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Battlestar Galactica AND Caprica *SPOILERS* - It's Over! YEAAAAHHHHH
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I mean, we almost made friends with the cylons. It was unlucky that we blew up the Cavils and his buddies. We could have went our separate ways and even learned from each other. The same goes with the Centurions.
Technology is not good or evil. Technology is crystalized memes. Our memes—our ideas, our learned behavior—are what make us human in the first place. Yes, the BSG universe posits a violent cycle where humanity repeatedly creates new life with technology and goes to war with it. But this ignores the bright side—we bring new life and new experience into the universe, particularly in the form of the far-seeing hybrids. That's not a cycle, that's a progression, and to throw it all away because it's "scary" is the simplistic philosophy of the Unabomber.
IIRC, that's approximately the survival rate after the fall of Rome and as a result of the Black Death. Which I think is equivalent to what they are attempting.
I doubt survival rates for say... Oregon Trail pioneers were a lot higher than that.
And what was with the It doesnt like to be called God. And then "oh so silly of me"
They shouldve ended it with the adama scene.
The story of humanity's cultural evolution from tribes to language-speaking hunter gatherers to farmers to civilizations is fascinating in and of itself. It doesn't require any monoliths or improbable galactic fleets from another civilization to explain. And I think such "explanations" actually cheapen both the real story of humanity and the fictional story in which they take place.
Every one of us motherfuckers would tune in for that one.
The shit I said here and the shit I said in the SE++ thread are starting to blend together.
Which requires the other lines of descent to die out.
They would have had to survive as hunter-gatherers.
I think you mentioned it in the last thread
Well, whatever. People shouldn't act like they know what it means when they don't, but I haven't seen anyone doing that here at least. Maybe I just missed those parts of the last thread though.
Not die out, blend together.
I totally agree. I disagree violently with Lee's decision. I think it was short-sighted, cowardly and foolish. But I don't have to agree with his decision to understand it and appreciate the reason why it's in the show. Indeed I'm happy to have something this juicy to debate- it gets right to the bleeding moral heart of science fiction.
Indeed you can say that Lee's decision was just another exercise in playing God; social engineering on a massive scale. The hubris and folly of saying "well fuck it let's just toss our ships into the sun" when the truly wise individual recognizes the challenge of wielding power responsibly and rises to it rather than flees. The Colonials and the Cylons by this point just had no faith in themselves or their civilizations so they started anew. This was short-sighted, because it doesn't mean the cycle doesn't repeat, just that it takes longer to do so. It was cowardly*, because if they had real courage they would have faced their flaws and overcome them rather than run away. It was foolish, because they could have really used the goddamn space ships.
*Not that it doesn't take courage to settle an unknown (albeit fertile) planet with nothing but what you can carry on your back when you've got fusion reactors that could be helping out, but it's still fundamentally motivated by an inability to actually solve a flaw in the human condition and settles for just removing the capacity to wield terrible power temporarily.
Absolutely. But it's a question worth asking, isn't it? The unabomber, for all his faults, had a point- our lives are increasingly defined and controlled by technology. I think that's fine, but it's not something we should just assume to be the case- it's worth debating.
No you keep saying that but there's no reason to believe that. They were splitting off into different settlements, which would make their ability to specialize even less than what would be possible while they create subsistence level farming out of completely virgin soil with no seed stock and no machinery. They won't have time for school when everyone has work just to eat. They have no printing presses and no computers. It was pretty clear they were going back to a primitive society, as much as they is incredibly stupid. Civilization is needed for a written history and knowledge base and they somehow came to the conclusion that civilization and technology was the source of their problems. If they weren't rejecting technology, they wouldn't have sent the ships into the sun, they would have stripped the ships and used the materials.
They also showed the lines of people apparently walking to their new settlements, with no evidence of machinery or heavy supplies. Combined with the fact that Hera was apparently found but no unusual artifacts were found in the vicinity and that these exceptions to the "technology is bad!" paradigm were never mentioned strongly indicates that they didn't go for hunter-gatherer with modern conceptions and science.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Which is fine, except we're talking 150,000 years, not 1,500,000 years. And it just means it was a technology they had, lost over time, and found again 10,000 years ago.
Um, no. Mitochondrial DNA comes only from the mother. There can be no blending. If there were any other females other than Hera that had descendents, those descendents would have different mitochondrial DNA unless they were all male and had children with female descendants of Hera.
Honestly? No.
Life without technology was brutish and short. Some technology has negative uses, but technology as a whole is what makes life not entirely miserable for the most part. It may be that you're creating a distinction between medicine and other scientific disciplines and "technology", but that's a false dichotomy. Science is good in large part because of the fruits it bears - technology.
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
Sorry, I guess I'll have to quote it again.
"The existence of Mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosomal Adam does not imply the existence of population bottlenecks or a first couple. They each may have lived within a large human population at a different time."
They were carrying gear. We saw cases and cases of supplies in the background of some scenes. I doubt they didn't at least have hatchets and knives.
Lee mentions a major exception- language, and then goes on to say "we keep the best of ourselves, discard the rest."
What I am saying is that we have no reason to think they didn't still wash their hands, or that Dr. Cottle wouldn't use his medical knowledge to heal the sick and set broken bones. He wouldn't stick a bone through his nose and start appealing to the spirits of sky and moon to cast out demons of disease and ill-temper. As for why none of their artifacts were ever found- none of it would last 150,000 years. Raptors would be gone; metal rusts and corrodes and just dissolves away. Metal tools, likewise, unless they had bronze. Clothing, writing, all that...gone. 150,000 years is a long, long time. Long enough to wipe away the evidence that they were ever there.
Now, realistically we'd notice their intrusion onto the genetic record, but somehow paleogenetics doesn't strike me as Ron Moore's strongest subject.
What I don't think is that it's okay to just shoehorn one side of this debate unceremoniously into the final episode, especially when it is completely at odds with the "reality" of the show's universe. If Moore wants to use BSG as a vehicle for that argument then I would have expected a lot better of him.
Do you actually know anything about evolutionary biology or are you just going to keep quoting Wikipedia?
They were parts of a larger human population but represent the only succesful line of descent from it.
Nope, although my degree in archaeology covered human development as it is reflected in the archaeological record. Wiki is a useful tool for basic information (which is about all I figured you could handle).
Show us your degree, professor.
There would have been a lot of shit left unresolved, but I think I honestly would have been happier if they had ended the show when all the ships jumped into orbit, maybe a cross-fade with verdant fields below to show that it was really Earth, not a nuked-out wasteland.
But it wasn't, not really- the early agricultural societies were much worse off than the hunter gatherers, who had more leisure time, longer life expectancies, and stable, sustainable tribal cultures. Now obviously modern society is like ten times more awesome, but at significant cost to our ability to sustain ourselves as a species. I suppose it's my recent obsession with global warming talking, but this is definitely a question worth asking, because the answer doesn't have to be "primitive or self-destruction by technology." In answering the question we may find solutions that solve the problems of one without resorting to the other.
See, it's important to note that this is the assumption the show is challenging. Science fiction is almost always "YES! Technology is GREAT!" I mean, in Star Trek, it results in a utopia- technological growth allowed the development of the Federation's advanced morality. A lot of BSG is Ron Moore taking revenge on Star Trek, and one of those things is questioning whether a technologically advanced society is a morally advanced society. That's the point of the finale.
I'm not even sure the show necessarily endorses Lee's decision, it just puts it forth as a subject of debate.
So do I. There's an Isaac Asimov quote I wholeheartedly endorse on this subject.
I don't think it's shoehorned, though. It goes all the way back to Adama's speech in the miniseries about the ethics of creation. The Cylons have always been Frankenstein-like figures. At no point in the show didn't anyone have the luxury of abandoning technology because of the pursuit and because they weren't ready for it. Only at the finale, when the survival of humanity is not the same thing as the survival of the Fleet, is the question even possible, and at that point, after all that suffering, the equation changes.
It's also foreshadowed pretty heavily, I think, throughout season 4- the story of the Final Five and the Ruined Earth is very much parallel to this.
Wait, what did I do?
Same here.
But oh looky here! Stinky white men with their technology screwing up a wonderful thing! The first city to be raised in America had to resort to digging up graves and eating corpses because, even with their technology, they were starving to death. Look at what technology is doing to us now! Too fat to even get a good fuck going.
We wouldn't have morals, period, if it wasn't for technology. I said this in the previous thread: books are technology. Writing is technology. You cannot have morals without a technological infrastructure in place to support and spread those ideas.
That means that the Cylon race died out? They never actually solved their breeding problem, and there was like what, 100 left of them? 500?
Oral histories spread morality without writing or books. Are you saying there was no morality in the world before Egypt/Mesopotamia (whichever you subscribe to) invented writing?
Yeah, he deserves all the praise. I got goosebumps when Baltar came into the CIC and saw the Final Five.
All Along the Watchtower is probably my favorite song ever by now. His version, specifically.
His version is definitely up there among my favorite cover songs ever adapted/performed.
On the other hand, look at the Native Americans. Wars, yes, even a few genocides, but a sustainable culture with a lot of positive attributes and a generally pleasant lifestyle that the people actually in it were reportedly quite happy with. With a sophisticated oral history to pass on morality and cultural attributes, you don't even need writing. And it was sustainable. The native Americans would have never had the power to destroy themselves. They were even reasonably egalitarian in many cases.
I agree with you, but there are ways to support and spread cultural ideas of morality without necessarily having printing presses and the internet. Oral tradition, most notably.
Doc Cottle was one elderly heavy smoker who is now apparently going to live in a hunter gatherer society. How long exactly do you think he's bound for that world. For that matter, how do you expect him to do his job in a hunter gatherer society? Its not like they had a bunch of spare Raptors either remember, almost all were destroyed in the assault. Cottle is not going to be able to fly around and not dispense their non-existent antibiotics (since they sent all their medical facilities into the sun since they're not going to have fucking electricity) every time a baby is going to be born or a natural predator eats the face of a former nuclear engineer now attempting to hunt wild game with a fucking spear.
That's a major reason cities exist(ed)! So you could gather specialists where they'd do the most good. Less repetition of labor, more specialization. By separating they are essentially guaranteeing that knowledge will be lost because they won't exactly have the leisure time to replace the books as they waste away or teach their children about the cellular structure of bacteria. And germ theory without science is essentially "evil spirits do it."
They decided that they wanted the Colonial survivors to be the ancestors of Earth years ago but never planned on how to do it. The plan doesn't make any sense but that's the result was what they wanted so...
QEDMF xbl: PantsB G+
I think that may be my single biggest problem with it, really. They got so caught up with the idea of making it mesh with reality that they--intentionally or not--turned it into this thing that comes across as paean to Luddism. The story would, I think, have been much better resolved had they just accepted that it occurred in an alternative universe.
Which is probably all why they're not around anymore. Dr. Cottle was one man who may have passed on some knowledge before he died, but not as much as he actually knew and his apprentice(s) would pass on even less to their apprentices, and so on. And the camps without Dr. Cottle wouldn't have even started with that. They probably scattered the medics and doctors in the fleet to each camp, but even so, that's a small enough knowledge base that it could fade over time.
What I am saying is that this "natural predators woulda got 'em" thing is a huge exaggeration; a nuclear engineer can learn to throw a spear. They're starting out with some disadvantages but huge advantages compared to our neolithic ancestors even without the technology they had.
It's not collective, physical suicide. It is collective cultural suicide.
Just how long do you think Raptor fuel is going to last? Where do you think antibiotics are going to come from? The ships only have so much. For all we know, they used what's left of the antibiotics after the colony war. Where are they going to get spare parts to fix the ships?
Saying that they should of cling onto the ships is fallacy. Even if they brought the ships down, they would quickly be worthless. Yes the eldery will die. Yes the infant mortality rate will be high. But that's how it always has been.
If there ever is a next thread.
Don't they all??