The Science of Avatar

by Stephen Baxter

  You can’t get to Pandora, not yet. But you can visit “climax ecosystems” like the forest of the Na’vi here on Earth, such as coral reefs and rain forests. You don’t even have to go as far as that to find the wonders of our world. Looking out of my window as I write this, at a scrap of lawn on an English early summer day, I see the chaffinches busily hunt for food amid the celandines, and the swallows whizz overhead like Scorpion gunships. The wild, right outside my window. The Na’vi are thoroughly embedded in the ecology of their world. But so are we—even if we don’t always remember it.

  Avatar was wonderful, and reality is pretty wonderful too. And, to me, the more we understand it, the more wonderful it becomes.

  RESOURCES

  PROLOGUE

  James Cameron’s screenplay copyrighted 2007 is available for download (see www.foxscreenings.com/media/pdf/JamesCameronAVATAR.pdf). The online “Pandorapedia” encyclopaedia (www.pandorapedia.com) contains a wealth of background material. James Cameron’s Avatar: An Activist Survival Guide by Maria Wilhelm and Dirk Mathison (HarperCollins), The Art of Avatar by Lisa Fitzpatrick (Abrams) and The Making of Avatar by Jody Duncan and Lisa Fitzpatrick (Abrams), all drawing on material provided by the creators, are richly recommended. But note that these sources derive from different points in a still-continuing development process and aren’t always consistent.

  Hollywood Science: Movies, Science and the End of the World by Sidney Perkowitz, Columbia University Press, 2010. On the fraught but productive relationship between movies and science.

  PART ONE: EARTH

  “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity” by J. Bockstrom et al., Ecology and Society vol. 14 p32ff, 2009. (Preprint available online.) Defining nine planetary “life support systems” and their safe boundaries.

  Nature (vol. 465 pp34–5, 2010) published an interesting twenty-fifth anniversary retrospective on the discovery of the ozone hole by one of the researchers involved.

  Climate Wars by Gwynne Dyer, One World, 2010. Grim projections of a future world battered by climate collapse.

  “An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and its Implications for United States National Security” by Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall, 2003. Report commissioned by the Pentagon, available online.

  The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock, Allen Lane, 2006. An apocalyptic vision of the climate-change future from the author of the Gaia theory.

  Living Through the End of Nature by Paul Wapner, MIT Press, 2010. A future in which we live sympathetically with nature.

  The Vertical Farm by Dickson Despommier, Thomas Dunne Books, 2010. Moving farming into the cities and freeing up the countryside.

  “Geoengineering and Climate: Science, Governance and Uncertainty,” The Royal Society, September 2009 (http://royalsociety.org/Geoengineering-the-climate/). Prestigious survey of a controversial subject.

  The Wildlife of Our Bodies by Rob Dunn, Harper, 2011. On how our bodies have been shaped by a connection with nature.

  The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, Virgin, 2007. How the Earth would recover if humans vanished.

  PART TWO: RDA

  The NASA websites (start at www.nasa.gov) are a terrific resource on past, current and future U.S. space projects. www.history.nasa.gov, NASA’s official history website, is an excellent resource on Project Apollo. You can find Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter images of the Apollo landing sites: www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.html For NASA’s Near Earth Object programme, see http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html

  A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin, Michael Joseph, 1994. Still probably the best popular account of the Apollo missions.

  Voyage by Stephen Baxter, HarperCollins, 1996. My fictional account of how we could have gone on after Apollo to reach Mars in the 1980s.

  Information on the Skylon project is available at www.reactionengines.co.uk

  Mining the Sky by John S. Lewis, Addison Wesley, 1996. Off-Earth resources and how to prospect them.

  The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space by Gerard K. O’Neill, William Morrow, 1977. Dated but still visionary prospectus for humanity’s expansion beyond the Earth.

  The Millennial Project by Marshall T. Savage, Little, Brown, 1992. A mind-blowing prospectus for the human colonisation of space, starting with baby steps in Earth’s oceans and finishing up by turning the Galaxy green.

  Titan Unveiled: Saturn’s Mysterious Moon Unveiled by Ralph Lorenz and Jacqueline Mitton, Princeton University Press, 2008. A post-Huygens survey of the solar system’s own Pandora.

  Life As We Do Not Know It by Peter Ward, Viking, 2005. Recent review of possibilities of exotic forms of life, on Titan, in the solar system and beyond.

  PART THREE: VENTURE STAR

  Project Icarus, the starship study by the British Interplanetary Society and the Tau Zero Foundation, is at www.icarusinterstellar.org

  The Starflight Handbook by Eugene Mallove and Gregory Matloff, Wiley, 1989. Still an essential reference to the theory and practice of star travel. Warning: contains equations.

  Centauri Dreams by Paul Gilster, Springer, 2004. A less technical overview of the prospects for interstellar exploration.

  How to Build a Time Machine by Paul Davies, Allen Lane, 2001. A very accessible guide to Einstein’s relativity theory.

  Antimatter by Frank Close, Oxford University Press, 2010. A recent study of the mysteries of mirror matter.

  The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss, Basic Books, 1995. Contains a discussion on antimatter as used in the TV show.

  The Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 61 no. 9, September 2008, contains a write-up of a recent seminar on progress in warp-drive theory.

  The Roth Lab, researching into suspended animation, is at http://labs.fhcrc.org/roth

  PART FOUR: PANDORA

  Extrasolar Planets Encyclopaedia, http://exoplanet.eu, a fascinating resource run out of the Paris observatory.

  The Crowded Universe by Alan Boss, Basic Books, 2009. A good recent review on exoplanets.

  What If the Earth Had Two Moons? by Neil F. Comins, St. Martin’s Press, 2010. Contains useful speculation on conditions on a Pandora-like moon of a giant planet.

  The Anthropological Cosmological Principle by John Barrow and Frank Tipler, Oxford University Press, 1986. Contains an interesting discussion of the effects of gravity (and other basic physical forces) on the size of living things.

  “The Limits to Tree Height” by George Koch et al., Nature, vol. 428, pp851–4, 2004. A recent study of the subject.

  The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction (Orbit, 1993) to which David Langford contributes, is currently undergoing a revision. A public website where progress can be viewed is at http://sfe3.org. Check out the “elements” entry for a discussion of unobtanium.

  Borderlands of Science by Charles Sheffield, Baen, 1999. An excellent review of current science developments, meant as a crib for science-fiction writers. Chapter Two contains a discussion of superconductivity.

  “Superconductivity Gets an Iron Boost” by Igor Mazin, Nature, vol. 464, pp183–6, 2010 (www.nature.com/reprints). A recent review of developments in the field.

  Rising Force by James D. Livingston, Harvard University Press, 2011. A recent study of maglev technologies.

  PART FIVE: HELL’S GATE

  The Case for Mars by Robert Zubrin, Free Press, 1996. Closely argued and detailed proposal for a feasible and relatively inexpensive way for humans to reach Mars.

  Project Boreas: A Station for the Martian Geographic North Pole, ed. Charles S. Cockell, British Interplanetary Society, 2006. Our Mars polar base study. The Mars Society is at www.marssociety.org. A good study on heavy-duty drilling on Mars is B. Frankie et al., “Drilling Operations to Support Human Mars Missions,” in Proceedings of the Founding Convention of the Mars Society, ed. R. Zubrin et al., San Diego, 1998 (MAR 98-061).

  “The Intellectual Property Implications of Low-Cost 3D Printing” by S. Bradshaw, A. Bowye
r and P. Haufe, (2010) 7:1 SCRIPTed 5, http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/ahrc/script-ed/vol7-1/bradshaw.asp. Extensive discussion of the exploitation of this new manufacturing technique.

  Medicine by Anne Rooney, Heinemann, 2005. A lively and accessible review of recent advances in medicine.

  The Stem Cell Hope by Alice Park, Hudson Street Press, 2011. A recent review of an exciting area of medicine.

  Handbook for Human Computer Interaction by Andrew Sears and Julie Jacko (eds), CRC, 2007. A handbook on this interesting field.

  Guns For Hire: The Inside Story of Freelance Soldiering by Tony Geraghty, Portrait, 2007. The modern private military contractors.

  Jane’s All the World’s Aircraft by Susan Buishell et al., Jane’s Information Group, 2010. Essential resource on military aircraft and others.

  The mecha fan community is at www.armoredcoreonline.com

  PART SIX: LIVING WORLD

  The Deep by Claire Nouvian, University of Chicago Press, 2007. A beautiful photographic essay on Earth’s deep oceans—including many examples of bioluminescence.

  The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2004. A compelling account of evolution—told backwards.

  The Book of Life, ed. Stephen Jay Gould, WW Norton, 2003. Pictorial guide to the evolution of life on Earth.

  Evolving the Alien by Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, Ebury, 2002. Excellent discussion of the possibilities of alien biologies.

  At Home in the Universe by Stuart Kauffman, Oxford University Press, 1995. The origin and development of life through autocatalytic chemistry.

  The Fifth Miracle by Paul Davies, Allen Lane, 1998. Panspermia: how Earth life might have originated on Mars.

  Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe by Simon Conway Morris, Cambridge University Press, 2003; Wonderful Life by Stephen Jay Gould, Hutchinson, 1989. The case for and against convergent evolution.

  Mendel’s Demon by Mark Ridley, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000. Argument that the evolution of multicellular life was improbable.

  PART SEVEN: NA’VI

  Late Stone Age Hunters of the British Isles by Christopher Smith, Routledge, 1992. Study of the hunter-gatherers of Britain’s Mesolithic.

  The Music Instinct by Philip Ball, Bodley Head, 2010. Recent work on the biology of music.

  In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent, Spiegel and Grau, 2009; The Klingon Dictionary by Mark Okrand, Simon and Schuster, 1992. Two references on artificial languages. A guide to the Na’vi tongue is at www.learnnavi.org

  Open Skies, Closed Minds by Nick Pope, Simon & Schuster, 1996. Entertaining perspective on the UFO controversy by the man once in charge of Britain’s “X-Files.”

  The Eerie Silence by Paul Davies, Allen Lane, 2010. Excellent recent review of the status of the search for life beyond Earth.

  The SETI League (www.setileague.org) is a non-profit organisation established by SETI enthusiasts in 1994 following the cancellation of NASA’s SETI programme. David Brin has contributed some of the best academic work on the subject (www.davidbrin.com).

  Where is Everybody? by Stephen Webb, Praxis, 2002. Fifty solutions to the Fermi Paradox.

  1491 by Charles Mann, Knopf, 2005. Eye-opening account of the first contact between the Old World and the New, and what followed.

  Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, Chatto & Windus, 1997. A striking study of the interrelation between geography and history.

  Second Nature: The Inner Lives of Animals by Jonathan Balcombe, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Do Fish Feel Pain? by Victoria Braithwaite, Oxford University Press, 2010. Recent works on animal consciousness and the challenge of inter-species empathy. James Anderson’s work on chimp mourning was reported in Current Biology vol. 20, p351.

  Brian J. Ford’s holistic theories about cells are reported in New Scientist, 24 April 2010.

  Between Earth and Sky by Nalini Nadkarni, University of California Press, 2008. Up-to-date study of trees in all their aspects.

  PART EIGHT: AVATAR

  World Mythology ed. Roy Willis, Duncan Baird, 1993. A useful source regarding the mythic background of avatars.

  The New Scientist link www.newscientist.com/channel/life/gm-food is a good place to start on the mass of literature on GMOs and their application, and the controversy surrounding their use.

  The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch, Allen Lane, 1997. Contains thoughtful speculations on the limits of virtual reality and mind-machine interfaces.

  “The Planetarium Hypothesis: A Resolution of the Fermi Paradox” by Stephen Baxter, Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, vol. 54, pp210–16, May/June 2001 (revised version in Exploring the Matrix, ed. Karen Haber, Byron Preiss Visual /ibooks, 2003). How we might be living in a computer simulation. See also “Are you living in a computer simulation?” by Nick Bostrom, Philosophical Quarterly vol. 53 pp243–55, 2003; www.simulation-argument.com

  Inside of a Dog by Alexandra Horowitz, Simon & Schuster, 2009. Very accessible account of a doggy sensorium and how it differs from ours.

  “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” by Thomas Nagel, The Philosophical Review vol. 83, pp435–50, 1974; http://members.aol.com/neonetics/nagel-bat.html. Classic paper on the mind-body problem.

  Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett, Little, Brown, 1991. Dennett’s widely-discussed non-Cartesian theory of consciousness.

  My Brain Made Me Do It by Eliezer Sternberg, Prometheus Books, 2010. A recent and provocative look at the lessons of the latest neuroscience concerning consciousness and free will.

  The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil, Viking, 1999. A vision of a future of enhanced human and artificial intelligence.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I’m very grateful to James Cameron, Jon Landau and their team for sharing their work with me for the purposes of this book and, still more precious, giving up some of their own time. It has been a privilege to get to know them and their work in some depth, and this book would not have been possible without their generosity. This book is a tribute to their exercise of disciplined imagination.

  Thanks too to my publishers at Orion Books, including Paul Bulos, Malcolm Edwards and Rowland White, for a bright idea in the first place, and for hard work above and beyond the call of duty in making it happen.

  I’m deeply grateful to the members of my Critical-Readers Clan who kindly donated their time and expertise in reviewing drafts of the book; without them the text would have been even more riddled with howlers. Thanks to: technology lawyer Simon Bradshaw; Malcolm Burke of Sharperton Systems; Dr. David L. Clements, lecturer in astrophysics at Imperial College London; evolutionary biologist Dr. Jack Cohen (www.drjackcohen.com); David Langford, author, critic and publisher of the newsletter Ansible (http://ansible.co.uk); and our good friends Alison and Nick Smart. Any misunderstandings, errors or ambiguities are of course my sole responsibility. And to you, the reader of this book: Irayo, Eywa ngahu.

  Stephen Baxter

  Summer 2011 (Earth timeframe)

  Na’vi bow and arrows. Evidence of high intelligence among the natives of Pandora and a striking example of cultural convergence.

  Jake Sully’s Earth. Only glimpsed in the movie, future Earth is a world of high technology but of ecological collapse, social division and conflict.

  A concept design for the Valkyrie shuttle. An example of a craft capable of reaching orbit from the surface of a planet without the need for throwaway boosters: a key step in gaining access to space.

  The ISV Venture Star. One of mankind’s first starships. Note the forward shields for protection against erosion by interstellar matter, the engine stack at the rear, and the long spine to separate the habitable compartments from the engine stack and its damaging radiation leakage.

  The Hallelujah Mountains. Tremendous masses of rock suspended in the air by magnetic forces, with the aid of the superconducting unobtanium.

  A concept design for the Scorpion gunship. Human war-making technology exported to Pandora, proven in the fie
ld on Earth and adapted to Pandoran conditions.

  A banshee. An example of the fauna of Pandora: an invented alien creature that is part of a consistent ecology and extrapolated from parallels on Earth.

  Tsu’tey, a Na’vi warrior. The Na’vi: humanoid but taller than humans, and with technology roughly corresponding to our New Stone Age period.

  A concept design for an avatar. An artificial life form mixing human with Pandoran biological structures: able to host a human mind and survive the physical conditions of Pandora.

  Neytiri. Behold the alien.

  meet the author

  STEPHEN BAXTER is the pre-eminent science fiction writer of his generation. Published around the world, he has also won major awards in the UK, U.S., Germany and Japan. Born in 1957, he has degrees from Cambridge and Southampton Universities. He lives in Northumberland with his wife. To find out more about Stephen Baxter, go to www.stephen-baxter.com.