Source: Discovery News
Last week, I had the good fortune to part of a packed house in Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium when director James Cameron came to Caltech on the evening of April 27 to talk about the fictional world called Pandora that he created in the blockbuster film Avatar. Moderated by astronomer and visualization scientist Robert Hurt, of the NASA/Caltech/JPL Spitzer Space Telescope Center, the panelists watched clips from the film and analyzed them for their real-world relevance, focusing on the intriguing question: “Is Pandora possible?”
Well, no, not likely, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a great deal of science that went into building Cameron’s fictional Other World. There is a massive amount of back-story information that never found its way onscreen. Much of that has been gathered on an interactive website called Pandorapedia, an official “field guide to the moon of Pandora and the world of Avatar… contain[ing] comprehensive information about the Flora and Fauna of Pandora, the indigenous Na’vi people and the technology of the RDA.” It’s now up to 300 pages of exhaustive information, and counting.
ANALYSIS: Ray Villard investigates the scientific pros and cons of Avatar‘s “Pandora.”
Personally, I was very impressed with the huge amount of research Cameron had clearly done in exploring the underlying science, and how well-versed he was in the scientific aspects he’d incorporated into his world. He easily held his own onstage, chatting with the scientists. He’s an avid scuba diver, for example, and some of the unusual undersea life he’s seen on dives inspired some of the flora that populate Pandora — specifically, those gigantic red “flowers” that retract at the slightest hint of pressure. And I hadn’t even noticed, until Cameron pointed it out, that the flying Mountain Banshees feature bright colors in coral patterning.
Cameron didn’t want to deal with classic sci-fi tropes such as warp drives and wormholes, so he located Pandora near enough to Earth that humans could get there in 5-6 years, while in a state of cryo-suspension — thereby obeying “the speed laws of physics.” When Caltech geologist and panelist John Grotzinger mentioned that he was disappointed by not seeing volcanoes on Pandora, Cameron responded, “Volcanoes fell off the to-do list. We did one thousand shots in six weeks. We’ll make it up in the sequel.” Ooh! SEQUEL! (The other panelists were Jess Adkins, a chemical oceanographer at Caltech, and microbiologist Jared Leadbetter — also from Caltech — who studies bacteria.)
To continue reading: http://news.discovery.com/space/james-cameron-at-caltech-the-science-of-pandora.html