Poland would be jealous: rhinoceros cavalry

Rhinoceros are formidable beasts. Cavalry has been a fundamental element of most military during a long time. Just like nunchaku and lightsabres, adding a formidable element to a proven idea will often result in something as awesome as it is ridiculous. So, as with bear-riding Norsemen or tiger-riding Asians, you would expect it in a comic-book setting: replace boring, practical horses with the most terrifying local animal*. Generally, comic books don't care if something is ridiculous, as long as it looks awesome enough.

* Hippopotames may not be as terrifying-looking as rhinoceros, but they are potentially even more dangerous. Leaving aside that they can attack and capsize boats, they are much faster and more manoeuvrable than they look. But hey, who wants to see goofy-looking hippopotamus cavalry?

This can be a problem when adapting a comic book to film, where the filmmakers have to walk a fine line between respecting the source material, delivering on the promise of awesomness made to fans of the comic, and try to not look too stupid while doing so. Rhinoceros cavalry is what happens when the second point wins out. Of course, for some viewers, especially those favoring hard-SF or otherwise believable fiction, this can be somewhat distracting.

At least it does look good, in its own "brain turned off" kind of way (source)

At first glance, when one thinks about it, rhinoceros would make formidable mounts, cattle and beasts of burden indeed. They are herbivorous, which you want in this case. Carnivores are a royal pain to feed, logistically. Most domesticated animals are herbivorous for a reason, the two notable exceptions, cats and dogs, side-stepping the issue: cats mostly feed themselves, and dogs are small enough to live on animal parts humans don't eat. Their bone and muscle structure seem well enough adapted for pulling or carrying heavy charges. Cows, for example, cannot carry a rider for an extended period of time. Nor could a giant wolf of tiger, alas.

They also have immense physical strength, run at 50 km/h, and can exceed one metric ton. In addition, they will naturally charge and hurt humans in front of them, and their big horn make for a vicious natural ram. Compare this to horses that have to be carefully trained to charge or kick humans, and will spontaneously avoid stepping on them, even humans with an uniform of the wrong color.

Then, why has no ancient culture domesticated rhinoceros to fill the roles of warhorses and cows? Because they have immense physical strength, run at 50 km/h, and can exceed one metric ton. In addition, they will naturally charge and hurt humans in front of them, and their big horn make for a vicious natural ram. Good luck capturing a breeding pair before the Industrial Revolution. And things only get worse from that point on, especially with access to no other domesticated animal. Africa has been one of the most competition-heavy natural environment for large animals, and those who survived are all tough bastards. (Human beings themselves evolved there.)

The terrible character of the rhinoceros not only makes it difficult to capture, it also makes it difficult to hold, as it will charge at barriers and attempt to trample humans on the other side. Including humans behind cover. Or possibly in buildings. Did I mention the pointy built-in ram on their head? In addition, rhinoceros have a terrible character among themselves, so humans could not even use their existing social structure, like we naturally do with horses or dogs. This is basically why horses could be domesticated and not the physically similar zebras. And it is even worse with rhinoceros than zebras, as they are also solitary territorial animals.

It may be possible to alleviate the terrible character problem through domestication, that is the long-term processus of selective breeding that will develop new breeds more adapted to taming and human use - like was done with boars to create pigs. We would probably see new rhinoceros breeds selected for military use, for draft and carriage, for meat, or even possibly for milk. (It may not be possible to have a long-distance runner breed, though this is difficult to tell in advance). After all, there is one known case of a rhinoceros letting a human ride it, so it is at least possible to work with them.

Not as good-looking as horse saddle position, but I would trust the professional.

However, there is a serious problem (or rather, one more serious problem) to domesticating rhinoceros: their reproduction rate. Gestation time is about 16 months, for a litter of one calf that will stay with its mother (preventing new gestations) for two or four years, for male or female respectively. And males will need three more years before starting to mate. All this means that very few new rhinoceros are born each year, and generation are quite long. This makes selective breeding a very slow process, one that will take significantly more than the working years of a human to see progress.

You may point out that elephants share this problem with rhinoceros, but Asian elephants are nice enough to be tameable as they are, even if they have not exactly been domesticated. Do note that African elephants have not been tamed the same way, and that Hannibal's famous elephants were the smaller, now extinct North-African elephants (expect possibly his personal one, that may have been an Asian elephant). African elephants have neither been tamed nor domesticated for the same reasons as rhinoceros, but worse.

So, what would our hypothetical pre-industrial African society need to domesticate rhinoceros? They would need some way to build fences that can stop angry full-speed rhinoceros. They would need weapons that can subdue said angry rhinoceros in the wild, and some way to move it to the fence, or force it to walk to it while stopping it from charging and trampling everything around it. At this point, someone with superhuman strength would help, and some personal protection that can make its wearer survive the enormous kinetic energy of a rhino charge would be mandatory. They would also have to need it enough to justify the hassle, instead of simply having more people work to raise food or as soldiers. And finally, they would need an extremely stable society, so it can plan for very long term and spare the resources for a plan that may take centuries before bearing fruit. Frankly, they would need heavenly assistance.

Oh, right.

Wakanda versus the curse of resources

Most of the film Black Panther is set in Wakanda, a fictional sub-Saharan African state. Extremely isolationist, disguised as a very poor agricultural, subsistence economy to the wider world, it is by far the most technologically and, supposedly, economically advanced nation in the planet thanks to its monopoly on the fictional metal vibranium.

Like Bhutan: an ancient, traditional, isolationist kingdom with a badass creature on its flag (source)

It has alternately been described as a message of hope for sub-Saharan Africa otherwise mostly thought as poor, dysfunctional states, a rallying cry for populations of African origin tired of bad Hollywood stereotypes, or even used for racist arguments about "look how far they would be if they weren't so <random racist stereotype>" - conveniently forgetting that a few of those states actually pulling it off, most notably (though not only) South Africa, despite the immense challenges it has and is still facing.

Not your average petro-state

However, one of the recurring themes when talking about Wakanda is the tragedy of the curse of resources. Its source of wealth, what has given it its technological edge, and allowed it so far to ignore the wider world, escape invasions, colonialism or even Cold War machinations, is vibranium, a metal found nowhere else, and whose mountain-sized deposit has been brought to Earth by a giant meteorite about five thousand years ago. Said metal, not unlike another ubiquitous resource, has wildly varied applications for materials and energy applications. And the most striking examples of the curse of resources are often petro-states.

Vibranium doesn't sound quite as good as Adamantium, but at least it is not Unobtanium (source)

Side-note about the meteorite: A meteorite of such size should have wiped out the entire region, created a giant crater, and probably scattered itself on a much larger area. Instead, the crater seems rather small and vibranium is concentrated on the impact point. This may be attributed to some of the many strange properties of vibranium, notably its ability to absorb and store kinetic energy. This allowed the meteorite to absorb the energy of impact, and possibly some of the heat, instead of releasing it all in megaton blasts in the atmosphere and on the ground.

Amusingly enough, the meteorite arrived 2.5 million years ago, not so long before humans started evolve sapience in more or less the same geographical spot. One may wonder if there is a causal link.

As for the curse of resources, this video gives a good overview of it and its causes, as well as why so many rulers seem to be evil, incompetent tyrants.

Now, it would be easy to dismiss Wakanda as unrealistic, but this would be a mistake. To begin with, the curse of resources can only exist when said resources can be sold on the market in exchange of wealth for the rulers. This cannot happen here, as it is isolationist and living in autarcie.

As such, it has to mine and process vibranium entirely on its own, and whatever wealth and luxuries its rulers and denizens have access to are locally produced. So, by nature, the economy of Wakanda has to be highly diversified.

Vibranium and autarcie

It is interesting to note that the vibranium mine itself seems to be highly automated, with very few workers visible at any time, if any. In fact, the on-site research and development laboratory may well hire more people than the ore extraction process itself.

This makes sense as, contrary to the wider world's global economy, Wakanda has access to only a few million workers at best, with which it has to cover all areas from industry to service to management and research. As such, there is a big incentive to automate everything that can be. We see a similar phenomenon in Japan, due to its free-falling demographics and reluctance to rely on immigration for low-qualification jobs. We can expect Wakanda to develop, say, the same automated restaurant chefs. Similarly, its supermarkets probably have automated cash registers only, if they haven't already been replaced by Internet-based shopping and delivery services. Construction workers would be drone operators and maintenance specialists.

Similarly, their city transports seem to be automated, and the apparent absence of cars in their city may be both to avoid further strain on their industry and because they rely more on teleworking to optimise daily productivity.

Also, car-less cities are just nicer (source)

One would expect unemployment to be inexistent. And with the absence or near-absence of low-qualification jobs, considerable effort must be put on education, that one can expect to be free, high-quality and mandatory from crèche (required when both parents are working full-time) to university.

In addition to vibranium, they have another major advantage to other, ill-fated autarcies of the wider world: their excellent foreign intelligence service. Great powers are known, and have been known for a long time, to massively use their intelligence services for industrial espionage. There is no reason to think Wakanda would do otherwise, particularly as they are not distracted by things like rival nuclear powers to spy on, terrorist groups to infiltrate, freedom fighters to arm, client states to bully or coups to organize. This also helps them achieving their goals with comparatively few agents, both so they can be directly managed by the monarch and because, again, of general manpower shortage.

Wakandan intelligence services can also count on their technological edge and their targets ignoring their existence. And, of course, they can gather all the public data in fundamental and applied research or from patents they don't have to abide by.

This allows them to focus all their R&D efforts in applications of vibranium instead of, for example, inventing the processor again.

This is not without consequence, though, as we can see from the minuscule size of their army: a few hundred infantry and cavalry soldiers, and a handful of flying aircrafts, with no fixed defences beyond the city forcefield and camouflage system protecting the nation. Even with their reliance on secrecy and advanced technology, and even for such a tiny nation, one would expect them to have a larger army as a safety measure. But they may simply not have the available manpower.

What economic model?

There doesn't seem to be any indication of what economic model Wakanda is using internally. However, we can speculate with what we do see.

Politically, Wakanda is extremely conservative. In five thousand years, they have kept the same federal monarchic government, and have never fallen for the lure of conquest and imperialism. This is literally unheard of anywhere else, by a far margin. Vibranium allowed them to withstand any external threat, be it natural or human, but only an exceptionally conservative and cautious mindset could have allowed them such a feat, adapting their ways only when absolutely necessary - but also with enough pragmatism to avoid ideological pitfalls or reluctance to change even when necessary. While not impossible, this is a very thin line to walk, and implies institutions with exceptionally strong and well-balanced traditions, enough to bind the occasional ruler not doing their job correctly, despite nominally being an absolute monarch.

On this note, modern Wakanda seem to be extremely good at gender equality, even compared to today's champions. While the original tribes may have been this way, it is also possible that this is a later evolution, when the manpower shortages drove them to let women work on more jobs, until gender biases completely disappeared. This has been punctually seen, for example during world wars, when men sent to the front had to be replaced and women started to do jobs they weren't allowed to before - even if, in those cases, after the wars ended, the status quo antebellum often came back.

So the transition from subsistence tribal economy to its modern, highly developed form must have happened slowly, with no abrupt transition, with pragmatism and only when dictated by necessity. This means that the often brutal transitions to mercantilisme, capitalism or modern planned economy didn't happen, and the evolution of Wakanda's economic policies have followed a very different path. While it is impossible to divine its current form, we can still take an educated guess.

When we think of command economy, it generally bring the grand, ill-fated political experiment of the Eastern Block and its variants in mind. However, ancient history has another example: many polities of the ancient world were command economies, run by a monarchic administration. While recent Marxist planned economies pretty much all ended in ruin one way or another, those ancient planned economies lasted centuries, some falling only to apocalyptic disasters.

While there is no concluding evidence to be found either way, and historians should always be wary of advancing hypotheses with no historical evidence, we are here to search for explanations making sense and can afford a bit more freedom in our speculations.

As such, it makes sense to imagine an early Wakanda developing such an ancient planned economy. The rulers being those originally taking all decisions and as such, were the de facto economic planners, and started to rely on advisers on those matters as complexity grew, which became in time specialised administrations.

With no major disruption and being able to resist external influences and threats, Wakanda would be free to slowly evolve and refine its planned economy, until it became the highly efficient system that works so well in its modern incarnation. We may see traces of it with the vibranium mines apparently still under direct control of the royal family.

Conclusion

By nature, Wakanda cannot fall to the curse of resources, as it can only exist if the rulers can be wealthy with a country that is only producing raw resources. As an autarcie, this is impossible and forces Wakanda to have a diversified economy. In fact, the economic challenge of Wakanda is the opposite, making such an economy work with so little manpower. As such, it is closer to Japan than Nigeria.

Unfortunately, this means that, contrary to what we may read in some places, using Wakanda as an example or a model of successful resource-rich African country is counter-productive: whatever lessons may be learned by studying it will be inapplicable to resource-rich nations in general. We are better studying nations like Botswana that seem to actually succeed at this particular challenge.

Even worse, it may be inapplicable to the modern world in general, as it required a stable nation evolving over the centuries, which won't help nations with problems now and attempting to solve them over human time-frames, in some cases because there may otherwise not be a nation anymore otherwise.

But not being applicable right now to nations facing immediate challenges doesn't make it worthless to study, far from it. In fact, the thought experiment of an ancient monarchic command economy surviving to this day, and what forms would its modern forms take, may yield valuable insight. Especially as the varied forms of capitalism have been increasingly criticised for more than a century, and its only serious contender has been experimentally proven unsustainable.

Avatar's dark forest - Part 3

A candle in the night

In the previous part, we have seen that humankind, without realizing it, displayed itself to a vastly more advanced alien overmind, Eywa, as an immediate, grave potential danger. Eywa's answer to this problem should be simple: accelerate a projectile at ridiculously high relativistic velocity, or use some other way to dump a whole lot of energy on Earth, then mop up the survivors, right?

Well, not exactly.

Hide and seek

As we have seen previously, having a neighbouring star system hosting an interstellar-capable alien means that the galaxy is most probably chock-full of those. And yet, there is none of those obvious high-energy traces we would expect from mature interstellar intelligences. Eywa itself, despite its capabilities, has clearly put extra efforts to stay hidden from humankind, even during first contact. Why are they hiding? What are they hiding from?

Us? Nascent intelligences in general?

This could have all been a test to se if we are ready, say, to join the Galactic Community or something. But then it means that said Community refrain from any form of high-energy engineering in order to not tip nascent intelligence off, but also refrain from any direct intervention to help them pass said test. Or at least not turn into berserker that could not only do who know how much damage before being stopped. And that would have to be a permanent policy, not one specifically done near a nascent intelligence: most of the observable, seemingly empty universe we can see through light emitted before our ancestors thought about getting down from those trees, if not out of the sea or even working with more than one cell. So it means that they both have been controlling the entire visible Universe for billions of years, and they managed to prevent anyone from wrecking a galaxy for one reason or another, without themselves using high-(waste-)energy projects.

Maybe they put a giant bubble screen around local stars, and fake the empty universe. But if they are able to do so, why use such crude form of first contact? Don't get me wrong, Eywa's performance is very impressive, both technically and by its knowledge of humankind. But you would something capable of turning the entire Local Bubble into a Truman Show stage to be subtler with its tests, especially in a way that wouldn't tip their hand off in such a blatant way to xenologists. Even more so if they went for the more direct route and put us all in some giant Matrix-like simulated reality.

So whoever they are hiding from, it is almost certainly not us. The most probable, then, is each-other.

The Dark Forest

Imagine you are an interstellar-capable intelligence. You have reasons to suspect there are others, or that at least there could be. You may even have detected a few. The problem is, they are pretty much all hidden, so you cannot know much about them. And as aliens, you have little ways of guessing how they will react to you - you don't even have the shared evolutionary history you have with others of your species (if you have those), or even animals from your own world, to guide you.

On the other hand, you know that being interstellar-capable means commanding vast energies, that could be used destructively. You also know that a first strike from a hidden source would be very hard to block. And there are probably much more advanced intelligences out there, with capabilities you may not even comprehend. Even worse, your own capabilities are equally dangerous to others, and have equally no way to guess how you think.

You could attempt to wipe everyone else out preemptively, before they can do the same. This is the Killing Star scenario we have seen previously, also called the Berserker hypothesis. This could work if you are the first one, and you are thorough with your xenocides. You will need to constantly watch for new species with an affinity for tool-making, and nip them to the bud. Or even wreck every single planet with indigenous life. Better not miss, tho. If one ever gets away, or if one survives your initial assault, you will get a taste your own medicine...

However, we know that Eywa is not a Berserker: otherwise, it would have wiped humankind out as soon as an ape cut one stone with another. And we know that there is no other active Berserker either, because Eywa itself is still there.

There is only one other course of action: hide. If you are hidden, you stand a chance to survive a Berserker. If aliens don't know your existence, they won't risk launching a first strike against you. And even if they do know you exist, they cannot be sure they are seeing all of you, and that they can get you in one strike.

This is the Dark Forest rule. And this, for Eywa, makes its human problem much more complicated.

First, it cannot simply dump a shipload of energy on Earth or the Sun and mop up the few survivors that may have made it. Leaving aside the danger of second strikes if it is not thorough, this would emit a very powerful signal, visible to everyone in the galaxy and beyond, saying "Hey look! I am a xenocide and I live here! Who know, you could be the next one!". Exactly the thing you don't want to do if you intend to survive in the Dark Forest - as evidenced, in fact, by the lack of such signal anywhere we look at.

A bad idea, actually (source)

Eywa could attempt to use more subtle measures, like engineered plagues with 100% death rate and a long enough incubation time to make sure everyone is infected before the dying start. Or mind-controlling a few individuals to cause humans to destroy each-other. After all, even with restraint, the difference between it and humans is about at the same level than between humans and animals. And it's not as if animals could stop a determined human military attack from, say, an industrialized country, right?

Of course it is Australian wildlife (source)

But let's assume that Eywa is confident in its ability to wipe humankind out of the galaxy, which is reasonable given its known abilities and knowledge of humans. It may still be a bad idea to do so: in the Dark Forest, you don't know who, or what, is watching you. Eywa was watching humans as they started mixing tin with copper, and was not discovered even as the first interstellar starships took flight. It cannot be certain what elder star god is watching its comparatively puny being in this very instant, keen on seeing how it will deal with another intelligence. It may even wonder if humans have been created for this very reason by such observer, not unlike Eywa creating the Na'Vi.

And this is where we have to jump head first into speculation, because how Eywa will act depends not only on its own alien, unknown decision-making and capabilities, but also on its understanding of equally unknown minds, both to us and to it, based on what it knows about other intelligences it may have already detected and analyzed. As such, the following is not an exhaustive list of what Eywa may do, but a few generalizations and examples of what it could do.

Something wicked this way comes

So you are in the Dark Forest, and you stumble upon a kid with a flashlight and a gun. It keeps saying "Hello? Is there anyone there?", clearly afraid of the silence but even more terrified at the idea that something could answer back. You know that very soon, the kid is going to do something stupid with that gun, which will put you both in deep trouble. What do you do? And remember, you are watched.

You take the kid by surprise and wrestle that stupid gun away. And then you crush that even more stupid flashlight, hopefully before it attracts something really nasty. And do something to stop the kid from screaming. Ok, time to leave that metaphor alone - in our case, it means that Eywa must find some way to suborn humankind. So here is a way to do it.

Eywa has a good experience with managing planetary biospheres, modifying organisms to fit its needs and direct them, including fine individual control. As we have seen in the previous part, Eywa or at least its parent most certainly has interstellar reproductive capabilities. A good way to suborn humankind may be to take control of Earth through its biosphere. So whatever form an alien overmind seed takes, send one to Earth. Better land it before they have too advanced detection capabilities, though. On the other hand, it may be a good idea to only send it if you really need it, so if their industry really start picking up steam (pun intended). That would be, roughly, early XXe Century.

Where to land it? Humans live mostly on land, so it may be better than a sea landing - and depending on the energy of the event, damaging waves may propagate further than desired. Better avoid the desert regions, due to the lacking biosphere. But as much as possible, no human must be present at the impact point, and as few as possible in the region. The fastest scenario for an expedition sent to investigate must still be long enough to let the seed bury and hide, so it must be a relatively inaccessible region for most humans. Say, there is a pretty good spot in Siberia.

Then, let it go dormant, hide from human detection and possibly start to preemptively send underground nets to everywhere on the planet, ready to act if needed.

It could also have sent it a million years ago, which would also be a good way to keep tabs on humans in the first place.

We are told that by the time of the films' events, Earth ecosystem has been ruined. However, that would be for all those big surface and oceanic beasties humans care about because they can see them. We can still expect piles of underground microorganisms to thrive. And at this point, the dormant overmind - let's call it Gaïa for obvious reasons - probably collected enough data on the now-endangered or extinct species to resurrect them if needed, including with enhancements.

As we have seen before, for millennia, humans have worshipped a Mother Nature goddess. In fact, the instinct is so strong that even humans with no prior history in such worship still did so on Pandora, when in contact with the Na'Vi and an actual being capable of filling the role. Eywa clearly knows it, and in fact several events in the film could be explained as an experiment on the protagonist on this point. This may, in fact, explain how he could take such a prominent place in Na'Vi society in such a short time - note how he could take control of a toruk, a feat that the much more experienced natives had last accomplished millennia ago.

Furthermore, humans know of their limitations on managing large groups of humans, and have searched for increasingly desperate ways around that problem: philosophies attempting to make the broken, iniquitous systems bearable, more and more complex political systems, simpler but flawed ideologies, even artificial AI-based gods... As we see in the film, it has been an overall failure with ultimately disastrous results.

All Gaïa has to do, then, is to rise and take its place as an actual god for humankind, turning those clever apes from existential threat to symbiotic allies - their alien mindset becomes an asset, as it can see things differently and may catch things in the mental blind spot of Eywa's decision-making processes. Billions of sapient individual minds may also be an asset, if overminds are a group of few (or even one) individuals. And humans should be much better off, as Gaïa's interest is to manage them as well as possible, and Eywa has proved an overmind has the skills and knowledge to do so. Furthermore, Gaïa can give neural queues to humans, for interfacing with animals and, potentially, new biotechnological tools, but also to Gaïa itself, or even to replacement bodies, and preserve their minds at physical death.

Unfortunately, this will not only run against existing, entrenched human power structures, but also paradoxically against basic survival logic for humankind. After all, there is no guarantee from the human point of view that this isn't a subtle plot to get rid of them, or even that converted humans aren't turned into mindless puppets. In fact, depending on how Gaïa's mind (or alien equivalent) works, this may well be the case. We can expect violent conflict.

This may very well give us a bizarre melange of GMO Captain Planet and those alien zombie films, but where the alien-infected zombies may or may not be the good guys, set in a sort-of post-apocalyptic technological dystopia invaded by a resurgent, organized Nature. Come to think of it, this could make for an interesting film...

Avatar 5: Of Gods and Men (source)

Something evil that way goes

As stated before, Gaïa may not choose to go for symbiosis. It does seem like the best option for it and its fellow overminds to our naïve first analysis, but we don't know enough about both its decision making and its knowledge of other aliens to do so. Maybe for some unknown reason, it would not be worth it. Maybe it will conclude that other observers will consider it too dangerous, or that humans are still too dangerous even under the control of Gaïa, exposing the overminds to retaliation. And humans cannot know it either way, so they have good reasons to fight against Gaïa, as this could be a ploy to take control of humans in order to extinguish them on the long term. It would take more time, but may end up being more effective than following The Thing or Body Snatcher scenarios, which may not be considered xenocide by alien observers, as technically humans are still there - even if we would see it as such ourselves.

Which means that even if Gaïa goes for benevolent symbiosis, there may still be human resistance that manages to keep itself free of it, for good or bad reasons. Gaïa may even deliberately choose to let some to their own devices, as a guarantee of goodwill: as long as there are free humans, they could attack or, worse, make a lot of noise if it actually extinguished humans under its influence. It seems improbable that it would do so voluntarily, given how humans have proven themselves to be violent and irrational, however a compromise may be found if enough humans manage to keep themselves away from Gaïa to be a problem, compared to the effort and danger of pursuing them.

We also have to consider the possibility of factions among the overminds: if one decides that humans must be wiped out while another wants to symbiose them, we could have conflict among overminds themselves, which would take forms we cannot even imagine, and may not even perceive until caught up in it. We can imagine, for example, Eywa going against the decision of other overminds to extinguish the free will of humans as well as Na'Vi, which are basically humans. It could then attempt to preemptively symbiose humans in order to more effectively oppose others.

Whatever the overminds decide to do, there is the possibility that it displease or worry enough one or more alien observers for them to take hostile action. The situation between humans and overminds may then repeat itself between overminds and those aliens, if they are superior enough to them. If the difference is not that important, we may see a more balanced conflict: like the previous case, this may take forms we may not imagine nor perceive, though again, both may attempt to act on humans. We could compare this case to the CIA and KGB fighting over a country in covert ways, attempting to strengthen it, demolish it and/or sway it in their direction - and similarly, humans may not even realize the primary causes of the resulting changes or disasters.

Taking this to its logical conclusion, we may even have different alien observers choosing to act at cross-purpose to one-another, bringing them into conflict with each-other. This could escalate to a galactic-wide (or even larger) cloak-and-dagger free-for-all of an unimaginable complexity, of which the human catalyst would soon be a sideshow.

This may in turn escalates to open war, where staying hidden becomes secondary to eliminating threats by any possible means. Those would have to be extremely rare, making this outcome improbable, as we have detected neither traces of such highly destructive conflict in the Milky Way nor seen instances of it in other galaxies. After all, if nova bombs and Nicoll-Dyson beams start being thrown around like confetti, you would expect astronomers to have noticed it, for those whose light reaches us as of now.

Note that while still improbable, it may be slightly less so than we would initially think: there are hypotheses suggesting that intelligent life may not have been possible until about one billion years ago, and that it would still be impossible in most galaxies. As such, this would limit the detection range to one billion light-years, and further limit it in the galaxies that would have to be settled from outside. And improbable doesn't mean impossible. Furthermore, Nicoll-Dyson beams may not be their favorite weapon, the way we don't use a mountain-sized stone axe to destroy a city. For what we know, there may still be immensely destructive weapons that leave few traces in waste photons or gravitational waves.

The sheer complexity and lack of information about what forms such conflict would take seems to preclude making a film about it (though a book series might just pull it off), but if it was, this would fit the theme for a sequel: the destructive, short-term ways of humankind causing environmental damage of an incalculable scale, which end up putting humankind itself in dangers it cannot even imagine. With extra irony if Gaïa did go for the symbiosis and humankind finally, for the first time in its history, found its place in the world - after all, those who will suffer are not the one taking those bad decisions today, but their descendants.

Avatar 6 : When the dragons wake (source)

And with this gleefully speculative part, we concludes our series on Avatar which, I hope, made you appreciate this film as much as I do now, for what it succeeds at - possibly unwittingly, but the outcome is what counts, after all!

Avatar's dark forest - Part 2

The Na'Vi anomaly

In the first part, we determined that perhaps surprisingly, Avatar is one of the most realistic hard-SF films ever produced. As such, seemingly unrealistic elements, that could simply be accepted in other settings, are jarring here and demand an explanation - namely our Space Blue Elves friends the Na'Vi.

The easy answer would be to declare it incoherent, that the author wanted Pocahontas with aliens and threw money at it to paint superficial realism. However, the easy answer is not always the most interesting - and, after all, "the author didn't care" is not what we are interested in here. Instead, let's see what conclusions we can draw from the seemingly impossible Na'Vi presence in a realistic setting.

Facing the Great Filter

In the previous article, we discussed the Fermi paradox and how the presence of an Earth-like ecosystem is restricting the possible solutions. However, Pandora also has a native technological society, and this may be the worst possible news humankind could ever get.

All the previous solutions discussed were based on an assumption: that the Great Filters that made technological life so vanishingly rare (one known space-faring civilisation in the local billion-light-years cube) are behind us, and we are the lucky ones that actually evolved to technological use. However, this implies that there has been, at most, very few technological species in the quintillion stars around us. Our own example show that, in cosmic time, a civilisation goes near-instantly from cutting stone to starships to, presumably, Dyson spheres everywhere. Our own example also tells us that the survival rate of such a species between those stades is at worst one in a few thousands, something we can round at 100% given the odds otherwise used working with Great Filters.

Given that assumption, what are the chances that one randomly chosen star system, say the one that happens to be the closest when we start throwing starships around, has a native technological civilisation? Around one in a quintillion, give or (mostly) take a few zeroes.

Even if it was a trillion times more probable, scientists would still round it to zero without an afterthought.

Do the Na'Vi really count as a technological species? Of course: they have the same technological level than humankind a mere cosmic instant of ten thousand years ago - in fact, parts of humankind are still using those technologies right now. Blink and they may as well be making starships on their own.

The important is not whether they cut stone or plutonium but whether they have the capabilities to build technological tools - and they indeed have the same as us: interpreted language, concepts, good hands and the understanding of making tools to make better tools. From there, Dyson spheres are only a matter of time and avoiding the occasional extinction event.

So the assumption that technological species are rare is ruled out. Those have to be so common, millions must be born in the galaxy right now. Which means that an unknown mechanism is systematically preventing technological civilisations from rising to visible galactic engineering levels. The Great Filter is still before us.

Even worse: if we can understand that it is before us, then at least some others can as well. And if none have escaped it, it means that such knowledge won't help us either. The presence of a nascent technological species right next to us means, literally, that we are doomed to extinction.

Or does it?

Apes and Angels

As we have seen, technological species like ours are, at least at the pre-space level, extremely short-lived. And yet, right at the very moment we emerge, so do the Na'Vi. Even stranger, the Na'Vi are physically closer to humans than any other species to ever evolve on Earth. They are even closer to modern humans than most extinct human species, from whose we still bear DNA.

Which is especially weird when comparing other Pandoran animals with terrestrial ones: beyond superficial resemblance that could be attributed to convergent evolution, there are differences that are absent from the Na'Vi: armor plates on large animals, secondary breathing holes on the chest, multiple pairs of eyes, absence of hair...

And this is no mere outward resemblance: for it to be possible to mix their DNA with human DNA and create the Avatars in the first place, both would have to work on the same principle and be closer than with almost any species from Earth. This proves that convergent evolution is not the explanation here.

Finally, you would expect alien society and language, had they one in the first place, to be radically different from ours. And yet, a Na'Vi tribe could be dropped on some corner of the Earth after a few cosmetic changes and anthropologists wouldn't even notice the difference.

As such, coincidence alone cannot explain the existence of the Na'Vi. They necessarily have a link with humankind, which can be explained by the other particularity of Pandora

The alien behind the alien

The human expedition missed a capital point: the Na'Vi are not the only intelligence to dwell on Pandora. The biggest piece of evidence was also the easiest to overlook: an animist Na'Vi religion worshipping Eywa, a Mother Nature-like divinity linked to all living things. Earth has those, after all, and yet an alien overmind has yet to be discovered here.

However, the evidence missing on Earth is present on Pandora, to be discovered by a former soldier lacking the mental tools or training to realize what he found, or by scientists that fail to communicate their findings (scientist and science communicator are very different jobs) or, for that matter, realize that there is was much bigger picture to look at.

Those are obvious in retrospect. The Na'Vi neural queue, an organ that allows them to connect to many high-level life-forms all around the food chain and seemingly inexplicable by natural evolution. he Trees of Voice that are both part of an immense brain-like network of vast complexity - and the Na'Vi can use their neural queue to connect to it and hear their dead ancestors, whose mind is apparently preserved by said network. The Tree of Souls, described as a vital organ of Eywa and that can even create neural connections to humans directly, who testify directly talking to the overmind.
And, of course, commandeering varied animals in great numbers and in formation to destroy a human formation threatening said vital organ. Note that the human formation is attacked before the actual bombing starts, and less threatening vehicles were previously ignored, showing understanding of both human intent and abilities.
Eywa also repeatedly communicate with the Na'Vi by directing floating motiles, the woodsprites. It is shown to take interest in a specific human Avatar and direct the actions of a Na'Vi individual.

First contact (source)

The obvious conclusion is that the Na'Vi were created by Eywa based on a detailed human template, showing both immense biotechnological prowess and advanced interstellar capabilities. The question is, why?
Now, it is always hazardous to divine intent from actions when lacking so much context, especially when applied to an unknown alien mind. However, we can make informed deductions from basic, universal logic.
First, we can expect Eywa to follow the same drives as any living organisms, or at least any that can survive long enough to evolve to such a degree: survival instinct and at least some drive to expansion and/or reproduction to compensate major accidents that may cause the death of the organism on an individual world. It has also demonstrated knowledge of humans and understanding of their behaviour, showing clear intend to learn about them.
As such, the most probable reason for the Na'Vi existence is to assist Eywa in studying humans.

Puppets and puppeteer (source)

Initially, they may or may not have been created for studying a human-like population in a controlled environment, the way we study rat behaviour by putting them in boxes in a laboratory. However, at the time of the depicted events, they are clearly there to directly interact with humans. We can see it when Eywa deliberately instruct a Na'Vi to interact with an Avatar with divergent behaviour. But the biggest clue is unobtanium.

Too good to be true

Unobtainium (with a 'i') is originally an engineering joke: a material that has all the proprieties needed, but either doesn't exist, is inaccessible or is too expensive. It has since then been adopted by science-fiction fans and critics to describe a material with fantastic properties that, while not forbidden by known science, does not seem to exist so far. This is a good way to take some liberties with known science and engineering while keeping the setting realistic, or at least believable.
Unobtanium (without the 'i'), to be found in vast quantities on Pandora and the reason the massive expenses of interstellar travel can see a return of investment, certainly qualify: a room-temperature superconductor with presumably massive power density, the figure of tens of millions of $ per kg (though inflation may give or take a few zeroes) is believable for present or near-future technology. Supplemental material hints as a grave energy crisis on Earth and unobtanium being used to build fusion reactors, which is indeed one of the obvious applications.

Now, some may say that it is a very stupid name to give to any actual material. Imagine if in Lord of the Rings, the One Ring was called the MacGuffin and Frodo's mithril shirt was the Plot Armor. However, remember in the first part: actual people called a high-technology space vehicle the VentureStar. And apparently, their heirs somehow thought it a good idea to use the same name for an interstellar vehicle. Those people have a history of giving very stupid names to incredible things.

Nevertheless, for it to be called that, and to be of such value, it is obviously incredibly, absurdly rare and impossible or near-impossible to manufacture in the Solar System. And yet, massive quantities of surprisingly pure Unobtanium mineral are to be found on a planet in the nearest star system, that also happens to host an alien overmind awaiting human interaction. Presumably no other nearby star system has such a mineral orgy, otherwise corporate interests would have avoided the headache of natives and go for the biggest profit.
The one thing that can drive humankind to stretch its nascent interstellar capabilities to their limit, but that is only worth so much due to the present conjoncture - specific technologies and industry and a major energy crisis that could have been avoided with better planning - and be presumably useless an instant before (steam machine don't use superconductors) and after (alternatives would be found). Again, this shows precise, up-to-date knowledge of humankind, impressive resources and a willingness to use them for this project.

This is the equivalent of some ancient Mediterranean merchants that would leave baubles on an unknown shore and go back on their boats to observe the natives. Were the natives interested in trade, they would take the baubles and replace them with local goods. The Na'Vi themselves may be the equivalent of repeating the words of the natives, while observing their reactions, in order to start deciphering their language - if it was human-shaped drones with speech generators that were sent instead of the actual merchants.

Shiny bauble (source)

Unfortunately, humans took the baubles, replaced them with beach pebbles lying around, attempted to beat the drones and steal their things, and then got angry and started to throwing rocks around. All the while never realizing that those bizarre metal islands off shore that were't there yesterday had more firepower than a volcano chain.

Killing Star

It is, in fact, even worse: as humankind reach interstellar capabilities, and with explosive technological and industrial progress, it becomes by nature a menace to any neighbour. Take the VentureStar, for example. The only difference between a transport starship and an interstellar relativistic missile (ISRM) is that a transport ship carries giant engines to brake when reaching destination. And an ISRM has enough kinetic energy from its velocity alone to devastate an entire planet. This only gets worse once you start making Dyson spheres, those can be used for example to emit Nicoll-Dyson lasers.

If a nascent spacefaring civilisation shows risks of using such means for violence, the obvious move to protect one's own survival is to destroy them before they can do serious damage. This is the Killing Star scenario.
And humankind has just showed itself to be violent, unreliable, often irrational, aggressive, divided, untrustworthy, cunning, expansionist and with fast-expanding capabilities. Which is, in fact, the worst, most dangerous combination possible.
Even if Eywa had reasons to avoid a first strike, it now has to extinguish the human menace for its own survival.

Note that a human first strike against Eywa, following the same Killing Star reasoning, would be futile. Not only can we expect it to be but one of many worlds hosting such planetary mind, it also has superior interstellar capabilities than humans, and ones that are so far undetectable to human sensors - despite the vast energies required for interstellar, well, anything. So even assuming that Eywa can be destroyed by a surprise human attack before launching its own second strike (and assuming Pandora contains the whole individual), and this is a big if already, there are unknown but presumably vast numbers of other worlds ready to second strike anyway.

A merciless ecological indictment

This, beyond the trompe l’œil Hollywood story, is the actual message of the film. Whether the author intended it so is unknown* but irrelevant: hidden depth, accidental or otherwise, is still depth.

* I would bet against it, but don't mind old cynical me and give him the benefit of the doubt

You can be certain that even without knowing about the presence of an actual alien, many scientists recognized what was going on the first time science probes or teams were sent on Pandora. Native near-human life and unobtainum were obvious enough clues. However, powerful corporate interests and, presumably, corrupt demagogic governments afraid of the energy crisis, controlled by people both incapable of understanding the science or caring about long-term consequences, overruled them.
Those consequences are (literally) calling the wrath of (a) Mother Nature (alien star god) upon humankind, in ways that are difficult to grasp in their details but obvious in the absolute, inevitable catastrophe they will bring. One could even imagine self-deluding populists claiming that whatever bad happens, we will be able to fix it with some techno-industrial solution. Or that if some alien wants war, we'll simply beat them.

Sounds familiar?

So it seems that ultimately, yes, humankind is now doomed to extinction - not by a Great Filter, this time, but its own tragically avoidable folly.
Or is it? As we will see next, even star gods are afraid of the dark...

Avatar's dark forest - part 1

Diamond-hard science-fiction

When evoking the 2009 film Avatar, people may remember beautiful visuals, heavy-handed exposition, then-bleeding edge special effects, a hippie message with the subtlety of a terminal-velocity anvil, nice-looking combat scenes featuring the worst cavalry tactics since Agincourt (from Poland the Na'Vi are not), Pocahontas IN SPAAACE, one memorable dedicated villain, and yet another bland hero to out-native the natives and lead them against Big Evil Corp.

All this is hiding a subtler, bleaker and more interesting narrative, in one of the hardest-SF stories ever featuring aliens.

Hard SF? Really?

A bold claim for a film with Space Blue Elf First Nations, but special care has in fact been given to keep everything as realistic as possible.

For exemple, let's look at one of the very first shots of the film:

The ISV VentureStar (source)

This may be the most realistic spacecraft from the entire history of film-making. In fact, it has a feature almost any type of spacecraft needs but that I have never seen elsewhere in any film or show ever: radiators. Specifically, badass giant red-glowing radiators to evacuate the massive waste heat produced by the kind of reactors a starship needs (and give both cool visuals and, in other works, potential plot points).

While looking strange and completely unlike common SF starships, it feels believable and actually made for deep space - and that's because it is. It has been designed by actual astronautic engineers as a workable antimatter interstellar slower-than-light transport starship based on known science and what engineering could be developed once enough time and resources are sunk into it. This very design may well be built someday for interstellar missions.
In fact, we could start working on it right now if we had enough industrial capacity in space (or enough rockets to launch said industrial capacity in orbit) and a more efficient way to produce and store antimatter. Two things that we know we could solve if enough time and money was dedicated to it.
And if we learned about the impossibly vast amounts of money to be made by mining Pandora (more on that in the next part), the investment would probably be made - Avatar is the rare bird where even economics make sense.

One may wonder who in their right mind would give such a ridiculous name to such a technological marvel of space engineering, but there is precedent: VentureStar was the name of a promising Space Shuttle replacement program in the 1990, killed by politics after billions were invested. Had it been completed, it would have in fact borne an outward resemblance to the Valkyrie shuttles used for orbit-to-surface movement (we can see one near a docking port of the starship). After all, there are few known possible shapes for Single-Stage-to-Orbit shuttle crafts.

This name is one of those cases where reality doesn't have to make sense the way fiction does.

Similarly, in lieu of the more outlandish designs that are common in soft-SF, human vehicles and weapons are grounded in reality. Weapons are variants of today's firearms and rockets. Flying vehicles are using existing technology, if more refined engineering. For example, ducted fans have advantages but are difficult to make at those dimensions and power levels. With lower gravity and higher atmospheric density in addition to advanced manufacturing techniques, they become a justifiable choice.

Lower gravity + higher air density + no need for heavy armour = cheat mode (source)

Mech suits are often glaringly unrealistic, but in this particular case, they make sense.

The main problem with bipedal vehicles is the unbearable pressure at the leg joints: as a biped is made taller, the weight supported by the joint, depending on volume, grows faster than the surface of said joints supporting it. This is why, on Earth, sea creatures can be much larger than land animals that have to use legs. Here, this problem is avoided in two ways: the AMP suits are reasonably small, and gravity is lower.

As to why use legs in the first place, legs are much more useful than wheels and threads in the uneven terrain of a jungle, and they can move faster and take less room than a multi-legged spider tank, while flying is energy-consuming and cause a nasty, noisy downwash.

Those suits are in fact used not unlike what is anticipated for exoskeletons today: for transporting heavier weapons, and for moving heavy charges around - a deceptively important job for any army. They are also useful for their enclosed cockpit and life support, allowing for greater autonomy and better environmental tolerances than portable gas mask and bottles. Air conditioning seems particularly useful in such a place.

Actually a good idea (source)

Let's pay attention for a moment to the gas giant Polyphemus hanging behind the world Pandora in that shot of the starship. You will note that, in all shots for a given location, it is always in the exact same position in the sky. This is because Pandora is not a planet but a moon orbiting said gas giant, and as astronomers will tell you, such moon will always en up tidally locked, like the Moon is around Earth: the same side is always facing the orbited body. As such, the same way the Earth is always at the same position for a Moon-dwelling astronaut, Polyphemus lay immobile in the sky of Pandora.

This is especially visible when seeing distant lands, where the gas giant appears at a very different angle in the sky. Even without knowing the details of orbital mechanics, this change reinforces the impression of great distance already given by the very different biomes replacing the jungle. This is an interesting example of an obscure (to the audience) point of realism being used for great visual narrative effect.

Similarly, the environment appears believable because for the needs of the film, actual biologists came up with its elements and did their best to create as realistic a forest ecosystem as they could - but more on that below.
The always interesting Sci-Fi Interfaces (one of the inspirations for this blog) has yet to publish articles on the user interfaces of Avatar, but at a glance, they seem to be equally believable.

(For the sake of this analysis, the tomfoolery of quantum entanglement superluminal communication will be ignored. At most, we could suppose that the popular but utterly wrong explanation of how the system works has been propagated by shoddy, sensationalist journalism instead of, say, wormholes, and leave it at that. It is still diamond-hard SF, even if there is a chip in said diamond.)

Why is that important?

This is capital to determine the narrative contract between the author and the audience.

Now, the narrative contract is a rather grandiose-sounding for how the audience is determining what kind of story the work is about and building expectations based on it. For example, if you are reading gritty detective fiction set in the 1930, the narrative contract states that the story is set in a realistic historical environment. So the protagonist should not pull a smartphone and check on Wikipedia when needing to check a fact - unless this is a deliberate detail added to hint at a major reveal (like time travel or that it is all reenactment). On the other hand, if the big reveal is that someone was a Nazi spy, this would fit right in.

Similarly, whether a story is more unconstrained soft-SF or more realistic hard-SF sets different expectations, and tells us different things about what it is about.

Soft-SF can get away with unrealistic technology and different scientific principles, for example space fighters battling as if they were WWII naval planes, but it cannot rely on too advanced real science without first explicitly establishing it first. For example, Star Wars cannot suddenly start to include relativistic time effects after those has never been shown to exist, and would need to do some serious exposition first if the story needed those.

On the other hand, the base assumption of hard-SF is that everything works as we know it, even obscure science and advanced engineering, unless explicitly shown otherwise, and its world works exactly like the one we are living in.

Now that we established that Avatar is very carefully constructed hard-SF, having even called professional scientists and engineers of varied fields in order to be the most realistic, we cannot handwave seemingly unrealistic elements as "It's just [soft-]SF". We have to try and explain it, and accept the consequences on the story.

And there are very strange elements there indeed.

Pandora and Fermi

Pandora, the world where the action takes place, is very close to the Solar System. Travel from Earth to Pandora took less than 7 years with a not-so-far-future realistic slower-than-light starship. In fact, there are at the very most a few star systems that are close enough - indeed, supplemental material tells us that it is actually the Alpha Centauri system*, literally the closest one to ours.

* The star system is Alpha Centaury, and the planetary system (the planets orbiting one star) is Alpha Centaury C. Technically the Solar System is a planetary system, but I also include such independent planetary systems into the star system definition and this article is already way too long to play with nomenclature.

For reference, our galaxy contains literally hundreds of billions of star systems - there are about fifty star systems in or galaxy alone for each living human today. And there are at least as many galaxies in the Universe, and probably much, much more.

So it seems that among this literally unimaginable amount of star systems, literally our closest neighbour also contains a planet where complex life appeared. And this life, by the miracle of convergent evolution, looks pretty much exactly like our own: green trees, flowers, dandelion seeds, canine predators...

The whole ecosystem can feel unnatural, artificial, but this may be an artefact of its uncanny chance resemblance with our own.

Barring an astronomical coincidence, this tells us that life as we know it is common, and that it converges to Earth-like forms even in relatively different atmosphere and gravity. So among those countless stars of our galaxy, we can expect at least billions of them to have an Earth-like ecosystem with reasonable certainty.
Even if a rare local event had made possible the appearance of complex life a few hundred million years ago, it would still have had to affect a large portion of the galaxy, as Alpha Centauri C was nowhere near us at that time.

There is also the question of timing: life as we know it on Earth isn't that old, compared to the age of the Universe. Our galaxy is twelve billions years, and modern-looking life is a few hundred of billions old. For about 99% of its age, Earth looked less like what we know than Pandora does. And for twice as long, there wasn't even an Earth yet in the galaxy.

There is a hypothesis that gamma rays burst were more common in the past, and that until about a few billion years ago, direct hits would have regularly destroyed complex life before it had a chance to develop. Similarly, most galaxies today may still be uninhabitable.

So right as earth is born, the galaxy becomes inhabitable and life can develop, maybe the same is true for Pandora. Both develop at a similar pace, and somehow stumble into life as we know it at about the same time.

This is stretching probabilities and hypothesis a bit, but it is plausible. Had Pandora been devoid of intelligent life, if we discovered it today, it would restrict quite a few models but not fundamentally overturn them. We would have deduced that intelligent* life is vanishingly rare, with a probably of emerging and surviving to humanity's spacefaring levels of less than one in a billion from an Earth-like ecosystem.

After all, a technological civilization like ours is very visible: radio, antimatter-powered starships, stellar engineering, Dyson spheres everywhere, galactic energy networks... Those may look out of reach today, but their science is known, and they are "merely" engineering and industrial challenges. We can expect to take a dig at those in a few hundred thousand years, an instant for cosmic time. If elder civilisations, even by a measly few million years, had emerged before us, they could have already started engineering around the entire galaxy if not beyond, including in our own Solar system. We looked for signs of those. Hard. The sky is empty.

* "intelligent" being used here as an admittedly crude shorthand for "capable of making advanced tools and developing technology"

This is how we already know today that highly visible, Human-style technological civilisation is astronomically rare at best. And this is the basis of the Fermi paradox: with such a vast and ancient Universe, why are we seemingly the only ones around?

The obvious explanation is that the probability of emergence and survival to spacefaring stages is so low that, even if in absolute numbers there may be many others in the unfathomable vastness of the Universe, the closest ones are simply in galaxies too far away for us to detect them. After all, according to what we know, even the billions of light-years of the observable Universe are at best a tiny fraction of its total size.

This implies that something, generally called a Great Filter, is severely lowering the chances of spacefarers. Some have already been ruled out: we now know that planets are common, so it cannot simply be that most star systems are empty. Pandora would rule out rareness of life at all, procaryotes, multi-cell organisms and of complex life as we know it.

And our own history rules out that civilisations simply extinguish themselves: sure, we have had setbacks and way too many close calls, but our chances to survive those and future ones, even if in the low percents, is not nearly enough to balance the astronomical odds necessary for a Great Filter - think of it that way: even if one out of a thousand makes it to the stellar engineering phase, a million civilisations should still be running around if even one star system out of a hundred let a civilisation emerge.

Unfortunately for all parties involved, as we will see in Part II, Pandora was not devoid of intelligent life, which will bring us to evoke other solutions to the Fermi Paradox...

Thanos' insane plan

With the next Avengers film being released soon, it is as good a time as any to talk about the most controversial element of the previous Avenger film, Infinity War: the master plan of Thanos the Mad Titan.

As it is one of the big reveals of the film, there will be spoilers, both about its nature and the film's ending.

Note: this is only based on the films released at this date, and mostly ignores side-material.

- End of the spoiler-free zone -

The Plan

A distant menace on several previous films, Thanos was presented as the main villain that the heroes would have to face some day. As hinted, his plan consists on gathering the six Infinite Stones, magic pebbles from the dawn of times that can each control an aspect of reality. With the six together, he will literally have access to the ultimate power over the Universe.

But while you would expect the grand villain of a superhero story to want ultimate power for its own sake, for Ruling the Universe (inset maniacal laugh), or for quenching his thirst of revenge and hatred in the blood of most everyone, Thanos doesn't care about all that. In fact, he wants to save the Universe and then retire on some peaceful nowhere.

The bad news is, what he wants to save the Universe of is a Malthusian overpopulation catastrophe, and his method for that is to kill half its population. At least it is fair, as the half to die is chosen at random, and they will die rather painlessly.

What the hell !?

It is a credit to the film that some of the audience not only sympathized but actually sided with Thanos. Convincing villains can make some of the most interesting antagonists. But do not be mistaken. That plan is an insane monstrosity of a literally unimaginable scale. And it is stupid.

Malthusian catastrophes, when they arrive, are nasty things. However, they are far from inevitable, several mechanisms exist that naturally tend to curb them or avoid them completely, and there are often less extreme ways to face it. Birth control, resource rationing, recycling, technological advances, you name it. Yes, food stamps and one-child policy are rather ugly, but much less than genocide.

In addition, much of the Universe is clearly not beset by Malthusian catastrophes, making the death of many of its inhabitants pointless. Even worse, the disappearance of half the people everywhere in every sector will probably cause social economic catastrophes on a scale that may kill entire worlds. And that's ignoring all the crashing vehicles and exploding power stations that lost their drivers and operators.

And even then, at some point the population will double again and you will be back at square one. Except you retired, so it will be up to someone else to fix it.

So you get your hands on ultimate power, and you want to stop Malthusian catastrophes in the Universe. What can you do? There are many options, often with flaws, certainly, but none as bad as half-omnicide.

You can double the existing resources of the Universe. For example, duplicate existing planets and celestial bodies, or make them twice as big. You can create new star systems, with portals to them so people can go there. You can change the rules of the Universe so population growth will naturally slow down.

You can even simply conquer the Universe and manage it directly, or give the job to competent administrators, in order to curb Malthusian catastrophes before they appear on each world.

Hemimating* the Universe is a terrible solution. I mean, duh.

* Literally, "decimating" meant "killing one-tenth of". Nowadays, it is used for "killing a large fraction of", so it is not technically incorrect, but it always bothers me for some reason.

How could he possibly think that was a good idea?

Thanos is shown as powerful, charismatic leader that can command not simply fear but also absolute loyalty. He even has a grand priest who make a great main villain by himself. You would expect someone that capable to be smart enough to come up with a better plan, right?

But he didn't wake up some day, wondering what he would do to kill time, and decided that Malthusian catastrophes were a bad thing and killing half the Universe would fix the problem.

He grew up on a great, advanced world, but one that was dying of overpopulation. And that is not an exaggeration: whether it was war, pollution or some other disaster, it is now a dead world, and he may as well be its last survivor. And he knew it at the time. In fact, they probably all did, but they were too far gone to fix it.

So he offered an extreme solution. A monstrous one, but the only one that could have worked: killing half the world's population.

Unsurprisingly, they refused. However the end ultimately came, it was bad. Extinction by overpopulation is one of the most horrifying way to go imaginable. Losing all of his people to that, and somehow surviving it himself, it is hard to imagine him or anyone else not going insane.

After that, he launched a crusade, attacking populated worlds and killing half of their population. Incapable of processing the staggering losses he suffered, he tries to save them again and again. But of course, it cannot work. His people are long gone, and nothing will bring them back. I suspect, not even the power of the Infinity Stones.

At some point, probably faced with how his task was simply impossible to accomplish, he devised a new plan. Gather the Infinity Stones and finish it in one stroke. With ruthlessness, no mercy and absolute dedication to his goal, he set to accomplish it.

And so he did.

And, at last, after symbolically succeeding where he had failed them, he can finally mourn his people.

His story is a cautionary tale about monsters who want to save the world.

As driven as they are to an altruistic goal, as strong, charismatic and diligent they can be, and with the certainty they offer in their answers, it is easy to follow them. And sometimes, after all they suffered, you can't help but to sympathize with them.

But they are still monsters.