Brad Ideas - What sort of Earth would it be, colonized by aliens? - Comments

What if part of the cycle is

Anonymous — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 19:32:20 -0800

What if part of the cycle is the complete annihilation of everyone on both sides maybe in a big bang that restarts the cycle, maybe even it is the rock that hits a planet and begins the primordial soup process. The reason why everything repeats itself like names for constellations, clothing, songs, religions and the like are because of a stream of consciousness in the DNA of the universe, in the case of the big bang example, or in the basic fiber of the primordial stew.

I think the idea that everyone will live in the end is jumping to a conclusion. Maybe they do discover our Earth, but as a rock that hits the planet billions of years before now.

You didn't get it then

brad — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:10:13 -0700

Life evolved on the planet before colonists (ie. us) would thus not be related to us. But we’re related to all the life on the Earth, very closely related in fact. And it’s been here for billions of years. Thus, so has our ancestry chain been here billions of years.

good points

Don — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 21:30:09 -0700

I have to say that some of the points are very good but I still think it is possible. Life could have been evolving on this planet prior to it being colonized.

I think the point of a NYC type civilization existing is very good. There was a show on one of the discovery channel type things that talked about the earth after we are gone. At the time I felt it was extremely dumb but with that point it makes more and more sense. I also thing space is irrelevant because after 70,000 years gravity would pull all the space garbage into the atmosphere.

Good column though

Many things from us

brad — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:15:44 -0700

Yes, the show is crawling with things from our era. However, charitably, many can be accounted for as just translations and TV-SF vagaries. We don’t assume they are really speaking English (though quite possibly they are) though it’s harder for Baltar to quote Shakespeare.

Explain the Artifacts in the show with a past arrival scenario.

Anonymous — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:57:03 -0700

The real problem with an arrival in the past are the things seen on the Galactica and Pegasus. I’m talking about things like Cain’s Weapon Collection (Thompsan Machine Gun and pistols) and the US Air Force Chevrons. These things are left over from their past which is mostly our past but this stuff is still in use in our time. I don’t believe these things would be re-created 70’000 (or any time) later. BSG is out future.

70,000 years

brad — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 11:18:40 -0700

Not a lot of buildings. I think some stone structures might well exist, though buried. Structures in desert climates (like the pyramids.) Coins. Old nuclear reactors. And of course stuff on the moon and in geosync orbit, though they might have not had satellites.

But yes, while it requires a few unusual conditions, you could have colonists arrive 70,000 years ago. The problem is the animals. Our animals are the result of patterns of evolution and migration over much more than the 70,000 year history of human migration. But they are just like us. If you write humans as arriving in Africa 70-100,000 years ago, the animals have to arrive with them. But the animals on real Earth didn’t spread that way, and they evolved their traits based on the places they evolved in, and in concert with the other life there.

Good Analysis

Coolmoose — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 22:04:31 -0700

I tried to do the same analysis you did here and I must say you did a much better job of it than I could have.

The only other thing I might throw into your analysis would be the Toba populations bottleneck theory. Wikipedia has a great entry on it, but basically, about 60-70,000 years ago, the human population on Earth was dropped to as little as 10,000 to 100,000 mating pairs of humans. The theory is that Toba, a supervolcano, erupted and essentially caused mass dieoffs of life on Earth. Around that time, is when the population bottleneck occured.

I started thinking about this event in terms of an advanced civilization living prior to that on Earth. What would be left of such a civilization? Suppose there was a New York City somewhere on the plantet 70,000 years ago and it was destroyed/abandoned at that time. Over 70,000 years, what would be left? The answers I come up with is "very little". Steel framed buildings would rot by then. Glass would be broken and buried. Cement and concrete would erode by then. The only thing I can think of that would last that long would be non-reactive metals- gold lets say, in the form of coins? Plastics? What about the bones of the dead? Well, we don't find them today from the people that lived back then, why would it surprise us if there was nothing left from a NYC type city? Depending on the location of such a city, it may be that such a place would be under water now.

I also thought about it in terms of a nuclear holocaust instead of a Toba volcano. There is little scientific study about it since there is no credible thought in the scientific community that such technology existed back then. But what if it did? What would be left of a society that nuked itself to death 70,000 years ago? Essentially the answer above - not much. If humans had been advanced enough to build nukes, there would be little left after such a war.

And given that there are about 50,000 people in the Rag Tag fleet - 20-25,000 mating pairs? Well... things that make you go "hummmmm..."

What sort of Earth would it be, colonized by aliens?

brad — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:08:24 -0700

Readers of this blog will know I believe there are extremely strong clues that BSG takes place in our far future, that Kobol is a future colony of Earth, and that there probably never was a real 13th tribe — it’s just a cover story for the true origins of humanity. (Well, I got that last part wrong…)

However, a lot of viewers still expect we’ll see a plot more akin to the original Battlestar Galactica, where “life here, began out there.” In that show, all the events took place around 1960, and Earth really was a lost tribe of Kobol. That plot turns out to be scientifically ridiculous, since there is massive evidence that we, and all the other life on this planet evolved from single celled organisms right here on this planet.

But, I have been asked, “could this be an alternate reality?” A fictional Earth, not the same as ours, in which we really are the descendants of ancient alien colonists. So I set out to explore how close you could come to our Earth in the BSG:1980 scenario.