Brad Ideas - Will Battlestar Galactica 2.0 update the "descended from aliens" mistake? - Comments

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Anonymous — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:07:51 -0700

The seeds of life are probably rife throughout the universe adapting to hostile environments. DNA possibly develops in a similar way everywhere. I believe its entirely possible we share our DNA with alien life that has developed separetly let alone the fact that their will be parallel universes where technology to collect or put DNA anywhere it wants. Let alone possible time travel. After all where does life come from why does it want to exist how does a plant know to bear fruit so we can give it fertilises and plant it for them.. ETC Wonders of nature... In other words the more we think we know the less we do.. Star trek is right in some universe. So is everything.

Earth speculation

Anonymous — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 18:42:25 -0800

Love the cyclical history plot Brad mentions - it would be amazing to see the fleet and cylons arrive at a far future Earth where AIs exist. I wonder if the show would go out warm with a harmonious humanAI civilisation like that found in Iain M Bank's Culture novels (not come across them? get hold of them) Somehow I doubt it. What about the possibilty the colonial humans themselves are not quite what they seem? Could the Gods of Kobol actually be AIs sent from Earth to colonise the galaxy with genetically engineered hybrids? After all, how exactly do Viper pilots manage to outperform Raiders which are in essence AI ships?

Thanks for the info. I've

Anonymous — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 06:36:56 -0800

Thanks for the info. I've recently gotten into battlestar galactica, And my roomate, who thinks he knows everything, tried to tell me how earth ties into and relates to the whole series. He seemed to think he knew exactly how it all works, but when I looked online, I realized that nobody knows how earth ties into the new galactica, and speculation is rampant. Now I have some arguments to shoot back at my roomie next time we discuss the show!

Star Trek Inconsistency

Mark Niemiec — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 10:09:58 -0800

I think that the worst thing about the Star Trek shows is that the writers often act like hack writers in an episodic TV show, with no memory from one show to the next and no commitment to realism, rather than creators of a coherent, consistent universe (compare Babylon 5, or the new Battlestar Galactica). There are many other inconsistencies between episodes.

For example, they cannot decide whether the time stream is mutable (which happens in most cases), or a closed circle (which they did in the two-parter where Data's head is found buried in 19th century San Francisco).

They aren't consistent about their own measurement system; in Voyager, it is reavealed that Warp 10 is infinite speed, which is incosistent with the description of warp speed in the original series, and is violated by several episodes in the original series where the Enterprise hits warp 11 (and also the series finale of TNG, where future ships are capable of warp 13).

There ought to be an industry rule that requires writers for science fiction shows to have passed at least high school science courses. Physics (If you're in orbit, you will NOT crash if your engines go out). Biology (Having alien DNA added to your own will NOT make you grow claws overnight). Computer science (Unless everyone is running Windows, bringing a virus-infected PDA onboard will NOT infect every computer on the ship; you can't interface your computer with every million-year-old device built by long-lost civilizations in half an hour). Common sense (The most powerful weapon system ever devised by man or alien is the TRANSPORTER. Why has no body ever realized this? There are only vague hints of this, such as when Scotty beams the Tribbles into the Klingon engine room. How about beaming a grenade onto the enemy's bridge? The possibilities are endless.)

Granted, many B Sci Fi movies make these (and worse) mistakes, but I expect better from long-lasting and respecting series like Star Trek.

Not that debate

brad — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 12:08:02 -0800

It is not necessary to get into the creation/evolution debate to answer this question about SF plots. Creationists also believe that Earth is the homeworld of mankind, and that we’ve been here longer than 3,000 years. And old-earth creationists while they might make whatever arguments about things they perceive as missing in evolution, don’t deny that life on Earth has been here a very long time, and primate life for many millions of years, and that it arose here.

DNA shows us we are all related, all the life forms on this planet. Most people think this is because of common ancestry, though some think it’s because of a common divine designer — but either way humanity is not from any planet other than this one.

Brad an expert?

Anonymous — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 18:36:56 -0800

Thanks Brad for solving the creation/evolution debate. Im happy you know all the answers to life's mysteries including the huge lack of transitional fossils. DNA is INFORMATION, not random patterns. I write all of this in good fun as lack of body language makes this post seem mean spirited. Fasinating subjects. BSG is the best SF show in quite some time.

Fiction and reality

brad — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 21:16:34 -0800

Even in fiction there are rules, and in SF even more.

For example, before we sent space probes to Mars and Venus, people wrote SF novels imagining various things there — canals, civilizations, you name it.

After the pictures came back you could still write such a novel, but it would be a different animal, deliberately ignoring the new knowledge, and people would find it to be breaking the rules. Doesn’t mean you can’t write it, but you’ll get less respect unless you can impress people with your dramatic purpose even more than usual.

You know there is another

Anonymous — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 05:22:00 -0800

You know there is another way of explainig how humen life evolved on Kobol, its Fiction! The Histroy of Earth can be completely diffrent, why does Fiction have to conform to reality? Thats kinda the point of calling it Science FICTION!

Other way around

Todd Larason — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 21:12:10 -0700

I've been assuming in BG-new, it was the other way around: the BG humans are descendants of future Earth humans. Of course, for this to work, if they ever find Earth it can't be 21st C Earth -- there has to have been time between now and then for us to colonize other planets_and_ for them to have forgotten quite where they came from.

It would also be interesting to see how that forgetting has impacted their religion: creationism (and tehrefore religion in general) would be a lot more convincing if there wasn't any pre-human fossil record.

Consistency?

brad — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 12:47:44 -0700

Well, we’re never going to get it from an SF TV show of course. However, they could explain this one by saying that had the Earth not had a base of compatible life, the seeders would not have planted humanity there.

Truth is they are already down a rathole they can’t make right. They need all the aliens to look like humans for cost reasons, and they had Vulcans breeding with Humans back in the 60s show (TOS as it’s known to fans.) They only ways to make this work are to have aliens or vanished advanced humans seed humanity from Earth throughout the galaxy (which is what Stargate and some other shows have done) or to somehow have the fossil record on Earth be faked.

If Earth were the homeworld of all humanoids, that would give it quite a different status. The main point is that “Humans evolved out there and then came here” just can’t be used any more.

Another Star Trek: TNG conception

Glenn Fleishman — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 14:03:25 -0700

And recall that the long ST:TNG finale had Picard nearly destryong all eukaryotic life by opening a strange hole in time, facilitated by Q. And Q, nearly omnipotent, said that destruction of Earth's cellular life in the past would destroy humanity in the future.

Will Battlestar Galactica 2.0 update the "descended from aliens" mistake?

brad — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 12:49:03 -0700

I’m enjoying the new version of Battlestar Galactica. Unlike the original, which was cheezy space opera, this show is the best SF show on TV. Yes, I watched the original when I was 18. I knew it was terrible (and full of bad science) but in the 70s TV SF was extremely rare, and often even worse.

The original show began with Pactrick Macnee narrating an opening “There are those who believe that life here, began out there, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians…” They sought the lost tribe of Earth, and in a truly abyssmal sequel finally came to 1980 Earth, which was of course technologically backward compared to them and unable to help in their fight.

This idea was a common one in science fiction of the 20th century. It was frequent in written SF, and Star Trek twice took it up. In one 60s episode, the Enterprise met Sargon, who claimed to have sewn most of the humanoid races. Spock states this meshes with Vulcan history, but another character says that Humans appear to have evolved on Earth. A later episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation reverses this, and Picard follows clues left in DNA to discover the common ancestry of all the humanoids.

Back in the 60s and 70s, when Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek were written, you could get away with this plot. It had a romantic appeal. While there was tons of evidence, as even Star Trek of the 60s knew, that humans were from Earth, we had not come to the 90s and the DNA sequencer. Today we know we share 25% of our DNA with cabbages. We’re descended from a long line in the fossil record that goes back a billion years. If life on this planet was seeded from other planets, it was over a billion years ago. It certainly wasn’t during the lifetime of Humanity, and nor were all the animals also seeded here at the same time as we were unless the aliens who did it deliberately created a fake fossil record.

(Of course creationists try very hard to make the case that this could be true, but they don’t even remotely succeed. If you think they do have a point, you may want to stop reading. You can read on for more SF theory though.)