Pandoran Information Systems

A quick thought about Avatar…

Wasn’t the evil corporation in Avatar missing a huge potential profit center by ignoring the ways in which the Nav’i uploaded and downloaded information thru their network of trees?

We’re essentially talking about organic computers, aren’t we. The information techmology possibilities are staggering, to say the least. It makes my MIS brain explode.

According to Jodie Holt, chairwoman of the department of botany and plant sciences at UC Riverside, who consulted for James Cameron on Pandoran plant life:

Since life on Pandora was intended to adhere to our known laws of physics and biology, it was not credible to me to suggest that the plants had any kind of nervous system. Instead, I suggested that communication among the plants could credibly be explained by signal transduction, an area of research that deals with how plants perceive a signal and respond to it. Since this process is still not well understood but is under active investigation, it made sense to use it as an explanation for Grace’s more futuristic understanding of plants.

I’d be willing to bet that if I spent some time digging, I would find efforts to harness signal transduction in nano-computing or some other type of information technology endeavor.

Even though the company in the movie is in the business of mining unobtainium, it still employed a science department to study the planet. My feeling is that they should have been paying more attention to potential practical applications of the research.

Photo Credit: James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game

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