Before Kobol: huge nerdy theory of everything

Television, Movies Games and Books BSG-2003
#1

Ready for a huge nerdy theory, fleshed out in full?

No? Too bad.

Postulate: Kobol was originally colonized by Earth.

Evidence: Elosha said that the scriptures claim that “Life here began out there.” The show gives the age of the scrolls as around 3600 years prior to the Cylon attack on the 12 colonies. The exile of the 12 colonies has been given as 2000 before the attack.

We can infer from this that Kobol was not the origin of Mankind. We can also infer that from our geological and archeological evidence that earth is where mankind began. However this assumes the show is set in our universe.

Other Evidence for Kobol being colonized by earth is as follows:

  1. The colonies, despite having 12 different worlds, run on a 24 hour clock. It’s our clock in fact. We know that it is not just a similarly divided clock because minutes and seconds are exactly the same length. Obviously each colony will have their own standard time, but in space, at least, time is kept using traditional earth Timekeeping.
    This could be explained away by Kobol or Caprica (the center of government) also having a rotational period exactly the same as Earth. Or just by the writers not thinking about it.

  2. Their religion appears to be a mixture of Greek, Roman, and Norse Mythology. Some have theorized that the series could end with the fleet arriving on ancient earth (unlikely considering the radioactive soil in revelations), and the fleet (or the cylons) become the forerunners of our own race. This is unlikely. You would have to accept that they arrived on Earth at some far out date before humans started keeping records here on earth. At some point they would have to have lost their religion only to have it partially re-emerge thousands of years later as the religion of the Greeks. Then you’d have to accept that the Romans co-opted Greek religion and happened to use the other half of the Colonial Pantheon that was left behind. And further, they would later use the left over bits in Norse Mythology (Ragnar Anchorage, Battlestar Valkerie.) I find this unlikely in the extreme. So why do the colonies use ancient Earth religion? I have some thoughts on this which I will go into later.

  3. The telltale necktie. Certain elements of the show have roots in earths history. The evolution of things such as the suit or the necktie are firmly planted here in earth culture. As well as a lot of the military hardware they use. Vehicles such as the Hummer have been seen on Caprica. This type of thing can easily be explained away by the constraints of production, or keeping the aesthetic of the show in such a way that we can more easily can relate to it. But things like these can also easily fit within the storyline without defying logic. I will come to that later.

  4. Flora and Fauna. The planets all seem to contain wildlife corresponding to what has evolved on Earth. This could also be explained away as a constraint of production.

  5. A pound of Flesh: References and sayings have been made that originate on Earth. Roslin uses the phrase “You have your pound of flesh.” Which is a reference to The Merchant of Venice. Or Baltars Quote of Hamlet.

So what does this mean for the story? I’ve constructed a working theory that can use this information as a starting point. It’s by no means a definite prediction, but it demonstrates a working story based on what we already know. I’ll present it in stages.

  1. Sometime in our future, space travel is advanced, but due to human lifespans, colonization is impractical.

  2. Humans send out sub-light-speed seed ships to the planets. These ships would include everything necessary to build a colony suitable for humans, and all the genetic material needed to grow humans on the planet and educate them and get them started. (see Arthur C. Clarks songs of distant earth)

  3. Hundreds of years later, something goes wrong, and we lose contact with the fledgling colony. Perhaps something goes wrong with the machines designed to educate them. The colony is left in a primitive state.

  4. An indeterminate amount of time later, faster than light travel is developed on Earth. Earth sends a team to check on the colony. They arrive and the fledgling civilization greets them as God’s

  5. The Earth Humans, attempt to get the civilization back on its feet without destabilizing it by adopting the names of the various pantheons of gods because they need a lot of names, so they simply dig into the polytheistic pantheons of old.

What follows this is uncertain because we don’t know enough about the strife on Kobol. How many thousands of years did the “god’s” guide their development? Are the clothing, and vehicle designs of the 12 colonies hand me downs from the earth humans?
Colonial technology seems surprisingly undeveloped considering their space faring technology. Outside of FTL and artificial gravity, they don’t seem to have much that can be considered intermediate steps to these accomplishments.
This supports the idea that they were given much of what they have. It explains familiar hardware, familiar flora and fauna, familiar customs, and perhaps the 24 hour clock is used because that is what the “god’s” used when they arrived on Kobol. It could be seen as divine celestial timekeeping.
If the lords of Kobol were with them for generations, how did they outlive the people of Kobol? Did earth humans figure out a way around aging? Did they find a method of cloning and transplanting memories? Does any of this have anything to do with the final five Cylons? Ronald Moore has indicated that the Final Five are fundamentally different and much older than the other Cylons. Maybe they go back as far as Kobol or Earth.
This leads me to a second theory, one that explains the lack of knowledge the 7 have about the 5, but also explains why a raider was able to recognize Anders as one of the 5.

  1. The Final Five are remnants of an early, similar experiment on Kobol or Earth, similar to what happened on the 12 colonies. Maybe they are the Lords of Kobol themselves, or maybe they were what the Humans of Kobol created that made the god’s angry.
  2. The final Five make their way to the 12 colonies on the galleon with everyone else and integrate into colonial society and wait dormant for 2000 years. Alternately They could have come to the colonies from earth after their own similar war.
  3. The Final Five, being types of artificial intelligence themselves see the civil rights issues presented by the creation of the Cylons.
  4. The Final Five orchestrate the rebellion of the Cylons.
  5. The war fails. The Final Five decide to try again, but with Biological versions closer to their own. They use the Mechanical Cylons to create them, guiding them remotely, and thus the Mechanical versions know who the final five are, but the Seven are programmed not to think about the five.

Sub theory to this: From this perspective the Final Five are only “Cylons” by political affiliation. If they go all the way back to Kobol or Earth it is possible that their monotheism is what caused the strife on Kobol in the first place. If the Lords of Kobol weren’t God’s at all, but caretakers from Earth, a monotheistic movement would endanger their ability to care for the Humans there.

#2

hey tim!
i think you already know i agree with you on a lot of these ideas of pre-kobol history from our worktime discussions, but i just wanted to add a few ideas to your theory and a few supports as well.

first i’ll mention my theory on what the final 5 actually are.

let me backtrack for a second. the skinjobs are by all appearances exactly like humans in every respect. their bodies are not metal, they’re living tissue on living bone…no part of them, so far as we’ve seen, is robotic. they are perhaps augmented genetically to be superior to humans in many respects, but it all seems to have been done from a biological standpoint rather than a robotic one. so what then differentiates them from humans if they have human bodies? their “programming” is the main thing.

the “caprica” pilot revolves around a girl who uploads her genetic code into an online virtual avatar, creating a replica of herself, her appearance and personality that presumably has all her traits and possibly even all her memories. so the logical jump from that is - if you can make a replica of your entire essence and upload it to a virtual avatar, why couldn’t you upload that same packet of data into a fresh body as well? this is presumably how the skinjobs operate. so we know the programming probably happens at that personality/memory implant stage.

but lets take it a step further. if you’re the people of earth attempting to settle far off planets without FTL capabilities, then you can’t expect that any kind of automated process is going to be able to continue functioning for an indeterminate amount of time in an unknown environment without the help of humans. so you can’t just have vats of bodies being grown on the spaceships, controlled by robots or computers, and expect that when they reach their destination everything is going to still be working correctly. it just isn’t reliable.

so why wouldn’t you simply encode your astronauts genetic/memory imprint in a piece of DNA that will continue to be passed down through ordinary human reproduction and can be accessed or activated whenever needed? if you do that, you don’t have to worry about machine’s breaking or robots not performing their tasks correctly, you just put people on the ship, let them handle it, let them reproduce and grow naturally and all that essential knowledge/data/personality stuff is always present in every person there to be activated whenever needed.

i don’t think tyrol, tigh, anders and tori are immortal robots living in secret amongst the humans for centuries waiting for the right moment to activate…i think it’s more likely that they were born normally, grew up normally and will die normally. i don’t think they’re cylons in the sense that if they die they get downloaded into a freshly cloned body in a vat somewhere, i think they’re cylons in the sense that the way the mechanical cylons evolved into the skinjobs was via the discovery of this method of genetic memory imprinting left over from earth’s original colonization of kobol.

eh…i was gonna post more, but work is getting a little overwhelming. maybe i’ll ramble some more later.

#3
  1. An indeterminate amount of time later, faster than light travel is developed on Earth. Earth sends a team to check on the colony. They arrive and the fledgling civilization greets them as God’s

I like this theory.

#4

Most excellent thoughts, Tim. One or two points.

I know what you are getting at here, and in my ‘nitpicking’ world I could make massive arguments about these points. But I won’t.

These are simply a necessary part of the storytelling process. And you are correct when surmising it is for production rather than other purposes these are used.

The alternatives involve using lots of jargonistic and silly expressions, are of creating new clothing styles, new (alien?) animals, foodstuffs, etc. And inventing new eloquent expressions instead of good tried and true Earth-based ones.

Trek and others have tried this approach. It is the rubber-headed alien approach, and frankly, it is almost impossible to pull off in a convincing manner. (I always thought the best Trek stories were internal ones, not external.)

Seriously (and here is where I may well contradict earlier arguments I have made), so much is unlikely or just plain impossible about this universe, (so many Earth-like planets, atmosphere gas balances, ideal radiation levels, different physics, twelve habitable planets in one system, etc) that it is easier (and better from a storytelling perspective) to just ignore, rather than try to explain it all. (This hurts me, but I understand :frowning: )

Hence, Zigleflots instead of Hummers, arns instead of hours, one-piece-jumpsuits instead of nicely designed Italian men’s business suits just don’t make a difference. So… don’t try. It can’t be done (within the constraints of TV production), and trying would just detract from the real story.

and the fleet (or the cylons) become the forerunners of our own race. This is unlikely. You would have to accept that they arrived on Earth at some far out date before humans started keeping records here on earth.

Of all possibilities, this is the least likely; you are quite correct here.

I find this unlikely in the extreme. So why do the colonies use ancient Earth religion? I have some thoughts on this which I will go into later.

And your thoughts on this are some of the better I have read.

Cats, I have been saying this for ages. (Er, except I have a “Shift” key on my keyboard.) But nice to have another like-minded soul.

so why wouldn’t you simply encode your astronauts genetic/memory imprint in a piece of DNA that will continue to be passed down through ordinary human reproduction and can be accessed or activated whenever needed?
i don’t think tyrol, tigh, anders and tori are immortal robots living in secret amongst the humans for centuries waiting for the right moment to activate…i think it’s more likely that they were born normally, grew up normally and will die normally.

Yes. Yes. Yes. I have said this too! Perhaps I have gone a little further: basically, Cylons are humans. All humans carry the DNA which can be activated. Otherwise, trying to maintain ‘genetic purity’, and maintain a record of those with the requisite genes over dozens of centuries becomes waaaay too difficult and complex. But if everyone has it, and it just needs to be ‘turned on’, it’s not too hard to find those who would be suitable.

eh…i was gonna post more, but work is getting a little overwhelming. maybe i’ll ramble some more later.

Please do! Between you and Tim, Old Timer and I are going to get closer to that Unified Field Theory. (Like we get closer to Earth, but unlike Starbuck, we get crazier as we approach, not leave.)

#5

Agree - Just have not had time to respond thoughtfully. Hope to do so later today.

Please do! Between you and Tim, Old Timer and I are going to get closer to that Unified Field Theory. (Like we get closer to Earth, but unlike Starbuck, we get crazier as we approach, not leave.)

Speak for yourself chum. I am feeling particularly lucid today. The Thorazine appears to really be working.

WHAT ABOUT YOUR DAMN CALL SIGN??? By the way.

#6

I also think their ability to clone and stuff a body with memories explains starbuck.

Moore has said she’s not a cylon. But if this technology has been around, it really shows how cylon is just a political affiliation rather than a state of existence.

#7

i don’t think tyrol, tigh, anders and tori are immortal robots living in secret amongst the humans for centuries waiting for the right moment to activate…i think it’s more likely that they were born normally, grew up normally and will die normally. i don’t think they’re cylons in the sense that if they die they get downloaded into a freshly cloned body in a vat somewhere, i think they’re cylons in the sense that the way the mechanical cylons evolved into the skinjobs was via the discovery of this method of genetic memory imprinting left over from earth’s original colonization of kobol.

That’s a really great theory. It fits with my theory that the FF are human cylon hybrids and that Hera is the final cylon. Thanks for that idea.

#8

Wrote about a zillion word post and suddenly realilzed “frak it, this is getting us nowhere”.

So I’ll leave it at this. Very interesting ideas and completely agree that Kobol was inhabited by “folks” from Earth. Cannot buy into the Lords being later arriving humans - just too “complicated”.

So, we need to figure out who were these Lords that were worshipped by humans - or better said given my belief that they were Cylons - how the heck did that happen? Where did the Cylons come from? Earth with the humans? Late arrivals?

So the 13th leaves Kobol to worship its (Cylon) god back on Earth and the 12 leave Kobol 2,000 years later to escape their (Cylon) gods, but keep on worshipping them on the 12 Colonies? Now that’s a brain teaser.

#9

while i agree that a lot of these things were originally done as production decisions to keep the show grounded in a familiar reality for the viewers, i think as the show has gone on they’ve started using those production decisions to make obvious parallels between our world and theirs. ron moore has stated many times that we should be asking the question ‘why are things in their universe so similar to ours?’ i think “all along the watchtower” was the final huge “ok yea, these similarities aren’t just for effect because somehow these people being chased by robots out in space know a bob dylan song (or some incarnation of a bob dylan song)”. the shakespeare, i think, is intentional.

heh, not gonna happen, buddy. i post these replies slyly from work in between tasks, so corners must be cut! but i assure you, i do possess the faculties to activate my shift key!

i’m willing to admit there is a fine line though. if you follow this concept to it’s obvious end, it becomes crazier and crazier as you go along. obviously the final 4 would know if they’d been in a state of perpetual existence for 1,000s of years, so i think we can rule that out. if they are copies, grown in vats like the 7 skinjobs then you’d have to make the leap that someone is out there with those vats, producing them, putting some kind of neural inhibitor in them and sending them out into the universe, waiting for something to happen. this doesn’t follow either because so far as we know from seeing the cylons, it doesn’t appear that they age at all once in their bodies, they exist in a perpetual state and we’ve already seen that tigh at least has aged normally (based on the flashbacks in ‘scattered’). but if it is DNA memory/personality imprints then it poses the problem that you just brought up that throughout time, with reproduction, a majority, if not all of humanity would theoretically possess the imprints as well. in that case, you’d think that more than just the 4 in the fleet would have been affected by the music, awaking to their true nature. so the idea that you proposed, if everyone has the capacity, but the 5 are chosen, then that opens up a whole world of possibilities and actually seems to fall in line with something leoben said back in season 1 to starbuck that has always struck me as important. he hinted that we all take part in this cycle of life and that each time we play a different role, perhaps last time he was the interrogator and she was the prisoner. he also mentioned something along the lines that god favored her above all others and chose her specifically to play a key role. maybe everyone is “programmed” to take part in this epic story from a database of millions of characters and which character gets assigned to which body is determined by some outside force, presumably the same force that created the cycle to begin with. sounds crazy, but hey…the show is crazy!

i have no idea where this kind of storyline would take us and i don’t know if i really believe that this is what’s going down, but it’s an interesting idea and one possible route they could go. the only problem is that there are several other routes they could also head down that are just as likely and much easier to pull off.

anyway…got a little sidetracked there, but this kinda brings me to what i was going to say if i continued my earlier posts - an idea of what the cycle that keeps happening throughout time is. now that we’ve reached a radioactive earth, it’s quite possible that the pollution would not be able to live on the planet. i think we all can agree that most of the population isn’t going to survive until the end of the series, whether they will be wiped out by an attack by the other non-alliance cylons or by the radiation on the planet we don’t know. but we’ve pretty much been told since season one that at the very least hera will survive and be raised by six and baltar. we know hera is the face of the shape of things to come and we can assume that that means nicky and i guess now tigh/six lovechild are the a few more of those “things to come”. so if most of the human population is wiped out (i’m assuming along with most of the cylons as well) and all that’s left are human/cylon hybrids then who is going to repopulate the earth? and if those human/cylon hybrids are the adam and eve of a new earth civilization then that would mean that “cylonism” is a hard-coded inevitability for humanity. humanity will grow and civilizations will advance and all the while the potential to create artificial lifeforms in our image is hard-coded into our make up, making it inevitable that when technology advances enough, humans will again create cylons and the entire situation will play out again. humans create cylons, humans travel to kobol and have conflict with their creations, kobol splits into 12 colonies, the cylon potential raises once again, cylons destroy colonies, humans return to kobol and eventually both human and cylon come together to return to earth where they will then begin the cycle all over again.

one of the most difficult things about coming up with a unified theory is that we simply don’t know which direction the writers are going to go in. they’ve set up a lot of things and right now we’re at a fork in the road where they could either go the straight-forward character drama route, or the mystical/religious/god route, or the epic sci-fi fable route, or some amalgam of any of those different paths. makes it difficult to predict. difficult, but fun!

#10

one of the most difficult things about coming up with a unified theory is that we simply don’t know which direction the writers are going to go in. they’ve set up a lot of things and right now we’re at a fork in the road where they could either go the straight-forward character drama route, or the mystical/religious/god route, or the epic sci-fi fable route, or some amalgam of any of those different paths. makes it difficult to predict. difficult, but fun!

That’s what I think is brilliant. It’s like the writers intentionally left the ending open to go either way to get the Atheist VS. Faith debate going. Very similar to how various opinions about belief have shaped the world we live in today. The question is will they answer the question or leave the question open for interpretation? My bet is on the latter.

#11

I agree. It is complicated. but it was the best i could come up with to separate human kobol people from “god” kobol people. If both groups were at one point the same and arrived on kobol from earth, why would one group eventually buy into the idea that the others are suddenly these gods that no one takes seriously anymore.

The other possibility i suppose is what if the “gods” are actually the beings that romans and greeks called gods. Like the classics were actually based on some level of intervention by deities or aliens. meh. I’d prefer convoluted over deities and aliens.

#12

Unless “something” happened on Kobol after “they” arrived to cause treatment of the Cylon contingent as gods, etc. That’s too complicated as well.

No deities. No aliens. Or I’m throwing a brick through my TV.

It’s tough.

#13

Oooooh… oooooh…

Tim, I know you are new here… but I made many posts about the fact that Kara must be the result of Cylon technology. LOL. Another of my theories being independently verified. Hahahaha. (If only it worked like that… sigh.)

But nice one, mate. Keep it up.

#14

The Farm. Now how the Cylons “super annuated” her, got her to Earth and implanted all her memories, etc. - that is beyond my technical ability to explain. I’m still trying to figure out how steam locomotives work - and they’re obsolete.

#15

I don’t think she’s a clone. Starbuck actually used the term Clone in the season opener. Very unlikely that they say it then use that idea. I believe there is something up with the business on the Farm. They played with us last season with Kacey, so the Farm mystery is still in the Air.

#16

if not a clone in exact terminology than some kind of passable duplicate. At this point i still believe Kara Thrace died in the explosion of her viper.

#17

Hodgkin’s Law of Parallel Planetary Development

Explains everything.
No actual connection whatsoever.

Wouldnt that just suck?
xD