Questions!

[peter noble]

The Colonials don't think Tyllium is worth mining on Carillion (thanks to a report from Baltar), yet they know that the passage to the planet is mined.

Shouldn't that raise the question is if Carillon is insignificant in terms of the war effort, why would anyone bother to mine the approach to it?

On Kobol, the 13 tribes lived on the one planet, yet when they got to what would be the Colonies, they separared and lived on 12 worlds, why?

There surely weren't enough people to populate 12 planets at the time (if you take that the present day population of the Earth is around six billion people, then that'd be around half a billion people per planet at the most, less than that, because we don't know how big each tribe was and one of them went missing!)?

It doesn't make any sense that they lived on 12 worlds after the migration anyway. It was obviously thousands of years before man landed on the moon, because the 13th Tribe came to Earth and influenced life on the planet. Yet we know from Iblis that Colonial civilisation has experienced great rises and falls. I can't see the logic that if the migrants found 12 worlds waiting for them, that they'd all lose knowledge of technology, war with each other, what have, you over the same peiod of time.

They must have all settled on one planet to begin with. But did they leave Kobol over a period of time, or was it an emergency evacucation?

Was the migration made by millions, thousands or a feww hundred of each tribe?

Theories?

[monolith21]

Hmm.

I always assumed that the colonials didn't view Carillon as a good risk as far as mining was concerned due to the "nova" and the dangers within.

As for the colonies, I always assumed that the just settled wherever they ended up. That and I figured they were guided to those planets by a higher power, the same reason that the thirteenth tribe went to Earth. It was part of a larger design in my opinion. The tribes could have been forced to leave Kobol (for natural or spiritual reasons...kicked out of Eden or the like) with each Tribe deciding that they wanted to hold to their own practices, much like the Pilgrims on the Mayflower.

[LZaza]

Twelve tribes went to twelve colonies (where they ultimately had twelve Council representatives) likely because it suited some Judeo-Christian imagery (12 disciples) that Larson wanted to insert in his story to lend a fond familiarity to this group of humans from the stars. Of course, the zodiac grouping of twelve is the other more obvious suggestion, considering the names of the colonies.

As far as the storyline goes, I had the idea that Kobol's star was dying and the inhabitants had to leave. That explorers had probably found the colonies. I guessing the death of a star doesn't happen over night. But how do you evacuate an entire planet's population of inhabitants? Did everybody have a space ship parked in their driveway, instead of the family hovermobile? Did everyone go? Then we have the contradicting suggestions of the pyramids with their low tech civilisation, and spacefarers voyaging across the galaxy. It was certainly an intriguing premise.

Another question raised is how likely is it that the tribes would actually stick together in an emergency evacuation situation? More likely it would be a sort of free-for-all. However, instead it was presented that the tribes migrated together to their planets of destiny, which certainly lends credence to the Great Powers of the ship of lights theory. Maybe Iblis had something to do with the death of the Kobollian star . . . After all, the forces of evil battling the forces of goodness and light had to figure in somewhere else in the story arc, as Monolith suggested.

[Darrell Lawrence]

Originally Posted by peter noble

The Colonials don't think Tyllium is worth mining on Carillion (thanks to a report from Baltar), yet they know that the passage to the planet is mined.

Shouldn't that raise the question is if Carillon is insignificant in terms of the war effort, why would anyone bother to mine the approach to it?

That was the short path to get there that was mined, wasn't it? Or was that the long path?

At anyrate, they headed there after Baltar's betrayal, so they probably figured out it WAS an important planet after all. Then while in transit to there, they detected the mines in one path, and that Cylons themselves were covering the other path.

So they went the mined route.

Originally Posted by peter noble

On Kobol, the 13 tribes lived on the one planet, yet when they got to what would be the Colonies, they separared and lived on 12 worlds, why?

There surely weren't enough people to populate 12 planets at the time (if you take that the present day population of the Earth is around six billion people, then that'd be around half a billion people per planet at the most, less than that, because we don't know how big each tribe was and one of them went missing!)?

It doesn't make any sense that they lived on 12 worlds after the migration anyway. It was obviously thousands of years before man landed on the moon, because the 13th Tribe came to Earth and influenced life on the planet. Yet we know from Iblis that Colonial civilisation has experienced great rises and falls. I can't see the logic that if the migrants found 12 worlds waiting for them, that they'd all lose knowledge of technology, war with each other, what have, you over the same peiod of time.

They must have all settled on one planet to begin with. But did they leave Kobol over a period of time, or was it an emergency evacucation?

Was the migration made by millions, thousands or a feww hundred of each tribe?

Theories?

My guess would be... Kobol was dying. Remember, they found it in a great void around a single dimming star. Also, each "tribe" at that time had different beliefs. When Kobol became uninhabitable, they had a consensus astro lock on a new star system with the 12 planets.

Maybe they were all going to go to just a couple of those planets, but then the tribes discovered more habital planets and decided to keep their tribes to themselves, thus eventually ending up on all 12.

Meanwhile, the 13th lost tribe experienced something different: They were the LAST ones to leave, and went the other way to avoid the bickering of the other 12 tribes of man

[WarMachine]

1. Carillon could have been a way-station on the way to somewhere else, and it may not have been considered (per Baltar's doctored reports) as being worth fighting over, which is how they knew that the system was watched by the Cylons.

2. Civilizations forget things -- less than 100 years after the fall of the Western Empire, peasants in many places of previously-civilized Europe considered money to be a form of magic.

Militarily? After Adrianople, it was generally considered that cavalry ruled the battlefield, giving us roughly a thousand years of Knight-Mafiosi, until a few little towns and villages in Switzerland proved that all infantry had ever needed was training and discipline, and cavalry started to disappear with a quickness.

Socially? After the Mongols tore through Persia and the Mesopotamian Basin, they left such a howling wilderness that the region has only now begun to support a population approaching what it did in Rome's day.

Any or all of these, and more, could and likely did, happen in the Colonies.

3. c.500 million was the average population of the Earth at any given time for the last 5K-ish years, at least, given estimated food production rates and known medical technology. Kobol having a population of 6 - 10 billion with highly advanced technology is certainly not out of the question.

4. Why split up to 12 worlds? If they're there, why not?