The Science of Avatar

by Stephen Baxter

  One possibility is that the trees themselves are more than simple switches; perhaps they contain some internal processing too—which would up Eywa’s total processing power significantly. There is in fact a theory that the neurons in our brains are similarly more than simple on-off switches. Cambridge biologist Brian J. Ford is developing holistic theories about cells, which are complex organisms in their own right, and are capable of remarkably complex individual behaviours. Amoebas, for example, single-celled organisms, can build glassy shells by picking up sand grains from the mud. The cells of our bodies can perform similarly complex acts in support of body functions. Why, then, asks Ford, should we not expect that some kind of processing goes on within neurons, brain cells, themselves? Even the details of their output firings seem to include delays, nonlinear responses and other subtleties. “My hunch,” says Ford, “is that the brain’s power will turn out to derive from data processing within the neuron rather than activity between neurons.”

  And what about connections beyond the intertwining of trees roots? The woodsprites are “the seeds of the sacred tree.” When they settle on avatar-Jake, during his first encounter with Neytiri, the Na’vi girl takes it as a sign from Eywa of great significance. But we see no physical connection between the trees and the woodsprites, no obvious neural links—and nor, indeed, have we any hint of how Eywa can predict Jake’s future. And later during the SecOps attack, the animals of Pandora, the viperwolves, banshees, hammerheads and thanators, join in the fightback. This is another expression of the will of Eywa, but again we see no evidence of a simple physical connection between trees and animals. In another odd incident, Mo’at, as tsahik, the shaman, presumably the closest of all the Na’vi to Eywa, tastes Jake’s blood on first encountering him. Is she sampling some kind of biochemical data to transfer to Eywa?

  There’s clearly much to Eywa that isn’t obvious. But we do witness one remarkable expansion of Eywa’s apparent power beyond the limit of the core forest infrastructure.

  In the Tree of Souls, when Grace and Jake are being taken into the Eye of Eywa to be transferred to their avatar bodies, the Na’vi of the Omaticaya clan all plug their queues into a glowing, dispersed root mass in the ground. The clan evidently becomes a kind of internet of the mind, with distributed computing going on in the “PCs” of the Na’vi brains in addition to the “mainframe” processor of the tree network.

  Such networks can be extraordinarily powerful. According to an estimate published by Wired Magazine in June 2008, the billion PCs that are today connected by the Internet—along with smart phones, tablets and a host of other devices—amount to a single computer with a power equivalent to twelve thousand petaflops. That’s thousands of times the power of that top-end Chinese machine. A project called SETI@Home is an example of how this distributed power can be used. SETI searches of radioastronomy data for signals from extraterrestrial intelligences can be very hungry for computing power; there is a lot of sky to search and a lot of radio frequencies to listen on. Since the 1990s the task of sifting through the tremendous volumes of raw data has been parcelled out to a network of volunteers’ PCs, each of which contributes a fraction of its total power to the SETI quest. It’s an attractive project that offers you the chance of being the one to make first contact, at home…

  To some extent a physical networking as in the Tree of Souls scenes is the ultimate expression of the Na’vi’s close sociability with each other—yet it’s much more than that. How must this linking feel? What would it be like, to be part of an internet of the mind?

  A group mind might be a new layer of processing, superimposed on top of the central nervous systems of each of its members, passing information in a different, faster way. It would be a growth of consciousness, perhaps like the mind-expanding feeling you get when solving a puzzle, or finding the right strategy in a chess game—or when a scientist sees her hypothesis confirmed by a bit of new evidence, and the world makes a little more sense than it did before. Joined in Eywa, you would no longer be alone. You would share thoughts, feelings, memories. What would it matter if some of those memories were now stored outside your own skull?

  And for the Na’vi, united in Eywa, this may have the strange consequence that to some extent the spirits of the ancestors are stored in the brains of their living descendants.

  Eywa as a computing system is worthy of deeper study, for it shows signs of great sophistication in her processing and decision-making. The biochemical communication of the tree roots cannot be terribly fast, so planetary-scale Eywa may have a distributed decision-making system. When the woodsprites first detect there is something special about avatar-Jake, a holding decision seems to be made about him—Neytiri is instructed to keep him from harm—while, perhaps, the news is passed to higher levels of the hierarchy, and a deeper decision made. Later, Eywa clearly responds to the mass appeals of the combined clan, but she has options; there are clearly occasions when she feels it right to promote an individual. This is the Toruk Macto phenomenon, culminating in the selection of Jake himself.

  But however smart she is, where did Eywa come from? How did she evolve?

  Eywa is central to the Na’vi and their world. Jake learns that the Na’vi see the world as a network of energy, flowing through all living things; the energy is only borrowed, and you have to give it back. Eywa, the great mother, is at the centre of all this; she protects the “balance of life.” As such, perhaps she is a sister to our own Gaia.

  As we saw in Chapter 2, according to theories developed first by James Lovelock, we believe that the Earth—its crust, the atmosphere, the water in the oceans and rivers and suspended in the air, and the biosphere, the world’s great cargo of living things—is a single, complex, highly interconnected system, constantly in flux under the pressure of powerful forces: the sun’s radiant energy which produces wind and rain and feeds life through photosynthesis, and Earth’s internal engine, principally the movement of the great tectonic plates and the outgassing of volcanoes. These forces drive tremendous cycles of mass and energy. And these unending cycles keep Earth habitable.

  The main long-term challenge faced by life on Earth is what astrophysicists call the “Young Sun Paradox.” The sun, like all similar stars, is slowly brightening as it ages. In Earth’s early history the sun’s power output was only some seventy per cent of its current value. But despite this, as far back as we can see, temperatures on Earth’s surface have stayed about the same. Yes, there have been Ice Ages, but we have evidence from geology that on the whole liquid water has been able to exist on Earth’s surface for almost all of its history. Faced with a relentlessly brightening sun, some mechanism seems to have maintained the mean surface temperature of Earth in a range suitable for liquid water, and thus equable for life.

  The key turns out to be carbon dioxide, the notorious “greenhouse gas” largely responsible for our current pulse of global warming. Carbon dioxide is injected (naturally) into the air by outgassing from volcanoes and other tectonic phenomena. It is removed by weathering, as the gas combines chemically with surface rocks, and by living processes; the bulk of the carbon in a tree trunk is drawn down from the air.

  The outgassing is more or less constant, but the weathering rate and the productivity of life change with temperature. And because of that temperature dependence a global feedback mechanism has been operating, apparently for aeons. As the sun heats up, the carbon dioxide concentration is reduced, so that less heat is trapped, and overall the surface temperature stays constant.

  This, and a number of other biochemical and geochemical feedback cycles, led Lovelock to formulate his Gaia hypothesis, that life has the ability actively to control its environment on a planetary scale, and thus to cope with changes such as the heating up of the sun. And all this emerged through self-organisation, as a natural outcome of the general increase of complexity on the planet. Lovelock’s ideas were greeted by a storm of scepticism, but the records of the evenness of temperatures in the past, and similar data, se
em unarguable.

  (This can’t go on for ever, though. When there is no more carbon dioxide left to draw down, the warming will at last be uncontrollable and the biosphere will gradually collapse. This will happen in less than a billion years. And remember that life on Earth is already some four billion years old. Gaia is old, not young, and Earth is closer to becoming a Mars-like desiccated world, like Burroughs’ Barsoom, than you might think.)

  In the case of Gaia as we understand her, there seems no need for mind to be involved, no intention. “Gaia” is not alive. But what of Eywa?

  Consider this. Alpha Centauri is an older star system than the sun, by some two hundred and fifty million years. That is a long time—four times as long as the gap between us and the dinosaurs—long even compared to the time there has been multicelled life on this planet, nearly half of that great span. So Pandora is most likely an older world than Earth, and its biosphere that much older too. And so Eywa must be older than Gaia.

  Eywa, meanwhile, in preserving Pandora as a habitable world, has had significantly greater challenges to face than Gaia had. As a hazard, the slow heating-up of the sun has been relatively easy for Gaia to deal with; Gaia has had to become no smarter than a vast natural thermostat. Alpha Centauri A is heating up just as the sun is. But Pandora also suffers the tectonic agony of Polyphemus’ tides, and the tumultuous radiative and magnetic environment caused by its own magnetosphere and Polyphemus’. So Eywa has had to become a good deal more complex than Gaia—but has had the time to evolve ways to face its tougher challenges.

  And, in the end, perhaps there was a sparking of consciousness, in a global network of ten to the twelfth trees.

  All this is just my speculation. Perhaps the truth is entirely different. We have much to learn of Eywa, her true nature, her origin, and her ultimate destiny.

  To paraphrase the British biologist J. B. S. Haldane, the universe is probably not just stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine.

  That is surely true of Pandora. And this strange and remarkable world, Pandora, these remarkable people, the Na’vi, are what Jake Sully encounters when he enters the avatar link unit—and, astonishingly, looks out through the eyes of a body not his own.

  PART EIGHT

  AVATAR

  “Everything is backwards now, like out there is the true world, and in here is the dream.”

  —Jake Sully

  30

  ANGELS AND DEMONS

  Perhaps the single most complex element of the movie Avatar, both scientifically and mythologically, is the idea of the avatars themselves.

  The avatars were originally created as a labour force adapted to conditions on Pandora, but proved too expensive for the purpose. Later, after pressure from the UN, scientists and the general public to establish fuller relations with the Na’vi, RDA changed the avatars’ mission; they became ambassadors for humanity among the Na’vi. Since this failed to have satisfactory outcomes the avatars have been redeployed for reconnaissance, field science and exploration—and, covertly, under Colonel Quaritch’s command, to gather military “intel” on the Na’vi. In future they could have other uses, such as supervisors if the Na’vi are ever made to labour in human mines…

  The avatars look like Na’vi, more or less. Yet they are not Na’vi, and nor are they human. They are made things, grown in a tank from a mixture of human and Na’vi genetic material. In fine details they differ from the Na’vi: their human-like eyes, the number of their fingers.

  And they are unlike Na’vi, and humans, in that they don’t have minds of their own. An avatar needs the consciousness of a “driver” to function.

  As a driver, Jake Sully is joined to his avatar by a “psionic link.” Lying inert in his link tank, perhaps kilometres away, he can operate his avatar as if it were his own body. He sees and hears and feels through the avatar’s sense organs; his mind controls the avatar body’s movements. While he is linked to the avatar it is as if he is the avatar.

  New technologies rarely find just one application. Aside from the application on Pandora, what else could you do with avatar technology? The ability to grow mindless bodies, including presumably fully human ones, itself offers possibilities, even without “driving” them. They could be used as banks of organs for donation, for instance, or test beds for medical advances, or they could be used to explore the tolerance of the body to various extremes, heat and cold, airlessness.

  “Driven” avatar bodies could be used as soldiers in the battle-field, disposable cannon fodder controlled by trained operators from the safety of link tanks in bunkers far behind the lines. Avatars could also be used on such assignments as bomb disposal, or sent into hazardous environments such as future Chernobyls.

  How about entertainment? You could stage fight-to-the-death gladiatorial contests with “nobody” getting hurt. And we can’t begin to discuss the opportunities for pornography in a book about a 12-rated movie!

  All of this would depend only on the cost—as Jake says, the avatar programme has turned out to be “insanely expensive”—and on whether an avatar body really does have no mind of its own. You would have to be absolutely sure that it cannot feel, or grieve, no matter what you do to it, or make it do.

  In the chapters that follow we will look at how an avatar could be built and operated. But avatars also carry an extraordinarily complicated mythological weight, a weight that surely shapes the Na’vi’s reaction to them. Remember, the warrior Tsu’tey accuses avatar-Jake of being “a demon in a false body.”

  There have been many fictional portrayals of mind-links and mind-swaps before, from F. Anstey’s Vice Versa (1882) to the recent movie Freaky Friday. In the 1960s, the boy hero of Gerry Anderson’s TV puppet show Joe 90 became a special agent “thanks to a fabulous electronic device which can transfer the brain patterns of those who are the greatest experts in their field” (according to a publicity brochure of the time). Joe’s gadget, a limited precursor of the avatar link, was itself anticipated by the “Educator tapes” of James White’s many “Sector General” stories, and the idea has recently been revived in a more adult form in Joss Whedon’s TV series Dollhouse. The recent movie Surrogates saw an ageing Bruce Willis operate a young-looking robotic “avatar” of himself. But the concept has never been taken so far as in the movie Avatar.

  And the concept has much deeper mythological roots.

  To begin with, Tsu’tey is right: an avatar is a false body. It is a made creature: that is, made by humans, not by nature, or any god.

  Avatars are like the golems of early Judaic legends, which were beings created from mud by rabbis who approached God closely enough to attain the power to create life. The most famous such story concerns the Golem of Prague, set in the sixteenth century. Golems crop up in popular culture, such as in the X-Files episode “Kaddish.” Typically a golem is a slave of its creator. And having been made by a mortal it is a lesser thing than any human, who is made by God. The Frankenstein monster is a descendant of the golem myth, the dead brought back to life through science.

  But golems have minds. The avatars of the movie are like golems but without minds of their own: they are controlled by the consciousness of their human operators. As such the name “avatar” is apt. The word is used in computing to describe a user’s representation of herself in some computational world, a game or a shared space like Second Life. Thus Jake is the “user,” the avatar his representation in the world of the Na’vi. This usage of the word seems to date from the 1980s, and it was popularised in “cyberpunk” novels like Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992).

  But the word “avatar” has much deeper roots. Ultimately it derives from the Hindu, from a word for “descent.” An avatar is a manifestation of a god on the Earth. This is not like the divinity of Christ in the Christian religion; through the Incarnation Christ was God made man, whereas a Hindu avatar is more literally a god walking the Earth. Perhaps an avatar is more like an angel of Christian, Jewish and Islamic traditions. Interesting
ly, avatars in Hinduism are often sent to Earth for a specific purpose, just as avatar-Grace is sent to educate the Na’vi, and avatar-Jake is sent to negotiate their evacuation from Hometree. And, incidentally, Hindu deities are often shown as blue-skinned, like the Na’vi in the movie.

  The control of the avatars by minds outside their bodies is like demonic possession, in which a human is controlled by an outside force. So Tsu’tey is also correct to say that there is a “demon” inside that false body. In the Christian tradition, the Bible contains many references to demons being driven out of possessed people. But the oldest references in western culture appear to go back to the first civilisations; the Sumerians believed sickness was caused by possession by malevolent spirits. And shamanic cultures, like the Na’vi, often also believe in possession. Disease is caused by vengeful spirits, the spectres of animals or of wronged humans, that can be driven out by exorcism.

  James Cameron’s avatars are thus a modern reworking of a whole set of very ancient mythic elements. And with such a background the reaction of the Na’vi to the avatars can only be complicated, depending on how they interpret the avatars in the precise traditions of their own culture. To the Na’vi, humans are “sky people,” tawtute, and the avatars “dreamwalkers,” uniltirantokx, bodies possessed by spirits from the sky. Maybe it’s no surprise that at the start of Jake’s adventure we learn that the avatars have been forbidden to come to the Omaticaya clan’s Hometree.

  But how is an avatar body created in the first place?

  31

  A FALSE BODY

  During Jake Sully’s trip out from Earth aboard Venture Star, his avatar is force-grown in an amnio tank for the specific purpose of hosting Jake’s consciousness (or rather his twin’s, who had an identical genetic profile).