In the movie Avatar we only glimpse Earth, but we see a lot more of the human colony on Pandora, the “Resources Development Administration Extra-Solar Colony,” more popularly known as Hell’s Gate.
And here we get to see some of the technological advances achieved by mid-twenty-second century Earth.
One challenge of the operations we see on Pandora is the sheer mass of the machinery required, such as the mining gear, the military hardware, the fixed structures at Hell’s Gate and elsewhere. Interstellar flight is always likely to be expensive, and the more mass you have to haul out, the more expensive it gets.
Given this, it would make sense to manufacture as much of your equipment as you could on Pandora using in situ resources. To get things up and running quickly you might bring out smart but lightweight components such as electronics from Earth, while manufacturing dumb but heavy components on Pandora.
And the way RDA achieves the latter is by using a much-advanced version of a novel manufacturing technique called stereolithography, or “3D printing.”
This is a kind of photocopying of solid objects, in which computer-controlled machines build up a component by spraying on layer by layer. Typically, systems working today have used plastics, but there have been experiments using metals and ceramics. Advantages of the technique are its ability to construct more complicated and intricate shapes than any other primary manufacturing technology, and its flexibility—one system can turn out any component you like, whereas otherwise you’d have to bring along specialised plant for each type.
Today, commercial systems are used to manufacture items like jewellery, but they are also being trialled on a larger scale, for example in projects where buildings are constructed layer by layer by robots pouring fast-setting concrete. There are also home-workshop experiments you can download, such as the “Reprap” project, the Replicating Rapid-prototyper, devised by Adrian Bowyer of the Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College in England. As you can imagine, there are fascinating intellectual property rights issues to be resolved around this technology.
Even on Earth, if we could manufacture a lot of what we need at home we might cut transport costs significantly. And stereolithography certainly cuts the cost of transport to Alpha Centauri, where the RDA manufactures its own ground vehicles, mine equipment, weapons, building elements, even clothing. As we’ll see, however, the use of this technology imposes some constraints on the kinds of machinery that can be used on Pandora.
Remarkably, experiments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have tried using the 3D-printing technique to make artificial human bones. In the course of Avatar we get a look at a number of other medical advances.
Former Marine Jake Sully is stranded in a wheelchair, the result of a traumatic injury he suffered on active service. He’s aware that a “spinal” can be fixed, but only at a price beyond the means of his veteran’s benefit. In the context of the movie, Jake’s paralysis serves a key narrative function. Like his eco-devastated Earth it provides another extreme starting point for his personal story; it makes Jake vulnerable to manipulation by Quaritch—and it amplifies the joy he feels, and we share, when he first drives his avatar body, and is able simply to run again.
But it is good to know that in the real world some steps are being taken towards alleviating this terrible condition.
A “spinal” is a spinal cord injury. The spinal cord is a long, thin bundle of nervous tissue that extends from the brain. The cord is contained for protection in the bony vertebral column. Together, cord and brain make up the central nervous system. The cord’s main function is to transmit neural signals between the brain and the rest of the body: “motor information,” data about the body’s movements, travels down the cord from brain to body, and “sensory information,” data recorded by the senses, travels back up the cord from body to brain. The cord also has some independent functions; it serves as a centre for coordinating various reflexes.
It’s estimated that in the United States, for example, there are some forty cases of spinal cord injury per million people per year. The spinal cord can be damaged by trauma, as in Jake’s war injury, or through a tumour, or through a developmental disorder like spina bifida, or a neurodegenerative disease. The vertebral bones or the discs between the vertebrae can shatter and puncture the cord itself. In the more severe cases, such as Jake’s, a patient can suffer a significant loss of motor and sensory functions to major areas of the body, all the way to full body paralysis (quadriplegia) below the site of the injury. In addition a patient can suffer bowel and bladder malfunctions, a loss of sexual function, spasticity and neuropathic pain, and in the longer term muscle atrophy and bone degeneration.
Current treatments amount to administering anti-inflammatory agents or cold saline immediately after the injury. These wouldn’t help Jake walk again. It seems that at present, despite the dreadful outcome of a spinal cord injury, there is comparatively little research being done into new treatments, because of the small (in percentage terms) number of sufferers.
But there are some promising developments. Treatment involving neuronal protection, and even the regeneration of damaged neurons, are being investigated to treat conditions like Alzheimer’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease, conditions of the central nervous system which have some similarities to spinal cord injuries.
Stem cell treatment seems the most promising approach to neurological regeneration, and attracts a lot of publicity. Stem cells are found in most multicellular organisms. They can renew themselves through cell division, but can also differentiate into a range of specialised cell types. They can be found in embryos, where they go on to produce all the specific tissues the embryo requires. There are also adult stem cells which can act as a repair mechanism for the body, replenishing damaged specialised cells.
In their application in medicine, stem cells are introduced into injured tissues. The cells come from the patient’s own body, so there is no risk of rejection. With proper management the stem cells can be trained to differentiate into the kind of cells needed to repair the damage. The first successful stem cell treatment was as far back as 1968, a bone marrow transplant. It is hoped that stem cell treatments will one day transform medicine by treating conditions ranging from cancer to cardiac failure.
For “spinals” like Jake’s these treatments are in their infancy. It has proved difficult to persuade stem cells to differentiate into spinal motor neuron cells, the type of cell that transmits messages from the brain to the spinal cord. But some success was reported in this in 2005 by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And in 2010 the first spinal-injury patient was treated with human-embryonic stem cells.
Another bit of evidence we see of advanced biomedical knowledge in Avatar’s twenty-second century is the creation of the avatars themselves, derived from “human DNA mixed with DNA from the natives”—the Na’vi. This is a topic we will return to in Chapter 31, but for now we can note that this is a remarkable achievement of genetic engineering.
Here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, genetics is another area of rapid advance and great promise for medicine. A gene is a unit of inherited material encoded by strands of the double-helix molecule DNA (that’s how it works in creatures from Earth, at least). The idea of gene therapy in medicine is to insert genes into an individual’s cells to treat conditions such as hereditary diseases, where harmful mutant versions of a gene can be replaced with functional ones. The idea was raised in the 1970s, and the first attempts focused on diseases caused by single-gene defects, such as cystic fibrosis. The first successful treatment in the U.S. took place in 1990, when a four-year-old girl was treated for a genetic defect that left her with an immune system deficiency. In a trial in London in 2007 a patient was treated for an inherited eye disease, and in 2009 researchers in America gave enhanced colour vision to a squirrel monkey, in experiments hopefully leading to a cure for colour blindness.
An interesting review in the April 2010 issue of the journal Nature summed up the decade since the first full decoding of the human genome, all one hundred thousand genes, the “blueprint of life.” Progress in using genetic data in medicine has actually been slower than expected, because of the complex genetics behind many diseases, apparently exaggerated claims after a few early successes in the 1990s—and the death of a patient in 1999, after a severe reaction to attempts to give him repaired genes. At the time of writing, no patients have actually been cured of common genetic diseases by gene therapy.
And then there are ethical and other doubts about the technique, as with so many other areas of modern medicine. For instance, babies can be “screened” in the womb for genetic conditions, possibly treated, or, perhaps, aborted if the parents choose. Many people will have doubts about where to draw the line in terms of such choices. Then there is the question of inheritance. There are two basic types of gene therapy. You can insert the therapeutic genes into the somatic cells of the patient—that is, the non-reproductive cells of the body. In this case any effects will be restricted to the patient only, and not passed on to any offspring. Or you can insert genes into germ cells—that is, reproductive cells, sperm or eggs. These changes would be heritable and can be passed on to future generations. These techniques are so controversial that in many countries, including the UK, tampering with the human germ line is a specific criminal offence.
One very unpleasant offshoot of gene therapy research could be “smart” biological weapons. You could target a specific group or individual with a particular DNA pattern, and trigger a natural or engineered disease. It must be hoped that this doesn’t occur to any SecOps think tanks on Pandora—but it is a possibility, since we know from the creation of the avatars that humans have to some extent mastered Na’vi genetics as well as their own.
The medical treatments discussed here are more or less at the experimental stage today. Perhaps the successful ones will be routinely available by the mid-twenty-second century. But it seems likely they will be costly. Aside from the evident cost of fixing Jake’s spinal injury, we see scientist Max Patel wearing glasses! If you can build an avatar, you’d think you could fix short-sightedness—but, obviously, only at the right price.
Another technological advance obvious in Hell’s Gate is computer technology.
Consider the Hell’s Gate Ops Centre control room. (Avatar’s creative team visited such locations as a real-world oil rig, the gigantic Noble Clyde Boudreaux in the Gulf of Mexico, to use as a model for interiors like this.) We see large-scale wraparound screens that respond to the touch and movement of the operator. In another instance, in the avatar lab, Max Patel swipes one tablet-like screen over another, taking an image to carry away with him to show Grace Augustine, as easily as he might pull a piece of paper from a pin-board. Three-dimensional displays are the norm, and there is an emphasis on graphic and tactile interactions, in an environment saturated with computing. These scenes recall recent experiments in “ubiquitous computing,” in which computers become embedded in the surroundings. Nokia’s Ubice is one prototype. In Microsoft’s Lightspace system, surfaces in a lecture room become screens for displaying documents and images; like Max you can pick up a virtual item from one display and move it to another.
The Ops Centre also features a holotable, with a continuously updated summary of conditions across RDA’s operations on Pandora. This is a very impressive, fully searchable holographic display, which Jake is able to reach into, tracing for Quaritch the internal structure of Hometree with his hands. Holography, the science of 3-D projection, is quite an old technology. The principles on which it is based were first set out in 1947 by the British physicist Dennis Gabor, who got a Nobel Prize for his trouble. Information about the amplitude and phase of light waves—that is, how intense they are and how they relate to each other—are stored as patterns of interference. Computer programs “ray-trace” back from these interference patterns to recreate the light rays that gave rise to those patterns, and so give the illusion that the object that emitted or reflected the light in the first place is present. Indeed, that “object” might only ever have existed in the electronic imagination of a computer.
Human-machine interaction (HMI) is the academic study of the interaction between people and computers. It is the intersection of a number of fields, from ergonomics and human factors to computer design. It arose partly because of bad examples of human-machine interfaces leading to calamity—for instance, it is thought that the Three Mile Island nuclear accident was partly due to operators struggling with a poor and confusing interface. HMI practitioners develop theories of interaction, come up with design methodologies and processes, and invent new kinds of interfaces and interaction techniques. A long-term goal is to minimise the barriers between a human’s cognitive model of what she wants to accomplish and the machine’s understanding of the task.
This makes sense in terms of what we see of the computer interfaces in Avatar, which seem a logical development from modern technology, our tablets and smart phones, with their applications which respond to touch, and can sense physical movements such as tipping and shaking thanks to internal accelerometers and GPS positional awareness. All of this builds an illusion that the computer applications are part of our physical world.
But if the human interfaces look familiar, current trends would suggest that we ought to anticipate huge advances in computer power by 2154.
“Moore’s law” is an empirical observation that thanks to technological advances and commercial pressure the speed of computer systems (as well as other parameters such as memory storage and relative cheapness) is growing exponentially. This was first described by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore, who in 1965 noted that the number of components in integrated circuits had doubled every year since the invention of such circuits in 1958. The doubling is cumulative, like compound interest, so in ten years the increase (two multiplied by itself ten times) would be over a thousandfold.
Similar studies based on other ways to calculate computing power give different values for the doubling time, but all of the same order of magnitude. Futurologist Ray Kurzweil has claimed the law has been working since the mechanical calculating machines of the early twentieth century. And it’s still working today, nearly half a century after Moore’s original paper. As of November 2010, according to the “TOP500” list that keeps a rank of such things, the most powerful non-distributed computer system in the world, a Chinese supercomputer called the Tianhe-1A (“the Milky Way”) was capable of around twenty-five hundred trillion elemental mathematical calculations per second (2.5 petaflops, in the jargon). The TOP500 list, maintained since 1993, confirms a version of Moore’s Law based on the big machines’ processing speeds, with a doubling time of fourteen months.
But Moore’s Law makes even mighty machines look dumb very quickly. With a fourteen-month doubling the Law should ensure that a laptop, presumably available for the same kind of comparative price as today, will pass the power of that big Chinese machine in a mere fifteen years. I won’t depress you here by telling you when the supercomputers, or indeed your phone, will become more powerful than your brain. We’ll consider that stuff in Chapter 32; it would certainly help with the tricky business of linking Jake to his avatar to have the whole process buffered by computers much more powerful than either brain.
Moore’s Law must have a limit beyond which it breaks down; in the end it will come up against fundamental physical limits. But by Avatar’s mid-twenty-second century the world will surely be utterly saturated by extremely advanced computer technology. Just as today it’s in your TV and car and phone, by then we must anticipate that it will be everywhere, in your clothes, your home, in every gadget you use—even in the very fabric of your body, which might swarm with tiny smart medical-repair nano-robots.
For much of the movie’s running time, however, humans are occupied with another sort of intelligence—the Na’vi’s—and on waging war against it.