There's a new map of the BSG star system...

[Candlelight]

That map has so many spelling mistakes and contradictions. In the size chart down the bottom Aquaria and Scorpia are spelt wrong.

[Candlelight]

BSG Wiki has updated to reflect the new map.

http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Th..._Colonies_(RDM)

[Harvey]

Robert Maxwell wrote:

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But once they started seriously considering settling down (Kobol, New Caprica, etc.) they never once mentioned terraforming or anything resembling it. New Caprica would've been the ideal time to drop at least a reference to it. From everything presented on screen there was no evidence that the Colonials had any capabilities that could modify a planet's climate or atmospheric composition.

Well, if they didn't have the technology with them, nor the ability to replicate it, I see no reason why it would come up in conversation (much of the settling of New Caprica takes place in the one year jump off-screen, anyway).

[Dark Gilligan]

Robert Maxwell wrote:

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If the Colonials had terraforming technology at any point, odds are at least 1 or 2 out of the 50,000 survivors would have some knowledge of it. It was never even mentioned which tells me it's a capability they do not and did not possess.

I'm not sure what you mean by terraforming technology or capability. We ourselves already know how to terraform; we've had that knowledge for decades. What we don't have is power or capacity. (And don't conjure up notions of vast atmo-producing machines as seen in Serenity. That's the stuff of fairy tales.)

The easiest way to terraform a planet like Mars, for example, is to bombard it with ice-rich comets harvested from the Oort Cloud. There's your oxygen and water. Lace the clouds with earthly bacteria and you're on your way.

Granted, a terraforming effort would take centuries if not millennia. But we could begin the process today, IF we had the power. We don't. Nothing in BSG suggested the rag-tag fleet had that kind of power either.

[David cgc]

Scrawny71 wrote:

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Troy looks like it could be as hot as Mercury, too.

Troy was a domed mining colony, though, so it doesn't have to be habitable. Maybe it's tidally locked, and the dome was on the night side.

[Candlelight]

David cgc wrote:

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Troy was a domed mining colony, though, so it doesn't have to be habitable. Maybe it's tidally locked, and the dome was on the night side.

Boomer said she was from Troy, which, despite being a lie, still implies there is a population of sorts there.

[Admiral2]

Robert Maxwell wrote:

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I never once said it was the first thing on their minds. Obviously, escape and immediate survival were more important.

But once they started seriously considering settling down (Kobol, New Caprica, etc.) they never once mentioned terraforming or anything resembling it. New Caprica would've been the ideal time to drop at least a reference to it. From everything presented on screen there was no evidence that the Colonials had any capabilities that could modify a planet's climate or atmospheric composition.

OR, none of the planets they encountered after leaving the Colonies were transformable using the methods they knew. Kobol suffered the same fate as the Colonies and Cylon Earth - probably worse being the origin world - and might have been unrecoverable. New Caprica looked to be in the middle of a mini ice age and the Humans would probably have died off before any serious terraforming took hold. The Algae Planet already had a breathable atmosphere and something else the Colonials needed, so terraforming it would have been counterproductive. Same for our Earth. Combine all this with the fact they were still being chased by the Cylons and having them sit back and talk about terraforming would be a waste of airtime. It's a storyline that would go nowhere and do nothing.

[David cgc]

Candlelight wrote:

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Boomer said she was from Troy, which, despite being a lie, still implies there is a population of sorts there.

Yes. They live under a dome.

[Frontman]

Robert Maxwell wrote:

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Kobol itself wasn't a myth--it turned out to be very real. But the exodus from Kobol was a few thousand years ago. Think about where we were 3000 years ago. Most of history from around that time is pretty mythical to us. Not that we have no evidence of it, but that it's so distant and we have relatively little information so it's not "real" to us.

Kobol could hold much the same status for the Colonials: a real place where they used to live and things happened, but the stories have been distorted and attained mythical proportions over time.

But still they are if not mythical very modest and Adama in his office has stuff that resembles Roman helmets, samurai warriors, old sail ships... And since they did not start from scratch on colonies like they did on Earth 2 those kind of things did originate on Kobol or descriptions of those things, but everything that happened on Kobol was litteraly in form of gospels and sacred texts and were not taken (too) serious anyway and probably didn't contain texts on building sail ships and whole history of Kobol to ancient wars like Rome is to us.
But maybe the colonies themselves already had civilizations with witch Colonists fused together.

[Harvey]

Do we know for sure that they didn't start from scratch after the Exodus from Kobol? Did the bits and pieces that were mentioned about that period over the course of the series establish anything for certain?

[Frontman]

Harvey wrote:

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Do we know for sure that they didn't start from scratch after the Exodus from Kobol? Did the bits and pieces that were mentioned about that period over the course of the series establish anything for certain?

Well if they did they came very fast from the scratch to pre roman, roman, medieval ages... colonizing 12 planets, discovering FTL, making robots in what it seems less then 2000 years. I mean that's time well spent.

[Robert Maxwell]

Frontman wrote:

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Well if they did they came very fast from the scratch to pre roman, roman, medieval ages... colonizing 12 planets, discovering FTL, making robots in what it seems less then 2000 years. I mean that's time well spent.

I would assume they arrived at the Colonies with at least basic industrial knowledge, but it would've taken some time (centuries?) to build up enough infrastructure to have a "modern" society.

[Marc]

Robert Maxwell wrote:

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I would assume they arrived at the Colonies with at least basic industrial knowledge, but it would've taken some time (centuries?) to build up enough infrastructure to have a "modern" society.

The exodus from Kobol must of been pretty large as well. It's taken humanity 10s of 1000s of years to reach a population of 6 billion so either colonials bread like rabbits or they have a large population base to start the colonies with.

[Candlelight]

Well, I did the geek and tallied the populations of each colony; there's around 29 billion humans.

So the figure in the Resistence webisodes (20 billion) and later in season four (50 billion) don't add up, unless there's 20 billion humans floating around on those smaller moons...

[Mysterion]

[Picard] There...are...FOUR STARS! [/Picard]

Aw, c'mon, someone had to...