• qyron@sopuli.xyz
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    51 minutes ago

    So… We manage to master space travel. We manage to master interstellar travel. We eventually find a planet with suitable environment for sustaining our species. And we just overlook it.

    Can someone explain me the reasoning behind this?

    Sci-fi to the side, there are more minerals available - readily - on asteroids and barren planets than anywhere else. Why go hopping around looking for habitable planets, to the reason of 1 out of who knows how many, to then strip mine it?

    • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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      1 hour ago

      The resource being extracted on the avatar planet was unobtanium.

      It was only available on that planet, precisely so intelligent people like you can’t say “why not mine barren rocks instead”?

      • qyron@sopuli.xyz
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        1 hour ago

        There are exactly zero minerals available inside planets that are unavailable on asteroids.

        Sci-fi will be sci-fi but can we go back to the time it was at least well thought? Can’t hurt. If the objective of the movie was to make social criticism, it didn’t need to go to such lenghts.

        And it was a boring movie; failed to captivate me.

          • qyron@sopuli.xyz
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            32 minutes ago

            Nice to cross paths with you again!

            I’ll grant that but what use for crystalized urea is there? Urea I know a few. And if we already know how to cultivate diamonds and other artificial gems, why bother mining for that?

            • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nz
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              29 minutes ago

              Drag was making an allegorical point. Perhaps Unobtanium results from an organic process. In the second movie, the capitalists are killing whales for a substance in their brains that makes people immortal. Can’t find that on an asteroid.

              • qyron@sopuli.xyz
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                24 minutes ago

                We can save mental effort and just go for the Dune series at this point. What is the point in that? In considering the advances in modern chemistry, there are ever few organic compounds that can not be synthesized.

                I fall back to my original thought: is well thought sci-fi so hard to achieve nowadays? If seems there is a fixation about misery and destruction nowadays.

      • qyron@sopuli.xyz
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        2 hours ago

        You realized I just opted for having a divergent view on the subject, right?

        • Jack@slrpnk.net
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          1 hour ago

          It seems more like intentionally missing the main point of the comic.

  • LibreHans@lemmy.world
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    1 hour ago

    What do you mean? Communists didn’t mine minerals and didn’t exploit indigenous people? Lol…

  • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
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    5 hours ago

    Holy shit! Avatar is about capitalism? How did I miss that?! I better rewatch it and see if it’s a recurring theme.

  • Ech@lemm.ee
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    8 hours ago

    Avatr is about capitalism

    That wasn’t glaringly obvious to everyone?

      • pyre@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        you forget the kind of people who complain that wolfenstein games or the x-men animated series “became” political

      • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        Some people are dense enough that “the point” is the name of a baseball bat you have to go get to get it across.

        It was also about the poor soldiers getting used to further capitalism.

        Honestly, though…. That military wasn’t very credible. Half their aircraft you could disable by dumping buckets of pebbles into the fans.

    • stupidcasey@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      That’s just Evil, if we build an industrial park there where will the slaves forced labor work bit*hes

      *Due to recent very public events our Public relations officer has been sent on leave with pay instead Nataly will complete this statement.

      That’s just Evil, if we build an industrial park there where will the (Checks Notes) Employees park there cars?

      • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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        9 hours ago

        Nataly needs a spelling-checker. Also, a quick tutorial on comma splices wouldn’t be wasted.

        You know: grade school stuff.

        • stupidcasey@lemmy.world
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          8 hours ago

          Thanks, I’ll remember that when I go to school… oh wait, I’m not in school anymore. I’m gainfully employed, get paid plenty, and nobody cares. Huh, it’s almost like the hyper-educated imposition placed on us by society is simply a form of control, gatekeeping, and self-aggrandizing and the people who spent more time studying than forming relationships wasted their time and are now disgruntled because they have to work harder than those who aren’t overly anal grammar Nazis.

  • egrets@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they’d never expect it.

    - Jack Handey

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    I’m torn, because there’s an idea that industrial capital only knows how to consume and destroy what it touches. And there’s ample evidence to that effect.

    But there’s this other more naive notion that life never changes, species don’t compete for habitat, and doing anything to alter the local ecology is this unforgivable sin. This, despite the fact that everything in the area is itself a product of eons of speciation and evolution and carnivorization.

    The impulse to preserve has to be balanced with the expectation for change. The goal should be symbiosis, not stasis.

    • thawed_caveman@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      The idea that nature is precious and must be preserved is human-centric.

      Trees caused an extinction event when they appeared by absorbing all the carbon dioxyde and radically changing the atmosphere. But we feel bad when we’re the ones doing it

    • FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      The issue is that you’re changing the ecosystems and environments so much that all those eons of evolution are simply lost. The only other times this happens is during natural catastrophes. Sure, in the long run this allows new life forms to take the old ones places, but it’s still a massive loss of diversity and evolutionary knowledge - and unnecessary suffering for millions of living beings.

      When species compete for a habitat, they rarely destroy it - and those species that do either don’t survive for long, or they wipe out large swaths. We’re actively killing almost anything in our habitats, and destroying them for almost all previous species.

    • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
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      5 hours ago

      That’s what I was wondering. Capitalists didn’t invent exploitation of nature, it just so happened that its worldwide adoption coincided with unprecedented technological advances. There’s quite a few examples of historical societies that exploited nature as much as they could and suffered for it.

      • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nz
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        38 minutes ago

        Businesses under capitalism aren’t required to pay for the externalities of their decisions. In a democratic economy, the people affected by corporate decisions would have a say in those decisions. It’s reasonable to assume that people want to breathe clean air and continue to have food and water, so they’d support policies that do that.

  • bleistift2@sopuli.xyz
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    11 hours ago

    Don’t forget about the part from the intro (might have been cut from the theatrical release):

    They can fix a spine, if you have the money. But not from a VA check. Add $5 and you get yourself a cup of coffee.

  • Rhaedas@fedia.io
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    11 hours ago

    The realization that we probably wouldn’t change how we are make me a bit glad we missed the chance to be a spacefaring civilization and are screwed here. The universe didn’t need that, one planet ruined is enough.

    • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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      9 hours ago

      I’ve found peace recently thinking about our blue planet. We may cause chaos for a bit, but in the grand scheme, it’ll be fine. The rivers will run, the oceans will be blue, plants and animals will eventually, over tens of thousands of years and longer will be fine.

      Humanity is fucked, we destroyed our chances because we as a society could never get over our greed, but the problems we cause will be temporary. Over time the planet itself will heal. We just won’t be here for it.

      That being said, it’s why I’m choosing not to have kids.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      10 hours ago

      The take on immortality in Avatar 2 is really interesting, because both sides get to have it.

      spoiler

      But on one side of the fence, you’ve got a familial connection that echoes through eternity with the spirits of one’s family forever surrounding you and offering guidance.

      On the other side of the fence you just have Eternal Employment, in which your immortal mind is a captive instrument for the profit of your masters.

      One is this transcendent euphoric existence and the other is an allusion to hell itself.