Lab Notes: Reach for a Battlestar

[GoldCylon]

Source: Science Fiction weekly


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All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again. With this catchy bit of scripture, SCI FI's hit remake of Battlestar Galactica neatly excuses its largest credibility problem: the vast and amazing similarity between modern America and the United Colonies-distant worlds named for the signs of the zodiac. In this scenario, the planets were colonized from a home world called Kobol, with the help of powerful beings named after the Greek gods. Earth is the fabled 13th colony, too distant from the other 12 to have maintained any sort of contact-even the knowledge of Earth's location has been lost-so, on the face of it, we'd expect the world of Caprica (for example) to have its own unique cultures and myths, unrelated to ours. We shouldn't expect a carbon copy.

But many Earth cultures, including the Mayans and the Australian Aborigines, believe history is cyclic rather than linear-that the world lives and dies and lives again, a little different every time but always following the same broad historical arc. There's no scientific proof for this-in fact, chaos theory and the archaeological record tell a very different story-but it's possible. We know, for example, that the glaciers of the ice age scoured whole continents down to the bedrock, and when the glaciers melted and sea levels rose by 120 meters, the coastline in some areas was driven inland by dozens of miles. In the process, the artifacts of one or more ancient civilizations could have been buried or drowned or otherwise destroyed, leaving behind traces we haven't found yet, or haven't identified. The fossil evidence does seem pretty clear that human beings were not imported to Earth, but evolved right here. This, too, can be explained if the Lords of Kobol brought Neanderthals from Earth to Kobol and later reseeded the Earth with modern humans, not once but several times. Again, there's no evidence that such a thing ever happened, but there's also no evidence it didn't. In fact, you could argue (and many people have) that Aboriginal and Mayan beliefs are a type of history, and therefore a type of evidence.

I'm not saying it's likely, but it isn't impossible, and that by itself is important, because if that's the biggest leap of faith the show expects us to make, then it's a highly believable story by science-fiction standards.

Going back to camp-not

In the campy 1970s original, the laws of physics were loose guidelines at best. Giant ships could smoothly accelerate to the speed of light with little effort. Fighter planes could bank their turns in hard vacuum, pushing their stubby wings against nothing at all. A different spaceship could crash or blow up every week, without the Galactica ever seeming to run out. Real spaceships do not, of course, behave this way, and this is one area where the new Galactica shines brightly indeed. When a Viper fires its engines, it adds a predictable amount of speed every second, and then keeps that speed until it flips around and fires in the other direction. This "vector movement" is a consequence of Newton's laws of motion, and it isn't optional.

In the same way, turning a real spaceship involves brief fiery puffs from small rocket engines called reaction control system (RCS) or attitude control system (ACS) thrusters. And again, the ship keeps on turning until there's an equivalent toot in the opposite direction. In practice, these are never perfectly matched, so real spaceships are always rotating a little bit, with occasional RCS correction burns to try and stabilize them. We see this clearly when the Colonial Vipers are in flight: Under manual stick-and-pedal control by their pilots, they jerk and puff constantly. That kind of realism goes unnoticed by most viewers, so you have to admire the team at Aces and Eights Productions for taking the trouble to get it right.

Where the old show offered laser beams that were both visible and audible in the vacuum of space, the new show uses high-speed tracer cannons similar to the guns on Earthly fighter planes. Can ordinary bullets fire in the airless void? You bet. In rocket science terms, gunpowder is a "monopropellant," containing both carbon-sulphur fuel and potassium nitrate as an oxidizer. In other words, it already contains everything it needs to ignite and explode, and doesn't need oxygen. And the bullets, leaving a trail of burning gunpowder behind them, could indeed be visible against the inky blackness, although the force of their departure would (again, thanks to laws of motion laid down by Isaac Newton) slow down the ship that fired them. This, I think, is one reason the Vipers' engines are lit most of the time during combat. It's also nice, I think, that both sides of the conflict have smart missiles that know how to hit the broad side of a Battlestar.


Capital ships like the Galactica itself are powered by something called "trillium," which is probably the same thing we call helium-3. This rare gas is an important material for nuclear fusion because when it's combined at high temperature with deuterium-a much commoner substance also known as "heavy hydrogen"-it releases 30 trillion times as much energy as an equivalent mass of chemical fuel, without any harmful neutrons or gamma rays. The by-products are all charged particles, which can be contained with magnetic fields and expelled as rocket exhaust. This makes it a very good spaceship fuel, and I think if we really needed to, even we backward Earthlings could build engines to exploit it. The Vipers and Raptors may use trillium as well, at least in outer space, but there seems to be some other substance, simply known as "aviation fuel," that they burn in planetary atmospheres. This must also be a monopropellant of some sort, since it works in oxygen-free atmospheres, but we don't know much else about it.

The Cylons have smartened up

The Cylons-mortal enemies and former slaves of the Colonial humans-have gotten a lot smarter since the 1970s. Like the humans, they use cannons and missiles and possibly directed energy weapons as well, although the dialogue is never clear on this. But the greatest threat in the Cylon arsenal is their great skill at cyber warfare. Is this realistic? Most of you reading this column have probably experienced the pain of spy ware and computer viruses, and have learned not to hit suspicious Web sites or download strange files. But Galactica's case is interesting, because they seem to have a lot of computers onboard, but a mortal terror of networking them together. Why worry? Unless they're stupid enough to plug in a wireless router with the firewall wide open, you might guess they were immune from cyber attack by spaceships that weren't, you know, cabled in directly. Alas, it isn't so. With powerful electric fields or tightly focused radio waves, it's possible to induce electrical currents in wires and even shielded cables. The longer the cables are, the easier this is, and if you twiddle your signal just right, you can introduce whatever bits you want into the data stream of an enemy network. The obvious countermeasure would be to use optical fibres instead of wires, but the sad truth is that no one has ever built a computer that works by light alone. Sooner or later, the signals have to get converted to electricity, and that point is the Achilles' heel of any electronic warfare defence. The Colonials are right to worry, and the Aces and Eights team are clever to include this threat, since it cranks up the tension and clarifies the conflict of man-vs.-machine. Not nearly so exciting if it were simply our networks fighting theirs.

But this does suggest a method for attacking the Cylons themselves. When one of their humanoid bodies dies, its memories are uploaded to a "resurrection ship" and copied into a fresh clone. This is all well and fine, but the amount of data involved must be huge. It's also interesting that the signal can pass through layers and layers of metal plating and still remain intelligible. Radio waves can't do this. Also, it's interesting that the Cylons don't upload their memories continuously. Why wait for death? The most obvious reason would be that the upload process itself is fatal. My guess would be some sort of nuclear reaction that produced modulated bursts of neutrinos. These ghostly particles can pass right through solid objects-even whole planets-with almost no attenuation. Building a receiver to detect them would be tricky-we couldn't do it here and now-but the Cylons are a clever people. Anyway, if the Colonials could somehow intercept and corrupt this data stream, they could introduce false memories into the resurrected Cylon, leading the Toaster fleet into one ruinous trap after another. With help from his invisible friend Number Six, Dr. Baltar could probably manage this, although I'm not sure he'd want to.

One final element that keeps the show exciting is the "jump drive," a device that can instantly teleport a good-sized spaceship (though evidently not a planet or asteroid) across astronomical distances. There are limits to how far they can go and how often they can do it, but by keeping their drives hot and a set of rendezvous coordinates in memory, the Colonial fleet can escape from almost any ambush, no matter how badly outnumbered they are. This makes their story of endless flight a lot more believable, which is ironic, because the jump drive is the show's second-biggest leap of faith. With current science and technology, no one knows how to build this miraculous engine. We do know that powerful electric fields can distort spacetime in the same way that gravitational fields do, and we also know that every Colonial ship-with the possible exception of the Vipers-is outfitted with artificial gravity, which probably works on a very similar principle. I would expect the energy requirements to be huge, but I don't know enough 25th-century physics to say for sure. Is the jump drive possible? I honestly don't know. But in the hands of writers like Carla Robinson and Ronald D. Moore, it sure sounds good.

Now, some readers may argue that it's fishy for me to sing the praises of the network that owns Science Fiction Weekly, but in the case of bad science (cough cough Ghost Hunters cough cough), the First and Second Laws of Robotics prevent me from pulling any punches. Also, unfortunately, "hard science fiction" has an often-deserved reputation for serving up technically plausible stories that, um, aren't very exciting. Since this show succeeds on both levels, believable and gripping, I'll give it the Golden Lab Note award and let the grumblers say what they like.