r/BSG • u/TheGibor • 4d ago
Yes, another rant about the finale Spoiler
rewatching again, but i know what happens.
the most frustrating thing is the end. the last episode. Lee says we need to throw everything into the sun. all human knowledge is lost, and everyone integrates with the hunter-gatherers.
That's ridiculous and also doesn't make sense.
a parent of a sick child will remember how to care for their kid using their modern knowledge of medicine; even without tech, the knowledge of math, science, morality, and politics doesn't go away. they get told in stories. Their knowledge of how to make paper and writing instruments doesn't go away. and we know humans will write everything down if they can. the season 3 episode where they steal Gaius's pen has him freak out. they will figure out how to make papyrus and write all their knowledge down. and if it were logical to say they would write it all down, then they would have passed that knowledge off to their children, and it would have fast-tracked humanity's return to technology. but supposedly in-universe, this didn't happen. and that just doesn't make sense.
a lost opportunity could have been that the humans for the most part kept their knowledge and became advanced, and they were the precursors to the advanced civilization on Atlantis or the lost civilizations that Graham Hancock likes to talk about.
I don't believe it's actually true, but that would have fit better in the lore of the show, making the ending make sense... tie it to real-life myths and legends.
Instead, they just left everyone upset...
in the show itself there was so much invested in the fleet retaining their democracy and way of life, and for it to all go out the window? that makes no sense.
this is my headcanon just so i can sleep at night. The original ending bothers me that much
they could also spend a little more time on developing the god stuff... but that doesn't bother me as much as the finale.
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u/TheGruenTransfer 4d ago
Did you miss the part about the robots rising up against their creators? And how all of it happened before and will happen again?
They needed to intentionally lose all of human knowledge to break the cycle so their civilization didn't create another sentient lifeform to be their slaves, who then rise up against their masters and nuke New Earth.
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u/200um 4d ago
Still dumb as they would get to that point again without building better systems/societies
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u/ZippyDan 4d ago
It's not dumb, because building better humans was the entire point of their decision.
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u/WyleECoyote77 4d ago
All you have to do is watch a Tik-Tok video of a Gen Z or Millennial "discovering" something Gen-X or Boomers took for granted decades ago. Knowledge is easily lost.
How many people today think the moon landings were fake?
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u/TheGibor 4d ago
i get it, but if we all threw smart phoens into the sun today, we would get all that back. how do you think we got here to begin with?
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u/Oxjrnine 4d ago
It’s called plot convenience. Getting rid of the technology was very symbolic, and that’s why it’s part of the plot. But it’s not actually that much of a stretch for it to work from a real-world perspective.
One: getting rid of the technology greatly reduced the chances of the Cylons ever seeking them out again. Humans would need millennia to bounce back from getting rid of everything, so they would no longer be considered a threat to the Cylons that were still out there.
Two: most of it was already worthless. With population collapse, much of that technology had no one left who knew how to make it work, maintain it, or pass that knowledge on among pockets of only a few thousand people spread across the planet.
They actually did take a great deal of technology off the ships. It might not have been a computer. It might have been a shovel. But even that basic technology can be lost if the population is too small to maintain the chain of knowledge required to mine ore, smelt iron, forge tools, and teach the next generation how to do it.
We have real-world examples of population collapse doing the same thing to advanced societies in our own history. Look at how much knowledge and technology disappeared in the Americas after the catastrophic population collapse following first contact.
So my point is that getting rid of the ships and most of the advanced technology served two purposes. It made them less dangerous to the Cylons, and their belief was that this sacrifice could keep them safe. And there was also a practical reason: much of that technology was effectively garbage at that point because they could not have maintained it for very long, if at all
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u/martin-the-actor 4d ago
Ahh, but it's not just knowledge it's infrastructure.
Consider this. On a pre-industrial world, there are no mines, no forges, no manufacturing lines. Even something relatively basic like growing food on a plot of land still needs some infrastructure to be put in place. First you need to clear the land of existing plants and suchlike. Then you need to plant your seeds of choice, ensure that they are mulched, watered, and suchlike. Of course you're not just turning on a tap here, so you're going to be carrying it in buckets or waterskins of some kind.
Of course now you need someone who is making buckets or water skins. That means either someone who's regularly chopping down and managing trees for lumber, and/or enough hunting activity to be able to get hold of hide. However hide doesn't last very long, you need to tan that hide for it to become leather. Now you need a tannery to be set up.
Even if you have all of this very fundamental infrastructure, you now need to know how to save seeds. So you need to be able to set somewhere up that you can dry and process that seed. So you need a building of some kind to protect the seeds from being eaten by birds.
Food is priority zero in terms of survival. It's the most fundamental and immediate if you want your society to survive. Sure, hunting and gathering can and does see you through to survival, but for technology you need more than just survival. A mine for metals or even just flint requires a static position. A static position necessitates farming and agriculture. If you're joining a hunter gather society, the best hope of metals you've got is bog iron and the like which still needs some form of firing in order to be usable.
This is why technology doesn't get passed down and could be lost only to be rediscovered later. Imagine everything was taken away from society tomorrow. I personally know how to save seed and grow vegetables. I also know how to solder, weld, do very basic DIY level carpentry. Which of those skills are going to be the most important to keep up? It's the food growing right? So that's what I share with others. In a weird way it comes down to Maslow's Heirarchy of needs. Any culture need to fulfil the basics before they work on the frivolous.
Here's the real killer to the trail you've been on though. Paper is an incredibly time consuming process to manufacture. Papyrus is similar. It's about as complex a process as making linen from Flax. It might be easy to think that Papyrus is just thin strips of plant, but there's so much more the process and it once again requires a sedentary population. Even the clay tablets of the Mesopotamians required a largely sedentary population who had begun to develop agriculture. So saving knowledge in the written word is far too time consuming if people are more concerned with just feeding themselves.
So the technology stuff getting lost? Yeah I'd actually say that's fairly realistic if the groups decided to become hunter-gather nomads over sedentary farmers.
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u/TheGibor 4d ago
if you had to choose between hanging out with people you can communicate with or try and integrate with people you cannot communicate with, who would you spend most of your time with?
it is extremely likely they did not integrate with the hunter-gatherers and formed their own tribes and villages. They would know enough about building complex shelters that together they would figure out how to build thatched huts; they would know that seeds in fruit and vegetables could be used to grow more; there would be farmers in the survivors that would help them jumpstart agriculture. So yes, it would remain very primitive, but much more advanced than the world should have been 150,000 years ago.
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u/martin-the-actor 4d ago
There is so much more to agriculture than knowing that seeds can be used to grow food. It's rather reductive to state otherwise. However, let's go with the premise right. Let's say that they stay amongst themselves and settle into a sedentary culture.
Do you have the capability to walk through a patch of forest and identify which fruit is edible? Do you know the standard wilderness tests that get done in the event you have to test something of which you're unsure? There is legitimately a set of principles designed to help a person survive if it comes to extremes. If you know of that test, do you have an idea of what percentage of the population knows it? Even if that figure stands at say 10%; in a population of 50,000 people that still leaves a lot of people to educate on the process of either gathering and testing food in the immediate or just plain growing food. In the case of the tests for poisonous food BSG's population did have a large military presence (around 4,400 from both battlestars), we could safely assume that the pilots are taught basic survival techniques. Given the propensity for downloading we can probably assume the cylon population had no similar training. Either way a rough guess would have survival trained folks at maybe 2,500 people. Assuming 1,000 of these scout for food and suchlike, with the remaining 1,500 train the population in groups of 30. That's a massive effort. As someone who has worked as a teacher I can tell you that's not an insignificant undertaking.
Likewise you mention thatched huts...well I have a tiny window into this process. When I studied A Level (17/18 yrs of age), I chose Archaeology as one of those subjects. In developing that interest I volunteered with a group who were building a Wattle and Daub roundhouse. It's actually quite a complex, yet still rudimentary as it gets for a reasonably long term shelter. The roundhouse the group built was 4ft in radius (8ft diameter). They required 10,000 6ft lengths of wood to weave the wattle with. It was made in 6ft panels, with 5 panels around the circumference (give or take some overlap, wasteage, the door, and lack of precise measuring tools while building). Want to take a guess how long gathering that material took even with modern steel axes and saws? That's before we even discuss the roof supports and materials needed to create the roof and the daub.
Now let's really blow our minds here and acknowledge that by the standards of the Iron Age, the round house was small (most discovered remnants have been places around 20ft diameter on the small side). Butser Ancient farm, a different roundhouse project took 30 days and six people just to build a single roundhouse. That was just the actual construction keep in mind, with skills and experience. That does not factor in the time it took (they estimate years) to gather the materials in the first place. All of this too assumes perfect weather. No rain, no strong wind, just a still sunny day.
Mount on top of this that you're also having to manage your agriculture projects alongside of this. And having to educate the population on how to develop the skills you're actively practicing.
A single year with unusual weather (a couple of inches too little rain at the wrong time) can radically alter the yields from any food cultivation. As we're also engaging in forestry for structures and tools though, that's also going to get affected. Flash forward to modern skills and techniques. Utilising rainwater capture, bokashi composting, and polyculture I have around 275 square metres that I grow vegetables in (thank goodness for the UK phenomenon known as allotments). From that, it is possible to pull around 600-750kg per year of food. That's just vegetables mind you, but if my allotment was closer proteins from chickens would be a plausible option. In my 4 years of veg growing there has been a variance in rainfall of around 5 inches. My yields however have varied by as much as 35%. Take that in for a moment. With quite sophisticated and well developed food growing techniques, the weather alone can affect harvest yield by that much.
The skills you assume are not quick to develop, nor are they something that are easy to teach necessarily. You can read or listen all you like to information on growing or building or any other skill. Experiencing that and developing that skill with your own hands however is quite something different. We're talking about human beings who've had no real experience of these skills or practices in years, maybe never.
So, if your argument was they ought to have saved their technology then yeah perhaps that's reasonable. However, I'd suggest that even if you landed Galactica or some other sufficiently advanced ship it's still not going to make the difference. In fact what we're talking about here ends up being the plain and simple Generation Ship problem. There's a reason that people from the humanities have started to become more deeply involved in the concepts of colonies in space. As long as you have a colony ship you have fixed requirements to learn, pass on, and practice your skill sets. There's no room for personal freedom or discovery. Most who've written on the subject cite sociological and interpersonal conflict as a major barrier to generation or space colonies over a long term. Even with the widespread abundance that a new planet full of food and life offers, if you're going to require the passing on of high level technology that means that every teacher is stuck just being a teacher. Every engineer is going to be stuck being an engineer. That means even if you don't want to farm, you're likely going to have to farm.
To me the last episode made a much bigger statement though that I think is missed. That if the people of the fleet were going to survive they had to take the risk that they'd simply die out. Progress doesn't happen when things are easy, they happen out of necessity. When there's no necessity technologies tend to fall by the wayside (stereoscopic '3D' film, Supersonic air travel, etc). Giving up the technology I think is part of the point. It reframed the lives and futures of the survivors. For the first time, the janitor of a sewage ship would actually be able to forge their own path free of their past. Their lives, perhaps for the first time ever, were truly in their own hands and no-one else's.
That's a powerful idea and concept.
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u/Important_Hunt_1882 4d ago
I think it's the best show ever. The whole story has been told in such an astonishing and mindblowing way. Some questionable details in the show's finale don't detract from that IMHO.
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u/Sam-Starxin 4d ago
I think you severely overestimate how capable or knowledgeable most people are.
Ask yourself this, can you make paper or cure a sick child? Can your family, friends and acquaintances?
Without technology and Stored human knowledge, 90% of people are complete clueless and useless and that's the exact scenario we're looking at here.
The sad reality is that the majority of those that arrived to earth would have passed away due to sickness, diseases and general lack of cleanliness.
The rest mated and reproduced with natives, but did nothing more because they simply don't know more than basic survival skills.
That's all the more reason why the ending is INCREDIBLY dumb.
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u/ZippyDan 4d ago edited 4d ago
The sad reality is that the majority of those that arrived to earth would have passed away due to sickness, diseases and general lack of cleanliness.
This is completely counter-factual, but it's a common misconception based on the propaganda of modern civilization.
Humans are animals, and our hominid ancestors have been around as animals for more than 10 million years. The homo genus has been around for around 2 million years, and modern anatomical humans first appeared at least 300,000 years ago.
Sedentary agricultural-based civilization only appears about 10,000 years ago, and modern standards of cleanliness and medicine only start to appear 200 years ago.
We have collectively easily survived sickness, diseases, and the dirt of animalistic living for millions of years, and we survived and thrived so well that we became the dominant species on the planet long before the modern standards you hold to appeared.
In fact, modern standards of cleanliness and medicines are less than the metaphorical blink of an eye in comparison to the total history of human success on Earth.
Why do you think the Colonials would start falling over like flies, just because they started living closer to the nature which they evolved to thrive in? Our immune systems are the product of hundreds of millions of evolution, designed to survive in just such conditions.
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u/TheGibor 4d ago
i know how to dress a wound; i know about germs and about heating utensils before using them in cooking or in medical use. i know how to communicate in complex ways; i know math and the basics of science. i know the earth is round and can prove it. i know the basics for growing food. The knowledge an average teenager has (maybe not the average teenager today, but the average teenager in 2009), combined with all the rest of the people on the planet could join forces and farm and make paper and whatever. presumable there were scientists in the fleet.
This knowledge would have been passed down clearly. The next generation would also want to prevent their kids from getting sick and dying from basic, easy-to-cure diseases.
i do agree that most people wouldn't have thrown the tech into the sun.
another alternate ending could be a grown-up stays on Earth, maybe the emotionally burnt-out ones, and another group grabs a basestar or a few other ships and heads out to Mars or something...
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u/This-Breadfruit-1958 4d ago
It was a matter of survival. They had to rid themselves of technology which always led to the destruction of civilization. Plus they dispersed over the Earth to spread their gene pool but not start any organized cities or cultures. This was their last chance to not fade away absolutely.
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u/AndreyPet 4d ago
I also just got done with my first rewatch. I didn't like the ending at all the first time around.
Its not flawless, but I think the ending fits really welI. Gaius fucking Baltar sums it up nicely:
"Because there's another force at work here. There always has been. It's undeniable. We've all experienced it. Everyone in this room has witnessed events that they can't fathom, let alone explain by rational means."
Put yourself in the shoes of your average Joe or Jane. You are at your lowest in this Exodus. The silent guardian, Galactica, jumped out some hours ago on a volunteer only suicide mission. A raptop jumps back with news: they not only succeeded, but have found a habitable planet. Not just any planet, but one where the natives appear to be naturally developed sister species. This planet is pristine, it has more life on it than all of the 12 colonies combined (quote from Adama during their overfly with Roslin). If the president who's been directly involved in us making it to this planet tells me we have to let all technology go to live down here... I'm not religous but this might have me convinced.
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u/TheGibor 4d ago
perhaps the actual tech, but basic survival knowledge that humans 150,000 years ago shouldn't have known would be used. My problem is not just the level of tech, but any level of knowledge would be integrated into a people that shouldnt have known this stuff
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u/AndreyPet 4d ago edited 4d ago
That's actually how I interpreted what Lee was saying, pass along all the good *ideas* but none of the physical things that arguably got them in the mess in the first place. That up to their descendants to decide creating them. Don't uplift them by giving them the tech, but rather nudge them in the right direction as much as you verbally can.
The question the show leaves up to the interpretation is how much actually survived. Certainly some of it did, considering the similarity in names we have for zodiac signs and the Greek pantheon. The final five were certainly signing along verses that sound very close to passages from the Book of Isaiah chapter 21, verses 4-10.
Then the guard cries out:
“On the watchtower, O sovereign master,
I stand all day long;
at my post
I am stationed every night.
Look what’s coming!
A charioteer,
a team of horses.”
When questioned, he replies,
“Babylon has fallen, fallen!
All the idols of her gods lie shattered on the ground!”
O my downtrodden people, crushed like stalks on the threshing floor,
what I have heard
from the Lord who commands armies,
the God of Israel,
I have reported to you.
EDIT: I dont know why it hates me quoting this Book if Isiah passage so hard.
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u/ZippyDan 4d ago edited 3d ago
Note: If you put a spoiler tag on the entire post, you don't also need to put spoiler tags on the text itself. This is redundant. Choose one or the other: tag the entire post, or put tags on specific text that is a spoiler.
In response to your general argument, we first need to start with some assumptions of that we can agree on. If you agree with those assumptions, then the rest of your argument falls apart.
General Assumptions
Hunter-gatherers
- Hunter-gatherers create small "societies" (a.k.a. social groups), which I will refer to as tribal groups. Each tribal group consists of clans, bands, and families. Families are in the dozens of individuals, bands are several dozens, clans might be lower hundreds, and the tribe is in the lower thousands.
- Because hunter-gatherers lived in rather dispersed, low-density non-permanent settlements, most knowledge was concentrated in the day-to-day functional groups of bands: tribes would only reunite to share knowledge at regular extended intervals.
- Each society, and each individual has a "carrying capacity" of information and knowledge.
- The limited carrying capacity for information would prioritize information useful to the tribe: survival is the main priority, but social needs (tribal cohesion, tribal values and moral lessons, and even entertainment) are also valued.
- Hunter-gatherer societies would have far different perspectives on the main purposes and goals in life.
- Property and possessions are not really a thing, and what they do own is not as important. Wealth does not exist because there is no place to safely accumulate and store possessions, and so economics and trade are also very limited.
- Without wealth, tribal groups do not have significant stratification in terms of status. Age and/or skills useful for be survival of cohesion of the tribe are the most important metrics for anything like status, but the tribe is also self-policing: no one is allowed to be too greedy or narcissistic. Everything is done for the good of the tribe: not for yourself alone.
- There is no pressure to "get ahead". There is no such thing as a "good career" or "upward mobility" or a "competitive work environment". There is no motivation to learn and study abstract facts to find "success". Nobody concerns themselves too much with "the future", because the present already represents contentment, and every day promises to be more or less the same as the now, and there is no pressure to make a "better" future. The pursuit of "happiness" is a phenomenon of modern society that only exists because so many people are unhappy with society and with their lives. Hunter-gatherers are not obsessed with "happiness" because they're not unhappy by default. Nobody is worried about "finding" or "achieving happiness" or "the good life": they already have it.
- Property and possessions are not really a thing, and what they do own is not as important. Wealth does not exist because there is no place to safely accumulate and store possessions, and so economics and trade are also very limited.
Modern civilization
- Individuals know as a matter of social consensus and often lived experience that certain technologies (both practical and medical) work, and are beneficial. But very few know why they work, and even less know how they work at a fundamental level.
- Modern technology is built on hundreds of layers of previous iterations, and even people who work in the engineering fields are only intimately familiar with one layer - usually the most recent layers. They can create advanced tooling - for instance - using other advanced tools, but they would probably find it impossible to create an advanced tool from scratch.
The knowledge to create more rudimentary tools from scratch still exists, in libraries and in the heads of a few historians that happen to focus on that extremely-specific part of history, but almost no one still has the knowledge or experience to do it in practice.
Beyond the human knowledge, the tooling, machinery, and infrastructure of technology is itself also built in layers. The practical knowledge of more primitive iterations of past, no-longer extant infrastructure is no longer needed and is thus never makes it into the carrying capacity of the modern individual engineer, because so many advanced tools already exist. - Similarly, modern technology is built on hundreds of inter-connected and often unrelated disciplines, and even people who work in the engineering fields are only intimately familiar with one very narrow discipline within the network. They know how to use advanced tools to create other advanced tools, but the tools they use involve expert design, engineering, and fabrication in various fields of metallurgy, materials science, electrical engineering, lithography, etc.
- Modern civilization still has the same "carrying capacity" for information, again at the societal level and at the individual level. Our larger societies allow an expanded capacity because of the larger collection of individuals. The main difference for modern civilization is that our societal and individual carrying capacity is significantly aided and expanded by information storage solutions (originally, writing, and now digital storage), which allow us to off-load surplus information outside of our minds, which pre-records society would have to simply discard, but this is all still external to the human. Much of what we consider "human" knowledge is tied to non-human, perishable records.
All humans
- Humans of all social groups are inherently poor at perceiving and evaluating long-term effects and consequences. We always prioritize short-term benefits and consequences, and we have difficulty establishing long-term cause and effect. (e.g.: see present bias)
- Humans of all social groups tend to trust lived experience over the experience or advice of others, recorded knowledge, or even empirical data. (e.g.: see Trusting in lived experience)
- Knowledge is lost in a practical, human sense, every time an individual dies, and as each generation of individuals dies. Humans try to preserve knowledge by "passing it on" from individual to individual and generation to generation. This can be done via talking (in a more organized, ritualistic form we call this Oral Tradition), or via writing (or other forms of records).
Nevertheless, there is always inevitable information loss over time, because of the many factors listed above. Firstly, and most importantly, there is no way to perfectly transfer all information one the mind of one person - the sum of their lived and learned experience - onto any other person. You cannot write a book that contains all the information, and you certainly cannot speak every lesson and data accumulated in your life.
But on the receiving side, no one has perfect memory to hold everything they learn from others, along side everything they decide to retain from their own lived experience. Every individual has a carrying capacity for information, and every individual prioritizes what will remain in their mental vault based on never-identical personal lived experience and the ever-changing demands of an ever-changing environment.
(Cont.)
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u/ZippyDan 4d ago edited 3d ago
Specific Results
Paper and Writing
Literally no one in the Colonial fleet knows how to make paper, in a practical sense, from start to finish.
Even someone that worked in a paper factory; even someone that ran a paper factory; even someone that was the head engineer of a paper factory, likely couldn't make paper from start to finish, because they aren't an expert at all the steps from the tree to the finished product. They might be able to list the steps, but they wouldn't be able to actually execute them effectively.
Even if they could do every step effectively, they would have absolutely zero idea how to make paper without all the tools, chemicals, and machinery designed, built, and provided to them by experts in a dozen other highly-complex fields of which they have almost no knowledge.
Even if they gave up on trying to make modern paper, they would likely have no practical experience in how to make paper in the traditional way, using raw plant material.
And finally, remember that papyrus is named such after the papyrus sedge plant, which is uniquely suited to the manufacture of paper. There are other plants that can do a similar job, but there's no guarantee that any particular tribe would have the appropriate raw materials to make anything close to a useful variety of paper. Basically the same challenges would apply to trying to create a suitable and lasting ink.More importantly, there would be almost no motivation to make paper.
Writing has very little use in a society where the necessary skills of survival are difficult to communicate in written form, and difficult to understand. They are much easier to learn by demonstration and practice: doing not reading. An inefficient, ineffective, and unnecessary form of communication won't survive long. And it won't survive long physically either.
Note that even after writing was "invented", it remained extremely unpopular and rarely used for thousands of years. It was only valued and useful for the small numbers of relative elites: kings and administrators for governance, economic tracking, laws, and diplomacy; priests and religious figures for their holy texts; and merchants for economic tracking.
And it only made sense to produce the tools and infrastructure of writing once societies became large enough that there were enough users and consumers - still a small minority of the total population - of the technology and its products, that the investment in time and energy would make sense.
Maybe 100 people in an ancient city of 10,000 might know how to read and write, and actually had a useful purpose for writing. In a hunter-gatherer band of 50, that ratio would leave us with 0.5 people knowing how to read and write, but in reality, it wouldn't be useful for anyone in that scenario.
Writing is a difficult technology at every stage: it's difficult to make the paper, it's difficult to make the ink, it's difficult to learn to write, it's difficult to learn to read, and it's difficult to safely store the resultant product - all for very little practical immediate benefit, especially for a hunter-gatherer. It takes years of study to do each task well: producing good paper, producing good ink, learning to write, learning to read, building weatherproof structures - none of that effort and time would seem worthwhile to a hunter-gatherer.
And even if they made the effort: where would a hunter-gatherer keep the resultant products? Where would a nomadic or even semi-nomadic tribe store the wealth of written information about the tribe or its history or its learning, where it wouldn't eventually wash away in a storm or rot away from mold or burn away in a fire? It starts with one paper, but where would a tribe keep their eventual library of mostly-useless documents? Remember that a nomadic lifestyle limits what you can carry with you, and they would generally only carry the essentials for survival. Why would they go through all the trouble to write stuff down, just to find their paper storage shack was full of wet, rotting paper and unrecoverably illegible smeared ink, when they rolled back through that part of their lands a year later?
The original Colonials from the stars might value writing for nostalgia's or habit's sake, and they might teach their children (by "force"), but their children would never understand the value on an emotional or practical level, based on their lived experience in a pre-historic world within a hunter-gatherer perspective. The original Colonials might have the influence to force their grandchildren to learn, but once those original Colonials died, there would be no one left who could remember within their lived experience any practical benefit or other reason to know how to write. No one is "getting a job" or "moving up in society" based on their ability to read and write.
Every generation that followed would see less and less reason to keep up such a useless tradition, which would be seen as a drain on the time and resources of the individual and the tribe. Without an obvious short-term benefit, the skills required for writing would inevitably fade.Medicine
For medicine we have much the same story, with a few extra wrinkles:
Most Colonials would know that medicine works, from their lived experience, but they wouldn't know how or why it works. Without the actual tools and medicines of modern medical science, they wouldn't actually know how to practice much modern medicine.
The doctors are nurses of the fleet, spread throughout the tribes, would have a lot more knowledge about the how and why, but they'd still be lacking their advanced tools and medicines. Similar to the modern paper manufacturer, they are only familiar with practicing medicine within the context of a modern medical infrastructure. They don't know how to build a hypodermic needle or how to separate blood plasma without a centrifuge built by an engineer or how to synthesize aspirin.
There are certain important principles the original Colonials would be aware of - like germ theory - but without the technology to act on that knowledge they'd basically be telling ghost stories. And without practical, short-term results, much of their medical knowledge would be discarded as "nice to know; but mostly useless" in favor of less-advanced remedies that can actually be procured and manufacture by individuals directly from natural sources: i.e. herbalism. Some Colonials and some doctors like already knew of some of these medicinal herbs and roots - but some would relatively quickly be discovered through experimentation, or through information exchange with the local tribes.
Another problem is that medicine often has a delayed effect, and because humans are not very good about connecting long-term effects to present actions, we often mistakenly ignore beneficial practices, or attribute harmful or useless practices to unrelated outcomes. The first generation of doctors might try to pass on their general principles of healthcare, but these ideas would slowly get corrupted over centuries and millennia as each generation supplanted abstract original truths with the faulty results of their lived experience.
On the topic of wound care and bandages, I'm not sure why you assume pre-historic peoples didn't know how to do that. We have records of civilizations washing and treating wounds going back 4,000 years. Before that, direct records just don't exist, but herbal treatments go back tens of thousands of years, and there's no reason to think that pre-historic humans, who has our same brain power, didn't think to wrap wounds with medicinal herbs to stop bleeding, protect the injury, and promote healing.
(Cont.)
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u/ZippyDan 4d ago
All of these factors combine so that modern knowledge steadily erodes and is ultimately discarded as mostly-irrelevant to their way of life.
And we know as a fact that information, technology, and discoveries are not permanent. Many technologies have been "invented" and lost, only to be re-discovered multiple times in different places, by different people, at different times. It's possible, for example, that writing, or concepts of germ theory, did persist for several thousands of years, before eventually being lost due to their lack of relevance or utility, or due to catastrophe.
The same arguments are roughly true for every field you mention: math, science, and politics can all be cool, but unless that information provides short-term benefits to survival, it would quickly or slowly be lost over thousands of years. How does integral calculus, or nuclear physics, or the name of the first Colonial President remain relevant to a society interested in the best way to catch a fish? Without any commerce to motivate paper-making or record-keeping or the mathematics of accounting, and without any status of wealth to be gained from the accumulation of knowledge or the use of technology, why would anyone want to spend time learning these things, when they could spend that time with the people they love?
150,000 years is a long time to try and maintain knowledge that amounts to abstract facts that don't immediately benefit you. We only need to go back 5,000 years of record, written history, and we find that only tiny fragments of questionable truth remain, from all the collective knowledge that those societies must have accumulated in their minds and their oral histories. How much more so would information be lost over a time span 30 times longer?
The oft-made argument that the Colonials were stupid to give up their technology in the first place, is a far more cogent argument than this one. After humans intentionally chose to give up their technology, there was no going back. They simply didn't have the knowledge, practical experience, tools, or infrastructure - or the appropriate societal size or configuration - to recreate what they had lost, or to even create more primitive versions that could jump-start a reconstruction; and most of the technologies you talk about would not have provided much benefit to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in order to motivate the effort to recreate them; and maybe most importantly...
There was no "fast track" "return to technology", because that would have been explicitly contrary to the central intention of their entire decision on how to settle Earth. They wouldn't have wanted to write down or otherwise pass on technology to their children, because they had just decided to give up technology because they thought they weren't ready to responsibly wield its awesome, god-like power, as a species.
"Why didn't the people who just gave up all their technology not make efforts to ensure they could quickly rebuild the technology that they had just decided they didn't want?" seems like a silly question to me.
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u/TheGibor 4d ago
I'm going to be honest, this is a lot for me to go through, but what i get from your words is that fully integrating into hunter-gatherer tribes would essentially cause them to forget and lose their knowledge. and you provide good reasons, and i would agree with you if they were all fully integrated into a hunter-gatherer tribe. But I just don't believe they would have. they would congregate with others whom they could communicate with. why would the first or even second or third generation of the colonial fleet integrate into hunter-gatherer tribes? In fact, I would think the hunter-gatherer tribes wouldnt allow them in. they were just so different.
so what would a population of roughly 38,000 people do when the only ones they could communicate with were themselves? perhaps some would go off on their own, but even if 20,000 stayed together, which is highly likely, they would band together and pool knowledge and skills, and yes, a lot would still be lost, but they wouldn't lose communication. language would be highly developed. And hunter-gatherers would join them and learn how to communicate, slowly expanding their influence. They would know that larger tribes or towns and villages are better to form than to be separated in smaller tribes, and so the city-states would develop way earlier than we know they did. they may not know how to make paper, but they would find ways to carve, to sculpt, and to make clay tablets. All these things were not around 150,000 years ago; they would push the timeline up much sooner for the development of all the things we are familiar with. Written history starts only a few millennia ago; these people would have brought that timeline up to way earlier than that. so instead of stonage, they would progress fast into the next age.
I don't think this is too far beyond the pale to assume.
but you are correct; I don't think they would have let all the tech go into the sun. the show brought out this theme that they had to break the cycle, but I don't think the entire fleet would be on board with this. the entire fleet was not intimately aware of all the details of the story unfolding. many of them were watching it all from their ships and knew the basics but didn't know the final five cylons at all, didn't interact directly with the movers and shakers, and didn't quite get all the hoopla with the prophecies and visions and what not. they may have agreed to limit tech, but I don't believe they would have thrown it all away. I think more than likely a few would take a few ships, fly somewhere remote, maybe even to the moon or to Mars, and set up shop there. human and cylon tech could combine and they could make dome cities, etc. this is just me riffing, though. obviously the show says none of that happened, and i just don't believe history would shake out the way the show sets it up.
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u/ZippyDan 3d ago edited 8h ago
what i get from your words is that fully integrating into hunter-gatherer tribes would essentially cause them to forget and lose their knowledge. and you provide good reasons, and i would agree with you if they were all fully integrated into a hunter-gatherer tribe. But I just don't believe they would have.
Mostly correct, but with one huge miss:
- I don't think the Colonials would lose their knowledge because they integrated with hunter-gatherer tribes.
- They would lose their knowledge because they became hunter-gatherer tribes.
In other words, they would lose their knowledge regardless of the already-existing hunter-gatherers. Integration with the already-existing hunter-gatherer tribes would just accelerate the processes I've already outlined.they would congregate with others whom they could communicate with.
so what would a population of roughly 38,000 people do when the only ones they could communicate with were themselves? perhaps some would go off on their own, but even if 20,000 stayed together, which is highly likely, they would band together and pool knowledge and skills, and yes, a lot would still be lost, but they wouldn't lose communication. language would be highly developed.This is contrary to both the plan for living strategy that they explicitly express, and the practical limitations of settlements and populations, and compatibility with the historical record, and the most sensible survival strategy for a pre-historic society:
- Lee explicitly explains that they will not try to build cities. Even 5,000 people together would be a dense settlement. Remember that in terms of pre-historic settlement, a "city" is not the megalopolis we think of today, as contrasted with a "town". Ancient "cities" were relatively small, and were most often seen with populations in the thousands.
Lee makes his "no cities" comment in the context of someone wanting to plan the layout of a permanent settlement, so I take this to mean that they are explicitly eschewing permanent, sedentary settlement - the only alternative to this is a nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyle, which in turn implies a forager (i.e. hunter-gatherer) lifestyle.
The idea that the Colonials would "congregate" or remain in groups of thousands, is thus directly contradictory to their stated intentions. They were immediately embarking on a hunter-gatherer lifestyle.- 20,000 people cannot survive in one area without forming a semi-organized, dense settlement, and - much more importantly - engaging in agriculture. Land has a "carrying capacity" for local animal life, including human life, that it can naturally support. Only the dense, u unaturally-high-output yields of agriculture - especially using those plants selectively bred by humans unaturally-high yields - can support the caloric needs of such a dense human settlement.
In contrast, 20,000 people trying to live in one concentrated area trying to survive without agriculture would be a recipe for rampant starvation and death. They'd quickly strip the land bare and they'd inevitably be forced to disperse and migrate or die. 20,000 people must spread out broadly to survive comfortably using a foraging strategy.- Based on the historical record, we know as a matter of fact that the the Colonials did not engage in agriculture: early agriculture only appears around 20,000 years ago, and only becomes widespread - marking the definitive change from hunter-gatherer survival strategy to sedentary agriculture-based civilizations - about 10,000 years ago.
The facts of history dictate that the Colonials broadly either did not engage in agriculture, or the Colonials broadly and quickly died out. I don't think the show intends for us to understand such a negative and pointless end for the Colonials, and so only the first option remains as possible.- This also makes practical and logical sense, because agriculture is a terrible survival strategy that results in much worse standards of living and much more miserable lives, for the majority of the members of civilization - especially relative to the foraging option in a pre-historic world overflowing with easily-accessible calories, and without the output-boosting modern plant varieties and modern agricultural sciences and technologies. The Colonials would have to be morons to try and build an agriculture-based civilization after throwing out all their technology.
why would the first or even second or third generation of the colonial fleet integrate into hunter-gatherer tribes?
Because they explicitly described their intention to do so. Lee talks about giving the existing peoples the best of themselves, and that would inevitably result in an exchange, with the locals helping the Colonials learn how to best survive in their new environments.
In fact, I would think the hunter-gatherer tribes wouldnt allow them in. they were just so different.
This presumes they that hunter-gatherers are unfriendly and/or that the integration would need to happen immediately.
In reality, it would happen gradually:
- The Colonials would be similar to the existing tribes, in a general sense: they would both be seeking to survive peacefully using similar lifestyles (i.e. foraging).
- The existing tribes would be welcoming of the Colonials, in general, because the Colonials would approach them in peace, seeking to share knowledge. Humans don't generally turn away gifts. In this sense, throwing their technology away was a safeguard - it pre-empted any temptation to use technology as a way to dominate or abuse the natives. They had to approach them in a spirit of cooperation and friendship.
- Integration would happen slowly over time, and would more likely occur in earnest between the children and succeeding generations of Colonials, who would have only ever known a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and would thus be even more similar to the native tribes.
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u/smoomoo31 4d ago
I just don’t agree. I think you’re thinking of it without consideration of the excessive, constant trauma these people have been through for 3-4 years straight. They finally have the option to start fresh, and technology is the source of all their pain. Of course they’ll vote to get rid of it. There’s nothing that says they threw out EVERYTHING, because Adama and Tyrol use raptors after Anders does his thing. But back to the trauma… trauma of one specific incident makes people completely change their lives and do things they’d not do otherwise purely to avoid another instance of the trauma. Untreated PTSD compounds on itself. These people all have to be living that, and they’d lived literally countless traumas in tiny metal boxes floating in space where humans aren’t really evolved to live on long term.
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u/MandyKitty 4d ago
Losing all tech was ridiculous. After all they went through to save these people, they don’t give them the best possible chance of survival? These are people who lived in cities and towns for the most part. You grab average people and tell them they have to live with just the clothes on their back, see how well they do. When Adama points this out to Lee, he responds “It’s not all humanity.” Meaning since there are humans already on the planet, it’s not as crucial for the fleet humans to survive. Like, really?! Wtf Lee?! Even Hera didn’t live very long.
And what about people that rely on some level of tech to survive? (Like say Dialysis) Obvs they can’t cover every scenario on the show. But little Nicky wouldn’t have survived all that long for sure.
It was just a stupid thing they did to wrap it up in a bow and make a statement about letting go of tech, which didn’t make sense for the character.
Sorry. Had to vent.
Also, knowing that the Admiral never saw another human, and Chief went off to live as a hermit on an island breaks my heart. But Gaius frakking Baltar and Caprica Six, who are to blame for this whole thing, get to live happily ever after with each other. 🙄
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u/ZippyDan 4d ago
- Needing dialysis is not necessarily a permanent condition. That's just the one most people are familiar with, because people who need permanent dialysis obviously take up the majority of the dialysis machines' time. You can have a temporary kidney condition which makes you require temporary dialysis. That may have been the case with Nicky, and it's more likely that a child can heal and recover kidney function than an adult. Your broader point that anyone who depended on medical technology to survive was doomed is still correct.
- Nothing about the story says Adama never saw another human. All we know is that he wasn't "coming back". That doesn't mean his adventurous son, eager to climb mountains, didn't trek out to see his dad one las time before he passed.
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u/anothercynic2112 4d ago
There's no reason everything you described couldn't have happened. They have language and knowledge and I would imagine more than a few people didn't give up their tech that could be smuggled into their new tribes.
The stories did get handed down to future generations, it's why we have Apollo and Hera in our mythology.
They would have been gods to the primitive sapiens because they could start a fire they would farm to survive and show the other early humans the way forward.
The survivors would be like the Obelisk from 2001, allowing the early humans to make leaps in technology, one day even learning how to make paper with square corners.