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To go off on a tangent, as much as I am a human-supremacist who goes fuck yeah everytime we get one over the aliens, photogenic or not (Avatar 2's opening sequence almost made up for the ham-fisted morality tale that followed), Quaritch is wrong.
Pandora, to put it bluntly, doesn't work as anything but an intentionally crafted artifact of an immensely superior technological civilization.
A Hive Mind of that scale simply doesn't evolve according to natural selection, and remind me what incentives prey animals have for letting predators plug in to their US ports? That is simply not something that happens in isolation. Leaving aside the fact that they have a form of immortality when they upload their minds to join their ancestors (!!!).
The Na'vi are also morphologically distinct from the overwhelming majority of Pandoran fauna, they're bipedal with 4 limbs, while the majority are hexapedal.
And why exactly are there room-temperature superconductors just hanging around everywhere and forming floating rocks? Apparently they're not found in the rest of the universe.
By far the most sensible answer is that the modern Na'vi are the Amish analogs of an advanced K2 or K3 civilization, that chose to consciously hew to a naturalistic aesthetic while keeping plenty of their creature comforts, all while designing the ecology and their AI to keep that status quo indefinitely.
Where did the rest of them go? Who knows, but the idea of the Na'vi being naturally evolved eco-hippies makes no goddamn sense. Glass the planet and take their resources, but you better go up the tech-tree fast if you have the sense to worry about a counter-attack from their distant kin.
I’d say this is the most common fan theory, or one of them. And I wouldn’t be shocked if something like this was revealed, because there are apparently some wild developments in Avatar 3/4/5. But it’s hard to say how much ‘this is an idealized fantasy of Hunter gatherer life with no real risks in a land of total abundance and with modern (and far-future) creature comforts provided by friendly superintelligent hive mind’ is a set up or just what Cameron wants for the purposes of the noble savage Native American analogy.
Regardless of Cameron's intent, the naive noble savage analogy makes no sense in context and if the author wasn't dead to me before, he's now being cooked by the exhaust of a dozen interstellar ships decelerating using lasers.
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Ironically your comment proves him right. Quaritch himself may lack the scientific background to ask the question you just have, but assuming your user ID is accurate, other humans are curious enough to ask just such a question and ponder the consequences.
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