(no subject)

[morwen]

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?"

Comments

[jojomojo.livejournal.com]

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.

[st-lemur.livejournal.com]

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