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Culturegasm: [Closed] Battlestar Galactica: Frak Earth
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Imagine not being able to breathe anything except your neighbor's recycled farts for 4 or 5 years.
You're never lived in a dorm, have you?and even the remnant people didn't outlast this last generation.
As someone else said earlier, that's not exactly how it works - the Mitochondrial Eve thing doesn't mean there aren't still Tighs or Adamas out there. It's like this: if I traced your heritage back to your mother, and then her mother, and then her mother, I would eventually reach Hera and Athena without having to go through a single male other than you - and the same would be true for everyone living today. If I did the same thing, but traced through people's fathers, I would end up all over the place - possibly Tighs and Adamas in some cases, native humans in others. What Hera (or, technically, Athena) represents is simply the matrilineal source; the throughline; the lowest common denominator. The evidence does suggest that colony heritage did eventually fade away into the native populations, but it could easily have taken thousands of years. -
- CommentAuthorlooneynerd
- CommentTimeMar 22nd 2009
Heh, maybe the colonials were the ones that wiped the Neanderthals out... -
Unless they first (or immediately afterward) devolved into Neanderthals themselves, they couldn't have - or else human society would have started about 140 thousand years early.
Or do you mean just the Neanderthals? -
The evidence does suggest that colony heritage did eventually fade away into the native populations, but it could easily have taken thousands of years.
True. What I'm thinking, and what I'm trying to suggest, is that, given what we know about the colonials and the way they dispersed on the earth, 150,000 years ago, they probably pretty much ended in that generation.
38,000 spread around the planet are not going to be able to produce enough children. Winters, previously unencountered diseases, hardships in general are probably going to finish off most of those isolated pockets of people. I would suspect that even spoken language didn't survive past Hera's first children. I'd guess the colonial population simply mostly died off or interbred with Earth humans, and the next generation were essentially native Earth pre-historic hunter/gatherers, which was the only viable, sustainable lifeway given the circumstances.
The technology was thrown away because it was spent and useless. Language and the social constructs of civilization are also technologies and would also have been useless. -
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CommentAuthororwellseyes
- CommentTimeMar 22nd 2009
I just recalled a book, "Earth Abides" by George Stewart, that tackles something like this. Plague wipes our most people, a handful of survivors, random folks, start living in a city neighborhood. The book is really about change over time. They eat up the fresh food and the canned stuff goes bad. They start farming but again, a random bunch of folks. Some of them start living in triples and other arrangements. The main character lives into his dotage and manages to see the language start to fade in the grand and great grand kids.
All that over just barely 70 years or so. Over a 200? Over a thousand? The remnants of the colonials would disappear. Their ships become legends, gods and myths. The language fades, the culutre evaporates. 500 years later and they'd be just a couple ticks up the ladder from the native humans, maybe better farmers or better at forging weapons.
The God complex stuff seems more a distraction than anything. I like mystery, and Moore left enough of one that a Theist answer isn't the only one available.
Remember, Moore was on Deep Space 9. I only caught a couple episodes, but a friend of mine loved it. One of the core conflicts on the show were the natives of the local planet who thought the creatures in the wormhole were gods, and the Star Trek people who thought they were just "non-corporeal aliens" or some other tecnho-babble.
If it's written well, like this was, it doesn't matter which is "true" because the character's arguments are so compelling. -
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CommentAuthorwarrenellis
- CommentTimeMar 22nd 2009
I would suspect that even spoken language didn't survive past Hera's first children.
The gene for spoken language skills didn't turn up until about 80,000 years ago, IIRC. -
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What's interesting is that this comes only a few months after Hickman's Pax Romana, in which a few hundred modern humans travel back to Roman times with a bunch of technology and drastically reshape the development, and pace, of modern society. Which does suggest strongly that even the most basic tech use had to have disappeared by whatever time the Colonials mixed with the natives, because giving a caveman even something as simple as a saw could've had an enormous impact on the future.
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- CommentAuthorlooneynerd
- CommentTimeMar 22nd 2009
@SteadyUp
Actually, we now know that we are genetically distinct from neanderthals: we were never Neanderthals and they never evolved into humans. They were probably distant enough to even make breeding with them impossible. Most people think they were wiped out by superior Homo Sapien technology and adaptability...
@OddBill
You're probably right. Going by what we think now, humans had just started leaving Africa at 150,000 years ago, so many of the groups probably could only breed with each other. -
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CommentAuthororwellseyes
- CommentTimeMar 22nd 2009
@Warrenellis:
The gene, FOXP2, might be a litte earlier actually, like 100-200,000 years ago.
OMG IT"S ALL TRUE! -
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It pleases me now in a bleak, nihilistic way to imagine the whole purpose of all the prophecies and tribulations of the colonials was to introduce the gene for spoken language into a population of pre-verbal Earth based hominids.
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Which does suggest strongly that even the most basic tech use had to have disappeared by whatever time the Colonials mixed with the natives, because giving a caveman even something as simple as a saw could've had an enormous impact on the future.
So what? This most recent arc of civilization in our real world is around six thousand years old. In truth, the Galatican could've taken the per-verbals from their current status to modern technology in six thousand years with jump-starting and interbreeding. And then Centurians could've come back and blasted that new civilization back to the Stone Age again. Assuming a four thousand year breathing period for the population to rebuild and stuff to stop glowing in the dark, this could've happened some fourteen times while still fitting into the 150K year timeline. Looked at that way we're just about due for another Robot Culling. Perhaps around 2012...
Bottom-lining, it's quite reasonable that the only remnents of the Colonials are in our DNA or bits of our culture. -
we're just about due for another Robot Culling
We were smarter than that this time. We made Microsoft Windows the dominant operating system. Those robots don't stand a chance against us now. -
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CommentAuthororwellseyes
- CommentTimeMar 22nd 2009
We were smarter than that this time. We made Microsoft Windows the dominant operating system. Those robots don't stand a chance against us now.
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Bottom-lining, it's quite reasonable that the only remnents of the Colonials are in our DNA or bits of our culture.
That was basically my point, too. How it ended up that way is open to debate. -
One question to consider is how long does it take the average human skeleton to decay into dust? Assuming that time is less than 150K years or so, it's quite probable that the human race has plenty of "Colonial Eves and Adamas." Hera's bones were only kept intact through fossilization and every one else that we know of crumbled to dust over time.
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i think cuz we and Hera are the hybrids so we can fossilize but non-hybrids like Adama turn to dust instead.
;) -
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CommentAuthorwarrenellis
- CommentTimeMar 23rd 2009
oh thank god -