Thread by @Eaterofsun

A few non-spoiler world-building thoughts about #AvatarTheWayOfWater
The General tells us the Earth is dying. At the same time the Earth, or maybe just some American-led faction of it, is capable of launching fleets of very big near-light-speed interstellar vessels.

So it's a future of ecological collapse and amazingly high tech on a mega-industrial scale (those starships must represent thousands of terawatt-years of energy in launch costs alone @anderssandberg @robert_zubrin ?)

In which case it represents the dark side of decoupling. Earth's civilisation is clearly way beyond fossil-fuel use and capable of synthesising just about anything, but the Earth's environment is still going to shit.

Which raises two questions, one in world, one out of world.

In world: Why do these clearly ecocidal colonisers care whether the Earth dies or not? They have access to effectively unlimited energy and tech that can build cities in a year or less. Are they really so deeply attached to a world they have despoiled to death?

Out of world: do people worry about this sort of future -- one in which extreme unchecked technological progress leaves a terminally ill environment in its wake...

...rather than the more common environmentalist concern that it proves self defeating because its effect on the environment leads to its own collapse...

...or the #ecomodernist view that once the technosphere has left the biosphere behind the biosphere will be regenerated, or regenerate itself?
cc @atrembath /ends

PS if you see this thread as just a way of trolling @AdamRutherford by yet again taking semi-seriously something he despises you may have a point.

https://twitter.com/AdamRutherford/status/1605517355030806532

PPS None of this explains why an antimatter-wielding spacefaring force powers its ekranoplans with liquid hydrocarbons. I mean WTAF?