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.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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!
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.
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!
