1 “Huey,” made possible a new kind of warfare in which troops became a kind of “aerial cavalry,” no longer tied to a fixed position but able to be deployed rapidly across the country. The Hueys became an icon of that war, and were involved in fire support for ground troops and were used in aerial rocket artillery battalions.

  In Avatar’s design, Cameron wanted the warcraft to be visually striking, but also to reflect real-world technology. As a result many of the craft have analogues in the inventory of U.S. fighting forces today. The Samson is a general-purpose utility aircraft comparable in size and function to the modern UH-60 Blackhawk, which is used for general air support functions such as medical evacuation, transport, command and control, and support for special operations. The Scorpion gunship, heavily armed, is comparable to modern attack helicopters like the AH-64 Apache, used for precision strikes and armed reconnaissance missions—Apaches are seeing a good deal of action in the Libyan conflict at the time of writing. The Dragon gunship is a heavily armed transport, combat and command and control aircraft which is a hybrid of several current types of craft. It is a transport like the C-130 Hercules, but with its heavy armament it is perhaps most similar to the AC-130 Spectre airborne gunship, a variant of the Hercules developed as a weapons platform for ground attack during the Vietnam War.

  The Valkyrie space shuttle is pressed into service as a bomber during the Tree of Souls attack. In combat the Valkyrie serves a role like the Boeing C-17 Globemaster III, a large military transport in operation since the 1990s for the USAF and other air forces. The C-17’s purpose is the airlifting of troops and cargo to operating bases; it combines a very heavy lift capacity with an ability to land on short airfields.

  Other weaponry in use on Pandora is also thoroughly recognisable from modern parallels. You could surely fire a modern gun in Pandora’s moist, toxic air, as long as its moving parts weren’t corroded or jammed—as indeed you could fire a gun in space. A bullet carries its own oxidising agent in the explosive of the sealed cartridge, so guns aren’t dependent on the oxygen content of the air, if any. As for corrosion, armies have been dealing with the problems caused by warm, soggy environments like Pandora’s for a century or more, through the use of proper lubricants and frequent cleaning. But on Pandora you would always have to watch out for the jamming of components by the intense magnetic fields.

  For the assault on the Tree of Souls the engineers put together pallets of mine explosives, to be dropped out the back of the Valkyrie shuttles. It is pilot Trudy Chacon who describes these improvised weapons as “daisycutters.” This is a Vietnam-era nickname for the BLU-82 weapon system, a fifteen-thousand-pound conventional bomb to be dropped from an aircraft like a C-130. It was one of the largest conventional weapons ever used, and was retired in 2008 to be replaced by the even more powerful GBU-43/B MOAB—Massive Ordnance Air Blast. The daisycutter’s original purpose was to flatten an area of Vietnam forest into a helicopter landing zone. Later, in Afghanistan, it was used as an anti-personnel weapon and for intimidation purposes; it has a very large lethal radius, a hundred metres or more, as well as creating an explosion that’s visible and audible over very long distances.

  By its charter, RDA is not allowed to deploy any weapons of mass destruction on Pandora, or indeed to use
excessive military force. We see ethical dilemmas on these lines played out in the course of the movie, as Jake, Grace and others oppose Quaritch and Selfridge. But fine ethical distinctions might not have been clear to the Na’vi on the receiving end of the RDA’s improvised daisycutter. Still, an organisation with space travel capabilities could easily do a lot more damage if it tried; a small asteroid prodded towards an impact on the Tree of Souls would unleash energies equivalent to a nuclear weapon.

  You might ask if the makers of Avatar have been conservative in their depiction of war-making, with vehicles and weapons with such close parallels to modern gear. The assault on Pandora is some hundred and forty years into the future. A hundred and forty years ago, it was the era of the Civil War in the U.S. and the Franco-Prussian War in Europe; war fighting tactics and technologies have evolved hugely since then. In 2154, would armed forces still be using craft and weapons so similar to those in use now?

  Well, specific military technology designs can endure a long time if they work well enough (as indeed they can in the civilian world). The Hercules, or variants of it, has been flying for over fifty years already, and the B-52 bomber, first flown in 1952, has a projected out-of-service date of 2050, by which time it will be a century old! And in Avatar the Samson, for example, is a century-old design.

  Then there’s the challenge of the environment. The aircraft shown in the film were primarily designed to operate in Earth’s atmosphere, and have now been adapted for Pandora, with its toxic gases and volcanic products in the air (see Chapter 17), and powerful magnetic fields. You would need to retune turbine and rotor systems, remodel intake ducts, recalculate fuel mixes, harden systems against electromagnetic fields. To face the challenge of such a difficult environment you would want to be able to rely on a robust, proven, veteran workhorse. The Samson is just such a workhorse, tested over decades in a variety of environments on Earth, from the Antarctic to the Honduras—including operations where hardening against electromagnetic fields was necessary, which is why on Pandora it responds relatively well over a “fluxcon,” an area of strong magnetic flux.