Stephen Baxter - The Science of Avatar

This book is about the science behind James Camerons movie Avatar. And to explore that science well access behind-the-scenes secrets of James Cameron and his team.

But an awful lot of the science in Avatar is right up there on the movie screen. All you have to do is observe it.

Imagine its the year 2154, and youre on Pandora, moon of the gas giant Polyphemus, planet of Alpha Centauri. You are following combat veteran Jake Sully down the ramp from the Valkyrie shuttle that has just brought you down from the orbiting starship Venture Star. You are at Hells Gate, the main operating base of RDAthe Resources Development Administrationwhich is here to mine this world for the supremely valuable unobtanium. Jake, though, is to report to Dr. Grace Augustine, to take part in the avatar programme she heads: his mind will drive a surrogate body intended to make contact with the Navi, natives of this world.

But youre not thinking about any of this just now. Youve just arrived, on an alien world. What do you see? What can you hear, smell, feel?

Actually, as you have your exopack mask glued to your face, all you can smell is canned air. Perhaps the sky is an odd colour, due to Pandoras subtly different mix of atmospheric gases. Maybe there are funny-shaped clouds. You could hardly miss the two suns of Alpha Centauri, and that big old Jupiter-like world hanging in the sky. You might see little of Pandoras native life, which has been pretty much excluded from Hells Gate.

You notice an odd feeling of lightness: a bounce in your step, a feeling that your head is full, like having a cold, a peculiar looseness in your internal organs. If youve trained on the smaller worlds of the solar system, the moon and Mars, you recognise these sensations; it was similar there. What youre feeling is Pandoras low gravity.

But then a huge mining truck roars pastand, with Jake, you see arrows sticking out of a tyre.

This is Jakes very first observation of the Navi, the natives of Pandora. And this alone tells him, and you, a great deal about them.

To begin with, the Navi must be smart, with cognitive skills at least similar to modern humans. Even an arrowwith a shaft, a head, some kind of flightis a multi-part tool. On Earth, only humans have ever made such things, as far as we know, not the chimps, none of our hominid forebears with their chipped stone tools. Another proof of smartness is the fact that the Navi evidently targeted the tyres, which look like the vehicles weak point.

But how did the arrows get there? You already know that the Navi have a roughly humanoid form. You saw avatar bodies being grown in tanks aboard the starship from Earth. And given that, you might speculate (correctly) that a bow was used to fire those arrows. But youre on another planet. How likely is it that an alien life form would develop a bow-and-arrow technology?

Well, on Earth, bow-and-arrow technology was independently invented several times. It seems to have emerged first by 8000 B.C. in Germany, but was separately developed by North American natives, who had no contact with the Old World between around 11,000 B.C. and the arrival of Columbus. The isolation of the continents has provided us with natural laboratories to study cultural evolution. Many things were invented independently, such as farming, wherever the local resources made them possible. Archery is one of thesealthough it didnt always occur. The Aborigines of Australia never developed it; instead they used a throwing stick, like the South American atlatl, that they called a woomeraa word later adopted for the Australian space launch centre.

So its not a great surprise for you to discover the Navi using archery, after another independent invention, on another world entirely.

And nor might you be surprised to hear Jake being told by Colonel Miles Quaritch of SecOps, head of security at Hells Gate, that the Navi like to dip their arrows in a neurotoxin poison. The South American Indians similarly fought back against the Spanish conquistadors with arrows and darts coated with deadly frog slime, strychnine, and curare, an alkaloid that causes fatal paralysis.

But, of course, the first thing ex-Marine Jake will have noticed is that the Navi are evidently hostile. Just like the Spanish on Earth in pursuit of gold, the twenty-second-century conquistadors of RDA, here in pursuit of unobtanium, have come face to face with hunter-gatherers of the forest.

All this Jake, and you, could deduce just from that very first observation on Pandora, of arrows in the tyres.

Audiences around the world have been enchanted by James Camerons visionary movie Avatar, with its glimpse of the Navi on their marvellous world Pandora. And, like Jake Sully in his psionic link unit, many havent wanted to wake up from the dream: Avatar withdrawal has become a common syndrome.

But the movie is not entirely a dream, not entirely fantasy. There is a scientific rationale for much of what we saw on the screen. This isnt a surprise, as the creators consulted specialists and used their own scientific knowledge to make it so. Take archery, for example. The movies designers have given the Navi no less than four kinds of arrows and seven kinds of bow, ranging from childrens practice toys to the mighty X-bow with two crossed supports, for use at long range in aerial attacks. And Jake will discover that the bows are integral to Navi culture; after completion of the Iknimaya initiation trial a young Navi hunter is allowed to carve a bow from a branch of Hometree, the clans mighty natural home.

Behind what we see onscreen is a fully realised, if imaginary, universe. Much of this we dont even glimpse, but it all adds to the authenticity of the movies vision, and to its cultural value. My own career has been (mostly) built on whats known as hard science fiction: that is, science fiction in which you try to stick to the laws of science as we understand them, with reasonable extrapolations and consistency. The appeal of the best hard science fiction is that it allows us to explore the meaning of our own humanity in the context of the universe revealed by our endlessly unfolding scientific knowledge. And thats just how it is with Avatar.

Like Jake wondering about the arrows, like Dr. Grace Augustine in her endless quest for samples, in this book we will be field explorers of the science of the fictional Avatar universe. Well take our lead primarily from what we see onscreen, but we will dip into the rich universe James Cameron and his team have developed behind the scenes. In places youll find me speculating about some feature of the Avatar universe without giving a definitive answer. At the time of writing only the first movie has been released; two sequels and tie-in novels are planned, in which we will learn much more about the worlds of Avatar

This is a book about science, but we will always have to be aware that were dealing with a movie: a story, a piece of fiction. James Cameron wrote a first treatment of the movie in 1995, but his vision of the Navi, for instance, dates back to paintings he created in the 1970s. His development of the universe of Avatar was a dialogue between this primary visions and the work of artists, designers and consultants, who were encouraged to use real-world scientific knowledge and imagery to flesh out a consistent, credible universe. But at all times the need of the audience was paramount. Cameron urged his creators to find the metaphor for each element of the movie. Thus the banshees metaphor is an ultimate vision of birds of prey.