Taking Cameron at his word, this is basically a Michael Moore film with really expensive visual effects.
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Currently the idea of many others in the galaxy and beyond appears to be on the wane due ironically to the decades of searches for alien minds and planets already conducted and underway. There are those who feel that since the various SETI programs in existence since 1960 have not detected any signals of artificial extraterrestrial origin, then there must either be no one else or no one nearby..
The idiotic assumption being made is that anybody with the brains and need to communicate across cosmic distances would do so via radio waves. That would be like me trying to send messages to German relatives by splashing stones in Baltimore harbor and hoping the Germans could read the message on the ripple waves. You can bet the farm that if anybody actually is communicating across cosmic distances, they're using something other than radio to do it.
Was’t there a SF novel (or maybe a series) set on a planet called Pandora that was similar to Avatar? I vaguely remember reading it many years ago. By Harry Harrison, maybe?
The other night I watched a Superman episode, “The Phony Alibi”, on MeToo. In his apartment, Professor Pepperwinkle had built a machine to transmit people over telephone lines ... just dial the number. His booth was distinctly prescient of the remake of THE FLY, and he even explains how it works with a line of hooey.
The technology of AVATAR is equally as fantastic as Professor Pepperwinkle’s contraption. The only difference is the more rhetorically and visually elaborate hooey that is required to engage the credulity of the audience.
Just another cliff for all the Liberal Lemmings to head for.
The formulas for constantly accelerated motion are actually very simple in Special Relativity, so it is very easy to plug into them and see the sort of thing that would be involved in traveling to Alpha Centauri.
Constant acceleration means as measured in the ship frame of reference, so that if it drops markers along the way, it always accelerates away from each one at the same rate each time as it is dropped. If tau is ship time in units of c/a, and distance is in units of c^2/a, the speed, distance traveled from earth, and elapsed earth time, are given by tanh(tau), cosh(tau) - 1, and sinh(tau).
c/g happens to be nearly one year, so let’s use years, and a = 9.5 m/sec^2 to make it even closer. We just suppose we have a ship capable of this acceleration for long periods.
Ignoring gravity, and just using the planets as markers, we can say that after one hour the ship will still be “classical” and will have reached a speed of 76,000 mph, well on its way to the moon. In 5 days( still “classical” ) it will be going 9.2 million mph, and will be clear of Jupiter. Of course it takes several years for space probes to get to Jupiter with current rocket technology, and our ship is barely underway.
Going to the formulas, we find it needs to accelerate for 1.76 years, ship time, to get halfway to a nominal 4 lightyear destination, and will be going at .94 c, relative to earth. This gives a gamma of almost 3, meaning it has twice as much kinetic energy as rest energy.
Now it can decelerate, and arrive at a destination 4 lightyears away in a ship time of 3.52 years, but with an earth frame elapsed time ( as told by synchronized clocks in Alpha Centauri space ) of 5.64 years.
Of course, you could save fuel by coasting. You could reduce your burn time to 3 years and coast for .61 years for earth and ship elapsed times of 5.69 and 3.61 years.
Well, the fuel requirements for any sort of rocket like this, no matter how ideal, become ridiculous. I know the authors of the article have gone through a lot of calculations, but near light-speeds remain in the realm of the fantastic. Remember you’re talking earth-to-moon in 3 seconds at 1/2 c, and we haven’t found the wherewithal to make the return trip in a week for the last forty years.