My next issue with the portrayal of the Cylons continues with the idea that these superior beings who can reanimate themselves and roam the galaxy with FTL spaceships (which are themselves sentient) want to spend most of their time kicking humanity’s behind into extinction – which they almost did.

The humans who were left, a mere 40,000 or so with only one battlestar (Pegasus was off hiding in the beginning) and a bunch of other non-combat spaceships were not a serious match for the Cylons, who were able to wipe out twelve worlds and billions of humans almost at once. The remaining humans only survived because the series demands dictated so. In reality the Cylons more than probably would have won and any remaining humans would not be worth their trouble to hunt down and destroy.

But would an AI species want to squash humanity as its first priority? If we go by Hollywood and lots of old SF stories, yes, these beings who will probably know more in an instant than our whole species will figure out in a lifetime want nothing better to do than send out human-looking machines to hunt us down or turn us into batteries.

As I said in Part 1 of my diatribe in this thread, an intelligence with superior processes may actually want to do something a bit more interesting than waste its time squashing us, unless of course we attack it, and then I have the feeling that unless the AI has no access to anything it can use as a defensive weapon, it will handle that problem with ease (See the 1970 film The Forbin Project for more on that one).

Now about the supernatural elements of the final BSG episode: I suppose it is the right of the series to do whatever it wants with its characters and maybe I am too caught up in the idea that this was supposed to be a SCIENCE fiction series on an alleged SCIENCE fiction channel, yet it seems that some of the main characters were not mere mortals or even hallucinations after all.

Kara Thrace (aka Starbuck), it turns out, was only a ghost in the episodes after her body was found inside her crashed Viper. The ultimate purpose of her whole life seems to have been giving the Galactica the magic code to help them hyperjump to our Earth and then disappear into… wherever.

At least we are supposed to presume Kara is a ghost. I could make this science fictiony and say that she was a mass hallucination (Oh Zeus, imagine if BSG had turned out to be just a dream ala Dallas or a daydream ala Saint Elsewhere!) or an advanced being sent to help humanity survive. At least this would make some kind of sense, because if Kara was an actual supernatural ghost then she was a lot more solid and “real” than most ghosts we ever hear about.

And then we have those mysterious versions of Baltar and Number 6, who it turns out were “angels”, or so they were called. Now of course it wouldn’t take much for an advanced ETI to do things that would fool us talking monkeys with car keys to think they were indeed supernatural angels come from a cloud-covered and harp-invested Heaven, so they could be this and still stay within the bounds of our reality. And they seem to have a boss who does not like being called God, though he certainly seems to act like one (and Baltar referred to this boss as a male).

Tell me if I got this wrong here, but I am under the strong impression that this God or whoever orchestrated the whole Cylons kicking humanity’s behind mass genocide to teach them a “lesson”, which was to throw away all their centuries of achievement and go live in a field and make babies. I guess it is okay for other intelligences to become like deities and do whatever they want to lesser beings, though. Great message, thanks.

And speaking of Baltar and Number 6 – so these two conspire to help bring about the downfall of humanity with entire civilizations destroyed with nuclear bombs and billions of people killed, and their “punishment” is to happily live together in an idyllic setting and grow crops. Nice lesson, godlike beings – thanks!

One more item: After Starbuck’s magic jump from the Cylon base near the black hole to Edenish Earth, Adama (hey, Adama and Eve!) comments that they went one million light years from where they were to where they are now. Assuming he was not just exaggerating like most of us often do to make a point (“I’ve told you a million times not to do that!”), just where the heck in the Universe were they?

Assuming they were in the Milky Way galaxy, which is a mere 100,000 light years across, I don’t know of any place they could have come from 1 million light years away to reach Earth. The Small and Large Magellanic Clouds aren’t nearly that far from us and Andromeda (aka Messier 31) is almost 3 million light years away. Maybe there is a galaxy made of dark matter at the right spot in intergalactic space the Galactica came from, but their galaxy seemed pretty well lit to me, if lacking in aliens at least. But there was celestial evidence in the series that they were in the Milky Way, or at least a version of it resembling our stellar island.

One blog writer postulated that the Colonials and Cylons come from an alternate reality and that when the Galactica made its hyperjump so near to the black hole that they were “warped” into our Universe and conveniently right next to a planet compatible with their biology. Oh, wouldn’t you just LOVE to know what the coordinates Starbuck plugged into the FTL computer were all about! In any event, while that idea is still a lot of iffy physics, it can’t be much worse than coming from a million light years in a galaxy only one-tenth as big. And the “angels” did say that the planet Adama and company settled on was not the “real” Earth (that one was the one they found as a radioactive mess).

For a nice detailed discussion of the whole idea about Hera being the Mitochondrial Eve of our reality, visit here:

http://sciencefictionbiology.blogspot.com/2009/03/mother-of-us-all.html

And why is it we humans can't ever seem to get a jump start on evolution and civilization without help from beyond?