[Apologies for the slight hijack] Where is the backstory about the Lords of Kobol? I think I have seen all of the episodes in the current series, and don’t recall this being explained.
Not all that much.
There were 13 tribes of humans on Kobol. They lived with or under their gods. Somehow they rebelled or transgressed, Athena killed herself out of grief, and the Colonists became colonists when they arrived at the 12 colonies. The 13th tribe (and presumably colony) would be Earth.
Really, WHY or how any of this happened is up in the air. We also have no idea if the Greek Gods/Lords of Kobol were aliens, gods, time-travelling Cylons (all this has happened before, etc), or even allegorical stories from 4000 years ago.
-Joe
So no one’s going to take a stab at why these space faring humans have no maps or records?
It’s been 4000 years. That data has turned into folklore and religious dogma. Probably after civilization stagnated/regressed a bit before it reached the level of technology at the time of the first Cylon War.
I don’t remember that the nuclear warhead was actually used by Baltar for anything. Mental-6 prompted Baltar to ask for one, but the look on his face said that he was surprised as hell that she would want one. He may have hooked it up to make things look good, but I don’t think it was a functional part of his equipment. In other words, he was bullshitting Adama when he said it was necessary.
Regarding why humans are advanced enough to create Cylons but not advanced enough to replicate Cylon-developed biotech: the Cylons have moved on since their break with humans. The Centurions alone are mentioned as being impossibly advanced beyond the Colonies’ tech, and they’re just mechanical.
The Lords of Kobol seem to have had much more advanced tech than currently exists. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” (Clarke’s third law). Magic, technology, what’s the difference at that level?
We don’t know who the Lords were, where they were from, nothing. Earth is mentioned as a lost colony. We don’t know how long ago it was lost. We don’t know whether it was more properly called New Earth, as in the Lords could have been from our future. Plus, like Star Wars, the human-seeming characters could be aliens who just happen to look human. The cultural parallels might be explained just from convergent evolution, not from a shared past necessarily. If they ever do get to Earth and it’s set on kind-of sort-of present day Earth, I’ll bet that the “English” they speak is actually nothing of the sort.
I’m only up to the end of season 2, so I don’t know about what’s going on since their play-buddies showed up again on New Caprica after Gina used Baltar’s courtship gift.
I thought he used it to determine that the original Boomer was a toaster.
I too thought he used some material from the bomb to create his Cylon detector. Apparently there was enough left to achieve critical mass.
Convergent evolution doesn’t produce viable offspring between species. That’s not the answer. Now that I’ve seen more of the show (on DVD through part of season 2) , it appears to me the Cylons have just been playing with human DNA.
What’s not explained is how Boomer 2 has the “spaceship memories” of Boomer 1. That seems to me physically impossible, as is the “download” of any kind of personality into a biological brain. Didn’t Boomer 1 shoot the captain while Boomer 2 was running around in the wilderness with Helo?
As mentioned above, it’s not clear from the dialogue that he really did need the nuclear material. He said he did, and he did create a functional Cylon detector, but there’s nothing in the script by which we can conclude that he actually used the bomb material for it.
I agree with you Cerowyn now that I think about it. His request for a nuclear bomb was made after head-6 told him to get one, and he kind of made up an excuse why (IIRC) he needed it. And it’s not very likely that even the great Dr. Baltar can dismantle a nuke, remove some of the material, and then put it back together again to make a functioning bomb.
My feeling is that he never used the bomb, and it just sat around in his office until he gave it to his erstwhile paramour on Cloud Nine, a stunningly incomprehensible act … unless …
This is speculation, but I’m more convinced than ever that Baltar is a cylon sleeper agent. His innate sympathies to cylons over humans, the presence of the Six model in his head, and him in hers, his weird acts of betrayal…
I agree that it seems the cylons have been messing with actual human DNA, and did not reinvent the wheel (so to speak). It does seem that their techiniques for replicating human DNA (and recording human memories and personalities) involve some kind of fantastic, improbable technology, which I’m willing to accept for the sake of a good story. Clearly, the science of this is beyond anything the Colonials have, hence their difficulty in cylon detection. But, after all, how hard was it, really? Baltar, genius or not, was an AI computer specialist, not a biologist, not a chemist, not a physicist, not a physician. He may have had a smattering of knowledge in those areas, but it seems clear he started from a huge educational disadvantage in terms of developing the cylon detector. They picked the wrong guy for the project, in other words (but we knew that already.)
Perhaps a radio biology specialist (if any were left alive) would have found detection to be a cinch.
Remember that the creators of the show have been clear that they’re primarily interested in telling stories about the characters, and not at developing the science part of the science fiction. The go further with that than many (ot most) sci-fi, though. Star Trek never explained anything coherently.
That’s why I don’t agree with you speculation. That would change the character from tragic, obsessed and redeemable and just make him a bad guy like the average toaster.
At this point, do you still think he’s redeemable? I don’t.
In the “Good Bad Guy” Bonanza sort of way, where in the character usually dies throwing himself on a poetic grenade of some sort. Much as I expected Gul Dukat in DS9 to play the part Dumar did. Instead he turned out to be totally evil, so what do I know? 
Nontheless, I’d put Baltar in the hyena cage in the Caprica National zoo, much as Richard Nixon would have been displayed had I had my way.
I whipped out an awesome post that had a whole bunch of possibilities but my damned phone ate it. Grrr…
It had a dozen possibilities listed that were quite eloquent and cool. My best one was…
The humans were kicked off Kobol by the gods for whatever reason. How do we know that they weren’t relatively primitive, and they weren’t a spacefaring culture. Instead, they were just shipped from Kobol to The Colonies in ships belonging to the Gods. They weren’t too sophisticated, so they ended up using colorful language “Lion’s eye” (or whatever) instead of “the pulsar at standard grid coordinates at 62x14x23” for their landmarks.
They were divided up among the 12 colonies. They didn’t have spacetravel at the time, so the Tribes found themselves diverging - religion, accents, even skin color. They didn’t become a unified society for a few thousand years until they managed to build the technological infrastructure to do so.
This would also explain why they were at their current level of technological and…expansional(?) development. Otherwise, there would have to be an explanation as to why their development had plateaued. Why are there only twelve colonies after all these years?
-Joe
Maybe it isn’t in line with the series canon but I had always presumed that they learned to build starships with antigravity and jump technology simply by copying old blueprints, with only the shakiest grasp of the physics involved. That’s why their space capability is so staggeringly beyond their tech in all other areas.
I’ll buy that. A fall in technology as a few colonized a planet without industry; The first colonists knew how to fix the bulldozers that broke but didn’t have a factory to make parts.