morwen | (no subject)

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Ok, so I mostly liked it. There were certain moments of squee.

But... but... but...

What about the constellations in "Home, Part II", eh?

There wasn't even an attempt at a handwave for this, that I could see.

At least they could have got Number 3 back to say "Well, whenever you notice something like that, a deity did it?"

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I sadly just can't get over the 'o hai let's throw away all our antibiotics and life-saving knowledge so we can become neolithic hunter-gatherers' plan that no-one in the entire fleet seems to object to...

That, and the last bit with the robots was just kind of silly. I read an interview with Moore saying that AI researchers were predicting true AIs in 5 years, so ooh, maybe we should really worry about it, or something. As you probably know, AI researchers have been saying that less and less convincingly since about the 50s, peaking in the 80s. I can't think of anyone more respectable than Kevin Warwick claiming human-level AI any time soon these days.

I sadly just can't get over the 'o hai let's throw away all our antibiotics and life-saving knowledge so we can become neolithic hunter-gatherers' plan that no-one in the entire fleet seems to object to...

That was handled very badly. It would have been better if either the tech was gradually forgotten, or they set it 10,000 years ago and had the new arrivals kickstart the great prehistoric civilisations.

The constellations in Home, Part II - perhaps the original Earth is in a nearby star system? *handwave* *handwave*

150,000 years of proper motion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_motion). I worked it out, the odds of the stars aligning the same way twice by chance are at most one in 10^260.

Centurions doing stellar manipulation, then?

Ah, I see the problem...

My assumption was that they were kickstarting the great prehistoric civilisations, at least indirectly at the neolithic level. The trouble is that if they'd been doing that, then a whole slew of inventions that are hard to think of but obvious in retrospect should be in the archaeological record -

Stirrups (big one; a dead easy concept for anyone to come up with and to replicate).

Alphabetic writing system - in real life we can trace fairly clearly the development of language from just pictures of things to a Chinese-style hybrid which adds logical concepts to modern alphabets. Even if the Colonials speak something like Chinese, we should really be starting off right at that second stage.

Maps.

Paper.

Gunpowder, even. Someone in the fleet is going to be enough of an SCA-geek-equivalent to be able to make that.

Boats more advanced than a hollowed-out log.

Sanitation. One would expect the knowledge that boiling water == much fewer deaths to stick around given the huge advantage it gives.

Water wheels - even the Romans didn't have them, they were a mediaeval invention.

Antibiotics, in the sense of a mouldly bread poultice or alcohol for sterilisation.

There have to be a whole set of other ideas which could be held in the heads of the colonists even if they somehow miraculously don't have a Wikipedia-equivalent available to them any more, and which at least some of them would use the first time the community they were in or people they cared about faced starvation/war/disease.

Personally, I like a suggestion I've heard that the colonists should found a new city on an island in the Mediterranean and call it Atlantis. A bit hokey, but on the other hand far more believable.

How long can Saul and Ellen hold out until one of them invents distillation?

Ok, try this:

If we treat this as a dramatisation of a translated historical record, then the language that the Colonials speak isn't English, it is only represented by English. The Twelve Constellations were not identified precisely in the original source material by descriptions of the layout of the stars, or identified by recognisable names, and the translation was erroneous in assigning them in identity with modern-day constellations, because the translator had made the same mistake as we had in assuming that the events therein described were roughly contemporaneous and that their Earth is our Earth. The events of later seasons were adapted from records discovered and translated after this, there was no opportunity for them to go back and adjust the material for this error in translation.

Edited 2009-03-25 18:47 (UTC)

That works.

Last bit to clear up, how come the continents on cylon-Earth are also the continents on our Earth?

(Also, who nuked cylon-Earth?)

We never saw the continents on cylon-Earth in "Revelations" or "Sometimes a Great Notion", I believe; the zoomout and zoomin at the end of "Crossroads" was a feint.

What about the greek myths so heavily used in the BSG world?

"translations" of the original names of the Colonial polytheistic religion, based on a similar misidentification of that faith with Greek paganism. I mean, it's not like they ever recounted any stories, did they? At most we got identification of god-name with role, so we can assume the translator took "arrow of X" where X was an archery-related god, and stuck Apollo in for X.

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