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Culture & Religion

Science or Fiction?

How much real science is there in James Cameron’s science fiction movie “Avatar”? Quite a bit, says MSNBC’s Charles Choi.

“The science fiction blockbuster ‘Avatar’ is set on a mysterious alien moon with out-of-this-world technologies. Its star director, James Cameron, has not only directed other science fiction epics like ‘Aliens, The Abyss’ and the first two ‘Terminator’ films, but was apparently the president of his high school science club, a physics major in college and has an engineer brother who has designed underwater robots. So how much science is there in ‘Avatar’?” Well, while the moon Pandora where the film is set is fictional, it is located in the real Alpha Centauri system where, although none have yet been discovered, scientists are working on detecting such moons with the James Webb Space Telescope. Also, every creature on Pandora is “biolumenescent” which means it can produce light. On Earth we have bioluminescent creatures such as fireflies and some sea algae. The list goes on…


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