So much for Pandora.

At our core, we’re selfish animals and consume whatever is around us. The only way Pandora can survive is if we’re forced to stop consuming or thrown off the planet altogether. People are right in saying we’re wicked and selfish, but they’re wrong in saying this is because of some kind of original sin or because eve ate some fruit she wasn’t supposed to. This is all just an over elaborate unnecessary way of saying exactly the same thing: humans are sick fukkkks.

People who fixate on little thigns like “With their advanced technology a primitive native population would stand no chance against them” are missing the point entirely.

I laughed at your comparison to the heavy-metal umlaut, but there are parallels. The metal bands liked the heavy-metal umlaut because it made their names and albums seem ‘cooler’ and more dangerous.

My guess is that sci-fi writers like the apostrophe because it’s not used much in English or other common languages (both in word position and as a glottal stop function). Therefore it’s presence in sci-fi is an easy way to achieve an alien-ness that the authors often want. They need audience buy-in and anything which helps that assists the author’s cause.

Back to the umlaut. I remember watching a video by a well-known former blogger about the heavy-metal umlaut’s entry in Wikipedia. The video was meant to illustrate a typical article’s evolution in the open editing environment and the heavy-metal umlaut was just a handy, non-directed context in which to show that. The video even showed a couple of defacement attacks.

I enjoyed the whimsy of the choice of topic!

I rephrase my question: Why do writers of English-language science fiction often have the glottal stop in proper names in their work? Is it the science-fiction equivalent of the
heavy-metal umlaut?

Readers here might be interested in the take on Avatar (with spoilers) at Brad’s blog:

http://ideas.4brad.com/avatar-isnt-dances-wolves-its-another-plot

‘Course, “In the long run, we are all dead,” as a noted economist once said. Frame it how you will, the story sucks.

Well, yeah. But it’s telling a story. What? People aren’t allowed to complain that it’s a story they’ve heard before and don’t much like? They have to just accept it, because “it’s a movie”? I don’t think so.

And I too was bothered by the Na’vi having two less limbs and eyes than everything else. Like the ants in that movie where the grasshoppers have six limbs… it’s like we can’t be expected to empathize with anything that isn’t a tetrapod humanoid.

And as for the ‘ – well, it’s a voiceless stop, by the way. But it’s silly to complain that the Na’vi wouldn’t have used a human alphabet. Of course they wouldn’t, but they didn’t. That was a human attempt to write their language, so of course a human alphabet was used.

I think we’re likely to find a lot of rare minerals in the asteroid belt and/or the moons of Jupiter. We’ll send robots to mine them and bring the stuff back without the need for invading alien worlds and being unwelcome guests. There are probably lots of uninhabited worlds out there to be discovered.

Should we find a world like Pandora we should study it, learn about the culture, not seek to exploit it or harm the natives in anyway.

The discongruously primitive mining tech was harder to swallow. It seemed that the only difference between the equipment portrayed in the movie and what is available now is just bigger size. This is supposed to be a major mining corporation, for whom the mining of unobtanium is their primary business. You’d have expected them to have something closer to state of the art here.

I would have liked it if they had been a little bolder with the design for the Navi themselves, rather just stretched out humanoids (although I liked the consistency of the mention of Pandora’s low-g). All the other terrestrial vertebrate equivalents in the Pandoran ecosystem were hexapods, including the primate-like critters which were presumably in the same clade from which the Navi themselves descended. It would have been nice if the film-makers had decided to have the Navi keep a vestigial third limb pair, like a wing remnant, or parachuting organ (they climb trees a lot, after all), or something.

And while D9 wasn’t didn’t exactly employ subtle allegory either, it didn’t approach the stunning conceit of Avatar’s great white hope. In D9, the human protagonist (such as he was) started out a pathetic, shallow, callous little nepotistic d-bag, and ended up a miserable, mutated, mutilated outcast. Yeah, Blomkamp copped-out on one heroism moment, but overall Wikus is a much more plausible “hero” than Jake’s Dances-With-Ehwah (or whatever Pandora’s Gaia was called).

Here’s the plot synopsis on IMDB, with obligatory SPOILER ALERT! :
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0858486/synopsis

Oh, don’t worry. Its almost the EXACT same story as AVATAR rehashed again and again. This one is animation from back in 2007 (around the time AVATAR was being made) and quite well done.

Synopsis of the Synopsis:
1. Humans exhaust Earth’s resources
2. Humans discover that Terra, if terraformed would be perfect for them.
3. Terra’s inhabitants worried that this might destroy them.
4. Smart alien girl perfects alien flying craft.
5. Stranded human astronaut who thinks aliens are savage beings helped by alien girl.
6. They get each others jokes and syntax and sarcasm in both languages are the same.
7. They combine forces to save the world from humans.
8. Thankfully, the alien is far from humanoid, so no mating scenes.

Done quite well though.

Wonder why nobody told Cameron about this movie.

I always thought Titanic wasn’t just about rich vs. poor but also a plea to leave the wreck alone. After all, “Titanic” (the movie) was made shortly after “Titanic” (the wrecked ship on the bottom of the ocean) was found and shortly before various corporations sent expeditions there to recover artifacts…