As ripoffs go, James Cameron's plagiarism of Frank Herbert was more faithful than George Lucas's attempt: Star Wars. But you have to give it to Lucas for conveying the importance of spice better than any version of Dune ever has by giving Han Solo a line explaining navicomputers in his own charming way:

"Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?"

It's such a perfectly Hollywood line, but the real danger is pointing your starship directly toward your destination and arriving to find yourself nowhere near it because you didn't lead your target. Through the telescope at your port of origin, you only see where the star used to be years, decades, or perhaps centuries ago. To learn its current vector you must account for the gravitational influence of nearby heavenly bodies, themselves wandering about under the influence. Then you have to plot a course for the patch of apparently empty space which the math says your destination now occupies.

No big deal, right? Just let the navicomputer have a think and away you go.

But in Dune, navicomputers have been hard banned throughout the empire because interstellar route calculation at faster-than-light speed requires both sentience and prescience, the sort of thinking machines from which humanity had escaped total enslavement only a few millennia prior.

Spice addiction provides the only alternative.

My biggest gripe with Cameron's Avatar is that it downgrades spice from the equivalent of crude oil and fentanyl to a nominally valuable MacGuffin colloquially referred to as "unobtainium" with no real name or purpose given (although the visuals imply that it's a sort of room-temperature superconductor). Will Avatar 2 go into more detail about this stupid mineral's true importance, both to human commerce and to Pandora's ecosystem?

An answer to that would be a nice touch, but the more important question is why did the Omaticya tribe decide to recruit Jakesully the moment they learned he was a warrior? They talked it over for no more than 30 seconds and then boom, it was decided. The Na'vi had designs on Jake from the moment they met him, and the cultural contamination he wreaked gave the Na'vi in general and the Omaticya specifically far more war power than they would have ever obtained naturally without industrializing themselves.

In that respect, the Na'vi of Pandora imitate the Fremen of Arrakis to a tee.

Is NASA [still] working on a warp drive?

The first scientific theory of warp drive came about in 1994, when theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre used Einstein’s theory of General Relativity to develop a framework that would allow faster-than-light travel within the confines of the laws of physics. The key that makes it possible is that, technically, the ship itself doesn’t travel faster than light.

“What warp drive is doing is…

7 Ways to Boost Your Creativity

Creativity can seem innate, but like many things, it is actually a delicate balance of nature and nurture. In other words, creative thinking can be enhanced by external forces, and isn’t necessarily reliant on “good genes” or natural ability.

Luckily, new research points the way to a variety of mental and environmental approaches that can help us improve our creative output:

1. Learn to Relax

By…

7 Ways to Boost Your Creativity

Creativity can seem innate, but like many things, it is actually a delicate balance of nature and nurture. In other words, creative thinking can be enhanced by external forces, and isn’t necessarily reliant on “good genes” or natural ability.

Luckily, new research points the way to a variety of mental and environmental approaches that can help us improve our creative output:

1. Learn to Relax

By…

7 Ways to Boost Your Creativity

Creativity can seem innate, but like many things, it is actually a delicate balance of nature and nurture. In other words, creative thinking can be enhanced by external forces, and isn’t necessarily reliant on “good genes” or natural ability.

Luckily, new research points the way to a variety of mental and environmental approaches that can help us improve our creative output:

1. Learn to Relax

By…