Comic Strips

It's a motif as old as time. Foreign invader getting Stockholm Syndrome with the natives. Another famous example is Dances With Wolves. That film called The Great Wall as well. Some versions of Robin Hood has it. Anthropologists call it Going Native, which is what Carlos Castañeda did.

But they're not all about economic expansionism

One time I unmatched someone from a dating app because the second avatar movie was coming out and they said that it was weird of me to say that the alien people were supposed to represent Native Americans because "they're just blue aliens why would you compare them to real life?"

Apparently media literacy makes you a weirdo?

Fucking Tarzan was fighting evil white exploiters of pristine Africa in books back in the early 1900s.

A good white saviour from the evil white people, because the indigenous can't do it for themselves. Just like in Ferngully and Avatar.

Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism.

Factorio.

The factory must grow.

Well it's literally Pocahontas in space so more obvious comparison is to the colonialism. They could grow gardens and farms while destroying the natives, the movie would have been the same.

I think there's a tendency to see inter- (and intra-)stellar travel through the lens of the inter-continental expedition and colonialism. It... kinda makes sense... superficially, there's some similarities; a voyage in a vessel, going to uncharted places, kicking off a new era of settlement and extraction. For this reason, movies and games really like the comparison, cus it makes for an easy narrative the audience is already familiar with.

In reality, though, nothing about space bares any similarity to anything in our past. Everything about the expeditions to, the colonizing of, and the industrial development and extraction of the Americas? All that was couched within the biosphere, contingent on it. Movies and media and junk get to ignore that because they exist to tell a story. So what if SciFi du jour doesn't actually make sense? Doesn't harm anyone, right? Except...

...except Musk and his fanclub really like describing Mars as the next colonial outpost. They'll tell you it's only a few short decades away! And I think that's cus they don't see where the metaphor falls short. To them, colonizing Mars is just the next thing that will happen in the narrative of history. After all, it's happened once - so it must happen again right???? They don't see the sheer wall of work and resources and work and decades (probably centuries, realistically) that would have to go into it. They don't think about anything more than a superficial picture on a screen. People needed boats to cross the Atlantic, we'll need rocketships. Now that they've got rocket ships, thats most of the work done. Afterall, in movies, you just need to get there. Then the plot can advance.

There could be many reasons:

• The thing you are mining is actually very rare, and although it could be elsewhere, it's the only place you found it. This is the case in Avatar. The Unobtanium they are mining is not found anywhere else.
• It's easier to mine on a habitable planet. You don't have all the extreme difficulty of operating in space or a planet/moon with no atmosphere. In Avatar workers can freely operate without any special equipment, using just a gas mask, and don't need to be astronauts.
• You are assuming they found Pandora to mine on it. They probably found it through scientific research, and the mining angle only appeared later when the resource was found.

Another important detail is that in Avatar they don't have any faster than light tech. Pandora is in the Alpha Centauri system, the closest star to the Sun, and it takes years to get there anyway. Sure, there might be lots of better places to choose, but it's literally the only habitable body in reachable distance from Earth unless you want to spend decades flying in one direction.

The resource being extracted on the avatar planet was unobtanium.

It was only available on that planet, precisely so intelligent people like you can’t say “why not mine barren rocks instead”?

Tbf, the air on Pandora is toxic to humans. That was the entire point of using the avatars in the first movie... Wouldn't exactly call that suitable for sustaining the life of our species

And that material they found in the planet was some fictional things humans had never encountered before.