So I saw Avatar over last weekend and was a bit disappointed that the absolute coolest thing in the movie was glossed over in about 20 seconds of exposition.  Evolution!  Spoiler Alert: this isn’t a review, so don’t read on if you haven’t seen the movie.

After a 40 minute wait in line, I sat down in the surprisingly small IMAX 3d theater, goofed off through the trailers and then settled in for a 3 hour romp through renderfest ‘09.  Try as I could to hate it, it was actually kind of fun, in a Fern Gully meets the Matrix kinda way.  I am a cynic though, with low expectations for all movies and my mind immediately started wandering, trying to figure out how all the science in the flick was working.

First, I was a bit disturbed by the remote control of these Avatars, which somehow was unhindered by the radiation dampening mystery fog, and suffered zero round trip latency.  I figured it must be some kind of quantum entanglement, and made a note to myself to research that before we try building another multiplayer space shooter.

Next, I was only mildly put off by the fact that these aliens looked a whole lot like humans.  I mean, I know they had to look like humans so that I’d care about them, but for a species that evolved completely independently of humans- man, they sure looked a whole lot like humans!  But then I remembered the old anthropomorphic principle which more or less suggested that if these alien duders evolved enough to be competition for us in the universe, then odds are they’d look a lot like us (since everyone else in the universe who evolved to be trouble for us (i.e. just us) also looks like us.)  I guess the over-growth of vegetation on their planet explained the tails, and something something different sun something explained blue skin, okay, done!  Now sit back and enjoy the movie!

But then, I started thinking about how weird it was that while we humans evolved over billions of years, and these other aliens evolved over billions of years, our evolution and their evolution took almost the same amount of time to reach basically the same place.  (When I say evolution, I’m referring to the continual increase in complexity of organization and computation power- both biological and technological.)  Sure, the Navi seemed to be roughly in the stone age, or  more accurately the 1800s Native American age, and the humans were in the 22nd century, clone the aliens, quantum entanglement phase.  Basically, considering we both evolved up from nothing but gas, that’s quite a coincidence that we were at roughly the same stage.  But, then, something like the anthropomorphic principle beat me down again- if they’d evolved much more than we did, they would have crushed the humans, and if they’d only evolved to semi-intelligent dinosaur thingies then the humans would have crushed them- either way Fox wouldn’t have funded the movie.  Call it the cinemamorphic principle.

But man, then they totally flipped evolution on its head when Ripley was like “there’s 10^4 connections in each tree and 10^12 trees.”  Holy crap, the planet has evolved, the singularity is coming!  It’s not a new idea (my wife turned to me and said “It’s Jane!” ) but it was pretty neat to see somebody thinking that way in a big budget movie.  The whole planet had evolved and figured out how to very efficiently turn plant matter into computation.  Okay, this had the potential to really start exploiting matter for computation at an alarming rate, but it left it very open to attack- you are a really really smart bunch of smart trees, but how are you going to protect yourself from any environmental or non-environmental dangers?  Well duh, with a really bad ass bunch of blue hunter dudes who think you’re a god.

And that’s where I got totally distracted- how interesting that these Navi, who think they’re communing with their ancestors and partaking in mystical experiences, are really just the evolution of this tree brain’s immune system.  For a while now, the Pandora brain hadn’t been mucked with by foreign invaders, so these T cells and B cells and macrophages were chilling out minding their own business (well apparently Neytiri’s great great grandfather faced a similar threat, but that only happened 5 times since the time of songs or something  like that ).  But now that the humans are here, the immune system kickd into high gear- so high that it actually managed to assimilate one of the foreign bodies, and turn it against its crew.  Now that’s an efficient immune system.

But that begs the question about which came first, the Chicken or the Pandora Brain?  Did the tree entity and the Navi evolve in parallel, in a symbiotic relationship?  Or did the existence of the tree brain create a world that selected for the evolution of the Navi?  I find the latter hard to believe, as something probably would have killed the tree brain first- also, what pressures selected for its evolution?  I find it much more likely that the Navi evolved first ( since the possibility of the evolution of such an organism is already demonstrated by our own evolution ) and that they in turn created an environment which allowed for the evolution of the tree brain, by fighting off foreign invaders and protecting the environment. However, just because that would have allowed a safe environment, it doesn’t mean it significantly increased environmental pressure such that a planet sized tree brain would evolve in the first place- what natural selection could result in that?

Being a human, the only selective force that seems plausible to me would be… people. A technological society, much like the one in which we already live.  It seems only logical that  thousands of years ago, the sentient inhabitants of Pandora were much more technological, with a vastly more complex, planet scale Internet than the one we already have.  For Cameron’s sake, let’s call it SkyNet.  And SkyNet ran all of Pandora and there were wars between the organics and machines (just like always happens) and SkyNet gathered enough computation ability to realize that better than fighting the organic life, would be to make the organic life worship it as a god.  So it wiped out most of the organic life (heck maybe it wiped out all of it!) and then made sure to interface with anything intelligent that evolved just enough to portray the image that it was a god.  It replaced inorganic parts with organic parts (because those are easier for organics to love and because they’re much more robust and redundant when it comes to fighting off the elements) and maintained the planetwide network it had established so that it could continue evolving towards more and more computational power.  And in this light, the Navi evolved, with their “magical” bio interfacing hair doodads, and their deep respect for nature and their actual communication with the intelligence of their ancestors-  selected for by SkyNet, selected for by human-like organics, selected for by physics.  All completely plausibly.  Which is why this movie should have been called Terminator 5.

By the time I’d thought through all of that, the movie was over, and I had to go back to work, but it did raise a bunch of interesting questions: Is Pandora the evolutionary future of Earth, with a planet sized brain and an organic immune system to support it?  Or is there already a mega-intelligence out there masquerading as a god in an attempt to have us protect it?  Or what’s even the difference between a god and an intelligence so vast it can’t be fully comprehended by those that worship it?  But most importantly, will  Cameron consider any of this when he makes a sequel to Avatar?  I dunno, but here’s hoping.