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!