I must not be a Holmes, or even a Watson! What do you think happened to the raptors? If I had to guess it would be that they were broken down for parts.
And I know the fate of the Colony will be shown on the DVD, but I really think it should’ve been aired. It’s something that needed to be tied up, and obviously the producers agree since they wrote and filmed it. But for some reason, they thought it could be cut.
They were “destroyed” on the surface - but I’m sure you are correct that some spare parts were kept. Like a chair or two. They always come in handy.
I know - unbelievable. What - another 90 seconds for a show that already is running over by 11 minutes and has a zillion die hard fans (that buy things) watching it? Run another ad, for Pete’s sake - it’s OK with me.
Chairs and Raptors brought to you be Kentucky Fried Battlestar Props!
Ron Moore’s answer’s:
What Lee saw was that it would be all to easy for the people in the fleet to simply repeat the mistakes they had made before, most recently on New Caprica, where they had attempted to restart Colonial civilization with unhappy results even before the Cylons arrived and began their occupation. The Baltar administration had been a disaster, the social problems of the colonists had become profound and the entire enterprise was on the verge of chaos before the first baseship jumped into orbit. While Lee himself had made a leap of faith with D’Anna and agreed to work together toward a common goal, it was too much to expect almost forty thousand people to have made a similar leap and to begin anew if they literally brought all their baggage with them. His solution was to wipe the slate clean, remove as many temptations as possible to repeat their past mistakes, disperse the people and try to bring the best part of themselves to this new world they’d found.
Think for a moment of the temptations available to people of the fleet armed with all their technology as they start a new life on a world whose natives are literally living in caves and carrying spears. Would there be any way they would not be gods in that setting? Would they ever be able to avoid playing god and ruling over the indigenous peoples? As it is, he was asking a tremendous amount from the people in the fleet, asking them to bring ideas of literature, art, justice, and so on to the new world, and hoping that they would be embedded either in oral traditions or perhaps in the collective unconscious and survive down through the ages. Asking people to avoid using the massive firepower and amazing technological advantages at their disposal would be asking too much. Would any of the indigenous peoples even survive in that scenario? Is that the gift the people of the 12 Colonies would give to their new home? Complete displacement, possibly annihilation?
Lee’s idea, while somewhat idealistic, was at least worthy of survival, and that after all, was really at the heart of the show from the very beginning.
More answers to m,any of the questions raised can be found Here
Personally, that’s good enough for me. Other’s need more, in the end it is what it is. I also think it’s a testament to the work itself that the minutiae is being debated, thought about & discussed this passionately…
Excellent stuff - and shades of Kobol had Lee not made the decision he did.
In the podcast, RDM said they’d originally had shots of the Raptors being blown up, but it happened in the background while other dialogue was going on, and it looked strange. So I just assumed they sent the things up into the sun on autopilot when they were done with them, with or without Anders.
I certainly like the idea of saving the natives from being conquered and oppressed by the newly arriving Colonials. It’s a much better reason to give up the technology than simple technophobia, and fits the theme of stopping the cycle, which Lee has been all about since he shook hands with D’Anna. I wish that thought had been emphasized in the finale just a touch more.
I agree, Glim-whatever-your-name-is-this-week 
I’m guessing there aren’t many anarcho-primitivists on the GWC forum
A common theme is disease, but communicable diseases are much more easily spread in cities than in non-urban societies. I think the main risks would have been trauma and infected wounds. I too am guessing they kept some meds.
As for life expectancy, 20 sounds a little low for the Native Americans prior to colonisation, but I’ll tentatively defer to a reference. Hunter-gatherers typically live into their 30s or 40s, provided they make it into their teens. I know this is still pretty grim but I bet they could extend this with some salvaged medical supplies and some know-how.
On top of that, hunting and gathering is much less like hard work than farming, so maybe people thought farming was just a dumb idea. There are plenty of studies that indicate the “working week” for hunters and gatherers is way lower than that of farmers. And hunter-gatherer groups, like most “uncivilised” societies are generally much more equal, and afford greater individual autonomy within the context of group cooperation. If they wanted to build agricultural societies with technology and government they’d need a decent sized work-force to produce food for the non food producers such as the political elite. I guess they could get those poor bastards from the tilium ship to till the land. Or maybe they could have kept a few Centurions as agricultural labourers/slaves. Oh, hang on…
See, civilisation might have given us loads of cool stuff, but it has its crappy aspects. It also almost certainly arose as a result of the need to manage large numbers of people in restricted geographical areas using limited resources. These conditions don’t apply on a sparsely populatin Earth, so maybe there’s no point being urban and civilised. Doesn’t mean people have to be stupid. Sure there’s a lot of learning to be done, but maybe they could learn from the natives - getting through the “first winter” and all that. I seem to remember a story about that from our more recent history…
If they did want to start building cities and extracting resources on an industrial scale they’d soon end up separating themselves from those early modern humans, and likely coming into conflict with them, although they could have done so in the uninhabited parts of the world (namely the Americas and Australia).
I think it works just fine as an ending from the technology perspective, although I agree that there might have been more resistance to the idea. But then after years cooped up in the Fleet, maybe people had had enough. Maybe they didn’t have all the luxuries of civilisation to give up in any case - resources were short. Wild game barbecues and sitting about in the sun probably seemed pretty attractive after ship quaters and algae.
I like the poetry of the ending, but then I do have anarcho-primitive tendencies (only tendencies - it wouldn’t be feasible or necessarily sensible or desirable for us to all become hunter gathers).
But there is an irony here. RDM seems to think that the story works with Tyrol fathering the Scots and us all being descended from the population of the fleet, combined with our real palaeolithic ancestors, even though this sort of udnermines the mitochondrial Eve proposition. Of course for the story to work in the context of what we know about human history, and for Mt Eve to be identified with Hera, we know that pretty much all of the colonists, and the natives, must have died out. So their renunciation of civlisation and technology ultimately did lead to their demise, with the exception of the descendants of Hera alone, who ultimately “out competed” their peers, maybe after a period of initial success. Which is sort of a pity.
That’s not how MtEve works, but it seems to be a common misperception. Mitochondrial DNA is unusual in that it is transmitted (normally) unchanged from mother to offspring. What we normally think of as “our DNA” is a mish-mash from both parents. The existence of an MtEve doesn’t mean that the contributions from the other females were lost, it just means that at some point each of those other lines had no daughters. Those lines still contributed to their sons, and thus to their granddaughters, etc.
MtEve is significant because we are all related to her on our mother’s side. (or mother’s mother’s mother’s etc. side.) It just means that we are all part cylon (fittingly, on Hera’s mother’s side.)
Just a followup: Since there seems to be some confusion about Mitochondria, see this article. We’re talking about structures within cells that have an independent DNA inheritance.
NB - that all fits together pretty well. The classic example of the trade off of good/bad between urban and rural society (in the case of the BSG survivors - rural with a vegence) is, of course (and as a U.K. resident you must have had this drummed into your head in school at some point), the Industrial Revolution. As you know, there are studies that reveal that (maybe) average life spans shortened, diet worsened, disease increased as a result of early industrialization. We also may have “shrunk” some. (And life in the rural areas was no picnic to begin with - one reason there was the movement to towns and cities.)
So, I’m packing up a few basics (including some antibiotics - not taking any chances, weapons, etc.), hopping into Mr. Peabody’s “Way Back Machine” and zipping back to the Botswana area circa 150,000 years ago in hopes of improving my life style.
(I wonder if Galen Tyrol was unusually thrifty? And a reader of the great Colonial poet - McTeague?)
MtEve is significant because we are all related to her on our mother’s side. (or mother’s mother’s mother’s etc. side.) It just means that we are all part cylon (fittingly, on Hera’s mother’s side.)
And that Kara Thrace indeed did lead the human race to its end.
No, unless you take a purist view. Aside from the contributions from other no-female-descendent females, there is the male side. See here for the male analog.
All great points here. I just wanted to clarify that the life expectancy of 20 years is mean life expectancy at birth. There was actually quite a large die off in the first 6 years, but if made it beyond that you would likely get into the 30s-50s. Only a lucky few would make it beyond that. Of course this interpretation only refers to one of a few societies for which pre-contact data are available. A reference can be found here.
Yes, I suspect life would have been hard, but not much harder than for most of the survivors of fleet probably experienced in the last couple of years. They at least got to walk around, have fresh air, and eat something other than alge. Remember, I think be focusing on Galactica we were watching the people who lived in relative comfort. I also imagine that those poor souls we saw working on the tylium ship it couldn’t be soon enough to see that ship head off towards the sun…
That’s what I meant - strictly speaking - “we” are not the same as BSG “pure” humans. And, of course, it is well known that the OGG was extremely literal in his musings.
Well, I for one and relieved to know that Thomas Hobbes was wrong.
(As usual, your points are well taken. Clearly they had to and needed to get off of those ships. And, as planets go, they found a pretty sweet place. Really the interesting points for debate - and I am glad RDM gave us these enjoyable issues to discuss - are the choices that confronted the survivors once it was clear where they were going to settle and that there were “humans” already there.)
Sure - I agree. It doesn’t mean that at some point it was just Hera and one guy left. But it suggests that it eventually came down to a small group of people with the genetic material from one woman ultimately dominating. Different groups could have existed in different areas for many thousands of years after Hera/Mt Eve passed on, with ultimately the line from Mt Eve prevailing while other lines fizzled out (perhaps 10s of thousands of years later). The descendants of Mt Eve could certainly have reproduced with male descendants of other women, but it still suggests a bottleneck in the population. At least, that’s my understanding, and I’m happy to defer to those with greater expertise in this area. But the important thing is that it doesn’t necessarily mean that at one point there was just one woman, or one couple left. I’m not suggesting that the colony failed within one generation - it could have been successful for millennia before the ice age came along (and it would have been drought not glaciers that got them in Africa at least). But there isn’t a continuous line of farming expertise from Baltar to the post-glacial Near East. Taken together with the inferred bottleneck in population this does suggest ultimate failure at some point. But Lee and the rest might have lived happy anarcho-primitivist lives. I must admit, I’ve always fancied being a hunter gatherer, provided I can have good healthcare, fine wine and my iPod Maybe there’s a happy medium between “reverting” to what used to be referred to as “savagery” and being techno-geeks. Maybe they managed this for a while.
Cheers for the reference Phil - this is something that interests me a lot, so I’ll chase it up. I wonder if pre-contact means prior to contact with the European colonists, or prior to contact with their diseases, which by all accounts went ahead of them! But if we’re talking about life-expectancy at birth it makes a lot more sense.
I read somewhere (I think it was the Lancet - unreliable tabloid rag) that life expectancy declined as Roman ciivlisation spread throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. I also read elsewhere (maybe in “Rubicon” by Tom Holland, but my memory’s sketchy) that life expectancy in Rome (the city) was around 29 at some point. So less than that of some hunter-gatherer groups (depending on how it’s measured).
Yes, that Hobbes was full of craaap. Not his fault I guess, everyone thinks their society is better than everyone else’s, and since we’ve had the idea of linear, progressive history, we all like to think things are better now (more “advanced”) than what went before. He may have had a point about the “shorte” (old English spelling), although I wonder what the average life expecancy was in his day, but I think life is often more “nasty” and “brutish” today than it would have been for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. To be fair to Hobbes he was talking about a theoretical “state of nature” that even he admitted probably never existed. But he was doing the usual thing of saying how much better civilisation with formal institutions of government is than society without formal government.
Freud did more-or-less the same thing in Civilisation and its Discontents, in which he views civilisation as arising from the necessity for mankind to overcome its “original disposition” to violence and general nastiness. I think these guys were both wrong. Violence has certainly characterised all of human history, and it’s daft to think in terms of some peaceful Eden where people all just get along and never argue or fight, or to romanticise the kinds of societies we used to call “primitive”. But people can live in small bands without formal institutions of government, in which decision are made through agreement and people have a good degree of personal autonomy. Of course this doesn’t work with large populations, and Civilisation is sort of the opposite of this.
I like to think of civilisation as a 5000 year experiment, the outcome of which is still uncertain. We think it’s great because we’ve developed a philosophy based on the idea of progressive social evolution in which societies become more “advanced” and generally better. But try and convince any modern archaeologist or anthropologist of this and they’ll just wince at you (although it was their precedessors that did much to spread this view). The reality is much more complex, and this view of progressive social improvement and some societies being more “advanced” than others along some predestined path of progress is very questionable (and I’m being kind there). It seems to come from a combination of the Christian view of time, or at least history, which is linear and associated with a beginning and an end, simplistic misinterpretations of Darwinian evolutionary theory, and a philosophical hubris that came out of the European Enlightenment and went on to act as a supporting philosophy for colonialism. The idea of linear progress still drives a lot of human activity, such as international development, and this has been disastrous in many areas, where it has led to people completely neglecting what does and doesn’t work in different environments.
Lecture over, for now
Cheers guys - this is what I love about BSG and GWC - where else could I hold forth on the follies of civilisation and philosophies of progress with a bunch of regular (albeit wonderful and highly intelligent) guys and gals in a public forum, outside of academia.
I love you all.
Cheers guys - this is what I love about BSG and GWC - where else could I hold forth on the follies of civilisation and philosophies of progress with a bunch of regular (albeit wonderful and highly intelligent) guys and gals in a public forum, outside of academia.
I love you all.
And yet there is something to be said for contemporary dental hygiene in the “developed” world and having one’s own teeth - at least until one nears the bitter end.
Perhaps, if we can all agree on just that, it will be a step in the right direction for man.