The Science of Battlestar Galactica

by Di Justo, Patrick

  Interrogation Drugs

  In vino, veritas.ao

  —Roman proverb

  “Taking a Break from All Your Worries” is one of the darkest third-season episodes. In it we get to see another side of William Adama, and we learn that the military man who fought hard for civil rights is also an experienced interrogator, well-versed in the application of truth drugs on unwilling detainees.

  The oldest “truth drug,” ethyl alcohol, was known and enjoyed by prehistoric humans and all early cultures from China to Egypt to Mesoamerica. It was seen as a relaxant and an intoxicant, and it was used by shamans to induce visions that would enable them to see the “truth” of a given situation. In Republican Rome, people testifying before the Senate were given a cup of watered wine—just enough to loosen their tongues and make them speak more openly, but not enough to get them so tanked that they made stuff up.

  As pharmaceutical knowledge grew, other so-called truth drugs entered the canon. Sodium thiopental and scopolamineap made their way into detective novels, spy thrillers, and more than a few real-life police stations as chemical keys to unlock a suspect’s mouth. Both drugs are sedatives and force suspects to lower their guard, but there is no guarantee that what they are babbling is the truth.

  In the 1950s and 1960s, the United States’ CIA ran a program called Project MK/ULTRA that was designed, among other things, to find the perfect interrogation drug. For a while the CIA was in bureaucratic love with a new compound developed in Switzerland in 1943. Called lysergic acid diethylamide, it would come to be known around the world as LSD. The CIA figured that an unexpected “bad trip” on LSD would make a person say anything, even divulge their carefully hidden truth, to get out of their personal hell. This appears to be the method that Adama uses on Baltar, and he quickly discovers what the CIA learned forty years ago—hallucinogenics might indeed make a person talk, but the results are too unpredictable, and sometimes the drugs make a person feel invincible. Especially when used on brilliant sociopaths (like Gaius Baltar).

  Anti-Radiation Medication

  Throughout a good portion of the first season, Helo is scrapping for himself on a nuked Caprica. When he’s not looking for food, dodging Centurions, or impregnating Cylon Number Eight (known as Caprica Sharon, C-Sharon, or Boomer), every so often we see him stick a hypodermic into his neck from a kit labeled “Anti-radiation.” What is he doing and how does it help?

  One dangerous component of nuclear fallout is the isotope iodine-131. Just like regular iodine, iodine-131 concentrates in the thyroid, which is bad because you really don’t want radioactive material to concentrate anywhere. Helo is almost certainly injecting saturated concentrations of potassium iodide into his neck, thereby concentrating “good” iodine in his thyroid. If he subsequently eats or breathes in any radioactive iodine, it will find that there’s no more room in his thyroid, and will be excreted from his body.

  Another anti-radiation medicine he might be injecting is iron ferrocyanide. Many radioactive by-products of nuclear detonations are heavy metals, an ill-defined group of elements that, at best, can be defined as toxic, whether or not they are radioactive. Iron ferrocyanide has the ability to bind to positively charged heavy metal ions and safely excrete them out of the body.

  Bloodstopper

  It’s yet another example of the bad luck of Felix Gaeta. As temperatures and tempers rise on Demetrius, two tall, broad-chested, athletic alpha males get into a dispute with guns. Who gets shot by accident? The little brainy guy.

  At least he wasn’t ignored. Immediately after Gaeta was shot, Starbuck called for a first aid kit and something called “bloodstopper.” We see her take a small sachet out of the box, rip it open, and pour a granulated powder onto Gaeta’s wound. Gaeta screams, but we’re also pretty sure he stops bleeding. What exactly is in Starbuck’s magic powder?

  Felix Gaeta lost a leg, but the bloodstopper kept him alive.

  Bloody battle injuries are as old as the first caveman throwing a rock at the second caveman. The natural body process to stop bleeding happens almost immediately. An open wound sends signals into the bloodstream ordering small, tough cells called platelets to converge at the site of the damage. These platelets, also known as thrombocytes, really have no other job but to clump together and swell themselves into spheres to clog up open wounds. An open wound also calls out a net of fibrous material known as fibrinogen, which also migrates to the wound and binds the platelets together into a solid blood clot, preventing the body from losing any more blood.

  When the wound is too severe to wait for the body’s natural process to take hold, however, it is sometimes possible to help the clotting process along. Starbuck’s bloodstopper is almost certainly a sandy granular powder called zeolite, an aluminosilicate mineral with many variants. Zeolites have a unique property that makes them useful in the age of nanotechnology: the pores in a zeolite crystal are very, very tiny and very, very regular. If it becomes necessary to separate individual molecules of one size from molecules of other sizes, zeolite may be used as a natural nano-sized filter that only allows the right size molecules to pass.

  A calcium-loaded form of zeolite has pores small enough to let water pass through while leaving other blood material behind. By removing water from the immediate location of the wound, bloodstopper concentrates the platelets and fibrinogen, allowing them to knit together into a clot more easily. The unfortunate side effect is that when calcium zeolite absorbs water, it gives off tremendous amounts of heat. We most likely hear Gaeta scream not from his wound, but from the burning side effect of treating his wound.aq

  PART TWO

  THE PHYSICS OF BATTLESTAR GALACTICA

  CHAPTER 9

  Energy Matters

  Energy,” to a scientist, is the ability to do work. “Work,” to a scientist, is the application of a force to move a mass some distance. These definitions are pretty far from our casual thinking of “energy” and “work,” and in order to understand the concept of energy, we must first understand the concept of work; to understand the concept of work, we must understand the concept of mass.

  It has been said that a physics student learns everything three times, and there’s no truer example of this than the concept of mass. In its most basic sense, mass can be viewed as the amount of matter an object contains (a count, if you will, of the total number of electrons, neutrons, and protons in an object).

  Mass is commonly measured in kilograms. Originally a kilogram was defined as the mass of water in a volume of one liter at 4 degrees centigrade, where water is at its densest. Now it is precisely defined by a block of metal—a 90 percent platinum, 10 percent iridium alloy—in a climate-controlled vault of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures1 in the town of Sèvres on the outskirts of Paris. Official copies of the official kilograms are made available by the bureau to other nations to serve as national standards.

  Alternately, an object’s mass can be viewed as its tendency to resist any change in motion. From experience we know that the more mass an object possesses, the more difficult it is to move. Anybody who has pushed both a shopping cart and a stalled automobile has first-hand knowledge of this. This second definition is often referred to as an object’s inertial mass.

  An object’s mass, however, should not be confused with its weight. Here on Earth, in everyday conversation with nonscientists, we do not generally differentiate between mass (how much material an object contains) and weight (how the material in an object is affected by a gravitational field). Because the vast majority of us live our lives in Earth’s gravitational field, we commonly say that an object “weighs one kilogram,” when technically we should say that the object “is being accelerated by Earth’s gravitational field by the same amount as a one-kilogram mass is accelerated by Earth’s gravitational field.” To be perfectly correct, one could also say that the object “weighs 9.81 Newtons.” No one talks that way because . . . well, try talking that way in any school in the United States, and see how long
it takes you to get beaten up.

  While the distinction between mass and weight doesn’t mean much to the average person, to scientists and engineers, and most especially astronauts, the two concepts are as different as Cylons and Colonials. Your weight, right now, is determined by the amount of matter in you and by Earth’s gravitational field. Anywhere else in the universe, your weight would be different. The strength of Earth’s gravitational field is, in turn, dictated by how much mass Earth itself has.

  As an example, take the Apollo astronauts who walked on the Moon. The mass of their spacesuits and backpacks was roughly 80 kilograms. An astronaut whose mass was 80 kilograms would, when suited up, be carrying the equivalent of himself around on his back! Some of the moonwalks lasted seven hours—can you imagine carrying another person on your back for seven hours?

  Admiral Helena Cain, in Razor

  Major Kendra Shaw, in Razor

  Well, neither could the Apollo astronauts—they didn’t have to. Because the Moon is both smaller in diameter and less dense than Earth, it has much less mass than our planet. This translates to much less gravitational attraction at its surface, which means that objects on the Moon weigh one-sixth what they weigh on Earth. This is important: the astronauts on the Moon still had 160 kilograms of mass; that didn’t change, but the weight (the way that mass was affected by a gravitational field) was only about 27kg—a small fraction of what it was on Earth.

  There’s also a third definition of mass, used by many disciplines within physics: an object’s mass is defined solely as its energy equivalent. Before we discuss the interrelation between mass and energy, though, let’s return to the concept of work.

  In classical physics, work is the amount of energy transferred along a distance; for example, moving an object from point A to point B. Energy can be divided into two types: potential and kinetic. Kinetic energy is the energy a body possesses because of its movement, the energy that is actually used to do work. Whether it is large in scale, like a planet orbiting a star; medium in scale, like a car rolling down a hill; or minute in scale, like molecules in an object moving more rapidly as they get heated, kinetic energy is nothing but mass in motion. Any moving object has kinetic energy; an object at rest has zero kinetic energy. A released spring, an energized motor, and a yo-yo on its way down its cord are all bursting with kinetic energy. Because of this, kinetic energy can be easily transferred from one body to another. If you’ve ever touched a hot stove, punched someone in the nose, played billiards, or gotten hit by a train, you know how easy it is.

  Potential energy is the energy that an object possesses because of its condition. It is energy that is not being put to work now, but is being held, either naturally or by design, to be used later; it is the “potential to have kinetic energy.” A diver waiting to leap off the platform, an unburned log, a tightly wound spring, a glow-in-the-dark sticker in sunlight, and a yo-yo held in the downward-facing palm of your hand are all reservoirs of potential energy.

  There are many different types of potential energy, and they generally can’t be converted to each other, at least not readily and not directly. In our examples just given, the potential energy inside an unburned log is chemical energy. When both oxygen and a source of heat are applied to the log, the log catches fire and burns—giving off enormous amounts of thermal energy and undergoing a chemical transformation in the process. When the diver leaps off the platform, gravitational potential energy accelerates the diver down into the water. Similarly, when a yo-yo is let go, gravitational energy pulls it down to the end of its string (and rotational inertia, or angular momentum, brings it back up). The glow-in-the-dark sticker, when placed in the dark, gives off photons of light it had stored in metastable quantum states when it was in the sunlight.

  Kinetic energy can be converted to potential energy and vice versa. In all the cases we discussed, the total amount of energy, the sum of an object’s kinetic and potential energies, is a constant. An excellent example of this can be seen in the episode “Exodus, Part II.” In order to rescue thirty-nine thousand humans from Cylon-occupied New Caprica, Admiral Adama attempts a daring move: to get underneath the Cylon defenses he orders an FTL jump directly into the planet’s atmosphere, beneath the orbiting Cylon Baseships. The jump is executed, and Galactica materializes in the sky above New Caprica. Initially at rest with respect to the planet’s surface, for a brief moment the ship has no kinetic energy but literally a whole battlestar-load of potential energy. Galactica falls. The gravitational potential energy of the Battlestar relative to New Caprica is converted more and more into kinetic energy as Galactica accelerates toward the ground. This kinetic energy is further converted into heat energy, as atmospheric friction heats Galactica’s underside to the point that its surface vaporizes and ablates. Adama gives the command to launch Vipers. Just before slamming into the ground, Galactica jumps away, having completed her mission, while her Vipers proceed to apply various forms of kinetic energy (bullets, bombs, and rockets, for example) to the Cylons! What really would have happened to the launching Vipers when they hit the shock wave and plasma enveloping Galactica? Who cares when the scene has such a high coolness factor? Repeat the First Law of The Science of Battlestar Galactica to yourself: “It’s just a show, I should really just relax.”

  CHAPTER 10

  E = mc2

  When Albert Einstein derived E = mc2 over a hundred years ago, he told us that at some level, energy and matter are equivalent. Just as kinetic energy and potential energy can be converted, one into the other, the most famous equation in all of physics tells us that energy can also be converted into matter, and vice versa. It’s the viceversa we’ll be discussing here.

  In the equation E = mc2 , m stands for mass, the amount of material in an object, which we discussed in the previous chapter. The variable c stands for the speed of light, officially measured as 299,792,458 meters per second (it’s usually approximated as 3.0 × 108 m/s for all but the most exacting computations). The meter is the basic unit of length in the metric system, and originally was defined by the French Academy of Sciences as 1/10-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator, when measured on a line through the Paris Observatory. The meter was designed to assist in the derivation of other basic units of the metric system. For example, in the original metric system definition, a kilogram was defined as the mass of water that could fit in a box one-tenth of a meter on each side. Later, the meter was defined as the distance between two marks on a platinum-iridium rod next to the six one-kilogram cylinders stored in the BIPM vaults. Since 1983, however, the meter has been defined, in a somewhat circular fashion, as the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458ths of a second.ar

  William Adama.

  Laura Roslin.

  WHAT IS THE MASS OF BATTLESTAR GALACTICA?

  Galactica, like all objects, has mass. It spends most of its time in space, far from many gravitational fields, so it generally does not have much weight, but it has mass. Boy, oh boy, does it have mass! Let’s estimate how much.

  According to the visual effects artist who designed Galactica, a Jupiter-class battlestar is 1,371 meters (4,500 feet) in length. It is 538 meters (1,760 feet) wide when the flight pods are extended and 156 meters (543 feet) in height. Let’s assume that Galactica’s width decreases by 138 meters (452 feet) when the pods are retracted, and call it an even 400 meters wide. A box 1,371 by 156 by 400 meters encloses a volume of 85,550,400 cubic meters. Since Galactica isn’t a perfect rectangle, let’s take 15 percent off that figure, and say that the volume of Galactica is 72,717,840 m3 .

  A schematic diagram of Battlestar Galactica.

  The table below shows the mass of a Galactica-sized volume filled with various materials.

  If Galactica were made completely of: At a kg/m3 density of: It would have a mass in kilograms of:

  Sawdust 210 23,651,271,000

  Manure 400 45,050,040,000

  Powdered Milk 449 50,568,669,900

  Soap
481 54,172,673,100

  Apples 641 72,192,689,100

  Plaster 849 95,618,709,900

  Butter 865 97,420,711,500

  Rubber 945 106,430,719,500

  Water 1,000 112,625,100,000

  Cement, Portland 1,506 169,613,400,600

  Magnesium 1,738 195,742,423,800

  Beryllium 1,840 207,230,184,000

  Ivory 1,842 207,455,434,200

  Brick 1,944 218,943,194,400

  Aluminum 2,560 288,320,256,000

  Titanium 4,500 506,812,950,000

  Steel, Stainless 7,480 842,435,748,000

  Iron 7,850 884,107,035,000

  Brass 8,430 949,429,593,000

  Bronze 8,780 988,848,378,000

  Nickel 8,800 991,100,880,000

  Lead 11,340 1,277,168,634,000

  Depleted Uranium 18,900 2,128,614,390,000

  Gold 19,320 2,175,916,932,000

  Plutonium 19,800 2,229,976,980,000

  Platinum 21,400 2,410,177,140,000

  In estimating the mass of Galactica, we start by estimating the mass of her armored exterior hull. The key questions, then, center around (1) the thickness of the hull and (2) the composition of the hull. Obviously, those two elements are related.

  Almost immediately we come across some problems. In the Miniseries, Galactica took a direct hit from a Cylon tactical nuclear weapon, but it didn’t vaporize Galactica. This tells us two things: the Cylon nuke wasn’t very big, and Galactica’s hull is very strong. More precisely, Galactica’s hull is somehow able to deal with the enormous energies given off by even a small nuke. When Starbuck eyeballs the result, she reports that the forward section of the port flight pod has sustained heavy damage. She (and we) see lots of relatively small hull breaches, lots of escaping atmosphere and smoke. We do not, however, see a crater. The Cylon nuke did not gouge out any sort of hemispherical opening in the hull. How can that happen?