Baltar is the first to discover that Boomer is, in fact, Cylon model Eight.
A mass spectrometer generally has three components. First, the molecules in a sample are split into component atoms and then electrons are stripped off, that is, the atoms are ionized. Next, by accelerating the atoms and applying a magnetic field, the atoms are “sorted” by charge-to-mass ratio. Finally, there are detectors to determine the presence of various elements, even their relative abundances. It is these detectors that would notice a “Cylon spike” in the abundance of silicon, owing to the presence of their internal optic cables.‹
Particle tracks through a bubble chamber.
SF: Hang on! Tigh’s been Adama’s friend for over thirty years! Tyrol’s been around for at least twelve! So does that mean that Tigh, Tyrol, Anders, and Tory aren’t really Cylons? That can’t be, because Anders made eye contact with a Cylon Raider, and Tory has super-strength.
RS: Oh, they are Cylons, they are just fundamentally different from the numbered models. The Ones through Eights were created just after the last Cylon war; the Final Five are a few thousand years old. It’s all perfectly self-consistent.
SF: Oh, making them self-consistent is fine and easy. Making them undetectable to a simple X-ray or CAT scan isn’t so easy.
RS: Sure it is. First, a CAT scan is basically a three-dimensional X-ray, so for our purposes here, the terms are synonymous. If we assume that the fiber-optic/silica pathways (synonymous) are of the same size scale as nerves, even significantly larger, CAT scans do not have the spatial resolution to see them. More importantly, the opacity of silica in the X-ray portion of the spectrum is very low. Rephrased, the glass of fiber-optic cables is just as transparent to X-rays as is visible light. Neither a CAT scan nor an X-ray would ever see the silica pathways.
Starbuck interrogating Leoben.
SF: Okay, so Cylons can be distinguished if you put them in a physics lab.
RS: Easily, and this is exactly what happened in “Flesh and Bone.” Baltar’s Cylon detector worked for Sharon because he was looking for the right thing.
SF: But Cylon neurons have to look and work the same as Colonial neurons, at least as far as a moderately stringent medical test is concerned. If they are different, the Cylon will be instantly found out.
RS: No, they don’t have to work the same. The neurons have to communicate with the brain at one end and biological sensors (heat, cold, pain) at the other, and those interfaces would be the biggest technological hurdles in creating skinjobs. There has to be a microscopic transducer of some kind at each end. What happens in between, how the data is sent, doesn’t matter.
SF: But that’s impossible.
RS: Not impossible, just the biggest technological hurdle, as I said. In fact, back in 1997 scientists at Caltech developed a “neurochip”—a noninvasive device that connects living brain cells to electrodes on a silicon chip. More recently, Infineon Corporation manufactured a chip that allows direct communications between nerves and both sensors and actuators.
SF: Ah, but wouldn’t those actuators and neurochips show up on a physical exam?
RS: They would show up on a physics exam. They would add to the silicon signature on Dr. Baltar’s Cylon Detector. Given all that we’ve discussed, I would argue that skinjob Cylons would pass even a very stringent medical exam. You would have to biopsy tissue and look at it under a microscope to see anything amiss. Or place a tissue sample in a mass spectrometer.
SF: A Cylon could be detected via a biopsy, then?
RS: Sure, if any of them had one performed. Tyrol, Anders, and Tory all appear too young and healthy to need biopsies. Tigh just probably says “Get away from me with that frakking needle.”
SF: So the Cylons have fiber-optic nerves?
RS: I knew you’d come around. Fiber-optic nerves would explain their faster reflexes (why Anders was so good at Pyramid, why Leoben could move so quickly when being interrogated by Kara). Software (or wetware, the biological equivalent to computer software) in their brains could explain increased strength. Remember, our strength is limited in many ways by pain—or a very similar impulse.
SF: When we learn new stuff, our neurons grow new dendrites to reach out to other neurons, to strengthen the connection that represents the new concept. A prewired network of neuron-to-neuron fiber optics wouldn’t allow Cylons to learn anything new.
RS: That’s in the head. Cylon brains are biologically similar, with different programming. It’s what carries the nerve impulses that’s different.
SF: But Admiral Adama very clearly talked about the “silica pathways” into Leoben’s head.
RS: Well, that is where they all converge. Besides, in context, when Adama said this it was in the form of an insult, not an analysis.
SF: If all of what you say is true, then it sounds almost like we could build our own skinjobs right now.
RS: It does sound that way, doesn’t it?
SF: Don’t tell me that skinjobs could be walking among us right now.
RS: By your command.
SF: I won’t ask.
RS: Probably for the best.
SF: Okay, next question: Why didn’t Cally and Tyrol POP when they got sucked into space in “A Day in the Life”?
RS: You fanboys just do not give up! Besides, that’s covered already in chapter thirteen!
SF: Okay, I’ll go there . . .
RS: Please do.
CHAPTER 7
Colonial + Cylon + Natives = Human?
Let’s define our terms: humans are the people currently living on the planet Earth in the twenty-first century. The people reading this book. The people who watched Battlestar Galactica on some form of video display sometime between the Common Era years 2003 and 2009 (2010 if you count Caprica). Colonials are non-Cylon people who lived on one of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol around the time of the Cylon attack. Natives are the people living on preindustrial Earth 150,000 years ago.
One underlying but unspoken question throughout the entire show was, “Are the first two groups the same?” Colonials sure look and act human.aa Colonials have all the same foibles humans have and no extra powers that humans don’t—they get sick and die of cancer, and they can’t resurrect. So humans and Colonials are the same, right?
Not exactly. There have long been clues that something fishy was going on regarding the two species. We got our first clue that humans and Colonials were distinct even before Hera Agathon was born. In the second season episode “Epiphanies,” Dr. Cottle, having examined the fetus in sickbay, said that Hera’s fetal blood was “damned odd.” Baltar followed by saying that the fetus has “no antigens. It has no blood type.”
Hera has no blood type. This fact astonishes Baltar and Cottle, and it even sounds pretty science fictiony: A person with no blood type? Cool!
Settle down. There’s a decent chance that you have no blood type, either.
In France in the 1600s, Jean-Baptiste Denys, King Louis XIV’s court physician, made a name for himself by transfusing lamb’s blood into several people in an attempt to save their lives. Unfortunately, the name he made was “the defendant”: after a few seemingly successful transfusions, Denys was arrested when one of his patients died. He was tried and found not guilty, but—much as our own government has forbidden certain types of stem cell research—the court forbade all kinds of transfusions from then on.
The subject of transfusions lay more or less dormant until 1901, when the researcher Karl Landsteiner discovered that human blood has three main antigen patterns: either one type of antigen (which Landsteiner called “Type A”), a different type of antigen (“Type B”), or no antigens at all. Landsteiner called this “type 0” to indicate zero antigens, and that quickly became corrupted to “Type O.” Two years later, other scientists discovered blood with both A and B antigens, a much more scarce type known as Type AB.
It so happens that here on Earth, Type O is the most common blood group, possessed by nearly two thirds of all humans. The complete la
ck of antigens means that in a pinch, Type O blood cells can be transfused into people with Type A, B, or AB blood without causing an antigen reaction. Without Type O blood, blood banks and transfusions would be a lot more difficult to manage, and would be short-stocked far more often.
Lee "Apollo" Adama.
Lee Adama after resigning from the Colonial Forces.
The Colonial population knows nothing about this. We don’t know what blood types they have—they might all be Type A, or Type B, or a mix of both, or their blood antigens might be totally different from ours. We do know that based on Baltar and Cottle’s reaction, they’ve never heard of Type O blood.
For blood type, human beings get a specific gene sequence from each parent on chromosome 9. One particular sequence of DNA codes for Type A blood. Another, slightly different sequence of codes for Type B. What is most likely a genetic mistake codes for Type O.
This probably means that somewhere in the ancestry of human beings, some people were born with a genetic error in their DNA.ab They should have had the sequence for Type A blood, but somehow their DNA had deleted the code for a single amino acid, guanine. The resulting protein was meaningless: it didn’t make Type A blood; in fact it didn’t do anything. Without a complete Type A protein, these people had no blood type.
A child’s blood type can be determined from the genes they get from their parents. Blood types A and B are dominant over Type O, so if a child got an A gene from the father and an O gene from the mother, the child would be Type A. It works like this:
If the alleles for A, B, and O were evenly distributed throughout the population, we would see blood types A, B, AB, and O appear in a 3:3:2:1 ratio. Type O would be about 11 percent of the population, and types A and B together would make up about 66 percent of the population. But in real life those numbers are nearly reversed. Humans must be heavily weighted with Type O alleles.
Again, this is all new to Colonial science. If they had a Type O allele in the Colonial genome, no matter how rare it was, at some point in their history two Type O carriers would have met and had a child without blood antigens. For Hera’s blood to be a total anomaly, the Type O allele must not exist on the Twelve Colonies. Is this proof that the Colonials and humans are different species? Not exactly, but it does show a curious separation between the populations: Humans could be Colonials with a strange genetic alteration, or Colonials could be a very highly restricted group of humans.
Our next clue came in the season three episode “A Measure of Salvation,” in which the Colonials find a beacon from the thirteenth colony, as well as a room full of dying Cylons onboard a Cylon Baseship. Dr. Cottle says that the Cylons are sick with lymphocytic encephalitis. He says it is spread by rodents, which is perfectly true, and that “humans” developed an immunity to it—which is most emphatically not true.
At least, it’s not true on Earth. Lymphocytic encephalitis is a real disease, caused by the lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus. In the United States, you’re most likely to get it from breathing in the dried urine of a common house mouse. The Centers for Disease Control figures that between 2 and 5 percent of the U.S. population have been infected by the virus, and while most people don’t get sick, the ones who do are in for quite a ride. Symptoms include fever, malaise, lack of appetite, muscle aches, headache, nausea, and vomiting. If you’re lucky, you won’t get the other, less frequent symptoms: sore throat, cough, joint pain, chest pain, testicular pain,ac and parotid (salivary gland) pain. But that’s not all. Just as you start to feel better, the second phase of the disease hits a few days later: drowsiness, confusion, sensory disturbances, and/or motor abnormalities such as paralysis. In really bad luck cases, the virus also causes acute hydrocephalus (increased fluid on the brain), which requires surgery, and/or inflammation of the spinal cord. The good news is that only about 1 percent of patients die.
It certainly doesn’t sound like “immunity.”
Some of you are already seeing where this leads: Colonials are completely immune to the lymphocytic encephalitis virus. Humanoid Cylons are killed by it. Earth “humans” are sickened, but very rarely killed.
We had enough evidence by the third season of the show to surmise that Earth humans are somewhere between Colonials and Cylons.
But come on, wouldn’t we know if we were Colonial-Cylon half-breeds? Not necessarily. Historically, it has been very difficult to determine exactly what a species is. More precisely, it’s been very difficult to determine exactly what species an organism belongs to. It is also difficult to recognize when the new species has branched off from an older species in the wild.
As far-fetched as the idea that we are Colonial-Cylon half-breeds sounds, it does have a possible historical precedent. One way to look at the species relationship between Cylons and Colonials might be to look at a similar relationship: the one between modern-day humans and Neanderthals.
Neanderthals were human beings who lived in caves across Europe around 130,000 to 30,000 years ago. They have been used as the stereotype of “cavemen,” but they really weren’t. They were an intelligent and musical band of people who probably had some form of religious beliefs and a detailed social structure.
Were Neanderthals the same species as modern humans? For years, the general scientific consensus was that they were not: Homo sapiens was of a slightly different lineage from Homo neanderthalensis. Then for years it was believed that they were: we were Homo sapiens sapiens and they were Homo sapiens neanderthanensis, a subspecies. Now current thinking is swinging back to a separate identity for the Neanderthal. But the question still remains: what caused the Neanderthal, whatever they were, to vanish from the scene about 30,000 years ago? There are three main hypotheses:1. The Neanderthal evolved directly into modern-day humans.
2. The Neanderthal were replaced, probably violently, by modern-day humans (they were killed off or died out).
3. The Neanderthal interbred with modern-day humans and were gradually subsumed into a hybrid population.
The likelihood that the Neanderthal evolved directly into humans is a very old and now almost universally discredited notion, formed back in the days when we thought these cavemen were our direct ancestors. Preliminary results of the Neanderthal Genome Project show that while modern humans and Neanderthal share 99.5 percent of their genome, the two species firmly split and separated from a common ancestor about 400,000 years ago. It is next to impossible that the Neanderthal evolved directly into us.
The second hypothesis is much more interesting: Modern-day humans evolved out of Africa, moved into Europe, and wiped out the Neanderthal in what is essentially genocide. Evidence is starting to mount for this explanation. Excavations in Shanidar, a cave located in the Zagros Mountains in Iraq, from 1957 to 1961 yielded nine sets of Neanderthal remains. Recent analyses of the remains from the individual known as Shanidar 3 at Duke University point very strongly to the conclusion that this adult male was killed by a thrown spear—a weapon that Cro-Magnons possessed, but Neanderthals did not.
Genocide also seems to be the chosen plan for Cylons to destroy Colonials, but do they really have to resort to that? Throughout the show, as the Fleet’s population dwindled it was quite possible that the Colonials would find themselves in a genetic bottleneck, unable to maintain a viable population. Baltar himself calculated that the Colonials had eighteen years left before they went extinct. In that case all the Cylons need do is to wait for the last Colonial to die off. If they are computer-based or computer-like beings, waiting shouldn’t be a problem for them.
Perhaps that’s what happened to the Neanderthals. It wasn’t that more modern humans came in and wiped them out through war or disease, but simply that modern humans, having better evolutionary advantages and being better competitors for limited resources, may have simply outlasted the Neanderthals. Life is the survival of the fittest, and compared to modern humans, Neanderthals were not the fittest.
The British scientist Stan Gooch, in his 1979 book Guardians of the Ancient Wisd
om, hypothesized a third possibility: that Cro-Magnons, essentially an earlier version of modern humans, evolved out of Africa and settled in northern India, while at the same time earlier tribes of the Neanderthal were evolving in Europe. Around 35,000 years ago the two species met up in the Middle East and Southern Europe, mixing and mating and forming a hybrid population—a cross between Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals. Eventually, by 15,000 years ago, Gooch states, pure Neanderthal and pure Cro-Magnons had died out, replaced by a hybrid of the two—essentially us, modern humans, who combine the best of both species. There is evidence both for and against this hypothesis in the preliminary results of the Neanderthal Genome Project.
MITOCHONDRIAL EVE
In the last scene of the last episode of Battlestar Galactica, Angel Six and Angel Baltar appear behind a bearded man (Ron Moore, in a goodbye cameo) at a New York newsstand, reading an issue of National Geographic magazine over his shoulder. Angel Six, in voiceover, reads, “Mitochondrial Eve is the name scientists have given to the most recent common ancestor for all human beings now living on Earth.” We’re supposed to assume they’re referring to Hera, Helo and Athena’s half-Colonial, half-Cylon daughter.
Lords of Kobol! An actual admitted scientific mistake!
The problem arises from the conflation of two very different terms: “Mitochondrial Eve,” and “most recent common ancestor.” The Most Recent Common Ancestor is, as the name suggests, the most recent common ancestor of all humans alive on this planet. Mitochondrial Eve is the most recent common ancestor of all humans along the matrilineal line. And to explain the difference—as always—we need a little background.
Biological cells come in two main types: prokaryotes and eukaryotes. For our purposes, the most important difference is that eukaryotes have a distinct nucleus and distinct organelles with their own membranes, while prokaryotes generally have neither. Mitochondria are tiny organelles embedded deep in the cytoplasm of almost every cell in your body. They have been called biological batteries or powerhouses because their chief task is to convert glucose into adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy unit of cellular metabolism.
The Science of Battlestar Galactica Page 5
