More Battlestar Galactica stuff

[annathepiper]

This is a non-spoiler thread, and not specific to one version or another of the series.

solarbird and I were discussing tonight what we know about the Twelve Colonies, if we can establish (in either series) that all of the colonies are in fact planets. 'Cause twelve inhabitable worlds in one system? Does seem kind of odd--though Dara also has pointed out to me that scientifically speaking, we don't know really what's odd and what isn't for a solar system!

We got into talking about scenarios involving some of the Colonies being inhabitable moons around gas giants as opposed to planets themselves... and even a scenario where the system's star is in fact a binary. Dara says, as we have just re-watched the theatrical release of a BG movie that got glommed together from the first few episodes and it's fresh in her memory, that we do even see a double sun in the background of one of the scenes.

If the Colonies' system happened to have a scenario similar to what got played with in 2010, where Jupiter gets ignited into a second star, then this could give us a teeny tiny second star. Some of the worlds could be orbiting the primary, some orbiting the secondary. We also don't even know if all of the Colonies are supposed to be on what Star Trek would call Class M planets, do we? So we might have some Colonies on worlds where life there has to be maintained by pressure domes or whatever.

Also, I'm trying to figure out if we've had all of the Colonies named in the various episodes--again, of either series--and if so, what the proper spellings of the names are. I know that the planet names are derived from the twelve signs of the Zodiac, and I couldn't remember all of them--and I wasn't certain how you'd derive planet names from one or two of them, either. Such as, say, Cancer.

Discuss!

Comments

[wildshadowstar.livejournal.com]

It's been some time since I've watched any Star Trek, but weren't other type of planets than Type M able to support other types of life forms than huminoid. Also, since I haven't joined the BG bandwagon, I don't know if there is even more than one type of species.

[annathepiper]

In the original version, we do see alien life forms--not many, but a few. There are at least three, if you count the race that created the Cylons; Dara says that in the original series, the Cylons are presumed to have been created by another species, against whom they eventually rebelled. Plus, we see at least two other non-human species fairly early on.

In the new series, we have seen exactly zero alien species so far, and the Cylons were created by humanity.

[solarbird]

The Twelve Colonies are all human worlds, settled by a people originally from a planet called Kobol.

In the original series, they had a bunch of other alien species hanging around. None yet this time, though.

[shikyrie.livejournal.com]

If the Colonies' system happened to have a scenario similar to what got played with in 2010, where Jupiter gets ignited into a second star, then this could give us a teeny tiny second star.

Would be neat having a second sun, though if Jupiter were to ignite and become one, what would become of us? If earth survived the transformation, would it orbit in a figure 8, or if it would simply orbit both... would it alter the length of our day? It would inevitably alter the length of our year (we'd either have to add days to our months or just create new months... What would be good names for new months? Neotember? Afterdark?) And lets not forget having to wait longer to celebrate our birthdays... it boggles the mind.. yeep!

[annathepiper]

You're assuming that Earth would orbit Jupiter as well as Sol--which is not the case. I haven't read 2063, the next book after 2010, but Dara says that Arthur C. Clarke DID do the math, and there would be no appreciable effect on Earth in this scenario. I don't remember one, at least, from my very vague memories of the end of 2010.

See, the thing is, Jupiter in that story turned into a star--but it was a very small star, and still far enough away from Earth that Sol's gravitational influence remained dominant. Earth is 93,000,000 miles out from the Sun. According to this web page about Jupiter, Jupiter ranges between 460 and 507 million miles out. So Earth's much closer to Sol than it is to Jupiter.

From what I remember from the book, Jupiter didn't actually get that much bigger, so at its distance from the Earth, it had no way of affecting Earth's usual orbital patterns.

[wrog]

I'm not sure it was ever actually made clear in the old series where the Cylons came from

[wrog]

I had always assumed it was 12 distinct solar systems and don't recall seeing anything in the original show to contradict this. I mean, yes, that gets a bit dicey (in terms of being able to have actual commerce and stuff) if you don't actually have FTL, but they were never anywhere near that fastidious about the science.

(or, if it matters that much, you could have them in a globular cluster where everything's all close together anyway).

[wrog]

the key point is that gravity depends only on the mass distribution and if spherical symmetry is maintained then even the distribution doesn't really matter. Jupiter could collapse into a black hole (*), expand to twice its size, transmute itself into a giant plastic beachball filled with liquid water, whatever,... and as long as its mass stayed the same then even its own moons will continue in their orbits exactly as if nothing had happened.

There isn't really a whole lot of math to do either. Inverse-square fields obey Gauss's Law:

for any arbitrary surface, the sum of the gravitational flux (g times area) over that surface is 4πG times the mass contained within.

And if you have spherical symmetry, then you just pick a whole mess of concentric spheres enclosing everything and you're done -- symmetry means the force has to be the same everywhere on a given sphere. 4πGM/4πr² = GM/r² and as long as all the mass is contained within the innermost sphere, you don't have to care what its radial distribution actually is.

This is also how you get that the gravity inside of a massive hollow spherical shell is zero, just in case you were wondering.

(... Well okay, to be fair, there is a fair amount of work in proving that inverse-square fields obey Gauss's Law, but Gauss already did that part ...)

(*) and yes, life is a bit different once you bring Einstein into the picture, but not that much.

F-list surfer and BG(OS) fan

[cirith-ungol.livejournal.com]

Your entry title caught my eye and got me curious :)

It turns out that Richard Hatch (Apollo) owns a site at www.battlestargalactica.com which has some linkings to a few reference sites. From the look I took, they did not bother to come up with names for all of the planets. In fact, a lot of the background was ignored, since it wasn't a big priority for series of the time.

Double suns have the potential to give some really f'ed up orbital paths, as I recall from an astronomy class.

[annathepiper]

I'm pretty sure that even in the original series, the Colonies were in the same system. In the theatrical-cut DVD Dara and I have, Tigh has a line to Adama about "inner and outer planets" (I forget the exact wording, but inner and outer planets are definitely mentioned) when the Galactica gets word about the attack on the Colonies.

However, the science in the original is indeed quite iffy. ;) And adding FTL into the mix in the new one is one of the things I really like.

[annathepiper]

Cool, thanks for spelling that out, Roger. I have only the basic beginning clues about astrophysics, so all this stuff is nifty and new to me. :)

Re: F-list surfer and BG(OS) fan

[annathepiper]

Hi there and welcome. :)

Yeah, I never remembered much backstory for the Colonies being developed in the original series, and so far we haven't seen too much in the new one. Which to some degree is fine--I mean, the story's all about blowing the hell out of the system anyway, and the focus is on what happens after. But what can I say, I get all geeky about worldbuilding details for any good storyline!

I know so far in the new series we've got Caprica (clearly important, as on-camera action has happened there and continues to do so), and we've heard or seen references to maybe five or six other worlds.

[annathepiper]

Dara's memory on this is better than mine, and it's been ages since I've seen any of the original series episodes. But she was telling me about how in an earlier version of the script for that series, the Cylons had in fact been created by humans. And they ditched that in favor of making the Cylons having been created by some other species.

It intrigues me that the new series went back to the Cylons-created-by-humans concept.

[annathepiper]

Yeah, if you assume that any one of the colonies is an independent world (vs. a scenario where multiple colonies are on the same planet), then there would be no difference in colony names vs. world names. :) I'm pretty certain that in the original, though, all twelve colonies were in the same system--because in the theatrical-cut DVD Dara and I have, which we recently re-watched, Tigh has a line to Adama just after they find out about the destruction of the Colonies about the "inner planets" and "outer planets".

[wrog]

Hate to say this, but "inner and outer planets" could mean just about anything, especially if we've got viable interstellar commerce, never mind what happens if the context of discussion is political rather than astrophysical.

If it's the case that inhabited planets are what matter and the overwhelming majority of solar systems that people talk about have one inhabited planet, then people could easily fall into speaking of planets and solar systems synonymously, taking for granted that any given planet that might be the subject of discussion will have an associated system complete with star, asteroid belts, other planetary bodies, and whatever other crap,...

just as, when people speak of "New York", you need some context to know whether they're talking about the borough, the county, the city or the state (all separate entities) and the fact that New York City has a whole host of associated suburbs in different states or reservoirs located hundreds of miles away from the city is going to be irrelevant to most discussions

or perhaps a better example,

people will speak of having visited "Hawaii" and never set foot on the actual Island of Hawaii. They really mean Oahu, or maybe just the city of Honolulu (which is only 1/2 the island) or maybe just Waikiki beach (which IIRC is a detached bit of land and so could perhaps be considered an "island" of its own, except that no one thinks of it that way)...
...
and if there are hundreds of other islands in the Hawaii chain -- mostly useless piles of rock -- stretching halfway across the Pacific, or if the State of Hawaii properly consists of some subset of these islands, or if at any given time there are hundreds of people tooling around in tourboats, fishing boats, or seakayaks -- and thus not located on any island at all, this all never even comes up.

And what "inner" and "outer" might mean is always going to be highly context-dependent.

If I were talking about Asimov's galactic empire, I might speak of Trantor (the capital city/planet) and its nearby "inner planets" of the galactic core vs. Terminus and the "outer planets" on the galactic fringe, thousands of light-years away.

If we were in a B5-type scenario where everyone is moving around via FTL jumpgates, then all bets are off, since the distance metric that matters is the hyperspace one rather than the normal-space one, e.g., maybe there's a really easy jumpgate route from Earth to a planet in the Andromeda galaxy [2 million LY away] and there's no corresponding easy route to Tau Ceti [10 LY away], so the former is an "inner planet" that only takes a few days to get to while the latter is an "outer planet" that takes months or years to get to.

... imagine rearranging the US map so that cities are located according to their airfare distances. You have a small cluster in the middle with NYC, Chicago, LA and SFO and all of these random places like Charleston, WV and Rapid City, SD located out on the fringes.

Or listen to a right-wing politican for a few minutes and suddenly it's Kansas City that's in the "heartland" and Boston is way the fuck out there...

[wrog]

I suspect even in a spacefaring society less than 1% of the population will have beginning clues about astrophysics (cf. number of people in present-day society who have clues about oceanography or any idea how to navigate a ship from place to place if they happened to be stuck on one in the middle of the ocean; even the number of people who could find Seattle/pick-your-favorite-spot on a globe if their lives depended on it is smaller than you'd think -- hell it even boggles me the number of people who get confused by road maps)...

[solarbird]

I'm pretty sure old-series Adama talks about how the Cylons were created by another civilization as servants, who then rebelled, at some point.

The interesting bit is that originally, in the first version, they were going to have been created by humanity - exactly as is the case in the new series. Then they became simple aliens for a while (biological under the chrome), and then finally the creation of that race. So the new series is arguably more faithful to the original concept than the original series was. Which is kind of funny, in a dumb way. ^_^

[solarbird]

It's very specifically one "star system." It's referred to as such on camera at one point.

[howlinhobbit.livejournal.com]

even the number of people who could find Seattle/pick-your-favorite-spot on a globe if their lives depended on it is smaller than you'd think -- hell it even boggles me the number of people who get confused by road maps)...

My sweetie (the Fallen Angel for the three of you out in the big world that read my blog) came home from working at Pike Place Market a week or so ago and told me about this lady who came up with a map in her hand. The map had both Pike Place Market and Westlake Center clearly marked and she asked the FA how she could get to Westlake Center.

So she (the FA) points to the map and says, "you're here" and then traces her finger to the proper street and tells the lady to go there turn left and walk a few blocks til she sees Westlake Center.

Blank look.

So now the FA points up the street in the proper direction, tells the lady how many blocks to walk (like one and a half), turn left and then walk until she sees Westlake Center.

Blank look.

What do you do?

HH

[wrog]

well fuck, that's just stupid, then.

but then, why am I surprised?

[annathepiper]

Yow. That's... impressive. I wonder what exactly it would have taken to explain to the woman where to go, in a manner that would have made sense. o.x

On the other hand, just considering it makes my brain hurt.

[wrog]

cry

[annathepiper]

*giggle* Well rationalized, indeed.

In the original series, the Cylons and the humans were both pretty much black-and-white in motivation. The Cylons were evil. The humans were not. "Because they're like that" seemed to be the primary reason for the Cylons going around invading their neighbors; we even hear Adama delivering lines about how the Cylons have invaded other systems and the Colonies have gone toe-to-toe with the Cylons on behalf of those systems. We never know WHY the Cylons are doing it--just that they are. And that some of the survivors once the fleet takes off have at least some measure of hope that if they mind their own business, the Cylons will leave them alone.

But we don't ever know why the Cylons want to completely obliterate the human race, aside from "they're just like that".

In the new series, it's pretty heavily implied that the Cylons are pretty much out to wipe out the human race specifically because they are rebelling against their creators. No Cylon has come right out and said that yet, but it's pretty heavily implied. So if they happen to take resources along the way, that's probably frosting on the cake. :) We've certainly seen that at least one of the Colonial worlds has been occupied by the Cylon invaders.

[annathepiper]

Very true! Just thinking about all the times I've seen or heard tell about people who are geographically clueless, I could easily extrapolate that out. All most citizens of a spacefaring culture would need to know would be 'get on ship, it goes fast, I get to another planet'.

[annathepiper]

Hate to say this, but "inner and outer planets" could mean just about anything...

Considering the relative lack of complexity in the original series, I doubt that this meant anything but exactly what Tigh said: "inner and outer planets". "Of a solar system" is the most obvious conclusion I can draw...

Though okay, I can also see it working in the context of "inner worlds of a galaxy" vs. "outer worlds of a galaxy". Just from the number of times I've seen "core worlds" vs. "outer rim" worlds show up in various SF works.

People will speak of having visited "Hawaii" and never set foot on the actual Island of Hawaii. They really mean Oahu, or maybe just the city of Honolulu...

... or anywhere in the state of Hawaii. :) Since that label applies to both the big island and the state at large. Granted, though, that people most often visit Oahu.