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.

Introduction

Have you ever watched a film or read a book and thought something didn't make sense in its universe, only to realize later that, actually, maybe it does?

"Apologetics"?

Apologetics is originally a religious concept: when someone read a sacred text and thought, "wait, that's inconsistent!", be it because it seems to contradict another part of the text or how the world itself works, it is then the job of some exegete to work the contradiction out - often by saying that the text should have been interpreted differently in the first place.

If it sounds like making excuses, that is indeed what the word itself means, after all. It doesn't mean that the effort is pointless, though. Incoherence is one of those things we really don't like, especially in our textbooks. So for the believers, this means that the basis of their faith is actually usable - and it is not only for the religious: ideologies need this to have a chance to work. It is part of the job of judges and lawyers when new cases happen and legislation hasn't had time to catch on, in creating jurisprudence. Similar works is also needed in science, when disparate working theories and models have to be made to work together.

If it sounds like I am doing apologetics for apologetics, well, maybe I am - it seems rather appropriate.

What does any of this has to do with science-fiction?

It may not have the fundamental importance of the aforementioned disciplines, but nonetheless, science-fiction fans, in fact fans of all storytelling shades, often like their stories to be internally consistent. For example, if the sheriff fires his six-shooter eight times in a row, it will feel wrong. And the importance of storytelling shouldn't be underestimated: great science-fiction and fantasy epics are now taking the societal roles that myths had, especially as references shared by society. Metaphorical stories can carry messages with great strength. Anticipation stories can tell about opportunities or, more often, warn about possible dangers.

It should not be surprising that, given what they can offer, they can gather such following.

Then again, I am simply doing this because I like science-fiction, consistency and finding patterns.

Major inconsistencies can break a story. Even minor ones can grate some of the audience, especially when it is about something they are specialised on, like impossible or impractical buildings to an architect, idiotic tactics to a soldier or mangled quotes to a scholar. And don't get me started on blue-themed user interfaces.

After all, a common reaction, upon facing those, is to reject it, and the story with it.

Fortunately, as almost no story is perfect, this is not the only possible reaction. Minor or secondary enough inconsistencies can be ignored for the sake of enjoying the story. Sure, the armour of that Viking in the background is definitely just a biker vest with nails and that wouldn't stop a kitchen knife, but that was a great fight scene so I don't mind.

Or one may assume that the apparent contradiction is in fact justified in some less obvious way. Some character made a stupid decision, but maybe they had another reason for it. Or maybe they were not in their normal state of mind - History has plenty of examples: Napoleon is considered one of the greatest strategists to ever live, and yet he made fatal mistakes at Waterloo, probably due to a serious illness.

In fact, legitimate plot points can be mistaken for contradiction because the audience missed subtle hints - or because the author thought obvious something that wasn't.

Without going as far as the Death of the Author theory, a story has to stand on its own right. If there is an inconsistency because the author made a mistake, even if the intention was there, the story is still flawed.

Conversely, if a story is actually consistent in an interesting way, even in a way the author didn't realize, it deserves praise.

So, what is this blog about anyway?

Searching for justifications for elements of a story that are initially appearing random or inconsistent, mostly (but not exclusively) in science-fiction.

And what is the point?

First, as said before, consistent stories are better enjoyed than inconsistent ones. So this may make stories more enjoyable.

Then, if you are writing stories set in the same extended universe, (official or fan-fiction), this can help, and even be mandatory. In fact, chances are that you have already done it to some extent. This can also help if you are working on similar stories, to understand what worked and why, or what should be made more explicit.

It can also make the story work on more levels, and make it hint at other subjects. A seemingly idiotic tactic being justified can call back to historical events, where idiotic tactics were used, and how this was allowed to happen. Characters making bad decisions can tell us more about their psychology.

Also, as we have already seen, apologetics in general are a useful discipline.

But mostly because that's a fun exercise.

As the name of the blog suggests, science-fiction stories will be the main focus. However, this is not exclusive and fantasy or other genres can be on-topic. In fact, the frontier between science-fiction, especially soft-SF, and fantasy can be rather porous, and similar techniques can be used.

In any story, it is assumed to be working like reality unless noted otherwise. However, consistency doesn't imply realism. So you can expect, say, alternate physics, as long as a consistent set of rules can be deducted.

PS: English is not my native language, so please forgive any bizarre turn of phrase (^،^')