What the Frak? Battlestar Galactica’s Science Explained

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What the Frak? Battlestar Galactica’s Science Explained
October 30, 2010
By Lisa Grossman
Wired Science

When the science fiction drama Battlestar Galactica ended in 2009, it left some geeks wanting answers. How can a humanoid robot plug directly into a spaceship? How does Galactica’s faster-than-light travel work? And what the frak was up with the mitochondrial Eve thing?

Read a Wired.com exclusive excerpt from the new book by Patrick Di Justo and Kevin Grazier, The Science of Battlestar Galactica.

To find out, Wired.com spoke with Patrick Di Justo, Wired magazine contributing editor and co-author of the new book, The Science of Battlestar Galactica. Together with the show’s science advisor, NASA scientist Kevin Grazier, Di Justo jumps beyond the red line to delve into the science behind the story — and discovers that some things lie beyond what science can reach.

Spoiler alert: Major plot points ahead.

Wired.com: What was the purpose of this book?

Patrick Di Justo: Battlestar Galactica has been called “a science fiction show without the science.” There are some episodes of Galactica that are almost like The West Wing, they dealt more with politics…. They never really highlighted the science in the show unless it drove the plot. That was very good from a dramatic point of view, but it did leave a lot of science unexplored and unexplained in the show.

So we thought, hey, no one’s really building up the science in the show, and it’s there. Why don’t we do it?

Wired.com: So in the show’s philosophy, who wins in the science-versus-drama battle?

Di Justo: There’s actually a quote in the book, where it says, “Drama wins every time.” That’s essentially it. It’s not that they completely threw science out the airlock. It’s just that there would be times when they wouldn’t mention or play up the science.

Wired.com: Can you give an example?

DiJusto: Very basically, how could Cylons pass medical tests? They never explained that, never went into any detail about it. It was just accepted that Cylons could be so wonderfully indistinguishable that it would take a demented genius like Gaius Baltar to build a special type of machine that could differentiate the two. You wouldn’t tell them apart from a standard medical test. And the show never explains how that works, how that happens — it just happens.

Same thing with the FTL drive. They never explain how it happens, it’s just spin up the drives and whoosh — off you go.

Wired.com: It seems like sometimes the physics of how the FTL drive works changes to fit what would be the most dramatic thing.

Di Justo: In the book, we explain that they never really locked down how the FTL drive worked, until they actually needed the details for a plot point. As long as you could reasonably say, okay, let’s FTL jump out of here, that’s all you needed to know — until an aspect of the drama required you need to know how it works.

Wired.com: People have raised parallels between Battlestar Galactica and our own world, and not just in the way the final episode plays out. Can you talk a bit about that?

Di Justo: Think about what the mood in this country was like in 2003. We were still scared from the Sept. 11 attacks. We had this problem of, who can you trust? People were seeing terrorists under every bridge, it seemed.

And here you had a science fiction property from nearly 25 years before that covered almost all of those fears and feelings that we were having. So the show, it did what I believe science fiction is supposed to do. It takes us to the future, out in space. It takes us away from our current day, so that we can turn around and look at ourselves through a different lens.

Wired.com: What kind of messages or cautionary tales do we get from the treatment of these questions in Battlestar?

Di Justo: One of the show’s executive producers, David Eick, said, “We’re not doing our jobs if, at least once a week, the viewer doesn’t ask. ‘Am I rooting for the wrong team?’”

Here, at least in America in 2003 when the show first came on, so many people were insisting that they knew this was right, these people were evil, we are the right people.

Then this show came along, which paralleled or mirrored that. You’ve got these Colonials who we’re sure are right, and the Cylons who we’re sure are evil and bad. But over the course of the first couple of seasons, sometimes maybe the Colonials aren’t right all the time. Sometimes maybe the Cylons aren’t evil all the time. Eventually you get to the point where the Colonials are doing suicide bombings against the Cylons. Here we are saying suicide bombing is just plain-out bad, and before you know it the good guys are doing it. Are they still the good guys?

My opinion is, if you had done that on American television with Americans and Muslim terrorists, and if you had blurred the line between the two, my God, the show would have been off the air before the episode had ended.

Yet by putting it in outer space, by making the bad guys manufactured robots, you could tell that same story, you could blur those lines. But you’re not doing it in such an obvious way that would make people get their defenses up. That’s what science fiction has been doing since the very, very beginning.

Wired.com: What are some other parallels and differences between Colonials, Cylons and Earth humans?

Di Justo: Well, we talked about blood type at Comic Con in New York. Another key thing is, in the episode “A Measure of Salvation,” a subgroup of Cylons come across an old beacon that happens to be contaminated with lymphocytic encephalitis. They’re sickened, they’re on the verge of death. If they’re not helped soon, they’re all going to die.

Doctor Cottle explains that the Colonials are immune to this disease. They’re just absolutely fine, while the Cylons are dying.

That sounds really cool, but when you start to look into it, we, the people on the planet Earth in 2010, we are not immune to lymphocytic encephalitis. We get sick. Sometimes if we’re not careful, we die.

Right there in the third season, we did not know how the show was going to end. But we got a really strong clue that Colonials are one type of people, Cylons are another type of people, and we humans really do seem to be halfway between both of them. We do seem to be a link, somehow, between them. And eventually at the end of the series we found out that we are the descendants of both groups.

Wired.com: What about Cylon neural structure? Are there brain differences between Cylons and humans?

Di Justo: At the very beginning, in the miniseries, where Commander Adama says that the radiation on Ragnar is affecting the Cylon’s silica pathways to the brain: For myself, I was thinking of dark silicon, like the stuff a CPU is made out of.

Until Dr. Grazier pointed out that a fiber-optic cable is also a silica pathway. Instead of dark silica, like a CPU, what is more likely is that they have fiber optics jacking up their neural systems. Which is how, when you see one of the Number Eight Cylons jam a fiber-optic cable into her arm and reprogram a computer, that’s how that happens. They have fiber-optic nerves.

Wired.com: And that lets them interface with any computer like a USB?

Di Justo: That’s what we’re seeing, yeah.

Wired.com: Is any of the science as presented just plain wrong, according to what we know about real-world science?

Di Justo: No, not wrong. Although, the mitochondrial Eve section, they do admit to a misprint. “An actual admitted scientific mistake.” It’s blamed on the conflation of two very different terms. So it’s not that they did something that was completely against physics or biology. This whole deal with mitochondrial Eve was a misunderstanding of terms, and it just made it on to the show. That’s the only official mistake.

Wired.com: So that was an out-of-world mistake, not something weird within the world of Battlestar.

Di Justo: Yes. There’s also one tiny thing to point out: In the final episode, we saw Angel Baltar and Angel Six reading National Geographic over Ron Moore’s shoulder about mitochondrial Eve, and everyone just assumed that we’re talking about little baby Hera.

But Baltar says in that last scene that mitochondrial Eve had a human father and Cylon mother. And then he gets this little smug look on his face. My reaction was, he’s talking about the child Baltar and Six had, some child they had after the show had ended.

Wired.com: So it’s not necessarily Sharon and Helo’s baby.

Di Justo: Right. We could be the offspring of Baltar and Six, which gives us a new way of looking at humanity. Helo was such a do-the-right-thing kind of guy, it’s nice to look upon him as one of the fathers of humanity today. But it’s equally possible that Six and Baltar had a child, and that girl became mitochondrial Eve. We could be the offspring of Gaius Baltar, which would explain a lot about humanity, too.

Wired.com: Is there anything that is still left as a mystery?

Di Justo: We didn’t do it deliberately. If there’s a question that remains unanswered, we really did, we went around and asked people on various BSG fact forums, friends, people who work on the show, people who watch the show. We asked them, what questions do you have? If there’s anything that is still unanswered, it’s not that we didn’t try.

Wired.com: One thing I was still wondering is, what happened to Kara, when she died and came back?

Di Justo: That actually is not science. That’s much more metaphysics, so we really didn’t touch it. But it’s my understanding that, she died, and was resurrected. She came back as an angel. And of course, what’s an angel? I don’t know. That’s really outside the realm of the science of Battlestar Galactica. That might be an interesting book, The Religion of Battlestar Galactica.

Wired.com: The theme of resurrection is interesting, though, because the Cylons are the only other ones who can come back from death.

Di Justo: Right, but the question is, did she come back bodily? It certainly seemed like she did, people had sex with her. So probably yes. But what was that body? She wasn’t a Cylon, but was she a Colonial? Or was she an angel, a totally different type of being? Who knows? I really don’t know. We looked at it, and we said, this is beyond science.

Wired.com: It’s interesting that the show was so careful with its science, but only up to a point.

Di Justo: Some things probably can’t be examined scientifically. We always knew that. There’s always some things that are just not amenable to scientific study. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? You can’t use science for that. What are these angel creatures? I would say that they’re beyond what the act of science can explain.

Wired.com: What science facts in our own world are approaching the stuff that is presented as science fiction in Battlestar?

Di Justo: Just a couple of months ago, Craig Venter announced that he had basically created a genome and created living cells out of a manufactured genome. That is the first step to making our own Cylons.

You’ve got kids at MIT, some of them are high school students, using BioBricks, which are predetermined segments of DNA that perform specific tasks. These kids are actually reprogramming bacteria to do things that bacteria never had evolved to do, simply by inserting standardized segments of DNA. They’re called BioBricks because they’re supposed to be like Legos: You snap them together and build what you want. That’s happening nowadays.

The iGEM competitions are manufacturing biological creatures using standardized parts, much like Legos or electronic components. We’ve got a lot of science fiction-y type things happening right now, that showed up in Battlestar Galactica.

Wired.com: What about the space travel?

Di Justo: That’s happening a lot slower. It always felt to me that the Colonial civilization that we knew was very very similar to ours. They used guns with bullets. When D’Anna was doing her documentary, they had portable TV cameras that looked just like ours, and cell phones that looked just like ours. The men had three-piece suits with pinstripes that look just like ours. Their civilization was very very similar to our own.

The big difference was that they had developed practical interplanetary spaceflight. It seems more to me like their civilization just got lucky, and had a very good practical spaceflight breakthrough that we haven’t had yet. But with any luck, hopefully we soon will.

Wired.com: Did it have anything to do with cutting all the corners off their paper?

Di Justo: [Laughs] To the best of my knowledge, no. I think that was just a joke about having to cut corners on the show.

[Editor's note: In a press conference at the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle, executive producer Ronald Moore said that this story was a myth. "These people just hate right angles," he said.]

Wired.com: So if we’re descended from this more advanced civilization, what happened to all the technology?

Di Justo: They shot it into the sun, remember? People I was talking to about the show had differences of opinion about whether that was a good idea.

The whole story, the events of the TV show Battlestar Galactica, all took place approximately 150,000 years ago. A ragtag bunch of people, barely able to hold their technological civilization together, it’s not too much to expect that they would not be able to keep that level of technology for 150,000 years. They couldn’t build new spaceships, they couldn’t rebuild an FTL drive from scratch. When these things wore out, probably within the lifetime of the first Colonial generation, they were going to be gone forever. So you can almost argue why not just shoot it into the sun and get us off the technology kick a little earlier.

Wired.com: Is that a comment on our civilization’s addiction to technology?

Di Justo: In the very final scenes of the very final episode, they did a montage of various robots. Industrial robots, I think they had Sony’s Asimo robot. They’re talking about, look at all the things that happen when you build robots. Then they show the robots we’re doing right now.

I very much think the final montage in the final episode was a comment to ourselves, saying hey, keep an eye on what you’re building. We just told you a four-season-long story about how these things that you’re building can get away from you. And look, you’re building them. So be careful.