I remember Tyrol saying that the “last raptor” was going to pick him up for a ride to the island of his. Of course, they needed Raptors to get everyone settled, but the definite impression was that they weren’t going to provide a cab service after the settling.
Primarily the Galactica, due to the cost-cutting during its building. But it’s not been established that most of the civilian fleet needed continuous maintenance. In fact, they were all grounded for a year and half on New Caprica. I doubt they were being maintained, given that Adama let even much of the Galactica maintenance go (and that ship was an active part of the orbital defence patrol). Yet during the exodus, all ships took off and escaped.
But the idea isn’t to leave the ships in orbit idling by. It’s to use them for tools, even as educational opportunities to teach the civilian laypersons the science and technology that the Colonials accumulated.
Tired of the Cylons and the journey, not their civilization.
They are tired of everything. That was the entire point of “Sometimes a Great Notion”. Their last hope of Earth got dashed, and they all went crazy. Dee was our point-of-view character into what was going on in their heads, and she blew her brains out.
They were done; they wanted out.
We have seen, over and over again, what was required to maintain their civilization. Virtual serfdom to mine ice for water, virtual serfdom to refine tyllium to keep the ships going. Again and again, people in the fleet rebelled against having to do that. Now, there was no further reason for that.
They’d found someplace to live. Just as we saw back with New Caprica, the fleet grabbed at that chance despite all its shortcomings. This is what they wanted, not their “civilization”.
Their “civilization”, by the way, had been wrecked twice by their technology. The Caprica preview clearly showed that the Colonies had regressed technologically after the Cylon War (something established since the miniseries). And then, again, at the Colonies falling. And the technology spawned by their civilization had been chasing them around the galaxy trying to kill them all.
These weren’t people motoring around in their mobil homes. These were people who’d been stuck in the trenches of WWI for safety, for years. Of course they want out of the trenches. They’d reached their breaking point, and they were well past it. They were ready for a new start.
Somebody would have won the civil war. There’d have to be some skinjobs around. If they do age normally, then I’m sure they’d set the Centurions free before the last skinjob died of old age.
I don’t know. I’ve read things will look a little different in 50,000 years, but they wouldn’t just go off of constellations. They’d have whole star maps and they’d notice the more distant objects all fit the map and it’s only closer objects that have moved significantly. It wouldn’t take long to determine they’re around the same planet, just a different time. A random jump would of course put them under unfamiliar star patterns, but there’d be no reason to assume time travel just because you don’t know where you are.
That calculation is based on an assumption that mutation rates in mitochondrial DNA are essentially constant. It does not allow for the possibility of a sudden injection of new DNA from outside. Still, it would have been cute to make the Colonial/Cylon arrival 75,000 years ago anyway, to coincide with the move out of Africa, wouldn’t it?
Thrice that we know of: on Kobol, on Rubble Earth, and in the 12 Colonies. And all of this will happen again.
and hence Dee’s suicide. Not ‘tiring of civilization’. Lampkin was a civilian and he wasn’t tired of civilization. Like I said, Apollo brought the idea up, and till then, the series showed no simmering resentment towards “technology” (but towards Cylons, of course). We didn’t hear conversation among civilians or Baltar’s cult/harem or over talk-wireless of how humanity tried to play God by creating cylons and got its comeuppance. Only Adama/Roslin/Tigh are shown having a few chats about that in their quarters.
Within the context of being forced by the virtue of having nowhere else to go and it being vital for the fleet. Surely, the tylium ships weren’t a serfdom before the Fall. And they weren’t as much of a serfdom after the child labor dispute resolution.
Nope, they wanted a civilization i.e. a stable environment, suitable to sustain the species. There’s no development in the show of a malaise towards civilization and all its trappings. Remember, at the time of the Fall, there had been an armistice with the Cylons for 40 years, meaning that for most of the civilian population, their civilization wasn’t seen as presently sowing the seeds of its destruction. And the cylon attack was out of the blue, not discounting Adama’s deliberate but secret breach of the armistice line. So no cause-effect perception for the civilians there.
I think there’s a fairly luddite implication here of using the abstract term “technology” as if avoiding sentient AI with the potential for rebellion implies getting rid of electricity and spaceships and all other prior technological developments. Which basically amounts to baby + bathwater.
“We” i.e. the audience know of. The reasons behind the exodus from Kobol are unknown. And the colonial fleet presumably weren’t listening in on Talk Wireless when Anders in sick-bay had his memory dump.
The reasons for the exodus from Kobol are better recorded than any of the others, namely in the Scrolls. Anders’ story was disseminated and completely believed; why would you think otherwise?
There was a time of unknown duration between the fleet’s arrival at our Earth, and the settlement process. That had to be consumed in debate, and in the people getting used to the idea that the voyage, and their civilization, had truly ended.
Do they mention ‘technology’ or even rebelling AI as downfall? I don’t remember that coming up at all. Only a war among tribes. Till Anders in sick-bay, no colonial even knew that the 13th tribe was synthetic.
Coz it’s never indicated one way or the other. Where do you get the ‘disseminated and completely believed’ part from?
Frankly, the show has rarely shown the leadership paying heed to popular opinion unless it fitted in with their own vision or there was a question of a power struggle. As should be clear, I personally find that throwaway single line about the people’s acquiescence plainly unconvincing, basically a lazy writer’s cop-out. Of course, I could say that about many of the “resolutions”.
No, it’s the paleontological record that tells us Homo sapiens didn’t leave Africa until far, far more recently than 150,000 years ago. The “Eve” hypothesis isn’t dependent upon that factoid.
Not that this really has much to do with Battlestar Galactica.
Dunno why they didn’t do that, but I guess it was the thought that counted. Actually, what I expected was that they’d arrive very early on in the history of civilization, somewhere near Greece, and mingle with the locals, some of them talking about the Olympian Gods, and some talking about the one true God who’d eventually become the Zoroastrian God, and you know how that ends up going.
No, the tests on all the humanoid remains on the other Earth showed them to be Cylon. That filled in the rest of the Kobol story even for the nonbelievers.
Now, why do you not think allofthis did not happen again on a planet later found to be radioactive rubble, with both skinjob and Centurion remains to be found there?
Now that’s just being stubborn.
If you refuse to believe the characters’ lines themselves as evidence of the writers’ intent, then I guess you’re welcome to.
Right. The Scrolls contain no warning about the perils of “technology”, and thus weren’t assimilated as such by the colonial population.
No, it’s just being clear. As it is, the show has rarely shown the civilians in their lair. All we get are some hookers and gangsters in ‘Black Market’, some vindictive doctors and superstitious Sagittarions in another episode, and some snippets here and there. To assume that all salient developments are communicated to the rest of the fleet is to me giving a benefit of the doubt where it’s not deserved.
Oh, I do believe that the writer(s) imagines that the people agree. I just think it plainly implausible.
You know who I feel really bad for? The Colonists who got dropped off in the middle of Australia. Subsistence living in the middle of Africa would be tough enough, but it’s arguable that Australia isn’t suitable for humans even today.
And there was another group going to Murmansk or somewhere else way north. Bet it wasn’t any Capricans - they probably all got the sweet spots in Africa & Southern Europe.
Actually, the depressing part is the whole point of their journey wasn’t to find a new home, it was simply to get Hera to earth so she could add her DNA to the local gene pool. And what was the point of that? Something about letting a complex system repeat itself until something surprising occurs. That’s God’s plan? They endured so much fear and pain and suffering and sacrifice, all in the hope of finding a new home to begin again. Starting with almost 50,000 was it? Ending with 38,000, and finally finding this promising new home what do they do? They chuck it all and basically walk off into the sunset to die. 15 billion people had to die so God could sit back and see what happens next time.
They’re loaded with technology, and while some of the ships received damage, it seemed to me the damage was eventually repaired. They’ve got the mining ship that can process ore into all sorts of useful building material. I found a ship called the Celestra. According to wiki:
That’s a pretty valuable ship. It’s got labs! And scientists! They’ve got something like 50 ships or more in the fleet. Park the fleet in a high enough orbit where it will take 100’s of years for their orbits to degrade. Heck, 1000’s of years. Run the ships on minimal power. They don’t have to go anywhere. Power down the ships you don’t need and take their tylium. On earth, concentrate on rebuilding your manufacturing capabilities, using parts from the ships or fabricating new parts. We know they have some fabrication capability, and we’ve seen them making bullets. If they can’t find more tylium, they’re in trouble, but I find it hard to believe they can’t do fusion or at least solar, to keep things civilized during the rebuilding.
Even if they ran out of tylium, how long would it take to get back to the point where they can at least launch and fly around the solar system? Think of the state of our technology 100 years ago and how much progress we’ve made. They don’t have to discover or invent anything. They’ve already got all the knowledge. Think how much more quickly they could recover if they didn’t just abandon & destroy all evidence of technology.
But this time, the civilization would start with the humans and Cylons already joined into a new species. There was, if you’ll recall, quite a bit of discussion among all of them about breaking the cycle. Whatever God’s plan might have been, whatever His ability and determination to carry it out, the decision to proceed that way made it the humans’ and Cylons’ plan. They had accepted that giving up civilization and technology was the price of perpetuating themselves.
Nitpick: virtually all the population of Europe are “Indo-Europeans”, of western Asian origin, who displaced whoever had lived in Europe before within the last 5000 years. So no, any Colonials who settled in Europe were not (directly) the ancestors of those who live there today.
But in the recent episode’s threads where Glass’ name was mentioned, I seem to recall that it was in another context. I’ll try to find it and look at it more carefully.
When I saw that magazine rack, my mind leapt immediately to seeing a rack full of magazines titled “Scientology”. It was in the same font that I’ve seen associated with Scientology’s name. I didn’t see any space after the letters “Scien” that might have made “Science Now” a possible title. For those reasons, I received a very strong impression that the title was indeed “Scientology”.
I just came back from watching that scene again, and my new impression was definitely weaker, but I still think it said “Scientology”. Stepping through it frame-by-frame was useless; I couldn’t make out anything clearly that way.
Perhaps someone who dvr’d the HD version would be so kind as to check what they could see?
You know, amidst all the goofy quibbling over why a group of people that were apparently 80% journalists didn’t plan on rebuilding a high-tech civilization using their extremely limited resources, I’m surprised no one complained about the real bogus science in the finale:
Hera’s remains being identified as Mitochondrial Eve. Even if we accept that there is some means to identify the mitochondrial DNA of 150,000 year old fossilized remains… they can’t identify her as Mitochondrial Eve. They’d need the complete fossil record to do that. Science would have only said that the discovery of a 150,000 year old fossil that matched the mitochondria of “Mitochondrial Eve” simply pushed back the common ancestor of all humans to 150,000 years or earlier; not that one particular human was that ancestor.
And, really, why not say that Athena was Mitochondrial Eve? 'Cause she’s the one who Hera inherited her mitochondria from.
