No offense, but boy, I hope so.
Okay smartie-britches. What’s your theory?
Wait… ok… I’m confused. At which point does Dr. Crusher figure out the binary code that Picard’s cyber-ghost is flashing across Moriarty’s holo-forehead, thereby letting her inform Data about the missing eggplant soufflee, which gives him enough insight to reprogram the transporter isolinear chips in order to break the temporal cycle thus saving Geordi from being blown down the warp shaft?
I have to admit, this time travel thing seems like the most likely explanation, except that RDM seemed pretty down on time travel when he was working on the miniseries. And even if he’s changed his mind about it since then… well, the whole “story wrapped around a single time travel event” thing was done in Babylon 5; doing it to BSG would seem a little too derivative, IMHO.
The 13th colony is responsible for Earth civilization, in some manner that Ron Moore has figured out yet.
Time travel screwed up Trek too much, beginning with such excellent stuff as The City on the Edge of Forever and becoming the “God From A Machine” for bad or uncreative writers.
Time travel and Space Opera are two different genra (sp) of science fiction, just as Westerns usually don’t have an airplane chase scene.
Strap a nuke to the raptor. It’s been done before.
I still think it’s logically much easier to make Earth the birthplace of humanity, and to have the Lords of Kobol be cosmic kidnappers, basically, who grabbed a bunch of folks and carted them off to Kobol to serve as their ersatz dieties for reasons yet to be revealed. For Earth to be the source not only of the Colonial Pantheon, but also the data in the Map Room in the tomb of Athena, which would be pretty damn difficult for any non-infinite intelligence to even calculate if the precise location of Earth at some time was not known, just makes the most sense. If one was on Earth to begin with, all one would have to do is look at the sky.
Of course, if the LoK are real honest-to-goodness gods, they can do pretty much whatever the Hell they want, logic of any form goes out the window, and we can all just sit in front of the tube like happy little vegetables and watch the pretty pictures flicker by.
Perhaps they’ll discover Earth was a mistranslation. The 13th colony actually went to a place called Terron.
The big problem is the whole “Chariots of the Gods” concept that was so popular in the 70s when the original B.G. series was made. It flies smack in the face of every shred of evidence we have about how humanity and civilization arose. This narrows the possible choices for the show to:[ul][li]Humanity really originated on Earth, not Kobol, the Colonists’ legends be damned.[}Kobol IS Earth and vice-versa, due to time looping.[]The writers postulate a fictional Earth where the whole Chariots of the Gods thing is real[]They never find Earth or any hard information about it, so we never find out.[]The whole issue is simply ignored and never resolved[/ul][/li]Also, I would have liked to have more information about the history of Kobol and why it was abandoned. In this show’s universe habital planets are vanishingly rare, and yet the ancestors of the Colonists fled Kobol and never went back. Why? The “curse of the Gods” be damned, unless you can show a REAL reason why humans can’t live there. The fleet couldn’t stay there because the Cylons were on their tail. The Cylons’ weird belief- that anyone who died on Kobol would simply cease to exist rather than go to the afterlife- sounds intriguing but how to put a rational spin on it?
If the visions associated with Baltar’s internal 6 can be believed, something went terribly wrong on Kobol, something involving human sacrifice.
Also, while the Chariots of the God stuff is pretty problematic, I bet it’s less of a problem trying to square everything we know about human evolution with the idea that humanity actually arose elsewhere. Talk about fictionalized Earth.
Dammit. “I bet it’s less of a problem than”
I like the idea of humans evolving on Earth and then going to Kobol. It makes the scriptures more sensible if they’re a history of where the humans came from than where they went to. After all, if the 13th colony went off to Earth, how did the route information get back to the Kobol, much less the 12 colonies? I have this image in my head of some smartass on his way from Kobol to the new colonies writing down the directions to Kobol and Earth but making it look like it the travel was inthe other direction. “Dude, this is, like, so going to blow their minds, man. People are gonna, like, think that I was this totally cool prophet who could read the future and had these totally cool visions.”
There’s probably a page missing from the beginning of the scriptures reading, “The characters, locations and situations in this book are fictional. Any resemblence to actual persons or places, past or present is purely coincidental.”
And if the 12 colonies are represented by the signs of the zodiac, what sign is used for the Earth?
Ok, how’s this: do “Chariots of the Gods” in reverse:
The Lords of Kobol were explorers from Earth, who found a planet (Kobol) inhabited by a species of para-hominid. Through genetic engineering the Lords attempted to uplift the native Kobolds into a sentient species, with mixed results. The Colonials are actually para-human, if by “human” you mean Earth-descended. The “Thirteenth Colony” was actually a group of select Koballians who returned to Earth with the “true” humans.
Meanwhile, the Colonies were laced with nanites which would lie dormant until the day that a computer network sophisticated enough to serve as a host was created. The resulting AI would enact the ancient program of evaluating the results of the “experiment”, and if it found them wanting would either try to produce “improved” versions of the Kobol-humanoids, or destroy them before they could threaten it’s original creators. This of course is the Cylon.
All this time I thought the lords of COBOL were would-be explorers from Earth whose spacecraft could not achieve orbit because of the mass of their punch cards.
Funny, I thought they were just hired hands to oversee smelly little miners.
Have we actually seen many elderly in the fleet? I remember the old woman on Caprica that Baltar almost stole her lottery ticket from. Since most of the ships in the fleet seem to be passenger ships it makes sense that alot of the passengers on them would be retirees. What to do with them would make a great storyline.
Old woman: “Yes, I’m going to see a play that was recommended to our senior citizens group. It’s about the goddess Demeter.”
Other old woman: “So am I. It sounds lovely, but I didn’t understand that word “soylent” they kept using. Do you know what that means?”