Jake Sully’s first meeting with Neytiri is not humanity’s first contact with the Na’vi. That came about when the first unmanned probes landed on Pandora, and blue-tinged faces peered curiously into the camera lenses.
But by then the value of unobtanium had already been realised; RDA was already in operation. And RDA was not best pleased. Loud protests were made that the natives must be protected. Cynics assumed that RDA, more or less beyond the control of Earth, would see the Na’vi as nothing but an obstacle in the way of it achieving its own goals.
Meanwhile the first samples from Pandora were returned to Earth: minerals like unobtanium—and living things, plants, animals, heavily quarantined and controlled, specimens of the flora and fauna for scientific studies and zoos, commercially valuable properties such as the basis of novel drugs.
Wherever we’ve travelled we’ve always brought with us a host of fellow travellers from viruses to rats, “invasive” species that have often done a great deal of damage to native biospheres. Pandora’s environment is not identical to Earth’s, and it’s not clear how easy it would be for terrestrial life to gain a foothold there. But I’m willing to bet that some of our hardiest “extremophile” bugs at least, that can withstand extremes of heat and cold, wet and dry, even radiation baths and oxygen deprivation, could survive there. And what if Pandoran life forms got loose on Earth? Maybe the hardier bugs of Pandora, bred on a tougher world, would prosper here, having evaded all attempts at quarantine and escaped, as living things tend to find a way to do.
And what of the Na’vi? Their genetic material must have been transported to Earth for analysis to support the avatar project. Cadavers were needed for dissection. And perhaps some Na’vi were brought back live.
Imagine the sensation a live Na’vi would have made! These tall, skinny, blue-tinted creatures, as ungainly as giraffes in Earth’s heavy gravity, wearing their own exopacks to enable them to breathe our air… The first Indians brought back to Europe by the conquistadors were a similar wonder. Scientists, historians, anthropologists, linguists and other specialists would have pounced on them. Maybe Na’vi ethnic “fashions” were all the rage for a while.
What might have become of that handful of Na’vi, transported across the light years? Perhaps they would have been taught English, and dressed up in suits and ties to be presented to presidents and monarchs. Or perhaps they would have been cooped up in zoo “habitats” with Pandora-like conditions, while their children were taken off to be experimented on, their genetics pulled apart, their bodies mined for such treasures as their carbon-fibre-reinforced bones. Either way they would have been cut off, not just from their people, their culture, but from Eywa—and from the possibility of joining their ancestors after death (see Chapter 29). And after he died the skeleton of the first Na’vi brought to Earth, no doubt given some human name like “Blue George,” would have been set up on a stand in a natural history museum.
Does it have to be that way?
And what if we were on the receiving end?
Certainly, if you’re a fan of peace, love and understanding, the precedent of first contact among human cultures is not encouraging.
In 1492 Christopher Columbus “discovered” a new world, and a whole branch of mankind nobody in Europe had any idea existed before. Just like Avatar’s RDA seeking unobtanium, the monarchs who sponsored the early explorers wanted New World gold and other goods to fund their own projects, notably wars with their Christian rivals and Muslim enemies. Columbus himself was a militant Christian who dreamed of finding a new ocean trade route to Asia, and of joining forces with the Mongol emperors to attack Islam from the east. None of this had anything to do with the Native Americans, but the Europeans had the technology to impose their own agenda on the peoples they found.
Perhaps the most single dramatic moment in the astonishing saga of contact and conquest that followed was the encounter in the Peruvian highlands between the Inca emperor Atahuallpa and the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro, in November 1532, just forty years after Columbus. Atahuallpa ruled the most populous and advanced state in the New World; he had millions of subjects and an army tens of thousands strong. Pizarro led less than two hundred Spaniards. Within minutes of their encounter, Pizarro had captured Atahuallpa. And in a subsequent battle, the Spaniards, with no losses, defeated a native army hundreds of times more numerous, killing thousands. In mere decades the Inca empire had collapsed.
The vast numerical superiority of the Inca meant nothing in the face of the Spaniards’ technological advantage. The Spaniards were a gunpowder culture facing essentially a stone age civilisation. Their steel weapons slashed through the thin armour of the Inca. And the Spaniards’ use of hourses terrified their enemy. As the horse had long been extinct in the Americas, when faced with cavalry charges the Inca did not even understand what they were seeing (remember Captain Cook’s ship and the islanders). Worst of all, in subsequent decades the “herd diseases” like smallpox that the Europeans inadvertently imported from home caused a huge implosion of the native populations.
This basic pattern, of the overwhelming advantage afforded by superior technology, and the leveraging of that advantage into conquest and exploitation, appears to be a common theme of human history. It goes on today. James Cameron intended Avatar as, in part, a cautionary tale about the consequences of contact, colonialism and exploitation. Cameron and some of the cast of Avatar visited the Xingu people of Brazil, who live in a part of Amazonia likely to be affected by the multi-billion-dollar Belo Monte hydroelectric dam project. Cameron calls this a “real-life Avatar confrontation… in progress.”
In the past it has even happened to “us” in the western world. Britain was overwhelmed when the Romans arrived, with their superior army discipline, road-building and literacy-based communications. For all the supposed advantages of Roman civilisation that followed—and Britain’s subsequent history is unimaginable without the Roman intervention—it wasn’t a comfortable process to live through, as Queen Boudicca (Boadicea) of the Iceni nation demonstrated in her bloody but futile revolt a generation after the Romans landed.
If it happened to us before, could it happen again in the future? By the end of the nineteenth century one thoughtful witness, H. G. Wells, disturbed by the plight of peoples like the Tasmanians who appeared to have been entirely exterminated during European colonisation, wondered how it would be if humans, specifically the Victorian-era imperial British, were ever on the receiving end. In The War of the Worlds, British army guns facing the Martian heat ray are “bows and arrows against the lightning”—a phrase evocative of the battle scenes of Avatar.
Today some like to imagine, as in Carl Sagan’s Contact, that if the aliens come we will receive wisdom from the stars: an Encyclopaedia Galactica, a cultural adrenaline boost that will raise our society to new levels. But others follow Wells in imagining harsher possibilities. Physicist Stephen Hawking recently said (in a Discovery Channel documentary called Stephen Hawking’s Universe, aired on 9 May 2010), “I imagine they exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources of their home planet. If aliens ever visit us, the outcome could be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.” Which sounds like an Avatar scenario in reverse.
Today there is a ferocious debate going on in the world of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, about the wisdom, not just of passively listening for signals from space aliens, but of signalling to them. This is known as “active SETI.” Earth is a noisy place in the radio spectrum; we’ve been leaking radio, TV and radar signals for decades. But the signal strength drops off quite quickly, over a few light years, spanning a few tens of stars, say. Purposeful signals would suddenly make us visible to a much larger chunk of the Galaxy. And signals have been sent before. In 1974, the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico transmitted a series of radio pulses towards the M13 star cluster, encoding a message from humanity designed by SETI pioneer Frank Drake.
Some have always been unhappy about this. Former Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Ryle warned that “any creatures out there [might be] malevolent or hungry.” And Sir Bernard Lovell, founder of Jodrell Bank, once said, “It’s an assumption that they will be friendly—a dangerous assumption.” Science-fiction writer David Brin speaks of analogies of toddlers shouting in the jungle. Maybe this is the resolution to the Fermi Paradox: everybody else keeps quiet because they know there is something dangerous out there.
But does it have to be this way? Is it in us to learn to love the alien? And could the alien ever love us?
At least we know we ought to behave better.
The “Golden Rule” of ethics, which is embedded in many religions and philosophies, was expressed by Christ this way: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” (This wording, a version of verses from the gospels of Matthew and Luke, first appeared in a catechism in the sixteenth century.) Also known as the “ethic of reciprocity,” the Golden Rule is arguably the basis for the modern concept of human rights: that you should treat everybody, including those not in your own immediate allegiance group, with consideration. It has been criticised. George Bernard Shaw pointed out that the other’s taste may not be the same as yours; how do you know that the others would like having done unto them what you want done unto you. But nevertheless it’s not a bad principle to live by. As Wells pointed out, the imperial British wouldn’t have enjoyed having the Martians doing unto them what the British did to the Tasmanians.
Even during the darkest years of the European colonisation age, there were flickers of empathy. As early as Columbus’ own expeditions, some people back home were appalled by accounts of slavery and massacre. It wasn’t long before the Pope decreed that the Native Americans were fully human, that they had souls, and that the mission of Christians must be to save those souls rather than exploit their bodies. The Christians missionaries that followed did a good deal to disrupt and destroy native culture, but in the context of the sixteenth century I think you must call the Pope’s decree a hopeful sign.
Interesting debates continue today, incidentally, about the theological status of hypothetical extraterrestrial aliens. There is no sign of any Christian or other missionaries working among the Na’vi. The collision with Eywa would be fascinating. Perhaps it might help the Na’vi’s cause if some twenty-second century Pope in faraway Rome were to declare that they too have souls…
But the Na’vi aren’t exotic humans, like the Native Americans. They are alien creatures. We can empathise with human strangers; could we ever empathise with the alien?
Again, precedents from our career on Earth aren’t very hopeful. Consider how we treat the animals. Though the Na’vi respect the animals they take for food, on Earth even our closest surviving relatives, the great apes, are in danger of being driven to extinction through the carelessness of habitat loss and fragmentation—and, sadly, from purposeful hunting.
We tend to measure animals’ worth in terms of how much they are “like” us. Thus we look for signs of human-like cognition in chimps, as expressed in tool-making and sign language. But maybe, as philosopher Jeremy Bentham said as long ago as 1789, we should treat an animal depending not on how well it thinks but on how much it is capable of suffering. Consider the heartbreak of a mother elephant when her baby is taken by the poachers. Scottish psychologist James Anderson has compiled data on how chimps treat their dead. Mothers can carry corpses of their dead babies around for weeks, even though it is clear from subtle reactions that they know the infants are dead. Such observations “make a strong case that chimps not only understand the concept of death but also have ways of coping with it,” Anderson says.
You only have to consider your own feelings when watching the distressing scenes that follow the aftermath of the destruction of the Na’vi’s Hometree to believe, I think, that we will indeed be able to empathise with the alien, when we meet it. After all, though in Avatar there is a Miles Quaritch, there is also a Grace Augustine, wanting to reach out to the Na’vi.
But it would surely make it easier to empathise with an animal if you could plug your mind directly into it.