The Science of Battlestar Galactica 465
gearystwatcher writes "TV science adviser Kevin Grazier talks about getting rid of the Trek babble in Battlestar Galactica. From the article: "Grazier's job was to help keep the technology and science real and credible — even when there were some massive leaps. Grazier didn't just make sure that there was a reason for what we saw — bullets instead of lasers — but also that when the science bit did break into the open, it was more mind-blowing than the writers could have conceived — such as when the humans discover their mechanical Cylon persecutors have evolved to look human.'"
Doesn't matter what he did (Score:5, Insightful)
The networks keep canceling all good TV shows and instead keep crap like American Idol and 90210 alive.
Re:Doesn't matter what he did (Score:4, Funny)
Someone still hasn't gotten over the cancellation of Caprica.
Re:Doesn't matter what he did (Score:5, Insightful)
He's right though. It's not just about Caprica, it's about TV shows which require a minimum of brain cells to watch.
Reaper (CW), Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (Fox), Better Off Ted (ABC), Heroes (NBC), Caprica (SyFy)... I've heard rumors about Stargate Universe being cancelled too.
Reaper was a lot funnier than Chuck. The guy doing the devil was hilarious and hated at the same time. I hope he gets a devil role in a future movie.
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles may have not had a lot of fans, but those who followed the story really want a proper ending/tie-in with the movies storylines.
Better Off Ted had a lot of good nerdy jokes and references in its first season but went a bit too mainstream for its second season, that's why ratings went down. You can see it happen with the fake Veridian commercials. The first ones are clever (friendship: it's like stealing), the last ones are just stupid.
Heroes... why did they cancel that? Is there not enough viewers that can follow a story told in a few years instead of a few minutes?
Caprica... we know what happened, the story was about filling in the details, which we'll never know. It sure didn't get cancelled because of the decors, special effects or actors IMHO.
Stargate Universe was slow to start (hey, the damn ship was falling apart), too bad too many viewers stopped watching. Their loss may end up being everyone's loss.
And those are just from memory, I'm sure a lot more good shows have been cancelled in the last decade.
Re:Doesn't matter what he did (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Heroes
Because, after a truly phenomenal first season, the last season or two was quite dreadful. It seemed clear that they didn't have a story to tell - you seem to assume they were really building towards something of note - like the end of the first season, opening of the second. It sure didn't feel like that to me.
As a fan that watched every single episode, I thought it was ready to be cancelled.
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Indeed. After the first season and especially in the third season I got a bit tired of the "Ooh Sylar is bad!", "Ooh now Sylar is in a suit and Bennetts partner!", "Ooh now Sylar is bad again!", "Ooh the Petrellis are Sylars parents!", "Ooh no they lied!". Bennett is bad, good, bad, good, bad, good. It was all a bit World Wrestling Federation. Then the powers. Peter has all the powers. Then Peter has no powers. Then Peter can change powers but just one at a time. Hiro has a power
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If they weren't making it up as they went along they sure did a good job of covering that up.
Heroes was a TV series made to be like a comic book by fans of comic books. Looked at the world of comic books lately? I believe that at least one major publisher is now on their third universal reset, because they ran out of plots and want to go revisit the old good ones and you can't do that if he's already done it! Heroes thus became a sort of accidental meta-parody of comic books...
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I may be wrong, but I blamed this on the "Lost" phenomenon. With everyone and his brother pretending that inserting something random into the story was deep and insightful, they thought that it would work for them. The "there's a deeper conspiracy" idea works well, but you have to actually have a deeper conspiracy in mind at the start and stick with it. The good series know the ending before they start. The bad ones just have a single cool idea and then flail around once they've given you the single coo
Re:Doesn't matter what he did (Score:5, Insightful)
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I wouldn't say any of those represents shows that 'require a minimum of brain cells to watch. I don't see the mark of intellectualism really applying to any of those.
Reaper was funny and the Devil really carried it, but it did kinda go in circles in fairly short order. Easily forgivable though, since it was funny and going around in circles isn't such a horrible thing when a series doesn't take itself seriously.
Terminator was somewhat interesting, but spread what they had too thin. It's the mark of many
Re:Doesn't matter what he did (Score:4, Insightful)
Farscape and Firefly
Re:Doesn't matter what he did (Score:5, Insightful)
Not sure I agree on Universe. The last couple of episodes make me suspect the writers have lost their way. Look we don't really need the girl having an alien hiding inside. There are lots of other loose plot threads on which they could move forward without having to add yet another that they'll abandon anyway in a few more episodes.
And let's face it, it's not reasonable for Rush to be able to keep the control room secret for this long. The others have *seen* the control room in the gate ship. They *know* what a control room looks like and probably the most likely location. It's contrived and totally out of character for Young to not have Rush followed either physically or electronically at all times at this point.
SGU is becoming uninteresting because they're taking small plot points and obsessing over them in episode after episode after episode. I'm still watching for now, but if something doesn't happen in another couple of episodes, I'll drop it, just as I dropped Caprica. Which, incidentally, had all the good parts in the pilot and then was excruciatingly boring afterwards.
This is not about a show being intelligent. It's about a show having too much dead time and too many contrived conflicts designed to fill same. It's about writers who (a) don't have a story arc and are just wandering, or (b) have a story arc, but are trying to stretch one season of story to three seasons to guarantee income from reruns.
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My problem with SGU was that it started with the premise of this population of people isolated and having to survive on their own, and then instantly killed it with the communication stones bringing them into regular contact with Earth. That, and SGU was meant to be a big break from the previous Stargate series', but that didn't last long either because for the season 1 finale they brought in the Lucian Alliance for a rather disastrous story arc.
Also, why is it suddenly fashionable to split seasons into tw
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I think it's a big problem with US shows, over UK ones.
US shows usually have 12-24 episodes to a series, and tend to produce them until viewing figures demand cancellation. UK series are often 6 episodes long, and tend not to be plugged to death.
At that sort of low intensity, a show can stay fresh for a great many years without running out of steam.
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Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles seemed to run out of ideas halfway through the first season. Another season would've just prolonged its death. I bet they only did the last season they way they did because they knew they wouldn't have to figure out the next episode.
Stargate Universe was a bad idea from the beginning, but I admit it's getting better. I hope whoever thought we needed a series of Stargate: Relationship Drama and No Action got fired. Not to mention that the plot of almost every episode i
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Heroes went downhill pretty fast after season 1 (though season 1 was so good that it would have been really hard not to). I watched every episode and would watch more, but it ran its course and the writers seemed to run out of ideas.
Caprica never really grabbed me, though I watched it hoping it would get interesting.
Stargate Universe also never grabbed me, though I never watched any of the other Stargate shows so that's probably just my taste...
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No, it had a few weak episodes, but was generally funny and could be clever at times. The guy playing the devil was great.
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Erm, what's your problem with a T-1001?
The writers made her a T-1001 instead of a T-1000 just in case they actually did need to do something different with her, like have John try to kill her with cold and it not work. It wasn't 'merchandising', it was caring about continuity enough to use a slightly different model just in case it behaved slightly inconsistent with movie T-1000.
It's worth mentioning her number wasn't even stated on the show, as far as the viewers knew she was a T-1000, so you got your in
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Her number was staed on the show when it showed her HUD.
You were able to actually read that? Well, okay.
The problem I had with that is that the one number increment was just stupid, and something I would expect out of a merchandising tie in, not a serious show set in the universe.
All the terminators had different numbers in the series had different numbers, mainly because they were different actors. Although, strictly speaking, it's the model that's the skin, Arnold is model 101. The T-xxx designation
Re:Doesn't matter what he did (Score:5, Insightful)
The series ran until the story ended, then it ended. May god grant that happens more often.
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The series ran until the story ended, then it ended. May god grant that happens more often.
Amen, brother!
Too many people are still overwrought about cancellations of great shows, like Firefly. The thing is, if they kept riding that horse, it'd just have ended up becoming another Star Trek Voyager.
Could they have filmed another season's worth of episodes? I'm pretty sure they could have written some really excellent ones. But there likely would have been a few stinker episodes. Season 3? Not so much. By season 4, it'd still be a good show, but showing wear around the edges.
As it was, they we
Re:Doesn't matter what he did (Score:5, Insightful)
This comic [cracked.com] illustrates the subject well, I believe. I rarely see a series that goes for more than 3 or 4 seasons and is very good.
There's nothing wrong with the short form! If you write out a series to be 3 seasons, you shouldn't hurriedly try to make a fourth because the producers wanted to drop a ton of money in your pocket. Finish the three seasons and leave it at that. Hey, you could always follow up with a movie!
On the flip side, I think maybe I would rather see a good series go long and have a lot of mediocre episodes than a series go short and not be able to resolve any of its major plotlines.
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Too many people are still overwrought about cancellations of great shows, like Firefly. The thing is, if they kept riding that horse, it'd just have ended up becoming another Star Trek Voyager.
Interestingly, the better seasons in Voyager were the later ones (IIRC). People didn't like them because they 'broke convention', which IMO, means it's a good story. :)
As for Firefly, there was at least another full season of content there. Supposedly, there were 2 full seasons of plot and character advancement already developed. They had to rush it and cram it into the movie to give it some sort of 'closure', but at the same time, it fell short.
Re:Doesn't matter what he did (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it ended rather poorly, but hey, that's just my opinion.
In the science department: No, BSG wasn't as bad as star trek, but neither was it good enough to deserve acclaim. It was, by the end, about B5/Firefly level, maybe a little better in some areas and worse in a few others. To wit:
1. Unobtainium. I realize Tylium was a holdover from the original 70's BSG. But they displayed it having a range of properties that completely exclude it from being any real life element or compound. It would have been trivial to give Tylium the properties of either Deuterium or Helium-3, and simply work from the assumption that the protagonists have different words than us for the elements. Hell, "frak" already established that the writers were ready to sub in one word for another.
2. Magic. B5 and star trek have been guilty of this too. Is it too much to ask that a sci-fi series stick to a rational universe? Or at least leave sufficient ambiguity that the few supernatural events might have been natural ones instead?
3. Space combat. This one is kinda a case of rule of cool. Realistic space combat wouldn't look like much. But really, the ranges involved in BSG are much too short, both for weapons fire and for targeting/detection.
4. Living ships. Seriously, this one's been done by every major soft science fiction series in the last 15 years, and has got to stop. Living tissue has no place in spacecraft design, except the warm meatbags who fly the damn things (and possibly as part of their life support).
Other than those 4 things, the series wasn't bad, science-wise. I'll give free passes on FTL and generated gravity, as those are virtually prerequisites for the type of setting involved. It may have been the first soft sci-fi series to employ concepts like mind uploading as major plot elements. Concepts like the Galactica being minimally automated made sense in context. They actually addressed realistic details like the number of survivors dwindling and running out of resources.
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4. Living ships. Seriously, this one's been done by every major soft science fiction series in the last 15 years, and has got to stop. Living tissue has no place in spacecraft design, except the warm meatbags who fly the damn things (and possibly as part of their life support).
Once you give ships self-repair capability or a good deal of intelligence, "living" ships are a natural extension. It may be cliched beyond redemption, but it's not that great a stretch.
My personal peeve is using boat physics in space. There's a natural "up" direction, ships bank when they turn, and ships top out at a maximum speed.
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Once you give ships self-repair capability or a good deal of intelligence, "living" ships are a natural extension. It may be cliched beyond redemption, but it's not that great a stretch.
Except that's not what's being addressed here.
I will grant that a ship with sophisticated self-repair, artificial intelligence and the ability to communicate is very much like a "living ship". It also won't bleed if you shoot it, nor does it have a spongy mass of brain tissue at the controls.
The kind of living ships you're talking about, where repair nano-tech and advanced computing are invoked, is more often found in written science fiction. And is just fine as far as hard science goes.
What BSG, B5, Fars
Re:Doesn't matter what he did (Score:5, Insightful)
It also won't bleed if you shoot it,
Sure it might, likely has all sorts of fluids in it. Cooling, material transfer, hydraulics and so on. Just because it's a "living ship" does not mean it's made from the same material as life on Earth.
nor does it have a spongy mass of brain tissue at the controls.
That's a design decision, if the easiest way to make an AI is to grow one from brain tissue than why not just make that part of the ship?
It's like the writers somehow got the idea in their heads that flesh can be engineered to extreme levels of durability and regeneration, or without the limitations of conservation of matter and energy.
No, they simply don't have your limited imagination and understand that just because life on earth is made out of something that doesn't mean all life must be made of that. Plenty of great hard science fiction covering that area I should add.
It ties into a fundamental misunderstanding about the capabilities and limitations of evolution and life in general.
Life has no limitations, anything that grows and reproduces is alive. It can be made of nuetronium and eat stars. Or be made of metal and nano-machines (technically proteins are nano-machines anyway). Or maybe it breather methane. Living ships in general are described as being engineered rather than naturally evolving so I'm not sure why you even mentioned that.
Want to see a ship made or organic matter? Wooden sailboat. You'll note we make our warships out of steel, and would continue to do so even if we could make a wooden boat that healed.
Why are you imposing the arbitrary restriction of it having to be made of Earth style organic material? Life is not limited to being carbon based. Hell, even life on Earth isn't as stupid as you apparently think it is. That calcium which makes up your bones isn't particularly organic.
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Sure it might, likely has all sorts of fluids in it. Cooling, material transfer, hydraulics and so on. Just because it's a "living ship" does not mean it's made from the same material as life on Earth.
You're reaching. Recall we're talking about BSG here (and the other series that had this cliche).
The Cylon Raider brain bled actual blood. Not coolant, hydraulic fluid or any such material.
That's a design decision, if the easiest way to make an AI is to grow one from brain tissue than why not just make that part of the ship?
A brain the size of a large dog? That can be outflown by a human pilot? In a setting where they have truly mechanical AI (in the form of Cylon Centurions)? Right, that's clearly a more efficient design.
No, they simply don't have your limited imagination and understand that just because life on earth is made out of something that doesn't mean all life must be made of that. Plenty of great hard science fiction covering that area I should add... ...Why are you imposing the arbitrary restriction of it having to be made of Earth style organic material?
Because, in series like BSG/B5/Farscape/etc, the carbon based, amino acid derived nature of the living ships is cano
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You're reaching. Recall we're talking about BSG here (and the other series that had this cliche).
The Cylon Raider brain bled actual blood. Not coolant, hydraulic fluid or any such material.
Because it's a human derived body shoved into a regular ship.
A brain the size of a large dog? That can be outflown by a human pilot? In a setting where they have truly mechanical AI (in the form of Cylon Centurions)? Right, that's clearly a more efficient design.
The Centurions are shown as limited in many ways and were not trusted by the humanoid Cylons. The biological Raiders were shown to be able to regenerate (thus learn perpetually) and some could out fly humans.
Because, in series like BSG/B5/Farscape/etc, the carbon based, amino acid derived nature of the living ships is canon, meaning this isn't a question of me imposing my own "limited imagination". This is a case of the writers failing to do the research. And copying each others ideas without checking whether the copied idea made any sense in the first place.
Okay, where do they say the ships in B5 and Farscape are carbon based? In BSG the ships are perfectly mechanical aside from the pilot. In Farscape and B5 the ships are made of horribly alien materials and it's generally noted many times how ab
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I'll let slide the question of how exactly said goop was effecting the repairs.
What was in my head when I was talking bio-ships in BSG was actually more the stuff like the meat brain found inside the Cylon Raiders. That made zero sense, except insofar as it was needed for a contrived Deus Ex Machina.
Seriously, they don't even have the excuse of not possessing computers perfectly able to do the same job. The Centurions demonstrated that. Nor was this a question of having biological systems for a biologica
Re:Doesn't matter what he did (Score:4, Insightful)
It makes sense within context. In retrospect I assume since that show didn't seem to have that much planning. The centurions were outdated designs and didn't seem too capable (possibly to prevent another rebellion). The Raiders were thus designed around the newer and more capable humanoid cyclons. That meant a human type brain inside them. They're not unmanned ships or organic ships but simply ships with a specially designed hard-wired pilot. That meant that they could, for example, resurrect and as such improve in combat despite being destroyed in battle.
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Exactly. It was mentioned that the Raiders had about dog level intelligence (or higher, by the end), and were continually resurrected to learn from the mistakes that got them killed in the last fight, so they continually became deadlier fighters.
It also makes more sense to do it that way since then the fighters were able to react to situations on solo missions, rather than needing to be connected to a C&C ship, or only be able to deal with minor parameters.
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Am I the only one who felt anew the pain of circumcision when they were talking about removing the centurions' higher functions? (I suppose more like a lobotomy, but still it's removing something you were "designed" with.)
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Natural Up Direction: Okay, so in space, you don't really really truly need a natural up direction, but if you have a bunch of ships all going in the same direction, you certainly would want them all aligned to be the same way. I mean, just imagine trying to communicate if no-one cared what way they were rotated!
"Fleet! Look out on your left!" turns into:
"Jack, look out below! Paul, it's to your right! Mick, it's right in your front window sights, Tom, it's behind you!"
See why all the ships would be in a natural "up" direction? Simple communication. It's a formation for a reason.
For the fleet, of course. But there is no reason why Cylon Basestars would pop out on that same horizontal plane. That's where the natural 'up' feels dodgy to me.
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I have to give BSG a lot of credit for space combat because they did allow ships to turn 180 while still traveling in the same direction. Most space combat I've seen treats the ships like aircraft instead of rockets, so I was very pleasantly surprised.
Totally agreed on that point. And the Newtonian flight mechanics were probably the most realistic element of space combat in the re-imaged series.
And yeah, realism in this case would mean a lot of BVR combat, with the added element of total silence in space, and that's not going to create the kind of wow-factor and dramatic tension people expect. That's what I was getting at with the "rule of cool" description.
Why are you so set against (living ships)?
Well, it's partly as you said, they've been done to death. But they weren't a good idea the fir
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One of the reasons I've always liked B5... Starfuries use newtonian physics in combat.
Kinda cool that NASA asked JMS permission to use that design (was granted as long as they keep the Starfury name)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfury#Real_world_interest [wikipedia.org]
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true but there were so many pauses in the series that many stopped watching.
Seasons 4 was separated by what 9 months? more.
TV shows that are popular but the networks don't like get all sorts of random stupid things, night changes, forced show changes, etc.
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Considering the ridiculous ending that they came up with, I rather wish The One True God had aborted this series a season early.
Re:Doesn't matter what he did (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually Battlestar: The Remake stopped being good around the middle of Season Two, right around the time they found "New Caprica". After that it got ploddingly slow, even more so than it already had been, and simply became infuriating to watch; I fell asleep numerous times due to boredom and found myself constantly having to rewind to watch what I'd missed. It was only because I'd already invested two years of my life into the show, and my fervent hope they would somehow manage to go back to the exceptional quality of the mini-series and first season, that even got me to watch the final two seasons.
I shouldn't have bothered. Seeing Ron Moore turn the once scary genocidal killing machines with a plan into inept whiny melodramatic losers who couldn't plan themselves out of a paper bag, they were too busy standing around talking about their feelings for hours on end with not only themselves but also the people they wanted to kill, made it really hard to enjoy the show. It also became apparent, very quickly, that Ron Moore had no idea what the hell to do with the show after a while. Incomprehensible story lines, the large portions of cannon that were completely retconned, the bordering on incredibly stupid waits between episodes, the almost Soap Operaesque story lines all made for a show that only got worse as time went on but, like a train wreck in slow motion, really really slow motion, it was just too hard to turn away. And don't even get me started on the completely pointless 3 hour "Lord of the Rings" ending that really only had about 35-40 minutes worth of value in it.
The show was so bad it soured me on all things Battlestar: The Remake that I couldn't even stomach the idea of watching Battlestar: The Prequel (Craprica). Of course if they wait a few years and give Richard Hatch the go ahead to produce his Battlestar: The Second Coming series to continue the story of the original, I'd be all over that in a heartbeat.
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Honestly, I could have taken the show way more seriously if they had not called it Battlestar Galactica. By calling it that, they set a high bar too meet, and unfortunately, they ended up being way too cheeseball to c
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turn the once scary genocidal killing machines with a plan into inept whiny melodramatic losers who couldn't plan themselves out of a paper bag
The problem with the show is that the premise basically requires this. The Cylons are machines. Unlike humans, they don't need over a decade to go from being created to being effective, they can go into the fight straight off the production line. As they spread out, their production capacity increases. When they left human space before the start of the first episode, they would have spread out and their production capacity would have increased in proportion to the number of star systems they colonised.
there is some good stuff on showtime and HBO but w (Score:2)
there is some good stuff on showtime and HBO but we need more channels like that for shows not the same movie over and over 100 times a month at a lower cost then HBO.
Re:Doesn't matter what he did (Score:5, Insightful)
Networks are businesses: they exist to make money. Network executives are not evil men who... well, OK, they are evil, but not in the way you think: they don't say to themselves, "This show is much too intelligent, it might awaken our viewers out of their drunken stupor, cause them to realize that corporations like us are the reason for their miserable lives, and spark a revolution! Away with it!". No, what they do is say, "This show is losing money, not enough people are watching it. Away with it." That's their job.
And don't talk to me about how the Nielsen ratings don't accurately reflect viewership, and how Firefly was actually this smash hit being watched by gobs of people around the country that Fox somehow overlooked. You know how Serenity did at the box office, the movie that all the fans were supposed to go see multiple times to convince Fox to bring the show back? It didn't break even [boxofficemojo.com], even when you factor in DVD sales. You're not as numerous as you think.
If you want to complain about bad television being the norm, you need to go find people and convince them to watch your favorite show instead of { watching crap like American Idol, pirating the show off the Internet, doing intellectually-stimulating or otherwise rewarding activities besides TV }. Lousy television is their fault, not the networks', the latter is just giving people what they want.
Lord knows I don't want to sound like I'm sticking up for TV executives, but it pains me to see this same crap appear in the comments every single time, when people could actually fix the problem if they were willing to make the effort.
Frothing rant over now.
Re:Doesn't matter what he did (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't like syence fyction any more (Score:4, Funny)
it's just not the same
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Why? You don't like pro wrestling?
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I don't think that word means what you think ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, that is one sentence.
But I don't think "evolved" is applicable in this situation.
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But I don't think "evolved" is applicable in this situation.
Correct - the term they are looking for is "robo-evolved".
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But I don't think "evolved" is applicable in this situation.
Correct - the term they are looking for is "robo-evolved".
Nonsense. Robots were created, not evolved!
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But I don't think "evolved" is applicable in this situation.
Correct - the term they are looking for is "robo-evolved".
No, the term "evolve" fits quite nicely. The presumption that the world only applies to living organisms is incorrect.
Nonsense. Robots were created, not evolved!
So? According to some people, all living creatures on this planet were created, but we still evolve. If the robots are sentient and capable of modifying and or improving themselves, then they are capable of evolving as well, regardless of what point in that evolution they were "created." Even if they are not sentient, but capable of altering their own structure in response to external stimul
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Whoosh. [theinfosphere.org]
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Re:I don't think that word means what you think .. (Score:4, Informative)
I think it would be appropriate. Each subsequent generation corrected faults found in previous generations, for future generations. More of, favorable traits were maintained, and unfavorable traits were discarded.
Or the appropriate definitions [reference.com]
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Except the root claim is that BSG is somehow more scientifically accurate, which means we are talking about biological evolution, which has nothing to do with the process you describe as "evolution", which is more akin to the kind of "evolution" that takes place in manufacturing.
BSG is no more scientifically plausible than Star Trek, they just use words like "evolution" instead of "warp drive"
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BSG is no more scientifically plausible than Star Trek, they just use words like "evolution" instead of "warp drive"
I'd put the two series on par with each other, as far as bad biology and misunderstanding evolution go. Recall that Star Trek produced such unscientific crap as "Threshold", that TNG episode where they start devolving into animals and that Enterprise episode with the one species limiting the evolution of the other. BSG was similarly bad about abusing life sciences for fun and profit.
But then again, I'd challenge anyone to name a soft science fiction series that paid any mind to realistic biology, natural
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Clearly they were intelligently designed.
Exactly. (Score:2)
Although if you stick to the mythology of the series ... there may not be much difference between the two. Re-watch the final episode if you need it clarified.
mind blowing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, let's get one thing straight -- the Cylons "evolving" into human form was not "mind blowing". It just wasn't.
It looked like a shameless ploy to reduce production costs, (which it probably was) and to have a bunch of scenes with James Callis dry-humping Tricia Helfer (which got tiresome after the second or fifth time).
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Well half the series was based on the fact they the humans couldn't identify the Cylons living among them. That would be pretty hard to pull of if the Cylons were all 3m tinmen.
It might have reduced production cost, but it also gave the series most of its subject matter.
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The storylines would have been virtually unchanged if the human looking cylons had been actual human traitors and fanatic cylon sympathisers instead.
Are you kidding? Cylon sympathizers know who they are. They don't think they're humans fighting the good fight against the machines until they find out they aren't. They don't have to make a choice between what they really are and what they always thought they were. It would have been a totally different show.
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It would have been a totally different show.
Yes, and arguably a better one.
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Also, less allegory would have been had about the torture of faceless, godless enemies, and the realization that they're just the same as us, etc. etc.
It would have been a totally different show, and for the millions who enjoyed the show thoroughly (especially when discounting the ending), it would therefore have been worse.
You get +1 troll.
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You're actually describing religious or racial extremists. Imagine some people who thinks they're "chosen people" for most of their life, and then one day discover that there was a mistake
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[...]dry-humping Tricia Helfer (which got tiresome after the second or fifth time).
It most certainly did not! :P
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This is the kind of comment that deserves to go past 5. I realize a lot of people love the show but at least accept the "human" psylons were an attempt to move AWAY from sci fi and keep production costs down. The fact that it let them add a bunch more drama was just a bonus.
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So was the transporter on Star Trek. Doesn't minimize the effect it's had on real-life science since then.
Sure, because it avoided more expensive Shuttle sequences. But the fact remains that the Transporter, as implemented by Roddenberry's effects people, was way cool and added another plot dimension that otherwise would have been unavailable. I don't know what particular effect the Star Trek Transporter had on real-life science, considering that it was a very, very old idea in science-fiction even then.
Deciding to make the robots in one's production look like humans is a legitimate cost-cutting measure, I s
Oh, they meant the NEW Battlestar Galactica. (Score:5, Funny)
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I was confused there for a centon.
You still remember that show? It didn't even last a yarin.
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I was confused there for a centon.
You still remember that show? It didn't even last a yarin.
Too much feldergarb. Oh frak, where did my mouse pointer go?
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You definitely had better drugs when you were watching it. The old show has more cheese than a Man Vs Food nacho episode.
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The remake took itself far too seriously
Oh, the original took itself very seriously. Which is what makes it so incredibly hilarious, because it was a steaming pile of crap, even for 1978.
For those who haven't caught the show in 30 years (or ever), the big splashy debut episode - which Universal blew millions on - involves the robotic Cylons launching a sneak attack on the Colonies, after which the ragtag fleet led by the Galactica flees for parts unknown. Literally days later they come across Las Vegas in
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One of the pleasant surprises was Richard Hatch (Apollo in the original) coming back and doing an excellent job of playing a villain (Tom Zarek) in the new series--and then giving that villain a very deep portrayal that made him one of the most interesting characters in the series.
In comparison, Dirk Benedict whined about he didn't get to come back as a hotshot viper pilot.
"The Office" Quote (Score:2)
The beauty was in a lack of explanation! (Score:5, Insightful)
I liked BSG because they don't bother with all the techno-babble. How does an FTL drive work? They don't tell you and it doesn't matter. It just makes the spaceship go and uses up some fuel. Quite refreshing from Star Trek and their neutrino flux combobulator matrices and anti-gluon snark fields.
Re:The beauty was in a lack of explanation! (Score:4, Insightful)
I liked BSG because they don't bother with all the techno-babble. How does an FTL drive work? They don't tell you and it doesn't matter. It just makes the spaceship go and uses up some fuel. Quite refreshing from Star Trek and their neutrino flux combobulator matrices and anti-gluon snark fields.
Spoken like a true Joss Whedon fan (and yes, Firefly was one of my favorite TV shows but not for the science, because there wasn't any.)
The problem with your perspective is that if you remove the actual science from a work of science-fiction, at best you have a fantasy. Nothing wrong with that, except that for the minority like me who grew up on books by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, George O. Harrison and other masters of hard sci-fi, well, we tend to resent fantasies falsely represented as science fiction. More to the point, it's the how and the why that makes the story interesting. If the only reason you watched Battlestar Galactica was for the (ahem!) "human" element, you might as well just watch re-runs of Wagon Train, or maybe a good soap opera. BSG (and Stargate, and Atlantis, and hell, Star Wars for that matter) are all fantasies with technological trappings, and the lack of any supporting foundation for all the critical technologies depicted simply detracts from the believability of the storyline, so far as I'm concerned. Complain about Star Trek's technobabble if you wish, but the original series, in particular, was about as much of a true sci-fi as the studio heads would allow: Roddenberry used scripts from some of the best science fiction writers of the time, and much of what they wrote was a legitimate projection of existing scientific knowledge (not all, but they tried.)
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Star Trek's technobabble wasn't science fiction. The words they used were tangentally related to science which was tangentally related to the events onscreen, but it may as well have been luminiferous ether for all it was coupled to the plot. Star Trek rarely dealt with issues of science*, it was very much a "space show".
*When it did, it was often excellent
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Please mod parent up.
Technobabble is not bad if it has legitimate reasons to exist. It's only bad if it covers the weaknesses of the script writers. In the Star Trek series, Technobabble got ridiculous in the last seasons of TNG, but largely in Voyager. It is no coincidence that this happened just after Rodenberry died.
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This gives me hope (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This gives me hope (Score:5, Informative)
If I were a hot asian female, I would be totally insulted by your comment, But I'm not, so ... cool where can I get one too.
You take a blank robot and download Lucy Liu... or don't you watch science fiction?
Science fiction ... (Score:5, Insightful)
The result: BSG was barely science fiction - at least to purists.
I risk to differ: Good science fiction can and should also refer to social sciences by putting people into extreme situations that are probably easier to conceive in a fictional setting then in a setting of the current world. When doing that kind of science fiction it will most likely tell you more about the time when it was created then about a possible future and IMO that is a good thing, because the future is not foreseeable anyway and the fiction should reflect and influence the now. I think BSG did an excellent job at that.
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That's just fiction, not science fiction. Real science fiction should have a large science component. That's what it's primarily about. Stories about people who use science to overcome difficulties, or who struggle in worlds ruled by scientific principles, etc. Think of it as fiction based on the
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That's just fiction, not science fiction. Real science fiction should have a large science component. That's what it's primarily about. Stories about people who use science to overcome difficulties, or who struggle in worlds ruled by scientific principles, etc. Think of it as fiction based on the core principles of the Age of Enlightenment.
And if you are going to create a universe that is technologically and scientifically more advanced than we are (but not so advanced that their technology might as well be supernatural) then you must project their developments in light of current scientific knowledge. That's why it is science fiction and not fantasy.
Re:Science fiction ... (Score:5, Funny)
That's just fiction, not science fiction. Real science fiction should have a large science component. That's what it's primarily about. Stories about people who use science to overcome difficulties, or who struggle in worlds ruled by scientific principles, etc. Think of it as fiction based on the core principles of the Age of Enlightenment.
Someone at syfy is reading your comment and writing a newton/leibniz buddy comedy.
"Don't be derivative!" - gottfried's catchphrase
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But science fiction (purist definition) refers to posing questions about things that are explicitly raised by advanced science concepts. BSG is good space opera. A story told against an aesthetically interesting backdrop defined in terms of futuristic aspects, but a story that could replace it all with fantasy or even current day elements and still preserve the essence of the story.
Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF? (Score:3, Insightful)
Don't get me wrong. I drooled over BSG, and it was a welcome change from Star Trek (victory for modernized scifi). But the part where Starbuck dies, then miraculously appears alive, and ends up stumbling over her dead previous body... culminating in her literally vanishing into a puff of smoke -- it made me facepalm IRL. I think some of the original appeal of BSG was what it could have become; the hope that, as you're watching it, all the crap religion and character idiocy will be tossed out in the later episodes. Unfortunately it only got worse. If BSG accomplished one thing, it was in showing a version of humanity even stupider than our own -- surely a remarkable feat.
Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Wait... what are you saying? Who was Starbuck?
Now I'm supremely confused. I thought she was just another "human" who served an allegorical role in the show. Was she something more?
Re:Reborn Kara Thrace was 'Science' ... WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah.... I'm glad you mentioned that, because that was my "bone to pick" with the whole BSG series too. It was an *excellent* series, all in all - but that religious stuff near the end deflated my interested in it almost immediately!
One of my friends pointed out that the main scriptwriter was a devout Mormon though, so he was probably trying to interject his beliefs into the story-line.
I mean, it's one, valid way to tell the story -- but it just wasn't at all satisfying one for me. I had a similar problem with "The Matrix" sequels, where they went from an initially really cool story-line to some sort of religious thing with Morpheus as a prophet, etc. etc. I know plenty of people who thought The Matrix would have been far better if they didn't bother doing a part 2 or 3....
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Not interesting at all (Score:2)
O
Offtopic, sort of. (Score:5, Insightful)
Reaction Thrusters... (Score:2)
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Stargate was better, well up until Stargate Universe that is.
Yes, I preferred SG-1 to Atlantis, but I have every episode of both. Conversely, I stopped watching Universe after the first few episodes. I mean, taken on its merits it was a decent, well-produced show, but it wasn't a Stargate series. If you use the word Stargate in your show's title, viewers are going to have certain expectations. Universe, so far as I'm concerned, simply didn't meet them.
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I always assumed that there were some peripheral systems open to infection (external sensors or communications maybe?) and that the lack of networking simply isolated the inevitable infections until the affected systems could be reset. Press a button, load from ROM, and whatever viruses got spammed at the communications receiver (or whatever) are deleted.
But that does raise the question of why all the systems aren't networked except the vulnerable ones. Is there seriously some reason why they couldn't net
Depends... (Score:2)
Trek and bsg represent distinct subgenres of science fiction. Trek more frequently grappled with questions directly related to aspects of change resulting directly from technology. It wasn't as deep on that front as less mainstream material, but they did ponder some questions (how does very advanced technology affect primitive culture interaction, how do you communicate with a species with an entirely difference frame of reference, what happens when transporters inadvertently clone somewone, stuff like th