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How we'll survive Battlestar Galactica's radioactive future
Between 1981 and 1996, the University of Colorado at Boulder hosted a series of conferences known as The Case for Mars, during which detailed arguments and plans emerged for the exploration and colonization of Mars. Unlike the other planets in our solar system, the conferees reasoned, Mars has a (nearly) livable climate and (trace quantities of) air and water and thus makes a plausible home for human beings in the future. Now, in the new and final season of Battlestar Galactica, a ragtag refugee fleet has come upon a ruined Earth—a miragelike disappointment of shattered cities and radioactive oceans. In the wake of this discovery, there has been understandable turmoil over what to do next: Where to go, whom to trust, who should be in charge for the difficult journey to somewhere better.
But there is a Case for Earth to be made here, not least because it gives human and Cylon a chance to live in peace without actually breathing down each other's necks. Certainly, whether they can live together without a planet is a question yet to be answered.
On the one hand, it's clear that Cylons are more than mere machines. They have free will, and a few have proven over and over again that they're trustworthy allies of the human race. That counts for something. In fact, I could argue that Cylons who've broken their programming are actually more trustworthy than human beings. A little stronger, a little smarter, less erratic and less prone to despair, they seem to have a stronger emotional center than we do. And you'd hope so, right? Or else why were they were built at all, and how did they managed to infiltrate and devastate 12 well-armed human homeworlds?
On the other hand, the dissident Colonials do have a point: Even the rebel Cylons are dubious allies, having pulled the rug out from under humanity more than once. They are members of a different species, after all, with different material and emotional needs and with their own separate survival imperative. Too, most of the Cylon models are like Blade Runner replicants: emotionally inexperienced and therefore lacking in empathy. In a way they're like children. Think of Leoben on New Caprica, trying over and over again to live as Starbuck's husband and really spectacularly failing to understand her resistance. Or Cavil, the Cylon leader, talking blithely about "reducing the human population" as a means of restoring peace and cooperation. And remember how shocked Caprica Six was when she realized that her friend Baltar might be killed, and that if that happened she would really, actually never see him again? Kids can be cruel, and because their worldview is simplistic they can also overreach, overreact and turn on a dime as new information is introduced. The Cylons launched their war with a terrible hubris, and while they're slowly coming to terms with it and learning to see themselves—and us—more clearly, they're hardly Nobel Peace Prize material, or even really grownups by any normal human definition.
Also, importantly, there may still be sleeper agents among them whose programming hasn't switched on yet. Dispensed by shadowy machinery in the depths of space, maneuvered by gibberish-talking "hybrids" and controlled by some master plan even they don't understand, the individual Cylons have no real idea what purpose they're intended to serve. Although orderly, their civilization is fundamentally clueless, and they know a timer can go off in any of their heads at any time and start issuing new instructions. So, really, it's only after the sleepers are exposed that you can start believing in their free will.
The humans may now be too weak to survive without Cylon assistance, and the rebel Cylons have little hope against their own nation without the protection of the Colonial fleet, so it appears that some kind of alliance is necessary. But if anything goes wrong—if old resentments bubble over or itchy fingers slip for even a moment on the triggers of war—with Galactica and the Cylon base ship sitting practically nose to nose and the fragile human fleet caught in the crossfire, both species could be wiped out in an instant. And let's not forget, there are still billions of main-force Cylons out there, waiting for a chance at revenge!
It seems to me the most logical course of action—the one least likely to end in tragedy—is to set up a permanent base on (or, better yet, beneath) the blasted surface of Earth. Crazy? Not at all. The cities may be blasted to smithereens, the plant and animal life may be stunted, the air and soil and water may be contaminated with "residual radiation," but it's still way better than no planet at all.
In the first place, "radiation" isn't some ghostly contaminant that leaches into matter and stays there like a bad smell. Rather, it consists of energetic particles—photons, neutrons, electrons and protons—emitted by unstable atoms. Each element on the periodic table comes in different flavors, called isotopes, each one a slightly different weight due to an excess of neutrons in the nucleus, and as a general rule the more extra neutrons there are, the more radioactive the isotope will be. And yes, the fallout from an atomic explosion is full of unstable isotopes, and it really does get into everything. In the long run, the most dangerous of these are the bone seekers—radioactive strontium, barium and radium—that are chemically similar to calcium and can be absorbed into living bone tissue. There are also radioactive variants of calcium and iodine, "heavy hydrogen," iron and other elements that can find their way into the body. These are a deadly gift that keeps on giving; unlike uranium or plutonium, we can't walk away from these. They're absorbed by our bodies as nutrients and then they emit their radiation from the inside, where we're most vulnerable. The possible results include inflammation, immune suppression, cancer and, in extreme cases, radiation sickness and rapid death.
That's bad.
However, every radioactive element has a half-life over which it decays. Every time it coughs out a "hot" particle, the atom gets one step closer to being stable, and in fact the most radioactive isotopes are, by definition, the ones most likely to split and therefore the shortest-lived. The hotter they burn, the quicker they burn out. Isotopes like calcium 45 and 47, iodine 123 and 131 and iron 59 are really nasty, but it takes only a few weeks for them to lose half their potency, and within a hundred years they've transmuted themselves into harmless substances and are no longer radioactive at all. Conversely, uranium 233 has a half-life of just under 130,000 years and will stick around for a long time but is not really all that dangerous—especially in trace amounts. For the most part, fallout is a short-term problem, which is why the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—the only two cities on Earth that have actually ever been nuked—began rebuilding within five years and were, within a few decades, no more radioactive than any other city. This is also why the Cylons were able to occupy Caprica and the other colonies after destroying them.
But will every target be so lucky? When the Romans sacked the city-state of Carthage in 146 B.C., they scattered the bricks and then salted the ground to make sure nothing would ever grow there again, and (sadly) there are nuclear weapons capable of doing something very similar. Certain isotopes seem perfectly tuned for poisoning the ground, including cobalt 60 and strontium 90, with half-lives of 5 years and 29 years. Active enough to be deadly and persistent enough to outlive entire civilizations, these materials take hundreds of years to cool off, and if enough of them got thrown around in the Cylon apocalypse that took out Earth, then yes, the place could still be radioactive a thousand years later.
Still, it's important to ask: Is that really a reason to leave? You may not want to grow food in radioactive soil, but you certainly can remove the offending atoms from the mix. In principle, pulling strontium and cobalt out of dirt should be no more difficult than any other sort of mining, refining or purification process, and once the bad elements are gone, the soil is as safe as it ever was. The same is true for water, air, rubble, decaying biomass or what have you. Now, this means safe farming soil could be as expensive as starship fuel, so I'm not saying it's an ideal solution. You'd want to keep it in greenhouses so outside soil couldn't sneak in and recontaminate it. But when your food supply consists mainly of reprocessed algae grown in tanks of reprocessed sewage, this still seems like a real step up.
Similarly, wouldn't a planet-sized air supply be better than a handful of breachable hulls? You might need to filter it—no one goes outside for long periods without a dust mask!—but isn't that better than living in the wilds of space? Think of it: After four years of kicking around the universe, hunted and harried, would you turn your back on a ready supply of water, metal, hydrocarbons, flat ground and just about everything else a civilization needs to function? I'm not saying they should get rid of the spaceships, but I for one would rather live in a plastic dome than a metal barracks. It may not be quite the garden spot that New Caprica was, but Earth's biosphere has bounced back from a lot of insults over the past 3.5 billion years, so there may be some life in the old gal yet.
Sources:
Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia (en.wikipedia.org): "The Case for Mars"
Britannica 2008 Ultimate Reference Suite: "Hiroshima," "Nagasaki," "Carthage," "Life"
www.scifi.com/battlestar
The Dynamic Periodic Table of the Elements: www.dayah.com/periodic/
By Michael Sacal at 9:33 AM ON 02/04/09
"All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again."
What if in order to keep with the cycle of time, the Colonials and rebel Cylons will return to Kobol and settle there? (12 colonies of man + one Cylon colony, like in the previous cycle).
Wasn't the only reason they left Kobol because the Cylons were after them? Once they defeat Cavil they wouldn't have a reason not to settle there, right?
By Facepalm at 10:40 AM ON 02/04/09
So far everything the Hybrid in Razor said came true.
http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Hybrid_utterances
Seems as if the end of the story was known to the writers back then.
Currently all signs point to total annihilation, except for Balthar, Six and Hera. Dump them inside a time paradox and you're done. Then again the Cylons had a plan, at least the intro said so for four years. Hybridization might be the plan of finally escaping the cycle of time. At the cost of everyone else dying. "The parents have to die so the children can reach their full potential" is another one of those quotes made by Six.
By Saint54 at 10:44 AM ON 02/04/09
Why not have a part of the human race that did survive underground and undetected, I mean ya just can't kill everybody. We don't die we just multiply.
By Question at 11:46 AM ON 02/04/09
My question is why didn't the Cylons take the shuttle, and speed away to Kobol's third moon? It would make sense to settle there while the Humans find a way to occupy Earth.
By decarillion at 12:11 PM ON 02/04/09
The prophecy talked about a dying leader--Roslin may not be the only dying leader, at this point. Adama looked like he was having bouts of angina or something else causing him severe pain. Maybe he's the leader they spoke of?
Nice read, btw. I enjoyed it--was easy to understand the science stuff :)
By bob53186 at 12:23 PM ON 02/04/09
I expect a blue police call box to show up and the Doctor will sort it all out for them ...
By Lexomatic at 12:30 PM ON 02/04/09
What writer McCarthy (why does the SFW redesign hide the author at the page-end?) proposes would of course be the sensible, dispassionate, best-of-a-bad-situation, engineer-like plan. But the Colonials and rebel Cylons are short of sensible heads.
If the Colonials were just interested in homesteading, they could have found a nice carbonaceous asteroid en route -- but they were fleeing, and chasing the promise of a welcoming ecosystem. They're not fleeing now, but given the Cylon nukes, a planetary surface with a breathable atmosphere isn't that much safer than a bubble on an airless rock.
Moreover, this is hardly the first time Hollywood-SF has betrayed a misunderstanding of the radiation-boogeyman. "Lethal exposure in fifteen seconds," announces the _Enterprise_ computer to the whole crew, regardless of differences in body mass and chemistry.
By batch at 3:39 PM ON 02/04/09
What a cool article to read! Well thought-out and researched.
By jpl1976 at 4:47 PM ON 02/04/09
In the original series (if we are going to stick with the it has happened before thing) Adama did die. So it is entirely plausible that he dies in this version too.
By Michael Sacal at 5:00 PM ON 02/04/09
Actually Adama lived through the original series and the spin off, Galactica 1980.
You must be thinking of Hatch's Second Coming trailer, which ignores G 1980 and has Adama dying years earlier.
By Insomniac at 5:15 PM ON 02/04/09
All of this happened before. All of this will happen again.
There is only ONE way to bring the series to a satisfying conclusion and tie up the loose threads. There MUST be some type of time travel involved. This would allow the survivors and the rebel cylons to settle a habitable Earth. This could help explain (in part) what happened to Starbuck and where she got the brand new Viper. This would explain why the dying leader cannot see Earth (the habitable one) because sick people cannot survive the time travel. This would allow the decedents of the survivors and cylons to repopulate the planet and then eventually set out from Earth to form the twelve colonies. This would allow the story to start over again in a thousand years.
I will be really disappointed if I am wrong...
By UnRiel at 6:17 PM ON 02/04/09
This thought provoking article made me think of the whole story differently, besides the objtecive not to too hastily abandon the Earth. I and I believe most have been under the impression that the humanoid Cylons are their highest evolution, but they seem pretty clueless on matters as simple as who are the last 5. Clearly they are not in the know and are middle managers at best, even so the hybrids I suspect. Compare BSG and Terminator stories, if humanoid Cylons are the rough cyborg equivalent of Terminators like Cameron and Cromartie, then what is the Cylon equivalent of Skynet? Is this the Cylon GOD? Is it an aware supercomputer. Does it have organic components? A hive mind? Has it transcended spacetime to qualify as God-like?
Will we know more about this in the last remaining episodes or will new series Caprica reveal them instead? Now that I've thought of this, I will not be satisfied without a really fantastic resolution to these questions.
By UnRiel at 6:22 PM ON 02/04/09
I and I believe most have been under the impression that the humanoid Cylons are their highest evolution, but clearly they are not in the know about big picture matters and are middle managers at best, even so the hybrids I suspect. Compare BSG and Terminator stories, if humanoid Cylons are the rough cyborg equivalent of Terminators like Cameron and Cromartie, then what is the Cylon equivalent of Skynet? Is this the Cylon GOD? Is it an self-aware supercomputer? Does it have organic components? A hive mind? Has it transcended space-time to qualify as God-like?
Will we know more about this in the last remaining episodes or will new series Caprica reveal them instead? Now that I've thought of this, I will not be satisfied without a really fantastic resolution to these questions.
By UnRiel at 6:46 PM ON 02/04/09
The nuclear devastated Earth is littered with Cylon, not Human corpses. To me, everything is reduced to definition.
Is the Earth devastated in the audiences near future or distant past? Are Earth-origin Cylons the same species as the audience?
What species are the Caprican humans as compared to the audience?
While Athena has demonstrated her cybernetics, we have not seen Earthen Cylons do so, so are we dealing with not two species but three, with the two Cylons species being more closely related genetically so that the remains are indistinguishable but with Earthen Cylons being wholly organic?
By UnRiel at 6:52 PM ON 02/04/09
The nuclear devastated Earth is littered with Cylon, not Human corpses. To me, everything is reduced to definition.
Is the Earth devastated in the audiences near future or distant past? Are Earth-origin Cylons the same species as the audience?
What species are the Caprican humans as compared to the audience?
While Athena has demonstrated her cybernetics, we have not seen Earthen Cylons do so, so are we dealing with not two species but three, with the two Cylons species being more closely related genetically so that the remains are indistinguishable but with Earthen Cylons being wholly organic?
By WVDrummer at 7:54 PM ON 02/04/09
One thing that no one has considered: Was that really Earth? We never saw any land masses from orbit that would help to identify the planet. Even if it was our past from 20,000 years ago or 2000 years in the future the land masses would still be largely identifiable. I wonder if the real Earth is yet to be found.
By Chris "Coach K" Kincey at 8:04 PM ON 02/04/09
This was one of the best articles I've read here. Smart, informative and thought-provoking!
Dug the science lesson too. Didn't know a lot of that stuff, and it managed to hold my interest.
The kind of reading I'd expect from a major media source for Speculative Fiction.
By decarillion at 11:47 PM ON 02/04/09
Another thought--
Starbuck's ovary--we don't really know what happened to it or what it was used for (although many of us speculated).
Suppose they somehow cloned her? That would explain the 'new' Starbuck (although it doesn't explain the 'new' Viper). On the other hand, Leoben would have known about that, but he looked just as shocked as any of us when they found the ship on earth...
Hera is a hybrid--so far, a successful one but there's a fully Cylon baby on the way...so we have a girl baby...plus maybe a boy baby from Six or maybe Starbuck's ovary was used to create a human male child...all this has happened before...?
By deadmanlives at 1:28 AM ON 02/05/09
Ok, so this may be a good forum to make my guess as to how BSG will end.....
The radioactive "earth" that they have discovered is not the 3rd planet from the sun. It is the 5th (not Jupiter, of course, I'll explain in a moment).
As we get closer to the end of the series, the rest of the cylons show up and there is a tremendous battle. Virtually everyone is destroyed, including the 5th planet from the sun (the planet they know as earth), which we now know as the asteroid belt (fragments of a destroyed planet).
Those who survive are sent to the young, very tropical 3rd planet (which we now know as earth).
By the way, the only ones who ultimately survive are the human-cylon offspring....you know the ones with the double-helix DNA (as opposed to the humans of the BSG universe and the cylons who only have a single strand DNA).
I've been looking for someplace to say all this--I hope no one minds my guesses.
Peace
By mrpwriter at 12:33 PM ON 02/05/09
Since we are guessing on the end, I have to take my stab at it.
I believe the comment that this has all happened before and will happen again is not a prophecy of the future, but a warning from the past.
From the age of Kobol Cylons and Humans have been fighting. After Kobol was devastated, the 13 colonies of Kobol (12 human/1 Cylon) split apart and went into the stars to find their own homes (and end the fighting).
...but it all started again. With the colonies nuking the Cylon's home world (earth).
Then the Cylon/Human wars 50 years back.
I think the "plan" is to bring peace, by making the only choice for survival the mixing of the species; leaving only one race behind.
Otherwise, they will be at war again in a few generations. Just as they have been for thousands of years (and perhaps longer if we knew more about Kobol's history).
How does this plan happen? I believe the final five lived in human society until Cylon's were reborn. Then guided them so they didn't make the same mistakes of the past (such as setup their own home world which the colonist would just eventually nuke.
By jmyers at 3:32 PM ON 03/11/09
I happen to know the ending from a reliable source.
1. The genetic code between humans and cylons will be unlocked and combined.
2. The Earth is actually the far far past, and not the future.
3. There is an epic battle in which most die. But a few survive and colonize earth.
4. We are the survivors of the human/cylon hybrid.
By Strakus at 5:45 PM ON 09/29/09
I had a similar string of thoughts with this episode, but I eventually decided that the more mundane challenges might make the spaceship existence still a better choice. If producing bricks involves isotopic enrichment, your absence of seed stock means you are still probably eating algae, and tracking in dirt from your walk outside-in a bunny suit- involves a decon step, and suddenly means your shower water needs to be thrice-distilled before it reenters your supply, it might prove to be a less attractive environment than even a Mars-esque rock, and when your starship existence seems both to be relatively self-sustaining and with the possibility of stumbling upon something better, resuming the hunt for something better might still have been the better choice.
I recognize the merits and defensibility of the argument, and that the decision to bug out and keep searching was one made of dramatic necessity- I just think a real-world assessment might still have been a tossup.
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Strakus:
I had a similar string of thoughts with this episode, but I eventually decided that the more mundane challenges mig...More »