Avatar (film)/Headscratchers/Avatars

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What about the other Avatars?
When Jake first wakes up in the Avatar body and starts running around, we see quite a few Avatars walking around doing stuff. There's even a house where they all sleep together. These other Avatars are completely forgotten for essentially the entire movie, with the only other appearance being the other Avatar who isn't Norm at the end. Where were these people for almost the entire movie? The only solution I can come up with was that was actually Grace's school and the other "Avatars" are actually Na'Vi students, but that also begs the question as to where THEY were for the rest of the movie (we get a passing reference to the school being closed down, but we aren't shown it), and also doesn't deal with the Avatar who appears at the end of the film.
 * Considering that Dr. Augustine's school was supposed to have been in the Na'vi village, this couldn't have been it. I really don't see the Colonel allowing Na'vi to enter his base anyway - he would have immediately realized the possibility of them being spies or saboteurs. Perhaps they're a some kind of sequel or spin-off hook. After all, a couple of them already star in the video game. Still silly that there wasn't even a mention of them.
 * The Pandorapedia says that only twenty Avatars have been produced so far; granted some of them may have been killed, but there's still going to be plenty left, and all the ones in the camp I could see had the five-fingered hands that marks out Avatars. Granted, the rest of them save Grace aren't accepted by the Na'Vi so they probably spent most of the movie doing their normal surveys and patrols until Quatrich shut the Avatar project down. Since the other operators are all researchers and scientists they weren't going to fight alongside the military, and Quatrich may have figured that if he tried to force them to do so, he might get a lot more defections than Sully.
 * I think they were just regular scientists doing survey work. The same thing Jake, Grace, and Norm were doing at first, and planned on doing the whole time. Remember, the only reason Jake, and later Grace, went to the Na'vi village was because Jake got chased by the monster, went completely off the planned path, got lost, and had to be rescued. If Jake had never gotten chased by the monster, they probably wouldn't have ever gotten to the village. Remember how shocked they all were when they let Jake into the tree? There's also the fact that the other other avatars might've been with other clans. Nytiri's (sp) clan isn't the only one. Not to mention they have the whole planet/moon to themselves.

Whats the point of the Avatars?
The Na'vi can tell they aren't one of them, and seem to have a tendency to want to kill them on sight. How is sending Avatars any better than sending humans in breathing masks? Ok, so maybe it's a little better, but they state that they are incredibly expensive and take 5 years to build. Does not seem worth it to me.
 * A Form You Are Comfortable With. The Na'vi do seem to respond to the Avatars well enough, and don't mistake the importance of not having the breathing mask get in the way. Being able to interact with the locals as if they are one of them and not being restricted by biochemical barriers can work wonders on getting past certain barriers. They're willing to kill the Avatars on sight now, but at the current point in the story the Na'vi are engaged in low-intensity war with the humans. Before that, they seemed to work well enough with the humans/Avatars.
 * The avatars also suit for scientific research on the planetside far better than humans. Also, according to the background material it was originally planned to produce avatars in larger quantities to act as supervisors to Na'vi hired for mining the Unobtanium (that costs 20 million per kilo, remember), but then it came clear that the natives weren't interested in working for humans, let alone helping to destroy their own living environment, so the uses for the avatars became more narrow than initially envisioned.

The finger count
I realize it was probably done for the audience's benefit, but... they have super-advanced genetic engineering technology that can recreate authentic Na'vi bodies down to the "USB braids", and they can't give them the right number of fingers? However well you study Na'vi culture and try to blend in, it's not much use if they can instantly identify you as a "demon in a fake body" like this.
 * Human genetics had to be dominant for certain traits to allow them to be recessive for others: it's possible that the protein sequence tied to creating the lekku is also related to the number of fingers/toes. Given the choice between and integral part of the species (the nerve) and something superficial like digits, they'd have to choose the former. Same goes for other things like eyes (smaller on avatars), eyebrows, and those weird hard ridges (or lack thereof) on their chests.
 * Plus, it's not like they're expecting to fool the Na'vi into thinking Avatars are their own. They're at least self-aware enough to know they don't know nearly enough about their culture to pull that off. Also, keep in mind it's still humans driving the things; humans who have five fingers, and would probably feel weird to suddenly not have the fifth digit.
 * Then why can't they just come to the Na'vi in their human bodies? Sounds like a big waste of time and money just to create A Form You Are Comfortable With.
 * The initial idea for Avatar project was to create supervisors for miners recruited from natives. You know, gas mask accident might have accounted for just a bit too large percent of fatal or debilitating accidents during the first years after establishment of the Hell's Gate. Too bad that avatars were too expensive and natives didn't want to mine.

Minor little point, but...

 * The Na'vi are nine freaking feet tall. The Avatars all wear human clothes. I specifically recall one of them, maybe even Grace's, wearing a Stanford t-shirt. Why would anyone bother making those clothes?! And please don't say it's for the comfort and modesty of their human "operators" - they're already occupying another body, going almost naked should barely register.
 * You know, it's not too difficult to make clothes in general. And in case of 'modesty', it's for the modesty of the avatar, not the operator. No employee dealing with the avatars wants to see a blue schlong almost directly in their face most of the time.
 * This could surprise you, but some people, like most, dislikes going in the nude. It's kind of an habit, and being in a different body doesn't change it at all. Or at least, I suppose it's so, as I never experienced trans-bodying yet.
 * Also, the Na'vi don't go around naked. Fur Bikini, sure, but not naked. So the humans wear whatever clothing they're most comfortable with, and everyone's happy.
 * It didn't look like the clothes were tailored to fit them. They were mostly in shorts and belly shirts with a lot of skin showing. Since the Avatars are so thin as compared to their height, they could fit into large human clothing, it just wasn't long enough.
 * Avatars are expensive to create already. Why would you want to have to buy enough material to make full clothes if you were just going to use it for a few Avatars? Also, judging by the vegetation and the Na'vi's dress, Pandora seems to be a rather warm planet.
 * Please read every other point made that are above yours.
 * There are a couple clear reasons: people don't only wear clothes for warmth and modesty, but also for pockets. Given that the avatars were out doing research, they wouldn't want to carry all their equipment in their bare hands. Also, given that the avatars are not as familiar with the local landscape as the Na'vi, they would want clothes to protect themselves from the small cuts and scrapes and such in the jungle. Finally, because the avatars' express purpose is to act as a cultural bridge, they should meet the Na'vi halfway - Na'vi bodies, Human customs.
 * I bet it was a Stanford's XL or XXL T-Shirt that Grace was using as nigthgown.

Avatar respiration.
How is it that the Avatars, despite being explicitly engineered to survive in the different atmosphere of outdoors Pandora, still manage to breathe comfortably when inside the human structures?
 * Pandora's atmosphere only has additional gases added. If you take out those gases (hydrogen sulfide, excess carbon dioxide, xenon), you'll be left with normal air that humans breathe. Put it this way: If you stepped into a sealed room and a machine pumped out all methane, argon, and helium from the air around you, you'd still be able to breathe normally. The Na'vi and the avatars still respirate with oxygen.
 * Plus, Avatars are never shown to interact with humans who are not wearing masks, at least that I remember.
 * They aren't. The only interaction between them is either in the lab near the start (which is depressurised with the airlock open and the humans in exopacks) or outside (again, humans with exopacks).

Avatar clothing.
So, who makes the clothes for the avatar program? They're obviously not designed for humans (the massive size difference, holes for the tails, etc.) yet some of them sport logos and symbols for no real reason. Also, what's the point of wearing them? Jake got around fine in his loincloth...
 * Go check out the "Minor little point, but..." entry on this page.
 * Yes, but who makes them? They probably just don't jam holes in the seats of XXL sweatpants and call it Avatar clothing. The "safari jumpsuits" worn by Norm, Grace, and the extras all have pockets that appear to comfortably fit the (presumably) larger Avatar hands. The same goes for some equipment- Jake's gun seems to have been signficantly upscaled, along with Norm and Grace's "datapad" device.
 * The clothes are specifically designed for Avatar-scale. The machine gun is an M60 with a drum magazine and a handguard/heatshield, which is about the right size for a Na'vi to use as a rifle.
 * Presumably somebody at Hell's Gate knows how to sew. Human personnel on Pandora number in the hundreds, and all of them would need to get their clothes repaired from time to time, particularly if they're going on patrol in a jungle full of snagging thorns and so on.
 * Once again, a moot point. The RDA likely has a small staff of people who do make Avatar clothing. Also, the rifle used by Jake is actually a light machinegun that's unmounted. You can see a few of the RDA troops use them during the final battle, either directly attached to Scorpion VTOLs or the off-ramp of the Valkyrie.
 * In the first chopper landing jake can be seen pulling it off the mount, and the mounting pivot is visible beneath the barrel the rest of the time he has it

Signal transmission?

 * Alright, I checked the page, and I didn't see anything quite expressing my question. Basically, how the heck does Avatar signal transmission work? It would seem to me that the Avatar Stasis Chamber Thing (Patent Pending) somehow transmits the pilot's nerve impulses across long distances. Essentially, it intercepts the brain stem's signals and sends an encoded version of them to the Avatar, where the Avatar interprets them, and then redirects them down the Avatar's brain stem. So, my questions are...


 * 1. How does the Avatar transmit signals back? Obviously the pilot gets sensory feedback from the Avatar, but I don't see a big MRI machine strapped to the back of the Avatar's heads either.


 * 2. If it sends signals through the air (life a wi-fi router, or Bluetooth), why is the no lag over large distances? When Jake is jumped onto moving vines thousands of feet above the ground, he really can't afford go "oops lag lol."


 * 3. Could there be a dormant personality inside the body? Does it have a functional brain? Or just a jelly-filled skull with a machine that sends received signals down the brain stem?
 * Read the Pandorapedia entry on the Avatar program. Apparently, Avatar brains aren't the exact same as Na'vi ones - Avatar brains have customized receptor nodes directly implanted, which I would assume could also send back a signal (that's the only theory I have - otherwise, it's unanswerable). Which leads to the somewhat disturbing fact that scientists had experimented with Na'vi cadavers before the Avatar program, which means the RDA were grave robbing or were killing random Na'vi for the sake of it. And there wouldn't be lag per se since the signals don't work on a similar basis to wi-fi. The signals do travel through the air, it's just that it's a lot faster. Don't know what else to say. Also, Avatar bodies are dormant; they only have enough brainpower by themselves to perform tasks like breathing and pumping the heart. Secondary personalities were written in the original Project 880 script, but were obviously taken out.
 * Also, during the final battle, when Jake's avatar pod is breached, how exactly does he control his breathing in both of his bodies? Assuming that his human form falls into a sleep-like state, breathing should be involuntary, which, logically should render him unconscious and pull him out of his avatar.
 * He doesn't control the breathing of his human body. It's not like all of breathable air inside the pod was suddenly switched out with non-filtered Pandoran air. His body coughed at first due to the unexpected air change, and this point is made a bit more clear when Jake takes a couple of breaths before one big "held-in" breath to return back to his Avatar. That one big breath probably caused some confusion, since he wasn't trying to keep usable air in his lungs, he was concentrating on returning back to his Avatar body (and some people do hold their breath in concentration).


 * There is no lag because the distances involved are very small, considering any signal would be lightspeed at a minimum and higher if quantum entanglement-based (which I consider more likely).
 * The MUST be lag involved, no matter what you do. It should mostly be reasonably small, but I agree that given some of the things that we see the avatars doing it would definitely become an issue. It takes a dozen milliseconds to send a command, and the same for the controller to see what happened. Transfer that to swinging on vines and such, and you see the problem. Even with that tiny bit of lag, it would effect you. It'd be like being drunk. Your body does things before you see them do it. And that's fine when you are walking and talking, but when you are doing the Tarzan act it starts to become a liability. Something that takes such an extreme amount of timing and motion control is just not feasible through that kind of connection.
 * There's lag involved in the human nervous system too, at well below c. Problem?
 * As for quantum entanglement, don't be silly. If they were using that, why do the avatar controllers need to be on Pandora at all ?
 * Because they actually do in-person work? /facepalm


 * Another point on transmission: why doesn't the same flux along the floating mountains affect the signals to/from the avatars? (Besides some bullshit about the superiority of biotech)?
 * Different principles? There's no circuit to cause induction.


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