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I thought the whole point was that our ancestors inherited something from the Colonials: the Kobold mythos that ended up as the Greek pantheon. Lee says that they would give our ancestors the best of them so the assumption is that they passed down their stories and their beliefs -- their culture. That's really the only thing that would survive the test of time through oral tradition.
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Sep 6, 2012 00:44
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Dreylad posted:I thought the whole point was that our ancestors inherited something from the Colonials: the Kobold mythos that ended up as the Greek pantheon. Lee says that they would give our ancestors the best of them so the assumption is that they passed down their stories and their beliefs -- their culture. That's really the only thing that would survive the test of time through oral tradition. He should have focused more on the "don't build robot slaves" part instead.   "Whelp, at least we got them to worship Jupiter for a few years, so there's that. Too bad about the robo-apocalypse, better luck next time!"
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Sep 6, 2012 08:59
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Friendly Factory posted:Unless succeeding generations, perhaps under siege from highly organized genocide robots, had their society wiped out. Which happened on Kobol and Earth 1 (though that wasn't humans at all). Not hard to imagine they'd forget that. Are you really saying that it makes sense that the out of the millions, if not billions of refugees that fled to Twelve Colonies, nobody wrote down what happened? Nobody had a basic computer or PDA or a typewriter? They had spaceships but not pen and paper? And I think you missed my point entirely. We might not know half of what happened in ancient history but that was ancient history. And we still know more about our origins then the Colonials know about theirs - and their origins are a modern spacefaring civilization that escaped a modern spacefaring society. We don't think that the civilization of Carthage just magically vanished or that Babylon was taken to the skies by gods or something even though the Romans did not have modern information technology. gently caress, we divide our history and prehistory based on when people started writing things down. It's really pretty unrealistic that they don't know anything more then "Twelve Tribes, Kobol". Only way I can explain that and Lee's actions is that their culture had some sort of tabu against writing things down but then again Adama was a pretty avid reader so I don't know what the gently caress. (Well I do know what the gently caress, the writers didn't think about it at all) DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 09:39 on Sep 6, 2012 |
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Sep 6, 2012 09:34
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Astroman posted:He should have focused more on the "don't build robot slaves" part instead. 
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Sep 6, 2012 10:14
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rolleyes posted:However, we're supposed to believe that when the colonials left Kobol their society was more advanced than ours (they had interstellar travel). At our present stage of development we document the poo poo out of everything and everyone past and present and do our best to fill in the historical gaps - are we really to believe that the colonials either didn't do this or didn't take any of it with them? A lot of people seem to think the 12 Colonies just picked up where Kobol left off, which isn't the case at all. Presumably the people who ended up at the Colonies were in the same situation as the Colonials themselves were at New Caprica: they had ships, but everything else was gone. They had a stash of drugs sure, but no means of producing them. That's the reason the whole "zomg they were so stupid to throw their tech away" is so silly; their tech was already gone. Most people in general don't have much appreciation for infrastructure (see the whole Obama "you didn't do it alone" kerfluffle). Without the means to maintain those ships and iPods eventually they're going to break down and you're gonna be out there in a field trying to grow potatoes anyway. That's what happened on the Colonies. There's a bit of Lot's wife in that, not being willing to make a complete break with your past and that's why the cycle perpetuated. The idea on Earth 2 was that this time, they weren't going to look to what their heads could come up with; they were going to develop their hearts. So that when they eventually did create all those fancy gizmos the species would be mature enough to deal with AI in a responsible fashion.
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Sep 6, 2012 12:30
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During season 1, Ron Moore posted in this blog that the colonies regressed alot after they fled Kobol. They basically had only a few ships that landed on these 12 worlds spread across several star systems, lived for awhile on what technology they could pull off the ships, and then went native for quite some time. He mentions this to explain why their ships have a mixture of star trek tech (like jumpdrives and gravity) and 1970's submarine tech (like paper printers and big old phones). Also, modern people don't seem to realize how fragile our giant webs of information are. Your PDA or smartphone is delicate as poo poo and the info you keep on it will vanish if new ones are being made. Most digital information exists in this precarious state since accessing it (or even saving it) requires that these complex machines keep being built.
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Sep 6, 2012 14:50
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Astroman posted:He should have focused more on the "don't build robot slaves" part instead. Skynet...Skynet never changes...
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Sep 6, 2012 16:29
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LooseChanj posted:A lot of people seem to think the 12 Colonies just picked up where Kobol left off, which isn't the case at all. Presumably the people who ended up at the Colonies were in the same situation as the Colonials themselves were at New Caprica: they had ships, but everything else was gone. They had a stash of drugs sure, but no means of producing them. That's the reason the whole "zomg they were so stupid to throw their tech away" is so silly; their tech was already gone. Most people in general don't have much appreciation for infrastructure (see the whole Obama "you didn't do it alone" kerfluffle). I really don't understand why you keep toting this line as it has not been refuted ten times before. If you have 30+ skyscraper sized ships with all their facilities, engines and materials, and a virgin Earth with all it's resources and space to utilize as you see fit, you can pretty much produce anything and build anything if given enough time. The show itself supports this point, as they were already planning to build a city in the series itself. No, they don't have infrastructure but they have the means, knowledge and manpower to build it easily. Please read the thread, or watch the show again, or something. It's getting kind of tiring. EDIT: How the hell do you think the escapees from Kobol managed to build up a population of 50 billion in two thousand years? Anonymous Zebra posted:During season 1, Ron Moore posted in this blog that the colonies regressed alot after they fled Kobol. They basically had only a few ships that landed on these 12 worlds spread across several star systems, lived for awhile on what technology they could pull off the ships, and then went native for quite some time. He mentions this to explain why their ships have a mixture of star trek tech (like jumpdrives and gravity) and 1970's submarine tech (like paper printers and big old phones). See now, they could have mentioned this in the show in like thirty seconds, and it would have made much more sense. DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Sep 6, 2012 |
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Sep 6, 2012 16:53
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DarkCrawler posted:Please read the thread, or watch the show again, or something. It's getting kind of tiring. I think it's pretty tiring how this is the "let's run hating the finale into the ground" thread.
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Sep 6, 2012 20:13
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Sub Rosa posted:I think it's pretty tiring how this is the "let's run hating the finale into the ground" thread. Oh, it's been ran to the ground ages ago. I think we are at subterranean level right now. To be fair I didn't start it this time.
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Sep 6, 2012 21:14
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DarkCrawler posted:I really don't understand why you keep toting this line as it has not been refuted ten times before. Because it hasn't and you're a loving retard. Edit: I just realized you said it hasn't been refuted. 
LooseChanj fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Sep 6, 2012 |
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Sep 6, 2012 22:29
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Let's go full circle and start back at how,  "There was too much relgion in BSG!" 
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Sep 6, 2012 22:49
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truth masseuse posted:Let's go full circle and start back at how, All this has happened before...
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Sep 6, 2012 23:04
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DarkCrawler posted:Are you really saying that it makes sense that the out of the millions, if not billions of refugees that fled to Twelve Colonies, nobody wrote down what happened? Nobody had a basic computer or PDA or a typewriter? They had spaceships but not pen and paper? Are you aware how quickly language changes, how war can make languages lost and such? Language even 100 years ago is confusing as hell for modern people. Now think of the wars between the colonies before unification, the different languages therein and the loss of language which is inevitable. So yes, it makes sense when you think about it.
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Sep 7, 2012 00:08
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LooseChanj posted:Because it hasn't and you're a loving retard. No, it has been, you just mysteriously run away from the thread whenever you get a reply on that point. Literally every time. I can drag out any of them if you would care to reply this time? Friendly Factory posted:Are you aware how quickly language changes, how war can make languages lost and such? Language even 100 years ago is confusing as hell for modern people. Now think of the wars between the colonies before unification, the different languages therein and the loss of language which is inevitable. So yes, it makes sense when you think about it. "Confusing as hell for modern people" meaning "we have literally hundreds of thousands of written works of every kind from hundred years ago, in countless of languages, that anyone can read free from public library". gently caress, we have people who can read and speak dead languages. And we already have proof that the Colonials can read the language of Kobol and translate it - the Scrolls of Pythia. So no, it really does not make that much sense at all.
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Sep 7, 2012 09:04
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I still find myself agreeing with DarkCrawler about this although it's not worth getting ridiculously wound up about it whichever view you take. The fact is it's a bit of an inconsistency with the show and, however much you love it (and I love it a lot), it doesn't take away from that to admit it. More cases in point from our own history:
I still find it ridiculous to think that, out of all the people who fled Kobol, no-one brought any sort of documentation of their culture with them or if they did it perished. People (especially the religious, professionals and intellectuals) would bring important texts. Two thousand years is not long enough to lose all of that, and saying the culture regressed isn't enough. That's precisely what happened with Rome - it was a huge empire which imposed its culture on everyone it ruled, it collapsed, the culture regressed (in the UK we pretty much went back to hitting each other with rocks for the next 500 years) and then, as people and society advanced up to and past the levels seen during the Empire, the details were rediscovered. Saying "yes but the Romans wrote an unusual amount down" is silly because when it comes to Kobol we're talking about a culture which was roughly equivalent to where we're at now. What we churn out makes the Roman documentation look like scribbles on the back cover of a notebook. rolleyes fucked around with this message at 10:38 on Sep 7, 2012 |
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Sep 7, 2012 10:28
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DarkCrawler posted:"Confusing as hell for modern people" meaning "we have literally hundreds of thousands of written works of every kind from hundred years ago, in countless of languages, that anyone can read free from public library". gently caress, we have people who can read and speak dead languages. The point is that it doesn't matter how they lost their history, but it would have been a less interesting show if in the miniseries Baltar had stopped Caprica Six from putting cylon code on the military mainframe because they already knew about the possibility of organic cylons due to their histories from Kobol about the 13th tribe, and took precautions against infiltration by them.
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Sep 7, 2012 14:38
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rolleyes posted:I still find myself agreeing with DarkCrawler about this although it's not worth getting ridiculously wound up about it whichever view you take. I'm not wound up, I just think DarkCrawler is a drooling idiot. Millions or billions survived the war on Kobol? Gimme a fuckin' break. Drivel, like everything else he says. I'm glad it came up again, because I've got a new appreciation for Lee's motivations in the whole back to nature thing. It wasn't about throwing everything away so that it'd take longer for the cycle to start again, it was about taking a different path and developing culturally and spiritually without the technology so that when humanity eventually did recreate AI it would be mature enough to handle them properly. It was a story, a work of fiction intended to make a statement. It was not a documentary or even a speculative what would happen if.
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Sep 7, 2012 15:30
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LooseChanj posted:I'm glad it came up again, because I've got a new appreciation for Lee's motivations in the whole back to nature thing. It wasn't about throwing everything away so that it'd take longer for the cycle to start again, it was about taking a different path and developing culturally and spiritually without the technology so that when humanity eventually did recreate AI it would be mature enough to handle them properly. Yeah too bad that fuckin' plan failed New theme for BSG: all plans fail.
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Sep 7, 2012 16:16
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I've kind of accepted that for BSG to work you have to accept that everyone in that universe is remarkably stupid and most have absolutely no concern in either the future nor the past. It works. Lee said "Screw it, lets hope for the best" and everyone shrugged and went along with it because no one in that universe had ever uttered the phrase "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." I mean, even the folks who went on about the scrolls were seen as crazy religious nuts. So I've taken to just assuming history isn't a course taught in Colonial schools and the only history people get is through religion. And I can only imagine my disdain for "history" if it was just "intelligent design".
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Sep 7, 2012 16:33
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:Yeah too bad that fuckin' plan failed Huh? It was left ambiguous. STAC Goat posted:I've kind of accepted that for BSG to work you have to accept that everyone in that universe is remarkably stupid This is almost every story ever.
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Sep 7, 2012 17:22
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STAC Goat posted:And I can only imagine my disdain for "history" if it was just "intelligent design". It's kind of hard to have objective historical fact on your origins when they're all on another planet you've never been to.
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Sep 7, 2012 17:27
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rolleyes posted:
We still don't even know for certain the reason for Julius Caesar's assassination, let alone intricate details about every territory they occupied. Even in the Roman case, which has a substantial financial and research bias, there are tons of things we don't know. As for the Dead Sea Scrolls, they were written in several languages, most of which were not dead languages. That's something completely different than finding something with little to no connection to successive generations. In Greece, which also has those biases I mentioned, there is an entire language (Linear A) which we have yet to decipher, despite hundreds of years of interest in the area of Crete. There is a second (Linear B) which we have only a basic understanding of. Linear A was used in palaces, which is generally assumed to then be something of importance. Yet we know basically nothing about the language. Without the Rosetta Stone, we may have never deciphered Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs. I'm not even saying the writers took all of this historical proof into account, because they were definitely fly by the seat of their pants writers. But it does fit regardless. vvvv This person gets it Friendly Factory fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Sep 7, 2012 |
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Sep 7, 2012 17:51
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Taking poo poo written thousands of years ago ignoring the context surrounding them (who wrote them, where they were located, what they were) and taking it as Historical Truth is 
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Sep 7, 2012 19:41
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Turns out it was historically true (i.e. Battlestar is not real life). e: I basically mean that while the show is chock full of allegory, the parallels remain echoes. One huge reason it's segregated from our experiences is that very early on (definitively by "Hand of God," I'd say), the story is firmly identified as existing within a deterministic universe. We don't have that kind of certainty, so it's important to understand that assumption when analyzing the show's socio-political dynamics. Kull the Conqueror fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Sep 7, 2012 |
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Sep 7, 2012 20:48
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Blame it all on some mass extinction event that didn't quite kill everyone
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Sep 8, 2012 00:01
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It's also worth pointing out we know little about life on Kobol. All the references to gods and lords of Kobol suggests that the humans who left may not have been near the top of the ranking in knowledge.
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Sep 8, 2012 03:03
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Senor Tron posted:It's also worth pointing out we know little about life on Kobol. All the references to gods and lords of Kobol suggests that the humans who left may not have been near the top of the ranking in knowledge. I like to pretend that the only ones who escaped were a handful of idiots who had no idea how anything around them actually worked, other than "tell the ship where I want to go and it takes me there". When they settled the new colonies, poo poo turned all Dark Ages for a while and they regressed substantially, and it took about 1500 years for them to rediscover their ancestors' technology (because the original Kobol refugees had themselves a Lee-esque idiot in charge who thought it would be a good idea to bury all their ships when they landed so they wouldn't be tempted to go back or something stupid like that). Another couple of hundred years for them to fully understand it and build on it, eventually they make crazy robots and all hell breaks loose. edit: but wait, were they flying back and forth between the Twelve Colonies the whole time? Because if they managed to hold onto interplanetary travel tech the whole time but not a story or two about the evil robots they fled... 
Gatekeeper fucked around with this message at 05:53 on Sep 8, 2012 |
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Sep 8, 2012 05:49
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LooseChanj posted:Huh? It was left ambiguous. I do not see our society as being particularly more culturally or "spiritually" advanced than that of the Colonies. Therefore, if the plan to break the cycle depends on us somehow further developing these traits before attempting to create AI again, I'd say there's a likelihood that the plan as intended has failed. That said, it's entirely possible that we (or at least the us as depicted in the finale) will not succumb to AI revolt: it's possible that, rather than become sufficiently enlightened as to not mistreat AIs in the future, we have instead become sufficiently paranoid and oppressive that developed AIs will never be able to rebel against us (or at least succeed in doing so).
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Sep 8, 2012 07:10
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LooseChanj posted:Huh? It was left ambiguous. I dunno, it was strongly hinted by that ending montage that our Roombas and Aismos will one day rise up against us. The only way I see out of it is that in watching Caprica the Colonials didn't seem to have a lot of social dialogue about the ethics of roboslavery; the debate didn't seem to exist in their culture. Most of them, Daniel being a brilliant example, had a very arrogant view of how to treat robots and AI. Whereas in our society the argument has been going on for a hundred years, well before we've invented any realistic AI, going back to Metropolis and Asimov. This could be the only indicator Lee's plan worked, but it was never explicitly said in the finale so it's all my conjecture at this point. Also I don't understand why people ITT are all  "Pshaw, those silly Colonials thinking there were actual GODS walking around on Kobol! Whatta bunch of primitive superstitious rubes."Did you miss the part of the finale where it was revealed that there were actual supernatural beings walking around in universe? There very well could have been Lords of Kobol walking amongst men.
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Sep 8, 2012 09:26
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Astroman posted:I dunno, it was strongly hinted by that ending montage that our Roombas and Aismos will one day rise up against us. And here I was thinking that it was strongly hinted that they might not. Astroman posted:the Colonials didn't seem to have a lot of social dialogue about the ethics of roboslavery There was outright bigotry and an evident belief in the inferiority of AI. Imagine if our society was confronted with actual artificial intelligence, there would at least be some sort of debate. For the colonials, even when confronted with indistinguishable from human cylons, were dismissive to the point of bitter contempt.
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Sep 8, 2012 12:42
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LooseChanj posted:There was outright bigotry and an evident belief in the inferiority of AI. Imagine if our society was confronted with actual artificial intelligence, there would at least be some sort of debate. For the colonials, even when confronted with indistinguishable from human cylons, were dismissive to the point of bitter contempt. That's one reason I loved Caprica, it really helped to flesh out the society. Although I did also like the matrix parts, they helped to build the idea of this decant Colonial society, while serving to question whether given a similar virtual reality we'd use it any differently.
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Sep 8, 2012 13:07
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LooseChanj posted:I'm not wound up, I just think DarkCrawler is a drooling idiot. Millions or billions survived the war on Kobol? Gimme a fuckin' break. Drivel, like everything else he says. I've really just lost track of what you are actually trying to argue. If at least millions did not survive the war on Kobol, how do the colonies have a population of fifty billion only two thousand years later? Then you attempt to justify your defense of the finale by saying that the people who left Kobol had the same situation, only their ships. How exactly is population growth of that gigantic magnitude (even if they had several billion people left) without modern medicine, food production, and other such things brought by industry. In fact we know that there were inter-colonial wars, cultural exchange and such, which tells us that they were able to retain their space flight capabilities. This seems to tell us that surprise, if you have gigantic skyscraper ships and untapped resources of a habitable planet in front of you (much less twelve of them) it is effortless to build a modern society. It's like you create this elaborate fiction - actually ignoring what the show itself tells or shows us - in your head just to make yourself believe that the finale and the show's mythos makes complete sense and is carefully planned. We already know that the writers pretty much made it up on the fly, they have said as much. You are just probably going to insult me instead of replying (again), but I'd really like you to at least enlighten me on these strange leaps of logic you are doing here. DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Sep 8, 2012 |
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Sep 8, 2012 21:21
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Man, you take obtuse to a whole new level. "Elaborate fiction"? "Effortless to build a modern society"? Are you a college dropout or something? The show made these things you argue about pretty damned clear. Dumping technology was the thing which served as a catalyst for the breaking of the cycle. The ending heavily implies the cycle is broken. edit: I mean hell, at least the guy who for some reason agrees with you is being cordial. You act like an rear end and then get all uppity when someone insults you back. Friendly Factory fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Sep 8, 2012 |
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Sep 8, 2012 21:41
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Friendly Factory posted:Man, you take obtuse to a whole new level. "Elaborate fiction"? "Effortless to build a modern society"? Are you a college dropout or something? The show made these things you argue about pretty damned clear. Dumping technology was the thing which served as a catalyst for the breaking of the cycle. I...never argued that it didn't? Friendly Factory posted:The ending heavily implies the cycle is broken. The ending is pretty vague on that. It can just as easily be seen as not being broken at all. Friendly Factory posted:edit: I mean hell, at least the guy who for some reason agrees with you is being cordial. You act like an rear end and then get all uppity when someone insults you back. Not sure how I'm "acting like an rear end". I'm also not uppity about Loosechang insulting me, I'm uppity about him doing that instead of replying to me. He can call me names all he wants, I'd just like an actual answer included with the insults too. I mean you call me names and also manage to engage me on the actual content. That's appreciated. LitigiousChimp posted:Who cares how they lost their history from Kobol? Maybe the Kobol refugees deliberately suppressed their history, and only kept their religious texts because they were a bunch of nutty fundamentalists. Maybe during their trip to the colonies they had massive computer problems and lost their only copy of wikikobol. After all, didn't Galactica have to wipe their computers at one point? Maybe they were anti-ebook and only kept books on paper, but their library ship was unfortunately destroyed on the way to the Colonies. It's not really that important, but they could have just as well written a way for them to lose their history that doesn't make them look like idiots. That's my problem with the finale too - not the fact that they lost the tech, but the fact that instead of writing a believable reason for them to lose the tech they made the characters suicidal retards instead. DarkCrawler fucked around with this message at 22:22 on Sep 8, 2012 |
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Sep 8, 2012 22:15
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Hey I just thought of a question that isn't the one we rehash over and over again! Do skinjob cylons age? Everyone seemed to be surprised to find out they could breed, which also opens up other questions about their biology. While it has been a while since my last rewatch, mostly I don't remember this being addressed. But all the regular cylons always seemed to be the same age. Are the final five a special case? I think in flashback we see a younger looking Tigh. But since Ellen is killed and resurrected on a resurrection ship, does it mean something that she was still the same looking age when resurrected?
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Sep 8, 2012 23:47
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Its never really explained but assumed they do. Otherwise the resurrection technology or being able to give birth isn't as important as they think it is.
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Sep 9, 2012 00:02
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I never did understand if they had any logic to the biology of the skinjobs. I mean, Tigh had to age, right? Or else Adama and the military would have noticed. And the Chief was military. And Anders was a celebrity sports star. So unless they all showed up out of nowhere then they had to have aged, right? But we know Adama knew Tigh for awhile, don't we? So the Final Five age? But do the rest of them? Boomer had all these memories of her past and parents but didn't someone tell her it was made up? But how long could she have been in the military to reach Lieutenant if she never aged? I never really thought to much about it because its Sci-Fi so I just assume stuff like that makes no sense and you need to suspend disbelief to make the nonsense work. But if there was an actual answer I missed it.
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Sep 9, 2012 00:13
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STAC Goat posted:So the Final Five age? But do the rest of them? One of the Leobens says they were going to stay on Earth 2 with the Colonials until they "pass into God's hands", which pretty much says to me that yeah, they age and eventually die.
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Sep 9, 2012 00:47
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I guess another question that follows along would be how many relative years did the Five experience in the 2000 years between Earth getting nuked and when they got to the colonies. They were traveling sub-light but really fast so time was passing slower for them, but how much slower? I guess that is a place to start. How old does Tigh look to you all in the flashback in Sometimes a Great Notion? I think maybe he looks a bit younger, but he looks too old to just say that he was once that age and he has gotten older to the point that he looks just a bit older in the main series. Especially when you consider how much more substantially younger he looks in the flashback to when he met Adama in Scattered. And if resurrecting resets your age, why would Ellen look the same age when she resurrects in No Exit, but Tigh look younger? Sub Rosa fucked around with this message at 01:34 on Sep 9, 2012 |
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Sep 9, 2012 01:28
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