01-30-2010, 09:06 PM
Hah! Glad I'm not the only one who has weird thoughts about movies.
Mine regarding Avatar happened at the end, when they are "allowing" the humans to "leave". The opening shot already confirms it takes 5+ years to get to Pandora, probably at some low multiplier of light-speed. This is also likely how interstellar messages get passed. As a result, unless the home company on Earth expected a mass evacuation at exactly that moment, there is no cryo ship to take them back. Several months have passed since the original one was there, and it's not likely to have been in standby orbit: it probably offloaded its passengers and left, since there's no practical economic use to holding a cryo ship in orbit indefinitely. The humans were shoved, en masse, into a subluminal shuttlecraft to die of starvation in space.
Cheery thought, no?
Mine regarding Avatar happened at the end, when they are "allowing" the humans to "leave". The opening shot already confirms it takes 5+ years to get to Pandora, probably at some low multiplier of light-speed. This is also likely how interstellar messages get passed. As a result, unless the home company on Earth expected a mass evacuation at exactly that moment, there is no cryo ship to take them back. Several months have passed since the original one was there, and it's not likely to have been in standby orbit: it probably offloaded its passengers and left, since there's no practical economic use to holding a cryo ship in orbit indefinitely. The humans were shoved, en masse, into a subluminal shuttlecraft to die of starvation in space.
Cheery thought, no?