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[ysengrin]

A few (non-spoiler) things to think about ... and a warning that comments may well *be* spoilery, so avoid this thread unless you've seen the film.

The environment of Pandora has been worked out in great detail for the film. All the 'higher' life is based off of a hexapod (six limbed) base. With a very notable exception - the Na'vi.

The avatars are supposed to be a hybrid mix of human and Na'vi. Aside from the interesting point that life on Earth and Pandora must have a lot of similarities for that to work (and that Earth biotech is really, really advanced), the film offers a lot of details that show the avatars are *not* Na'vi -- they smell different, have a different number of fingers and possibly other gross differences as well.

Pandora seems to be the only source of Unobtainium (which is supposedly a room-temp superconductor, though I'm not sure that's stated in the film). Is it possibly biological in origin?

There's also a big chunk of ecological speculation that *is* spoilery, so I'll leave it for later.

Comments

This comment also contains spoilers

[pippinbear.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'd mentioned that oddness too; every animal but the Na'vi have six limbs; the flying ones have two sets of wings and one pair of legs.

I just had a thought: could the room-temperature superconductor be a necessary part of Eywa's connectivity? After all, they've evolved something as sophisticated as carbon fibre for use in skeletons and armour plating... That might also explain just where the unobtainium is found.

First time they mentioned "unobtainium", I thought it was the character joking about how hard it was to find. It was a bit disappointing to realise that it wasn't.

Re: This comment also contains spoilers

[ysengrin.livejournal.com]

It is suggestive that the two major deposits of Unobtanium that we're told of correspond with particularly obvious bits of Eywa. That's also why I was suggesting a biological origin for the stuff; it's a bit of a leap from what we're told in the film, but Eywa may be subtly (or not so subtly) working with biological systems on Pandora.

Re: This comment also contains spoilers

[pippinbear.livejournal.com]

Actually, I had assumed that Eywa was the name the Na'vi gave to the emergent behaviour of Pandora's interconnected flora/fauna, which they percieved as a separate entity without it necessarily being so. That is, it's not so much "working with" as "being an aspect of".

Re: This comment also contains spoilers

[ysengrin.livejournal.com]

There's some hints that I took be mean the Eywa was self-aware. That doesn't mean that Pandorian life wouldn't be considered by Eywa as the stuff it was made up of, but that Eywa could work with that stuff (life) with a fine hand.

Of course, the most obvious hints were *after* Eywa had deep-scanned a human. Possibly seeing how a mind outside itself was organized inspired Eywa?