The Science of Avatar

by Stephen Baxter

  Hunters rely entirely on the bounty of nature to sustain them, and they know it. They are bound into natural cycles of life and death. They will often pay their respects to the animals they have to hunt for meat, just as we see among the Na’vi when Jake, completing his initiation hunt, brings down a hexapede in a “clean kill,” and thanks it for the gift of its body to the people, while its spirit goes with the Great Mother Eywa. This applies to the life and death of people too. The Na’vi believe that spirits are endlessly recycled through Eywa; nothing is lost—and for the Na’vi, this is literally true (see Chapter 29 on Eywa).

  Hunters’ mythologies, whose purpose is to establish relationships between humans, nature and the gods, reflect this perception of unity. Hunters may see spirits in the animals and plants, and in the physical structure of the world, in rocks and sky and rain. Myths of creation and the nature of the world are diverse. In North America, however, some types of creation myths are common, with a “Great Spirit” lying behind all creation, like the Gitchi Manitou of the Algonquians, though more definite and active figures are often imagined, like the widespread Mother Earth and Father Sky.

  So Eywa the Great Mother is not an uncommon archetype, although, as Grace Augustine learns, Eywa actually has a biological basis. Otherwise Na’vi religion contains elements of many forms of religion on Earth, from monotheism, worship of one true god, to animism, the idea that the gods are immanent in every aspect of the world.

  Mo’at, mother of Neytiri, wife of Eytukan, clan matriarch, is tsahik—“like a shaman,” Grace Augustine says. A shaman is a pivotal figure spiritually, able to mediate between the spirit world and the human world, perhaps through trances, dream states or narcotics. This is the role we see Mo’at play in the scenes in the Tree of Souls as she tries to shepherd the spirits of Grace and Jake out of their bodies. In Mo’at’s case there is a physical, observable link between herself and Eywa, but her shamanism is a reflection of widespread religious practices on Earth.

  Among the Na’vi, as among similar human groups, there is no clear distinction between religious practices and those of everyday life; they don’t save it all up for Sundays. Initiation rites are common on Earth, doubling as training, testing and indoctrination programmes for the young, and ceremonies to mark the movement from one stage of life to the next—and they are often just as dangerous as those Jake endures to gain acceptance with the Omaticaya, like the Iknimaya, his “stairway to heaven” climb in pursuit of the banshee.

  Just as the Na’vi see themselves as bound into nature, so they are bound into their communities. The Na’vi are intensely social. We can see from the evidence of Neytiri’s family that they are monogamous, and that they are close to their children. They eat communally, in one great hall, gathered around a central fire as many human communities would. There doesn’t seem to be much privacy in Hometree, but that’s like dwellings in our own past, even Iron Age roundhouses. And when Jake is accepted into the Omaticaya they touch each other in a web of physical contact that includes the whole clan, and Jake, its newest member. Their wider sociability may be a by-product of their neural linking with each other and with Eywa (see Chapter 29).

  Na’vi seem to have few children, compared to most human hunter-gatherer groups which are typically afflicted by high child mortality and a low life expectancy. Perhaps Na’vi children have a better chance in their world than human children do in ours. This would certainly change the demographic mix and the social dynamic of a clan.

  So the Na’vi are expert hunters, bound in to nature, intimately social—and, clearly, highly intelligent.

  The Na’vi’s intellect is clearly expressed in the art of their artefacts and decorations, such as body paint and clothing. We even glimpse pieces of Na’vi art hanging on the walls of the Hell’s Gate base. The Omaticaya clan particularly pride themselves on their brilliant textiles. Their largest loom, called the mas’kit nivi sa’nok, “mother loom,” has pride of place in Hometree.

  They can count. In Dr. Grace Augustine’s images of her time running a school for Na’vi children, we glimpse the Na’vi’s octal arithmetic—that is, a number system using the base eight, derived from their eight fingers, as ours is based on ten.

  And the Na’vi know something of their history. Neytiri tells Jake that her “grandfather’s grandfather” became Toruk Macto when the leonopteryx chose him as its rider. This has only happened, says Neytiri, five times since “the time of the First Songs.” Now, her grandfather’s grandfather takes us back four generations, and so “the time of the First Songs,” before all those other Toruk Mactos, must be many generations further back still. The Na’vi don’t have any writing. Is it plausible that a non-literate people could remember events that far back in time?

  In fact, on Earth oral traditions can sustain knowledge over many generations. The Trojan War is thought to have happened around 1200 B.C., at the end of the Bronze Age. But Homer, who composed the Odyssey and the Iliad, did not live until around 700 B.C.—twenty generations later, in the Iron Age. Between those dates lay a calamitous interval known as the “Greek Dark Ages,” when the Greeks lost literacy altogether. What seems to have happened is that oral traditions preserved the memory of the Bronze Age wars, in songs and poems, until Homer and his contemporaries and successors wrote down versions of them. Achilles and Hector may not have been real, but scholars today have detected many authentic details of Bronze Age life and warfare in Iron-Age Homer’s words. So non-literate peoples are indeed able to preserve memories across many generations—as long as the story is good enough.

  Researchers on Pandora find evidence of a strong oral culture among the Na’vi. Their oral tradition, of songs and story-telling, is thought to go back some eighteen thousand years. Perhaps this is why their basic language is uniform across the planet. Of course the Na’vi have a deep biological connection to that great information store Eywa at their disposal, but personally I like to believe that the Na’vi don’t need Eywa to remember their own heroes.

  The music of the Na’vi is another expression of high intellect, and one of the most memorable aspects of the movie. For example, in the scene following the destruction of Hometree and the retreat of the clan to the Tree of Souls, the Omaticaya sing a hymn-like song of loss and imploring, striking and beautiful to our ears. Neytiri associates music with the roots of her culture—“the time of the First Songs”—and the Na’vi appear to use their singing to reinforce their bonds with each other, and with Eywa.

  All human cultures seem to make music, though nobody quite knows why, as it’s not as obviously useful as fire-making or cookery. It is used for common purposes, such as in play with infants, and to mark important events like weddings, funerals and religious rites. Musical styles are hugely variant, but it has been shown that listeners can tell whether music from a widely different culture is meant to be happy or sad.

  Nobody knows if there are common fundamentals in terms of how we comprehend music. Since the ancient Greek Pythagoras, some theorists have held that notes with simple frequency ratios—like notes an octave apart, made by plucking strings in the ratio of 1:2—are in some sense natural in terms of the evolution of our auditory capabilities, and will appeal to everybody. But there’s much more to music than simple mathematical ratios; even the blues scale features dissonances.

  Music is among the most sublime products of our minds. Indeed some have suggested that if we signal to the aliens we should send them, not mathematical codes or history lessons, but Bach fugues. But is it likely that aliens would develop anything like music, or even comprehend ours? Clearly music of our sort works because of the way our bodies and minds process sound. If the Na’vi’s hearing is different from ours (see Chapter 25) then our music would seem distorted to them. And a bat, who “sees” using sound waves, would presumably perceive our music altogether differently—though conceivably an intelligent bat might appreciate its patterns and symmetries, even if it didn’t experience it as we do. Conversely, a species that “heard
” electromagnetic radiation rather than acoustic waves could create music that we might see as patterns of light. In the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind humans try to communicate with the aliens’ mother ship using a simple musical pattern matched by a light display.

  You’ll find in sources like Pandorapedia much more detail on how the film makers intricately constructed Na’vi music. The basis is singing and drumming as in many hunter-gatherer cultures, but it incorporates for example tonal and rhythm structures different from what we’re used to in western culture.

  It would be fascinating, if we ever do encounter the alien, to learn if something like music really is a universal feature of intelligence—and even more fascinating to hear alien music, the product of minds quite unlike our own. But to the Na’vi, their music is simply a sublime gift of Eywa.

  Another interesting aspect of Na’vi culture is their language, often subtitled onscreen. And it’s a “real” language—or at least, it’s a designed one. Paul Frommer, a linguistics professor from the University of Southern California, devised the language for the movie. The new language has its own sounds, syntax and grammar, with elements borrowed from human languages; Frommer coached the actors who would have to speak it.

  Constructing languages has a long tradition. You might make up a language in the hope of easing human communication, as a linguistic experiment, or to support the artistic creation of an imagined world, as in the case of Avatar. The earliest non-natural languages were supposed to be supernatural, such as the “Lingua Ignota” of St. Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century. The most famous “auxiliary language,” devised for international communication, is Esperanto, introduced in 1887. Some seven hundred such languages have been created worldwide.

  It’s a paradox however that even as we are creating new languages we are letting old ones die out. According to the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, humanity today uses over six thousand languages, of which three-quarters are still spoken by just handfuls of indigenous people—and every two weeks a language goes extinct. If we lose language diversity we will lose key insights into the potential for human thought and expression, and we will lose something of our own past too; history can be traced through language evolution.

  In fiction, Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars features Barsoomian words, the first of which John Carter has to learn is “Sak!”—“Jump!” The “Newspeak” of George Orwell’s 1984 was intended as a device to restrict human thought. The most famous science-fictional language to date is surely Klingon from Star Trek. There is now a Klingon Language Institute, and at least one parent is said to have tried to raise his son as a “native” Klingon speaker. There is even a version of Hamlet in Klingon—or rather, as any Trek fan would put it, in the original Klingon.

  By comparison the Na’vi tongue is very new, with a still-small vocabulary and rules that are gradually emerging. There is however pressure from a global community of enthusiasts for it to develop further. For one thing, a language expresses the culture that originates it, and Na’vi culture is rather more pleasant than Klingon.

  The Na’vi’s culture reflects hunter-gatherer lifestyles once found across planet Earth. And given how long the peoples of the Earth were isolated from each other, in the case of the Australians tens of thousands of years, and yet developed similar life ways, perhaps this is plausible; perhaps we are seeing cultural universals in play.

  We have to remember though that by the time Jake visits them, the Omaticaya are already a people transformed, if not traumatised, by their contact with humanity. They have had to coin names for humans and their artefacts: a Scorpion gunship is kunsip. Attempts by RDA to negotiate treaties with the Na’vi have stalled because of fundamental cultural differences; the Na’vi derive all their “rights” from Eywa, who protects all, and so to them there is nothing to negotiate. And the interaction of Na’vi with humans has grown more violent with the years.

  Maybe the behaviour of the Omaticaya is already atypical of the Na’vi on the rest of Pandora. In the same way the horseriding culture of the plains Indians of North America, which has provided later generations with a classic image of “unspoilt” pre-contact peoples, was at the time of the Old West only a few hundred years old. Until the European immigrants imported them, there had been no horses in North America since they went extinct many thousands of years earlier.

  So the Omaticaya may not be “pure” Na’vi. Still, contact with them shows that they behave like us.

  And, not only that, the Na’vi look remarkably like us.

  25

  OTHER BODIES

  Why do the Na’vi have a mere four limbs? Most Pandoran animals have six. And indeed, why only one neural queue rather than two, and only one set of eyes, and no supplementary breathing vents?

  Do the Na’vi look more human than they’ve a right to?

  In Chapter 23 I noted that the four-limbed body plan that we share with every other vertebrate land animal (not to mention the birds, the flying reptiles of the past and creatures that have returned to the water such as the whales) is a relic of that common wheezing four-limbed fish-grandmother who first hauled herself out of the water many millions of years ago. On Pandora, judging by what we see of the six limbs of animals from the direhorse to the leonopteryx, that ur-mother must surely have been six-legged herself. The Na’vi aren’t unique with their four limbs; the banshee too are quadrupeds, but it’s clearly highly unusual.

  There is an onscreen hint of how the Na’vi’s four-limbedness might have come about. The prolemuris, a monkey-like tree-climbing creature, appears to be the closest animal to the Na’vi in form. It too has just one neural whip, no vents, one set of eyes. And its arms are, if not quite like the Na’vi’s, not like the limbs of other creatures either. It has two sets of forearms, but its upper arms appear to have fused, so that the limbs branch from the elbows. Maybe this is a glimpse of the evolutionary trajectory the Na’vi have followed. But we have to remember that the protolemuris is as fully evolved a creature as the Na’vi, and its peculiar fused arms serve a purpose in the particular way it lives its life; its arms help it with mobility as it clambers through the trees. In the same way, while chimps may holds clues as to our own evolutionary history, a living chimp is not an incompletely evolved human—it is a fully evolved chimp.

  Our humanoid form converges with the Na’vi’s in a number of other ways, many of them quite subtle. They have reasonably human-looking sets of teeth, for example. Our teeth have evolved in response to the mixed diet we omnivores have to cope with: canines for killing prey and tearing meat, molars for grinding vegetation. The Na’vi evidently have a similarly wide food base. And they needn’t have had teeth at all. Teeth seem to have evolved from the scales of the ancestral fish that crawled out of the sea, but teeth themselves are surely only one engineering solution to the problem of crushing and tearing food prior to digestion.

  And the Na’vi have red blood, like ours. You can see this when avatar-Jake punches out warrior Tsu’tey. Why is blood red? The purpose of blood is to deliver essentials such as oxygen and nutrients to the body’s cells, and take away waste. In vertebrates like us, it consists of blood cells suspended in a liquid called blood plasma, which is mostly water with dissolved proteins and other products. The majority of the blood cells in your body are red; the other sort, white blood cells, includes platelets which help your blood to clot. Red blood cells contain haemoglobin, an iron-containing protein. This bonds chemically to oxygen to transport it around the body—and when haemoglobin is oxygenated, the blood is bright red.

  As the Na’vi are functioning in an oxygen-rich atmosphere they must need some equivalent of haemoglobin in their blood to transport the oxygen around their bodies, and indeed the active biochemical in their bodies is an iron-based compound like haemoglobin. But it didn’t have to be haemoglobin or anything like it; some molluscs use a molecule called haemocyanin instead.

  Of course there are evident differences between Na’vi and
human, including the Na’vi’s senses. Na’vi eyes are four times larger than a human’s, and much more sensitive. They can see beyond the human range, into the near infrared. This would be a great help to the Na’vi in their dimly lit bioluminescent forest. A Na’vi’s ears, meanwhile, are mobile, like a cat’s. This would help sense the direction a noise is coming from, another adaptation useful for forest hunters. But Na’vi ears are expressive as well as functional. They move in response to what is said, and emotions expressed. Na’vi ears aren’t just hearingcups; they are part of Na’vi faces.

  However the single biggest bodily difference that Jake notices, when he first wakes up in his avatar body, is his tail—and he does a good deal of damage with it before he learns to control it. The Na’vi use their tails for balance and direction changes when running, and to grip tree limbs and vines when climbing.

  Why should the Na’vi have tails, and humans not? A tail is certainly useful if you’re planning to live up a tree. All New World monkeys have tails, and in some, like the spider monkeys, it is prehensile, like a Na’vi’s; that is, it can be used like an extra arm. Monkeys can hang from their tails alone, or from any combination of arms, legs and tail.

  Our deepest primate ancestors had tails too, but we, and our ape cousins, lost our tails over evolutionary time. Body features which are not used tend to shrink or disappear, even eyes, such as among fish that live in unbroken dark. There are plenty of other creatures who have lost their tails, such as moles, hedgehogs, bears and sloths.