Stephen Baxter - The Science of Avatar

But to resolve Fermi you have to believe that everybody is the same; all it would take is one exception, one brash, noisy, expansionist, technological species like ourselves to survive the bottleneck of ecocide and war, anywhere nearby, and we would notice them.

Another class of possibilities is that they are indeed here—but they choose not to be seen by us. This kind of notion is generally known as a “zoo hypothesis.” The UFO mythos is an example of this. In St ar Trek , the Prime Directive dictates that junior species should be left alone and given room to grow until they have reached star flight capability. Perhaps they really are here, all around us, concealed in some kind of high-tech duck blinds—hiding from us for good intentions, or bad.

A final possible way to resolve Fermi strikes me as the worst of all. What if there are no Na’vi? What if, despite our intuition to the contrary, we are, after all, truly alone? What if our tiny Earth really is the only harbour of advanced life and mind in the cosmos? We saw in Chapter 23that multicellular life arose quite late in the story of life on Earth. Intelligent life of our technological kind only arose in the last hundred thousand years or so, a tiny fraction (one forty-thousandth) of life’s duration on Earth. So maybe it only happened just the once, right here.

In which case, surely our first duty is not to wipe ourselves out. For if we allow ourselves to become extinct, the universe will continue to unfold according to the mindless logic of physical law, but there will be nobody even to mourn our passing.

You might ask why we so long to discover the alien. Why do we find the idea of meeting the Na’vi so attractive? And why do we long to talk to them?

I have a personal theory that it’s because we aren’t used to being alone. It’s unusual on Earth for there only to be one species of a class of advanced mammal, as humans are unique. There are many species of monkeys, of whales, even of elephants and chimps. The dolphins have complicated social lives that routinely involve interactions between species.

But we have increasing evidence that in the past we did share the world with many other sorts of hominid. The Neanderthals who died out some thirty thousand years ago were probably our closest cousins, but now there is new and exciting evidence of other sorts of humans surviving until quite recently. The diminutive “hobbits” of Indonesia may have lasted until a mere thirteen thousand years ago, and in March 2010 German scientists discovered a bit of bone from a child’s finger, in a cave in Siberia, that came from yet another hominid species that was still around some thirty thousand years ago. So as recently as that we shared the world with at least three cousins, three other twigs from the bushy human family tree, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the future brings more discoveries of this type.

We evolved in a world full of other human types—not just strangers, but creatures of another sort, with minds somewhere between ours and the chimps’. And now that they’re all gone, we know something is missing from the world, even if we don’t know what it is. Maybe we dream of the Na’vi on their world because they remind us of the vanished cousins on our own.

In the universe of Avatar some, at least, of these questions have been answered. But the discovery of the Na’vi on Pandora was a big surprise in many ways.

Humanity is a young species in a very old universe; it was expected that any intelligences out there, if they exist at all, were probably much older than mankind—and perhaps that very advancement was why we couldn’t perceive them. So nobody expected to find stone age humanoids inhabiting a jungle world orbiting the nearest star. But then, nobody expected to find Jupiter-sized worlds orbiting closer to their stars than Mercury does to the sun. The universe is full of surprises; in a way that’s the point of doing science.

But if we do find the alien, will this dream of the future turn into a nightmare of the past?

Jake Sully’s first meeting with Neytiri is not humanity’s first contact with the Na’vi. That came about when the first unmanned probes landed on Pandora, and blue-tinged faces peered curiously into the camera lenses.

But by then the value of unobtanium had already been realised; RDA was already in operation. And RDA was not best pleased. Loud protests were made that the natives must be protected. Cynics assumed that RDA, more or less beyond the control of Earth, would see the Na’vi as nothing but an obstacle in the way of it achieving its own goals.

Meanwhile the first samples from Pandora were returned to Earth: minerals like unobtanium—and living things, plants, animals, heavily quarantined and controlled, specimens of the flora and fauna for scientific studies and zoos, commercially valuable properties such as the basis of novel drugs.

Wherever we’ve travelled we’ve always brought with us a host of fellow travellers from viruses to rats, “invasive” species that have often done a great deal of damage to native biospheres. Pandora’s environment is not identical to Earth’s, and it’s not clear how easy it would be for terrestrial life to gain a foothold there. But I’m willing to bet that some of our hardiest “extremophile” bugs at least, that can withstand extremes of heat and cold, wet and dry, even radiation baths and oxygen deprivation, could survive there. And what if Pandoran life forms got loose on Earth? Maybe the hardier bugs of Pandora, bred on a tougher world, would prosper here, having evaded all attempts at quarantine and escaped, as living things tend to find a way to do.

And what of the Na’vi? Their genetic material must have been transported to Earth for analysis to support the avatar project. Cadavers were needed for dissection. And perhaps some Na’vi were brought back live.

Imagine the sensation a live Na’vi would have made! These tall, skinny, blue-tinted creatures, as ungainly as giraffes in Earth’s heavy gravity, wearing their own exopacks to enable them to breathe our air… The first Indians brought back to Europe by the conquistadors were a similar wonder. Scientists, historians, anthropologists, linguists and other specialists would have pounced on them. Maybe Na’vi ethnic “fashions” were all the rage for a while.

What might have become of that handful of Na’vi, transported across the light years? Perhaps they would have been taught English, and dressed up in suits and ties to be presented to presidents and monarchs. Or perhaps they would have been cooped up in zoo “habitats” with Pandora-like conditions, while their children were taken off to be experimented on, their genetics pulled apart, their bodies mined for such treasures as their carbon-fibre-reinforced bones. Either way they would have been cut off, not just from their people, their culture, but from Eywa—and from the possibility of joining their ancestors after death (see Chapter 29). And after he died the skeleton of the first Na’vi brought to Earth, no doubt given some human name like “Blue George,” would have been set up on a stand in a natural history museum.

Meanwhile, far away, on Pandora, the conflict we see in Avatar would have begun, and the Na’vi would have started to die at human hands.

Does it have to be that way?

And what if we were on the receiving end?

Certainly, if you’re a fan of peace, love and understanding, the precedent of first contact among human cultures is not encouraging.

In 1492 Christopher Columbus “discovered” a new world, and a whole branch of mankind nobody in Europe had any idea existed before. Just like Avatar ’s RDA seeking unobtanium, the monarchs who sponsored the early explorers wanted New World gold and other goods to fund their own projects, notably wars with their Christian rivals and Muslim enemies. Columbus himself was a militant Christian who dreamed of finding a new ocean trade route to Asia, and of joining forces with the Mongol emperors to attack Islam from the east. None of this had anything to do with the Native Americans, but the Europeans had the technology to impose their own agenda on the peoples they found.