If you haven't watched the two-part miniseries that preceded this, please do so. This episode is essentially episode 3 immediately following that. It''ll give you more context of what's going on.
33 is not the first episode, it is but it isn't... Let me explain. The miniseries, that predates the series, can be viewed as season zero episodes 1 2 and 3. I would highly recommend watching that first
@DrBecky That's so funny, I just started rewatching Battlestar Galactica a couple of days ago. If you're looking for something to watch and react to next, I can highly recommend Stargate Atlantis and specifically pretty much every scene that has Dr Rodney McKay (David Hewlett) in it. Maybe S03E08 (McKay and Mrs Miller) , that episode is about an Einstein Rosen bridge but again, anything with Rodney McKay in it is great fun to watch.
Yep. I don't remember how much of the Galactica crew is left alive, but a HUGE chunk of that number is civilians; kids, politicians, doctors, etc. Those folks don't know how to operate anything on the Galactica, so it would be pretty hard to get them going in shifts...
Didn't Becky watch the Miniseries first? You should always start with that, as it becomes clear what that number means, and really how the cylons really did a thorough job, all because of Cavill's daddy/mommy issues (But that is not revealed until much later in the series).
IIRC, the jump was jarring enough that you would wake up/it would disrupt your sleep patterns. So at best they were surviving on 33 minute naps. The fleet itself, as seen elsewhere was fine enough. The issue was the poor flight crews who had to scramble every time in case the drive failed or had a problem. So, jump, deploy, set up a perimeter, fly back. But since they can't live in their suits, it takes time to refuel and prep the fighters, they need bio-breaks, food, and so on, more like grab 5 minutes when you can. Or every new parent ever. lol.
episode 1 of the series doesn't make much sense out of context, I made that mistake and then realized my mistake and went and found the miniseries. isn't the 33 minutes the time it takes for the cylons to make the ftl calculation ? and it's just the pilots and command that had been awake for 5 days , not everyone else.
Their FTL is more teleportation than travel across space. It’s instantaneous, so time dilation wouldn’t really be a factor. There is no difference in time between the people experiencing it, and an observer.
Best example of that is the Adama Manoeuvre, which by the way is probably the MOST epic FTL jump in all of SciFI. Who ever thought that up deserves an award all for himself.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 When i first saw that, it was so epic that i felt a little bit emotional for some reason. One of the most epic scenes in SciFi
I suspect this is the intention of the writers; but I don't actually think the mechanics of it was ever discussed in enough detail to call anything much more than assumption. Its unclear to me whether the jump is like some sort of instant jump like a momentary wormhole or if they just "jump" directly to a velocity faster than light, thus appearing to just vanish instantly. However I am not aware of any actual explicit discussion of whether jumps are instant, or whether FTL means "we move with a speed faster than light" or "we arrive at our destination faster than light would" both seem reasonable, and the total lack of discussion of travel time does seem to support the later.
@@mooferoo Yeah I was like,"This is frakkin incredible" when I saw it first time. And Hot Dog casually stating "Well, this should be different" as he launches himself towards a plasma storm...
The premise of the series is that the 49k survivors counted on the whiteboard are whoever just happened to be on long-haul transports at the moment of the attack, and the overwhelming majority of them are untrained civilians. Worse, the one military vessel that survived to shepherd this "Rag-Tag Fleet" (the titular Battlestar _Galactica)_ is running with a skeleton crew - she was in the process of being decommissioned and turned into a museum at the start of the pilot miniseries. So in-universe, the reason they can't just send half the crew off-duty to rest is that they risk leaving critical stations unmanned during a continuing crisis. Out of universe, of course, the reasons they don't send half the crew of-duty to rest are 1) to ratchet up the drama and 2) so they don't have to bring in a bunch of new faces the audience hasn't seen before and doesn't have any attachment to.
Correct, at the start, Galactica doesn't have its full 3000 member full crew, but only a few hundred people, some tourists, and various media crews and dignitaries and the like as it was on its way to being decommissioned. By combining assets with other military ships in the miniseries/launch episodes, they had about 1700-1800 people on board when this happened, and only 60 fighters/one launch bay was inoperative. Of the 120 fighters they were supposed to have, only about 30 were working and one launch bay was inoperative.
See this is the problem with a lot of this "reacts video" culture, they react to things completely out of context. I remember she did one on The Expanse a few years back and didn't know what was going on and thought they had "anti-gravity". I feel when these people do these reacts things they should at least watch a few episodes and get acquainted with a summary premise of what the movie or show actually is.
The jump drives are less "FTL", more "folding space". They instantly connect two regions of space as if through a very wide and short-lived wormhole, and the entire ship is effectively teleported. Different principle, just as wildly improbable.
Only the crew of Galactica is staying awake. The rest of the fleet can rotate. The reason is the number of enemy fighters attacking every 33 minutes. They are folding space, not actually moving at "c." If memory serves, they can only jump some 30 light years before the inaccuracies in the guidance system bites them.
15 LY maximum, but the civilian drives could only do 10LY. The issue was the rest of the fleet as Galactica could spool up and jump in 20 minutes but the fleet was full of many older ships that took longer. Every few jumps they would lose another ship. In theory the lost ship could find them again, but for story purposes, it rarely happened.
But it was wearing on the other people as well as jumping appears to interrupt your sleep. Meaning you never got any REM sleep. If you re a new parent, you know exactly what this is like.
Dr Becky, you should have watched the miniseries first. If you had, you would know that Galactica was about to be decommissioned and turned into a museum. They are not going a relativistic speeds when they are traveling in normal space.
33 is technically the first episode. However it was preceded by a miniseries that was also the pilot for the show. It explains why they are all running, etc. You may want to check it out before getting too far into the show to fill in the back story.
"Frak" is a way of swearing with a four-letter swear word without getting censored for TV. The series Farscape used "Frell" for exactly the same reason. There's a RUclips video they put out for one of the later series in BSG called "All The Fraks of BSG" which is just all the swearing edited together. You really need to watch the Mini-Series that preceded S1 to get a proper idea of what's going on here and how desperate the situation is. Those 49,000-odd lives aren't just on the Galactica itself, they're the population of the entire fleet, who are, as far as they know, the last survivors of the human race. Galactica is the ONLY warship: everything else is a rag-tag collection of civilian vessel, some of them stuffed with thousands of desperate people and with none of their crews trained to fight. BSG was always very good about attitude jets. Even in the middle of huge space battles, you can still see them, at least on the fighter-sized craft. BTW there IS another way for a spacecraft to change attitude without reaction jets, and that's gyroscopic reaction wheels. Lots of satellites, icluding the Hubble Space Telescope, use these.
Remember that this is a remake of a 1978 series that was broadcast OTA, so there were words they couldn't use, instead substituting "Frak" and for BS "Felgercarb". And the remake continued that usage.
@@Sehlat Well, yes and no. "Smeg" isn't totally made up, it's an abbreviation of "smegma", which is a real word that I'll leave you to look up for yourself...
@@MrHws5mp "Frak" is obviously a slightly changed "frag", which is real military slang, so it isn't totally made up either. I know about smegma, but the writers on Red Dwarf insist that "smeg" doesn't come from that, and that the similarity is a coincidence. I know that's impossible to verify, but why should they lie about that?
Missing SO MUCH context. The 50k people have nothing to do with the no-sleep-pilots. The 50k is the survivor count as of their census, and the count of pilots is much lower. Also, I think I recall that the pilots are actually using amphetamines to stay awake for preposterous amounts of time, just like we used to do with our US pilots during cold war crises or whatever. Amphetamines to pop them up, Bennies to let them sleep again after.
While there's a reason for a spesific timeframe(as far as lore goes without spoilers), the 33 minutes is interesting; "Moore stated in an interview that they picked 33 minutes because it was a decent amount of time to allow people to do small stuff like shower and shave or take a nap and they purposefully decided not to create some technobabble reason of why it was 33 minutes." :D
I always figured it was related to the original show's airing period, 1978 and 1979. 1980 seconds is exactly 33 minutes. Kind of disappointing to learn it was just randomly picked.
The original Battlestar Galactica was my initiation to nerdhood. I was around 5 to 7 y.o. when Battlestar Galactica was shown on TV in Finland in the 80's. I forced my mother to read the subtitles out loud, as I couldn't read yet. I built the ships and the laser guns out of Lego, a Viper cockpit out of cardboard and had several dreams related to space and Galactica. I have a vivid memory of one in kindergarten, where I had the watch that would make me invisible. Later once I learned to read, I read copious amounts of science fiction and joined the local astronomy club. As a sophmore at college I built my own Dobsonian telescope. Seeing the rings of Saturn with it was an emotional moment :) This eventually led me to the path of science. I was very close to studying astronomy at university, but went for theoretical physics instead. This in the end changed to computer science. And here I am now, an AI researcher (no cylons on my resume yet, though) with big love for physics and astronomy remaining...
Lovely story. Although if the epilogue of battlestar is anything to go by your new career in AI will do its part in pushing us into the next cycle of man and machine conflict and resolution.
Sleep deprivation used to be part of certain army training exercises. After about 3 days the chances of being coherent drop and the chances of visual and audible hallucinations increase. The longer you stay awake [with no chemical help inc caffeine] these effects will escalate, chances of injuring yourself or others is dangerously high.
@@johannesbowers7467 Well.. I left the forces a long time ago and don't have any current experience lol and it also depends on which forces and which regiments we are talking about :)
One of BG's "better" points was that C+C (Command & Control) was deep within the ship. Instead of right in front with a big glass window that just screams "hit me"!
@@havok6280 And in the original series it was loaded with state of the art Tektronix graphics terminals, which today seem unbelievably primitive but looked quite advanced at the time.
TL;DR: Very few popular, well-established sci-fi settings' FTL physics were created or maintained by people who "just don't understand physics". Quite the opposite. The good ones very consciously choose one or two subtleties of either GR, SR, or QM to work around, usually using plausible, or at least not-impossible things that we "just haven't discovered yet" in the real world. Assuming a sci-fi author "just didn't think of time dilation" is generally unwise, and there's usually a _ton_ more going on behind the scenes with how they're rationalizing their workarounds. Anyway, yeah... what spawned this was: "Nothing can go faster than c." That's _kind of_ true... Except for the fact that literally _anything_ can go faster than c, and indeed many many things _are_ going faster than c; they're just very far away from us while they do it. (And, in fact, _we_ are moving faster than c relative to very distant galaxies near the cosmological horizon). The sci-fi FTL drive types are, for the most part, based on some sort of _plausible_ real-world work-around to relativity. Warp drive takes advantage of the nuance that _should_ be in the above statement, that "nothing can travel faster than c *relative to its local spacetime"* by manipulating the spacetime _itself_ into moving faster than c relative to neighboring spacetime. The real-world plausible version of it was theorized by Miguel Alcubierre in 1994. Initial versions required negative mass/energy and _vast_ amounts of it, and were completely impractical even in principle (requiring something like a galaxy-mass of negative energy, which probably doesn't even exist, to move a very small craft at v>c). Over the decades, it's been refined, first down to a Jupiter mass, and now a medium-sized asteroid's worth, and there are even versions that _don't_ need exotic matter or energy, that have been successfully simulated in computers. Star Trek's warp drive in particular invents a hypothetical energy field they call 'subspace' that grants this negative energy density. It's also how the ships can move so nimbly at sub-light speeds (impulse drive = fusion rockets + inertial dampers a.k.a. mass reduction of the ship via negative energy density thanks to 'subspace'.) Of all sci-fi FTL drives, this is by _far_ the most plausible, which is why there's serious research going into it. Hyperdrive invents a parallel dimension we can move in and out of with enough energy, called "hyperspace" in which the laws of physics are different than in our universe, but which is similar enough that they map onto each other... so you slip or punch into hyperspace, travel at what is in _that_ universe, sub-light speeds, but either c is far, far greater or, more usually, distance is vastly compressed... then you pop back into normal space, and you've gone 100 light-years in our universe while only traveling a few hundred kilometers in hyperspace. Star Wars hyperspace is the "different laws of physics" kind, where the maximum speed is much much higher than c, but gravity gradients act to significantly slow ships down in hyperspace, which is (in Star Wars fan-canon anyway) why the Millenium Falcon "ran the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs". People make fun of that for being the use of a measure of distance, seemingly to measure time, but it isn't. The speed of the ship is "She'll make point-five past light-speed" which is... poorly defined, but basically the smaller the number between 0 and 1, the faster the ship is going relative to real-space. The "12 parsecs" is literally the _distance_ the ship had to travel to complete the Kessel Run. The boast is "My ship's navigation computers are so good, and my sensors and galaxy map so accurate and detailed, that I managed to find a path in and around and through intervening stars that stayed gravity-neutral enough to only be a 12-parsec path length while still maintaining 0.5 past light speed". This is also why travel times in the Star Wars galaxy are so strange. If you want to fly from one side of the galaxy to the other, it's _much much_ faster to go all the way around the circumference, than to go along the _physically_ shorter path through the core, because dipping down into the galaxy's gravity well that far makes it significantly slower... which is also why the galaxy's socioeconomics works in vaguely ring-shaped regions, rather than proximity-based regions. The "outer rim" is all closer to itself via hyperspace, even when it's farther in real-space, than the "mid rim" is, or the "outer core" or "core systems". Babylon 5's hyperspace is the "physically smaller space mapped onto our space" kind, with fluid within the space that includes eddies and currents, with islands of stability between jump gates where jump beacons can maintain stable positions. If a ship slips off course and loses track of the beacon network, it can be irrevocably lost, literally just pulled off-course into the depths of the hyperspace 'sea' giving it a very Rennaisance nautical sort of feel, with pioneering Explorer-class ships able to venture off of the beacon network (at great risk), and if they discover a new island of stability, they can construct a jump gate and a beacon trail to establish a new colonizable region. Wormhole drives obviously create stable, traversable wormholes, which are, like warp fields, not expressly _forbidden_ by relativity, but which, as you've covered yourself many times, require exotic matter or energy to hold open the throat and negate the gravity well and tidal forces near the mouth. And then there are jump drives, which abandon relativity workarounds altogether and go with pure quantum physics, usually some sort of large-scale coordinated quantum teleportation or tunneling (which would indeed require _immense_ computational precision, which is why in BSG, it's the only time they network their computers, to provide enough computing power to achieve it, because unfortunately the amount of computing power it takes to calculate jumps is equivalent to the amount of computing power it takes to run a machine sentience as well, making Cylon viruses semi-sentient and ridiculously sophisticated, and networked computers basically suicide for humans. In BSG, later on, it's kind of loosely implied that it's more of a just "locality isn't such a hard and fast rule after all". In real-world quantum theory terms, I would describe BSG jump drives as entanglement drives. Some advanced research in quantum mechanics, especially within the Many Worlds/Everettian theory, has found some promising leads in the idea that what it _means_ to be near another object, or a portion of space-time, is to be highly entangled with that portion of spacetime, and what it _means_ to be far away is to be weakly entangled. So... if you could directly manipulate entanglement with some massive quantity of exotic energy in a jump drive, such that the ship crosses a threshold at which it's more highly entangled with some distant point in spacetime, than with the point it's at now, then *blink.* It's not there anymore; it's in the new, more-highly-entangled spot, and they spin down the drive and allow the universe to sort it out and diminish the old entanglement with the old location. So... yes, you were overthinking things, but not so much in a "science vs. fiction" standpoint; sci-fi writers are very smart and generally pretty well-versed in science. Rather, you were overthinking things in an "astrophysics vs. quantum mechanics" standpoint, which given that you're an astrophysicist, makes perfect sense. ;) Personally, I think it's almost certain that FTL travel really is impossible, that whatever future paradigms successfully merge Relativity and Quantum Mechanics in a non-perturbative way that doesn't break at high energy scales, will have new features that prevents it... but I'm holding out a _tiny_ bit of hope for Alcubierre-style warp drive, and for BSG-style jump drive. Hyperdrive and wormhole drives are non-starters IMO, and if anything remotely like them does turn out to be possible, it'll be a total black swan, with completely new physics, where Warp and Jump are both at least tied to tiny threads of physical reasoning that are not yet completely disproven.
@RJM1972 Thanks! I keep getting told that lately for some reason... I'm starting to think maybe there's something to it. Now if only I didn't loathe editing videos, hate the sound of my own recorded voice, and hate how I look on camera...
One minor change: They are experimenting with warp drives and figured out that you can use one very soon - in the next decade or two - if you want to go LESS than C. Speeding up a probe's transit time to even 1/100 C is an immense difference. Imagine going from Earth to Mars in a day. 1500 minutes (~25 hours) is absurdly fast but might be required to dal with the radiation issues in transit. Even if it was 1/1000th (about 70K mph), 10 days is a snap. Current speeds are about 0.0005 with conventional rickets. Every jump forward is huge. Imagine going from Jupiter to Earth in days.
Note that a recent paper was published that discusses subluminal speeds without the need for exotic matter. RUclips won't allow me to post links, but it's easy enough to find online.
I once went six days with a total of between ten and twelve hours of sleep. It's certainly not pleasant, I can tell you that much. At some point you start to sort of hallucinate, hear indistinct whispers, see shadows or movements out of the corner of your eye and feel like you're being watched. Pictures, wallpaper patterns or plants seem to move, tunnel vision is enormous, concentrating is almost impossible and sometimes I was standing in a corridor somewhere and didn't know, for example, whether I was already in the bathroom or in the canteen or whether I was still on my way there.
I once drove at the tail end of about 50 hours awake. The Vivarin (caffeine pills) and Jolt Cola were not working anymore, and I woke up as I was headed, at about 35MPH, for the stone wall of a cemetery. I hyperventilated the remaining 15 or so minutes home and slept for a day and a half, then went cold turkey on caffeine. Worst. Week. Ever.
The way I interpret it, FTL is more like a jump from place to place, no acceleration, no deceleration and no journey time, like a worm hole or similar. I think the series was praised for the way things like rapters and fighters manoeuvred in space. The population count was for the entire fleet, most of which was civilian, similar to a naval convoy escorting cargo ships.
The amount of people still alive are primarily civilians on civilian transports. The Miniseries explains the concept that the series picks up with. 12 Colonies based on the Tribes of Mankind, have progressed to a point where they have space travel and created A.I. in the form of androids called Cylons. The Cylons and humans fought a 12-year war to a stalemate, and the Cylons left for deep space, only to return some 40 years later attacking the colonies with nuclear weapons. 13 Earth-type worlds, almost their entire military structure, and billions of humans...and 49,000 plus escape on 200 plus civilian ships, mainly civilians with no military training, to find a new home. A myth called Earth, the 13th Tribe of Kobol, the Cradleworld of Mankind. If you can get past all of the hand-waving that accounts for the science in the show (the FTL drive, some of the Cylon lore, etc.) Battlestar Galactica is an exceptional series that looks at human nature, what it means to be human, the power of faith, the recurring patterns of history, and how civilizations survive. The funny thing is that this is a reboot of a series that lasted a single season in 1978-79 on ABC TV in the US. That series is even less science-based, and much more spiritual...with a fair amount of 1970s cheeziness. The original ended for two reasons...1) the cost to produce the show. 2) George Lucas tried to sue that BSG was too similar to Star Wars, especially the effects which were done by John Dykstra (who won an Oscar for the first Star Wars). I was 6 years old when the first series aired and it is still one of my favorite childhood shows. I was in my 30s when the reboot happened...and it was one of the best shows ever. Its in my top 10 all-time favorites. The concepts of both versions were by Glen A. Larson, who was a major sci-fi series developer in the 70s and 80s (The Six Million Dollar Man and its spin-off, The Bionic Woman, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Knight Rider, and Automan), and both series also have a healthy dollop of Mormonism (Larson was raised Mormon), along with Ancient Greek, and Egyptian mythologies blended together. The reboot was spearheaded by Ronald D. Moore, who started as a Star Trek: The Next Generation writer. Since BSG, Moore has also headed up the time-travel romance Outlander based on the Diana Gabaldon novels.
One of the best things that happened during covid is the BBC broadcast the entire of Battlestar Galactica, including mini series and TV spinoff movies inserted at the correct points, at two episodes per week solidly from start to finish. This was broadcast in HD and with 5.1 surround sound on digital terrestrial and satellite. iPlayer streaming only had stereo sound as always.
I'd like to see her cover B5 too, although my spidey sense tells me she'd find lots to pick apart ;) If you want to see her go off on a tangent about rotational gravity, watch the video she did about The Expanse. The space stations in that one rotate to generate gravity, too.
Really everything is better there. Every side has got their understandable motivations. You can understand the antagonists as well. And the protagonists are no saints like in the old series.
The cylons are computers, machines... so a highly advanced navigation system is very much at the core of abilities. If I remember right, they actually covered the navigation issue and how the Cylons were able to perfectly locate where the fleet went in later seasons.
And the rest of the video is just her not understanding the most basic facet of a "jump drive". The three largest segments are FTL/Time Dilation tangents that are completely irrelevant to what is literally shown unambiguously on the screen. I like Dr. Becky but this video ain't it.
On "days without sleep", when I was in the military, I did have one stretch where I was "on" for 4 days straight. Had two 30 minute naps during that span. And much like the show, I was operating a vehicle for long periods of that, with other people as passengers. (Or really cargo, _they_ got to sleep.) Adrenaline is a hell of a drug. When I watched this episode, I *FELT* the exhaustion, anger, frustration, all of it. The performances were very accurate for people operating on extreme sleep exhaustion.
I love when vets look at military themes in sci-fi shows, and confirm that writers with past military history did a good job. They don't make shows like that anymore, even if they call it the same.
The original idea of the FTL was to fold space but the graphics were difficult and slow so they opted for the stretch look. They don’t accelerate, they fold space then jump to the new location. Not that its a thing it was the concept to get around acceleration.
Very cool of you to do a react to Battlestar Galactica. This reboot series is considered by some to be one of the finest ever sci fi shows on television. With regards to the point about the crew not sleeping and there being over 49,000+ humans. That population total was for the entire fleet of ships. Most of those humans were civilians, on ships other than Galactica. The military crew on Galactica, and those pilots were a much smaller number of people. They were also military professionals. As in today’s world, a pilot is a highly trained person. You can’t simply plug a civilian into a pilot’s seat. This was the first episode of the series and as a result, there has not been time to train civilians for military roles. With regards to the word “frack”, yes, it is a curse word. And yes, I think that it is the equivalent for the other “F” word. But since it’s a made up word, they could use it in the program without worry of it having to be censored for broadcast television. I hope that you watch more of the series, even if you don’t “react” to it in videos. It is a fun series to watch. Keep up the good work on your videos.
I also like to imagine that the entire BSG civilization is still griping about extracting petroleum resources by shattering the water table with mildly toxic slurry. Ergo, 'frack' being a good swear word.
A later episode does go into navigation errors that build up over a series of Jumps. Catastropically so, one space vessel ends their Jump inside a mountain. Time dilation does not come into it as the Humans and Cylons were always in the same frame of reference, the Jump used dimensional translation ie the ship does not pass thru real space between Jump points. The reason for the Cyclons requiring 33 minutes to Jump after the fleet was never explained, presumably it was because the Cyclons (being expert infiltators) had left a tracking device on one or more of the ships and it took 33 minutes to receive it's signal (the Cyclons did posess some sort of FTL communication as shown by their Resurrection Ships).
I started watching this show YESTERDAY, does everyone ahve the same schedule for this Also. There’s a miniseries that comes first, you gotta watch it. 8:10 The cylons are also stationary. They use the same jump drive tech, basically a Minecraft cheat command teleport
Basically, BSG jump drives give up locality. They circumvent SR by using basically quantum teleportation, so no time dilation. The reason they were suspicious of the Olympic Carrier was that being missing for over three hours, which did _not_ involve time dilation, coincided with the Cylons not showing up for about six jump cycles, which is... _quite_ the coincidence. But yes, definitely overthinking it, because you were thinking relativistically, where their drives use nonlocality instead.
Just a note that the 50k people includes all remaining civilians (and even prisoners). It's not 50k crew on one ship, the Galactica, which at just under 2,000 crew members. The remnants of the fleet had approx. 2,800 military crew, with the remainder of the population being civilians.
You made the mistake many others have made: “33” is NOT the real first episode. The “Miniseries” is actually the first episode. Because you missed the true beginning, you probably couldn’t figure out what was happening.
This show is actually wonderful and is relatively "light" on Science, focusing instead on the psychological tolls of being at war. For instance, what you missed is that the captions said "150 hours the Battlestar CREW without sleep" - they are the only war ship in the human fleet and simply don't have enough fighterpilots, jets or staff to man constant rotation of battle. If you do decide to go ahead and watch the series for your enjoyment (which I highly recommend, by the way) I would recommend you go back first and watch the mini-series, as it serves as an extended pilot episode and explains most of what the crew will experience throughout the series.
They were down to a skeleton crew because Galactica was being decommissioned when the Cylons attacked, so they didn't have adequate personnel to staff multiple shifts, and Galactica was the only Battlestar on hand to protect the fleet.
My favorite Sci-FI, other than The Hitchhiker Guide to the Galaxy, is BSG. I also love playing the the game Starfield visuals for planets is magical. I always tell my grandchildren that there is a bigger number than infinity and it is infinity+1. I used to sleep on Sunday I used to work at Oxford Icerink at night and working in computing during the day having a show at the Icerink at 4am before going to work. I used to do that many times a month not sleeping Monday-Sunday and only 10 hours on Sunday sleep. I did so many jobs like night security/Ice carts/bouncer/Dispatch riding and also used to drive to Perth for meetings on Monday for a 9am in Perth Scotland. Sleep to me was a waste of time.
If you want to understand Battlestar Galactica you have to watch the 3 hour miniseries that precedes "33" which sets up the universe. Galactica is the last surviving colonial war ship. The cylons destroyed the colonials entire civilisation killing 78 billion humans, nuking all 12 of their colonies into oblivion and destroying the entire colonial fleet. Their fleet are the few civilian ships that survived the slaughter. President Roslin gathered them up and managed to meet up with the Galactica which was taking on new munitions as it was being decommissioned and turned into a museum - the fact Galactica was old and had a squadron of antique vipers in its museum exhibit is one of the only reasons she survived. Roslin convinces Commander Adama their only hope is to run for it and try and find another habitable planet and get away from the cylons. Galactica fights a massive battle with the cylons who have followed them and manages to escape but obviously "33" opens with them being chased. It's a really good series. If you look at what was in vogue at the time pop culture wise - we had, had Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine in the 90's which did more serial story telling. CGI had become more affordable. You had war films like Black Hawk Down and series like 24 which had a much grittier darker feel to them and you had shows like The West Wing which were quite politically astute. There are also unmistakable elements of Blade Runner in it that become more apparent as time goes on - the Cylons have the ability to mimic human form. Battlestar tried to bring these elements into TV science fiction. Looking back on the series something it reminds me of - and its themes that become more pronounced as the series goes on is a weird kind of apocalyptic religious revivalism. It reminds me of "The Stand" by Stephen King. You might not be very religious but how might you feel if you survived the death of your entire race? Maybe you might think god was at work.
Becky, I'm sure everyone's telling you this, but the ships don't actually move faster than light. The magical FTL drives create some sort of wormhole or something and almost instantly "jump" the ships from one point in space to another. So there is no time dilation. p.s. I'm sure you have better things to do than watch 57 hours of a TV show, but if you do have a few hours to kill, please start with the mini-series, which introduces the characters and the universe. And the technology. It's not like TNG with a bunch of technobabble and pseudoscience.
That's still technically faster than light. Basically if something is moved from one point to another faster than light is able to in ordinary space, then that is FTL. And could well cause time dilation. Stars tend to move quite fast relative to one another, although low compared to the speed of light. When they "jump" to a star system, they would need to adjust their velocity to match that of the star, so that they do not fly off into deep space. That could cause time dilation when compared to a system with a different velocity.
The Cylons were "just waiting" for the "supposed" homing beacon to reach them at the previous contact point, given that the Colonials could only safely FTL "jump" 33 light minutes (probably less) in a spherical direction from the origin--also taking into account any detritus at the emergence point. Given that the straight line distance is something between 3 to 4 AU (or SU), the signal would not have to be that "powerful" for the Cylons to receive it (and "jump" in again).
The precision and synchronization of the jump drives is a plot point in a later episode. So, yes, the writers thought about your commentary at about 9:15 a couple decades ago.
In the show faster than light travel as you’re imagining it is not possible. Theirs is more of teleportation. Time dilation due to near light speed sunlight travel is brought up.
I can't believe you've never watched the series?! Don't get me wrong, I was a bit skeptical as well when my friends first mentioned it.. But it's shot beautifully and it actually plays alot in favor of what might actually happen in space! There's only 1 other series that does that currently and that's for All Mankind. It really irritates me when you "hear" spaceships fire and them maneuvering around as if there' an atmosphere.. 🙂 Yes, the navigation systems on all these shows are the finest measurements ever devised. They can jump and reappear within a meter or 2 of wherever they want... 😂. But again, it's Sci-fi.. gotta give a little for the story to unfold.. 🙂
It makes more sense if you’ve seen the two episode mini-series that preceded the first episode. Almost all of the 50,000ish people in the fleet are refugees and the one warship an old, if not obsolescent, battlestar that was to be retired and whose modern fighters and pilots had mostly been wiped out when the war began. They don’t have enough pilots to go in shifts, at least not until things can settle down and they can check out the other survivors for people who might be suitable for training. But at this point in the story they’ve been on the run constantly and simply haven’t had time.
This is one of my favorite sci-fi shows of all time, but trying to understand the "science" of the show unviverse will lead you down a deep rabit hole of "just because" macguffins and inconsistencies. They'll talk about the time dilation of near speed of light travel in one episode then have a massive battle in the orbit of a black hole a few episodes later. Still an amazing story tho, I definitely recommend it
There was a later episode where Galactica hadn't given up to date timing to the rest of the fleet and they jumped to different points due to the minor timing discrepancy.
So it takes exactly 33 minutes fleet time for the Cylons to find the fleet. The Cylons might be experiencing different time intervals due to time dilation. Then it stands to reason that the delay is on the fleet side. The Cylons are jumping to the fleet as soon as they receive a message from Olympic Carrier.
FTL is not Faster Than Light in BSG, because ship doesn't move faster than light. It is more like folding fabric of space with gravity, first by anchoring ship in place by device that is powered by compound known as Tylium, and punching or rather moving that folded space on ship. It's also not teleportation as some may say. Galactica's FTL computer computing core is size of footbal field, that's a lot of computing power, so it can calculate precise jumpoints by nanoseconds, which has to be manually entered into system that operates drive as ships's systems are not connected, the problem is recharge of drive itself. 33 minutes takes to power up reaction chamber in FTL engines on Cylon ships as their systems are connected. Their ships are much faster than Colonial Fleet, which needs 35-40 minutes, that's why Vipers are on hot standy each time. Irony is that this method indeed is faster than light, because ship gets moved to new position instantly.
As others have mentioned, you should have watched the miniseries. There they have to make FTL calculations manually, and you see Gaeta skimming through massive binders of numbers.
"Motherfracker!" Yeah it's a common enough device. The BBC show _Red Dwarf_ did exactly the same thing in their show in the 1980s, except they used "smeg" instead -- as in "smeg off!" -- which they adapted from the real word "smegma" which is "the harmless combination of oils, skin cells, sweat and other fluids that accumulate around your genitals." So the writers did their research on that one! Another of my favorite sci-fi shows from that era -- _Farscape_ -- uses "frell/frelling" as their broadcast-friendly swearword. Oh, and I almost forgot. _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ surpassed them all. In that show, "Belgium!" is the most offensive swearword in the Galaxy.
The 49988 was the total population across the entire fleet, most of which were civilians. The Galactica was the leader of the fleet of the surviving humans and the principle military ship.
I wonder if the Cylons were using a gravitational wave detection device to find small fluctuations in spacetime to track the fleet. Its like dropping a rock in a pond and using the waves to track where the rock dropped.
GALACTICA's FTL is folding space, which doesn't violate the lightspeed barrier. I've also read that while objects can't move faster than light but space can. But I've always concider this shows use of FTL as a jump drive or a space folding drive...it's the reason they can't jump to a locate they don't know about. It takes 33 minutes for the Cylons to triangulate the fleets position and jump to them.
re: FTL in BSG (reboot)... I think it's an instantaneous relocation. re: "xxx hours without sleep"... there are some 50,000 humans in the "fleet", of which there are many civilians and only a limited number of operation crew, fighter pilots, etc.. Also... a lot of details in the show have drawn inspiration from the real-world US military in that "alert status" means *everyone* is on duty; the brief gaps between jump complete and arrival of the pursuing Cylons is all the time any of the crew has for rest - essentially no time at all, especially for the ship's operational crew who are in a near constant state of preparation for the next jump. As to FTL navigation, yeah, it takes time for the "Colonial" crew to compute each of their jumps so they know where they will end up, and I believe the notion is that the 33 minutes is the amount of time it takes the Cylons to detect where the Colonial fleet has jumped to and execute their own pursuit jump. In the BSG universe, I don't think anyone is "travelling through" space at superluminal velocity, just instantaneous translocation. Not sure there is any time dilation going on in the show because no-one is even approaching the speed of light.
1. The miniseries should be watched first to understand more like what ftl actually is. 2. Ftl is not travelling but a jump from point to point skipping space. Thats also the reason why time dilation isnt a thing.
For anyone who doesn’t know, this show was created post 9/11 and captured the sense of doom and gloom that Fox News was putting out. American media took pride in repeatedly showing the towers collapse regularly for the first year and this traumatizing the nation repeatedly. The sense of despair and trauma on the show is a reflection of the insane American psyche that lead up to the invasion of Iraq. This will hopefully help non Americans understand why we keep waging wars in the Middle East. Shows like this captures an element of that type of thinking.
@zeitgeistx5239 "This will hopefully help non Americans understand why we keep waging wars in the Middle East." Ya Really Don't Know Much About This do Ya?
Some of what you bring up is covered in the show itself. For example: the calculations you mention are part of why ships just can't jump over and over, as well as cooldown and 'spinning up' the engines.
I can't lie, the signal light Morse code in that episode was the moment I fell in love with the "hard scifi" genre. Yes I know bsg isn't that scientifically realistic, but it undeniably tries hard not to hand wave basic space human things like food, sleep, cancer, radiation, line of sight, communication, etc.
You're over-thinking the time dilation. It's not that different amounts of time pass between them. Within 33 minutes of arriving at their new location they're found and the Cylons arrive. They both travel the same distance at the same speed. It's just taking the Cylons 33 minutes to find their new location.
@DrBecky As for navigation accuracy, assuming we know π to 200T places, wouldn't that be in the realm of accuracy needed to adjust for faster than light navigation? 3.14...→ 200,000,000,000,000 places. Maybe I am not fathoming the depth of the math needed.
I’m not gonna repeat what others have said about the way FTL works in this series cause that would likely get repetitive but in the miniseries it is made clear that you can physically feel when a ship makes a jump and it’s not something you could likely sleep through so even if they had enough people to take shifts with the people that aren’t actively working would still be unable to get any decent amount of sleep without being jolted awake every half hour. Also on the precision thing around 9:24 with ftl being an instantaneous teleport you just have to enter in coordinates on a map and you’ll end up exactly at those coordinates which is part of why it takes them a few minutes to actually jump as the computers have to read the coordinates and spin up the FTL drives. But the benefits are that it’s extremely precise and instant once the drives are spun up. Only downside is that the distance you can go is entirely dependent on how powerful your ships computer is which is why the galactica does most of the calculations and then relays those coordinates to the rest of the fleet
Is anything about Aliens a hard Sci-fi. What is hard science. Yiu always argue a technology makes possible. Is it how of tech is do able or basis of technology is the factors being acknowledged
Aside from the artificial gravity and the FTL, the technology isn't too far ahead of what we could make now. The space ships mostly move like they would in real spaces and there are scenes of the vipers flipping end for end or shooting their cannons sideways to the direction of travel. The weapons are missiles or railguns (some of the missiles wiggle back and forth like snakes). Ships also have to be very efficient at recycling water and air.
I think Dr Becky is digging a little too deep to find problems. There comes a point where you have to trust the (fictitious) technology to perform perfectly. That is why we need not bother testing the navigational tolerances of FTL drive. They may call it FTL, but it doesn't mean that is how it works. It is based on some old distant/foreign technology to achieve the effect protrayed it doesn't necessarily encounter acceleration limits or increasing mass side effects or complex causality.
It's been a while since I watched this show, but IIRC its attempts at physics realism were really focused on how the ships moved in conventional travel. There was a lot of that using thrusters to change direction, etc. As other commenters have pointed out, the FTL system was purposefully vague, and how Cylons could have all of their non-human abilities while being indistinguishable from humans at a very small level was also never explained, IIRC, because that wasn't the point. The movement of the ships looked really good, added drama to fight scenes, and some of that ground had been broken in other sci-fi shows. The real heart of the series is the kind of tension and personal drama that makes up so much of this episode, which is why there wasn't a ton of physics to talk about. I remember being enthralled by this show when it was originally airing.
There are a couple real-life theories for faster than light travel. Alcubierre drive was proposed by Miguel Alcubierre in 1994 in his doctoral thesis. It uses General Relativity and reverse calculates that way an engineer does. It showed that warp drive like Star Trek is possible. However, it required a mass the size of planet Jupiter in front of the spacecraft, and another mass of equal mass but a special type of matter called negative mater that theoretically should exist, but no one has been able to prove does exist. Carrying two plants the size of Jupiter in your back pocket is not practical. However, going from absolutely impossible to absolutely impractical is progress. In the 21st century Dr Sonny White has done calculations that energy optimize Alcubierre drive. By reducing speed and using some exotic physics he calculated you should be able to propel a spacecraft to a significant fraction of the speed of light with a spacecraft the size of Skylab. "We" launched Skylab into space, so that's practical. Furthermore he showed it wasn't necessary to use exotic matter. He set up a laboratory experiment, funded by DARPA. He claimed he "accidentally" produced a static warp bubble. Uh huh! He deliberately created an experiment to create exactly that, and succeeded in doing it. That isn't an accident, it's deliberate. I call that a success! The warp bubble was microscopic, and required a laser to prove the warp bubble existed. But he did it. Yea! Very rudimentary research, a lot more work is required before we get anything that will propel a spacecraft. Another theory states that if you could exceed the speed of light, then energy calculations reverse. That is once you exceed the speed of light, the faster you go the less energy required. This implies that exceeding the light speed barrier would result in a massive acceleration to incredible speed! The more energy you start with when you cross the light speed barrier, the faster and farther you go. As you accelerate to speeds faster than the speed of light, you lose energy. Eventually you lose enough energy that you cross back below the speed of light. This is a real physics theory, and it's the basis of jump drive. How you "bump" across the light speed barrier to start the jump? Well, that's the catch.
There is a mole and GPS-like trackers planted in the battleship that is allowing the Cylons to know the human fleets' location... it is intentionally psychologically on the Cylon's part.
You should have gone for the mini-series pilot because out of context 33 does not make much sense without knowing the backstory where the lack of military pilots/crew is explained.
The biggest thing you are missing is that the travel they do is more of a space fold jump wormhole... not actual speed of light so time dilation is negligible or non existent.
They don't actually travel faster than the speed of light. I know they call it FTL, but that's purely for the purpose of explaining that, relative to where they are going, they have traveled a distance, faster than light. But if you listen to the dialogue, they are "jumping" instantly to that point. So they are probably traveling using Quantum entanglement teleportation. As for their navigation, that's why they can't just jump at "FTL" for a long time. The farther away they go, the more difficult the jump.
Regarding time dilation, when they are using their FTL drive, they essentially go from rest to rest... So the 33 minute interval should be counting approximately the same time for both since both are presumably at the state of rest at the same time other than the instantaneous moment when an FTL jump happens.
As others have said, FTL in Battelstar is more of a space-fold drive than it is an 'accelerate real fast' drive, which is why they make instantaneous jumps. Accuracy of the navigation system also becomes something of a plot point later in the series. The longer the distance of a jump, the less accurate it is. They also have a 'red line' which is the distance beyond which jump calculations become so inaccurate that it's dangerous to make them. Off the top of my head I don't recall them ever explicitly stating how long the average jump distance is, but I'm pretty sure it's less than a light year. The star system they're fleeing from is a trinary system with 12 habitable bodies, and the jump drives are for fast in-system travel and they don't really do any travel outside of that star system. The Cylons have much more advanced navigation systems and can accurately jump significantly longer distances than the humans. There are no relativistic ships.
You've put far more thought into the physics of BSG than the creators did. They never considered anything like time dilation or how their FTL works. It's just cool spaceships go pew pew.
The thing I like about FTL in this science fantasy show is, they did not accelerate to go faster than light. The speed they were going in space had no relation to their FTL travel. Do I think FTL is possible? Probably not. If it ever does happen, it will likely not be related to movement in space. (The one exception to this is if they ever find some way to play with the Higgs field and give an object zero mass. If they ever did manage to do this, they would probably kill anyone in that object. If you play around with the basic parameters of the universe, things like chemistry will probably not work the same.)
What makes me curious is the rule where an object in motion stays in motion in space unless acted upon or approaching the speed of light, but the space ships and missiles have continuous trust. Isn't that acceleration in action? Is that the point of continuous thrust cause all you need is side thrusters to correct for course corrections, but the main thrusters are there to reach the max speed? And when max speed is approached you shut your thrusters off saving fuel? Ion drives on some satellites have continuous thrust.
As others have pointed out, a ton of your "common sense" questions would have been solved by looking at the miniseries first. This IS, technically, the "first episode" of the series, but it relies heavily on the miniseries for not having to explain some of the basics.
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If you haven't watched the two-part miniseries that preceded this, please do so. This episode is essentially episode 3 immediately following that. It''ll give you more context of what's going on.
I was did up 4 days off of 12 -1ltr Mtn Dews & Coffee(family issues)....but crashed for 48hrs....
33 is not the first episode, it is but it isn't... Let me explain. The miniseries, that predates the series, can be viewed as season zero episodes 1 2 and 3. I would highly recommend watching that first
Actually the Guy at Fermi lab did a video on this and he said your mass doesn’t increase the Energy increases ( the mass of the energy increases)
@DrBecky
That's so funny, I just started rewatching Battlestar Galactica a couple of days ago.
If you're looking for something to watch and react to next, I can highly recommend Stargate Atlantis and specifically pretty much every scene that has Dr Rodney McKay (David Hewlett) in it. Maybe S03E08 (McKay and Mrs Miller) , that episode is about an Einstein Rosen bridge but again, anything with Rodney McKay in it is great fun to watch.
They don't have enough people to work in shifts. The number on the whiteboard is the total number of people left alive.
Yep. I don't remember how much of the Galactica crew is left alive, but a HUGE chunk of that number is civilians; kids, politicians, doctors, etc. Those folks don't know how to operate anything on the Galactica, so it would be pretty hard to get them going in shifts...
Didn't Becky watch the Miniseries first? You should always start with that, as it becomes clear what that number means, and really how the cylons really did a thorough job, all because of Cavill's daddy/mommy issues (But that is not revealed until much later in the series).
I believe the approximate compliment of enlisted personnel on the ship was 2,000.
IIRC, the jump was jarring enough that you would wake up/it would disrupt your sleep patterns. So at best they were surviving on 33 minute naps. The fleet itself, as seen elsewhere was fine enough. The issue was the poor flight crews who had to scramble every time in case the drive failed or had a problem. So, jump, deploy, set up a perimeter, fly back. But since they can't live in their suits, it takes time to refuel and prep the fighters, they need bio-breaks, food, and so on, more like grab 5 minutes when you can. Or every new parent ever. lol.
Yea the pilots they have are everyone who is qualified, and it's not many at all.
A better "first episode" would have been the miniseries that precedes and ties into episode 1.
Agreed, the miniseries is combined into 1 big movie last I watched it on Amazon. Jumping right into this feels kinda weird as a first episode.
came here to say this
Yes you started at episode 3
episode 1 of the series doesn't make much sense out of context, I made that mistake and then realized my mistake and went and found the miniseries. isn't the 33 minutes the time it takes for the cylons to make the ftl calculation ? and it's just the pilots and command that had been awake for 5 days , not everyone else.
Agreed. You need to start with the mini series. It established so much that's needed for not only "33" but the ENTIRE series.
Their FTL is more teleportation than travel across space. It’s instantaneous, so time dilation wouldn’t really be a factor. There is no difference in time between the people experiencing it, and an observer.
Best example of that is the Adama Manoeuvre, which by the way is probably the MOST epic FTL jump in all of SciFI. Who ever thought that up deserves an award all for himself.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 When i first saw that, it was so epic that i felt a little bit emotional for some reason. One of the most epic scenes in SciFi
Yes, FTL has to be like that or it would be too complex for a series with a fair amount of action scenes.
I suspect this is the intention of the writers; but I don't actually think the mechanics of it was ever discussed in enough detail to call anything much more than assumption. Its unclear to me whether the jump is like some sort of instant jump like a momentary wormhole or if they just "jump" directly to a velocity faster than light, thus appearing to just vanish instantly. However I am not aware of any actual explicit discussion of whether jumps are instant, or whether FTL means "we move with a speed faster than light" or "we arrive at our destination faster than light would" both seem reasonable, and the total lack of discussion of travel time does seem to support the later.
@@mooferoo Yeah I was like,"This is frakkin incredible" when I saw it first time. And Hot Dog casually stating "Well, this should be different" as he launches himself towards a plasma storm...
The premise of the series is that the 49k survivors counted on the whiteboard are whoever just happened to be on long-haul transports at the moment of the attack, and the overwhelming majority of them are untrained civilians. Worse, the one military vessel that survived to shepherd this "Rag-Tag Fleet" (the titular Battlestar _Galactica)_ is running with a skeleton crew - she was in the process of being decommissioned and turned into a museum at the start of the pilot miniseries. So in-universe, the reason they can't just send half the crew off-duty to rest is that they risk leaving critical stations unmanned during a continuing crisis.
Out of universe, of course, the reasons they don't send half the crew of-duty to rest are 1) to ratchet up the drama and 2) so they don't have to bring in a bunch of new faces the audience hasn't seen before and doesn't have any attachment to.
Correct, at the start, Galactica doesn't have its full 3000 member full crew, but only a few hundred people, some tourists, and various media crews and dignitaries and the like as it was on its way to being decommissioned. By combining assets with other military ships in the miniseries/launch episodes, they had about 1700-1800 people on board when this happened, and only 60 fighters/one launch bay was inoperative. Of the 120 fighters they were supposed to have, only about 30 were working and one launch bay was inoperative.
Ya, I’m thinking she might be missing the point. I mean… it is entertainment not a thesis.
See this is the problem with a lot of this "reacts video" culture, they react to things completely out of context. I remember she did one on The Expanse a few years back and didn't know what was going on and thought they had "anti-gravity". I feel when these people do these reacts things they should at least watch a few episodes and get acquainted with a summary premise of what the movie or show actually is.
The jump drives are less "FTL", more "folding space". They instantly connect two regions of space as if through a very wide and short-lived wormhole, and the entire ship is effectively teleported. Different principle, just as wildly improbable.
The Adama manoeuvre is in my opinion the GOAT of all FTL jumps in scifi.
Dune. Improbable Drive? (Hitchhiker's Guide). Also, 33, not Dr. Becky.
@@ryanchicago6028 I believe you mean the "Infinite Improbability Drive"
what he said
@@EnglishMike Oh he doth protest... Are you a Volgun?
Only the crew of Galactica is staying awake. The rest of the fleet can rotate. The reason is the number of enemy fighters attacking every 33 minutes.
They are folding space, not actually moving at "c."
If memory serves, they can only jump some 30 light years before the inaccuracies in the guidance system bites them.
15 LY maximum, but the civilian drives could only do 10LY. The issue was the rest of the fleet as Galactica could spool up and jump in 20 minutes but the fleet was full of many older ships that took longer. Every few jumps they would lose another ship. In theory the lost ship could find them again, but for story purposes, it rarely happened.
@@plektosgaming thank you for the correction! 😀
But it was wearing on the other people as well as jumping appears to interrupt your sleep. Meaning you never got any REM sleep. If you re a new parent, you know exactly what this is like.
@@plektosgaming I'm pretty sure Galactica also crunched the numbers and did the calcs for the other ships.
Dr Becky, you should have watched the miniseries first. If you had, you would know that Galactica was about to be decommissioned and turned into a museum.
They are not going a relativistic speeds when they are traveling in normal space.
So say we all ❤
so say we all
So say we all
So say we all
So say we all
So say we all
33 is technically the first episode. However it was preceded by a miniseries that was also the pilot for the show. It explains why they are all running, etc. You may want to check it out before getting too far into the show to fill in the back story.
yeah watching BSG without the Miniseries is like watching a headless snake trying to ascertain if it is poisonous or not
"Frak" is a way of swearing with a four-letter swear word without getting censored for TV. The series Farscape used "Frell" for exactly the same reason. There's a RUclips video they put out for one of the later series in BSG called "All The Fraks of BSG" which is just all the swearing edited together.
You really need to watch the Mini-Series that preceded S1 to get a proper idea of what's going on here and how desperate the situation is. Those 49,000-odd lives aren't just on the Galactica itself, they're the population of the entire fleet, who are, as far as they know, the last survivors of the human race. Galactica is the ONLY warship: everything else is a rag-tag collection of civilian vessel, some of them stuffed with thousands of desperate people and with none of their crews trained to fight.
BSG was always very good about attitude jets. Even in the middle of huge space battles, you can still see them, at least on the fighter-sized craft. BTW there IS another way for a spacecraft to change attitude without reaction jets, and that's gyroscopic reaction wheels. Lots of satellites, icluding the Hubble Space Telescope, use these.
And then there's Firefly, where the curses were in Chinese. (English subtitles are available.)
Remember that this is a remake of a 1978 series that was broadcast OTA, so there were words they couldn't use, instead substituting "Frak" and for BS "Felgercarb". And the remake continued that usage.
A famous UK one would be "smeg" from Red Dwarf.
@@Sehlat Well, yes and no. "Smeg" isn't totally made up, it's an abbreviation of "smegma", which is a real word that I'll leave you to look up for yourself...
@@MrHws5mp "Frak" is obviously a slightly changed "frag", which is real military slang, so it isn't totally made up either. I know about smegma, but the writers on Red Dwarf insist that "smeg" doesn't come from that, and that the similarity is a coincidence. I know that's impossible to verify, but why should they lie about that?
Hmmm 🤔 check out the mini-series/pilot episode which was released before this episode. This is a great episode, but you're missing context.
Missing SO MUCH context. The 50k people have nothing to do with the no-sleep-pilots. The 50k is the survivor count as of their census, and the count of pilots is much lower. Also, I think I recall that the pilots are actually using amphetamines to stay awake for preposterous amounts of time, just like we used to do with our US pilots during cold war crises or whatever. Amphetamines to pop them up, Bennies to let them sleep again after.
While there's a reason for a spesific timeframe(as far as lore goes without spoilers), the 33 minutes is interesting; "Moore stated in an interview that they picked 33 minutes because it was a decent amount of time to allow people to do small stuff like shower and shave or take a nap and they purposefully decided not to create some technobabble reason of why it was 33 minutes." :D
Utopia?
I always figured it was related to the original show's airing period, 1978 and 1979. 1980 seconds is exactly 33 minutes. Kind of disappointing to learn it was just randomly picked.
The original Battlestar Galactica was my initiation to nerdhood. I was around 5 to 7 y.o. when Battlestar Galactica was shown on TV in Finland in the 80's. I forced my mother to read the subtitles out loud, as I couldn't read yet.
I built the ships and the laser guns out of Lego, a Viper cockpit out of cardboard and had several dreams related to space and Galactica. I have a vivid memory of one in kindergarten, where I had the watch that would make me invisible. Later once I learned to read, I read copious amounts of science fiction and joined the local astronomy club. As a sophmore at college I built my own Dobsonian telescope. Seeing the rings of Saturn with it was an emotional moment :)
This eventually led me to the path of science. I was very close to studying astronomy at university, but went for theoretical physics instead. This in the end changed to computer science. And here I am now, an AI researcher (no cylons on my resume yet, though) with big love for physics and astronomy remaining...
Lovely story. Although if the epilogue of battlestar is anything to go by your new career in AI will do its part in pushing us into the next cycle of man and machine conflict and resolution.
Sleep deprivation used to be part of certain army training exercises. After about 3 days the chances of being coherent drop and the chances of visual and audible hallucinations increase. The longer you stay awake [with no chemical help inc caffeine] these effects will escalate, chances of injuring yourself or others is dangerously high.
Can confirm, by day 3 of us all burning about 10,000 calories a day I was hallucinating and knew it. My platoon went 5.5 days like that. Frak that.
Whaddaya mean "used to be"
@@johannesbowers7467 Well.. I left the forces a long time ago and don't have any current experience lol and it also depends on which forces and which regiments we are talking about :)
One of BG's "better" points was that C+C (Command & Control) was deep within the ship. Instead of right in front with a big glass window that just screams "hit me"!
CIC (combat information center) not C+C.
@@havok6280 And in the original series it was loaded with state of the art Tektronix graphics terminals, which today seem unbelievably primitive but looked quite advanced at the time.
@@havok6280 I stand corrected.
@@kennethswenson6214I’m standing behind you.
So, now way to take out the leadership with an out-of-control A-wing?
TL;DR: Very few popular, well-established sci-fi settings' FTL physics were created or maintained by people who "just don't understand physics". Quite the opposite. The good ones very consciously choose one or two subtleties of either GR, SR, or QM to work around, usually using plausible, or at least not-impossible things that we "just haven't discovered yet" in the real world. Assuming a sci-fi author "just didn't think of time dilation" is generally unwise, and there's usually a _ton_ more going on behind the scenes with how they're rationalizing their workarounds.
Anyway, yeah... what spawned this was: "Nothing can go faster than c."
That's _kind of_ true... Except for the fact that literally _anything_ can go faster than c, and indeed many many things _are_ going faster than c; they're just very far away from us while they do it. (And, in fact, _we_ are moving faster than c relative to very distant galaxies near the cosmological horizon).
The sci-fi FTL drive types are, for the most part, based on some sort of _plausible_ real-world work-around to relativity.
Warp drive takes advantage of the nuance that _should_ be in the above statement, that "nothing can travel faster than c *relative to its local spacetime"* by manipulating the spacetime _itself_ into moving faster than c relative to neighboring spacetime. The real-world plausible version of it was theorized by Miguel Alcubierre in 1994. Initial versions required negative mass/energy and _vast_ amounts of it, and were completely impractical even in principle (requiring something like a galaxy-mass of negative energy, which probably doesn't even exist, to move a very small craft at v>c). Over the decades, it's been refined, first down to a Jupiter mass, and now a medium-sized asteroid's worth, and there are even versions that _don't_ need exotic matter or energy, that have been successfully simulated in computers. Star Trek's warp drive in particular invents a hypothetical energy field they call 'subspace' that grants this negative energy density. It's also how the ships can move so nimbly at sub-light speeds (impulse drive = fusion rockets + inertial dampers a.k.a. mass reduction of the ship via negative energy density thanks to 'subspace'.) Of all sci-fi FTL drives, this is by _far_ the most plausible, which is why there's serious research going into it.
Hyperdrive invents a parallel dimension we can move in and out of with enough energy, called "hyperspace" in which the laws of physics are different than in our universe, but which is similar enough that they map onto each other... so you slip or punch into hyperspace, travel at what is in _that_ universe, sub-light speeds, but either c is far, far greater or, more usually, distance is vastly compressed... then you pop back into normal space, and you've gone 100 light-years in our universe while only traveling a few hundred kilometers in hyperspace.
Star Wars hyperspace is the "different laws of physics" kind, where the maximum speed is much much higher than c, but gravity gradients act to significantly slow ships down in hyperspace, which is (in Star Wars fan-canon anyway) why the Millenium Falcon "ran the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs". People make fun of that for being the use of a measure of distance, seemingly to measure time, but it isn't. The speed of the ship is "She'll make point-five past light-speed" which is... poorly defined, but basically the smaller the number between 0 and 1, the faster the ship is going relative to real-space. The "12 parsecs" is literally the _distance_ the ship had to travel to complete the Kessel Run. The boast is "My ship's navigation computers are so good, and my sensors and galaxy map so accurate and detailed, that I managed to find a path in and around and through intervening stars that stayed gravity-neutral enough to only be a 12-parsec path length while still maintaining 0.5 past light speed". This is also why travel times in the Star Wars galaxy are so strange. If you want to fly from one side of the galaxy to the other, it's _much much_ faster to go all the way around the circumference, than to go along the _physically_ shorter path through the core, because dipping down into the galaxy's gravity well that far makes it significantly slower... which is also why the galaxy's socioeconomics works in vaguely ring-shaped regions, rather than proximity-based regions. The "outer rim" is all closer to itself via hyperspace, even when it's farther in real-space, than the "mid rim" is, or the "outer core" or "core systems".
Babylon 5's hyperspace is the "physically smaller space mapped onto our space" kind, with fluid within the space that includes eddies and currents, with islands of stability between jump gates where jump beacons can maintain stable positions. If a ship slips off course and loses track of the beacon network, it can be irrevocably lost, literally just pulled off-course into the depths of the hyperspace 'sea' giving it a very Rennaisance nautical sort of feel, with pioneering Explorer-class ships able to venture off of the beacon network (at great risk), and if they discover a new island of stability, they can construct a jump gate and a beacon trail to establish a new colonizable region.
Wormhole drives obviously create stable, traversable wormholes, which are, like warp fields, not expressly _forbidden_ by relativity, but which, as you've covered yourself many times, require exotic matter or energy to hold open the throat and negate the gravity well and tidal forces near the mouth.
And then there are jump drives, which abandon relativity workarounds altogether and go with pure quantum physics, usually some sort of large-scale coordinated quantum teleportation or tunneling (which would indeed require _immense_ computational precision, which is why in BSG, it's the only time they network their computers, to provide enough computing power to achieve it, because unfortunately the amount of computing power it takes to calculate jumps is equivalent to the amount of computing power it takes to run a machine sentience as well, making Cylon viruses semi-sentient and ridiculously sophisticated, and networked computers basically suicide for humans. In BSG, later on, it's kind of loosely implied that it's more of a just "locality isn't such a hard and fast rule after all". In real-world quantum theory terms, I would describe BSG jump drives as entanglement drives.
Some advanced research in quantum mechanics, especially within the Many Worlds/Everettian theory, has found some promising leads in the idea that what it _means_ to be near another object, or a portion of space-time, is to be highly entangled with that portion of spacetime, and what it _means_ to be far away is to be weakly entangled. So... if you could directly manipulate entanglement with some massive quantity of exotic energy in a jump drive, such that the ship crosses a threshold at which it's more highly entangled with some distant point in spacetime, than with the point it's at now, then *blink.* It's not there anymore; it's in the new, more-highly-entangled spot, and they spin down the drive and allow the universe to sort it out and diminish the old entanglement with the old location.
So... yes, you were overthinking things, but not so much in a "science vs. fiction" standpoint; sci-fi writers are very smart and generally pretty well-versed in science. Rather, you were overthinking things in an "astrophysics vs. quantum mechanics" standpoint, which given that you're an astrophysicist, makes perfect sense. ;)
Personally, I think it's almost certain that FTL travel really is impossible, that whatever future paradigms successfully merge Relativity and Quantum Mechanics in a non-perturbative way that doesn't break at high energy scales, will have new features that prevents it... but I'm holding out a _tiny_ bit of hope for Alcubierre-style warp drive, and for BSG-style jump drive. Hyperdrive and wormhole drives are non-starters IMO, and if anything remotely like them does turn out to be possible, it'll be a total black swan, with completely new physics, where Warp and Jump are both at least tied to tiny threads of physical reasoning that are not yet completely disproven.
Dude musta got a PhD in faster than light travel. Cause this post be a dissertation 😂
@RJM1972 Thanks! I keep getting told that lately for some reason... I'm starting to think maybe there's something to it. Now if only I didn't loathe editing videos, hate the sound of my own recorded voice, and hate how I look on camera...
One minor change: They are experimenting with warp drives and figured out that you can use one very soon - in the next decade or two - if you want to go LESS than C. Speeding up a probe's transit time to even 1/100 C is an immense difference. Imagine going from Earth to Mars in a day. 1500 minutes (~25 hours) is absurdly fast but might be required to dal with the radiation issues in transit. Even if it was 1/1000th (about 70K mph), 10 days is a snap. Current speeds are about 0.0005 with conventional rickets. Every jump forward is huge. Imagine going from Jupiter to Earth in days.
Reply of the month, across all RUclips! 😊
Note that a recent paper was published that discusses subluminal speeds without the need for exotic matter. RUclips won't allow me to post links, but it's easy enough to find online.
I once went six days with a total of between ten and twelve hours of sleep. It's certainly not pleasant, I can tell you that much. At some point you start to sort of hallucinate, hear indistinct whispers, see shadows or movements out of the corner of your eye and feel like you're being watched. Pictures, wallpaper patterns or plants seem to move, tunnel vision is enormous, concentrating is almost impossible and sometimes I was standing in a corridor somewhere and didn't know, for example, whether I was already in the bathroom or in the canteen or whether I was still on my way there.
I once drove at the tail end of about 50 hours awake.
The Vivarin (caffeine pills) and Jolt Cola were not working anymore, and I woke up as I was headed, at about 35MPH, for the stone wall of a cemetery.
I hyperventilated the remaining 15 or so minutes home and slept for a day and a half, then went cold turkey on caffeine.
Worst. Week. Ever.
Those are not hallucinations. You're starting to see through the Veil.
(This is a joke, in case anyone worries about their sanity... or mine)
@@MonkeyJedi99 Uh... So you fell asleep, almost crashed and then continued to drive? Shows how sleep deprivation affects judgement as well.
@@brandyballoon I will not deny your assessment.
@@brandyballoon Actually the adrenalin kicks in which usually gets you over the hump into the next alert cycle.
A FTL jump can be achieved by simply surprising a cat with a cucumber.
The way I interpret it, FTL is more like a jump from place to place, no acceleration, no deceleration and no journey time, like a worm hole or similar. I think the series was praised for the way things like rapters and fighters manoeuvred in space.
The population count was for the entire fleet, most of which was civilian, similar to a naval convoy escorting cargo ships.
According to Einstein...sci-fi is better with ice cream.
The amount of people still alive are primarily civilians on civilian transports. The Miniseries explains the concept that the series picks up with. 12 Colonies based on the Tribes of Mankind, have progressed to a point where they have space travel and created A.I. in the form of androids called Cylons. The Cylons and humans fought a 12-year war to a stalemate, and the Cylons left for deep space, only to return some 40 years later attacking the colonies with nuclear weapons. 13 Earth-type worlds, almost their entire military structure, and billions of humans...and 49,000 plus escape on 200 plus civilian ships, mainly civilians with no military training, to find a new home. A myth called Earth, the 13th Tribe of Kobol, the Cradleworld of Mankind.
If you can get past all of the hand-waving that accounts for the science in the show (the FTL drive, some of the Cylon lore, etc.) Battlestar Galactica is an exceptional series that looks at human nature, what it means to be human, the power of faith, the recurring patterns of history, and how civilizations survive. The funny thing is that this is a reboot of a series that lasted a single season in 1978-79 on ABC TV in the US. That series is even less science-based, and much more spiritual...with a fair amount of 1970s cheeziness. The original ended for two reasons...1) the cost to produce the show. 2) George Lucas tried to sue that BSG was too similar to Star Wars, especially the effects which were done by John Dykstra (who won an Oscar for the first Star Wars). I was 6 years old when the first series aired and it is still one of my favorite childhood shows. I was in my 30s when the reboot happened...and it was one of the best shows ever. Its in my top 10 all-time favorites.
The concepts of both versions were by Glen A. Larson, who was a major sci-fi series developer in the 70s and 80s (The Six Million Dollar Man and its spin-off, The Bionic Woman, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Knight Rider, and Automan), and both series also have a healthy dollop of Mormonism (Larson was raised Mormon), along with Ancient Greek, and Egyptian mythologies blended together. The reboot was spearheaded by Ronald D. Moore, who started as a Star Trek: The Next Generation writer. Since BSG, Moore has also headed up the time-travel romance Outlander based on the Diana Gabaldon novels.
One of the best things that happened during covid is the BBC broadcast the entire of Battlestar Galactica, including mini series and TV spinoff movies inserted at the correct points, at two episodes per week solidly from start to finish. This was broadcast in HD and with 5.1 surround sound on digital terrestrial and satellite. iPlayer streaming only had stereo sound as always.
They aren't going FTL, they are jumping point to point. No less fictiony :)
If you jump to a point faster than light can get there, what's that called?
@@Jesse-cw5pv Since speed is just distance divided by time, if it's instantaneous (t=0) then by definition it's undefined.
@@johnmcgimpsey1825 In effect, you go back in time.
@@Jesse-cw5pv Magic?
@@FLPhotoCatcher aren´t you just skipping time?
By your command....What is totally frakkin awesome is that we are still talking intelligently about the best TV show ever.
"Frak" is a fun bit of Galactica profanity that is also family friendly. Another one from the original series was "feldercarb".
A VPN to watch Battlestar Galactica?
Nah! Just get the entire DVD set! You can even watch it without an Internet connection! 😂
Pretty sure that rando people can't run the battleship or fly the fighters.
I would be fascinated in seeing her react to an episode of Babylon 5 and talk about the artificial gravity generated by the space station rotating.
And the Starfury fighters
I'd like to see her cover B5 too, although my spidey sense tells me she'd find lots to pick apart ;)
If you want to see her go off on a tangent about rotational gravity, watch the video she did about The Expanse. The space stations in that one rotate to generate gravity, too.
@@stewi009 Yes but that station is not ten miles long nor has a giant diverse multi-mile long garden inside it....
B5 did thrusters a decade before NuBSG.
@@oghus Yeah. I always liked that they don't launch from the station, rather they just drop/eject from it using angular momentum.
I'm afraid to say you started in the wrong "order". The Show starts with a mini series. 33 is like an actual "second" episode.
3rd it goes Day 1 then day 2
DR.Becky you are missing out on a fantastic series
This version seems to have gotten the physics better than the 1970's series. The thrusters of the Vipers are more realistic.
The physics, along with the writing, acting, storylines, effects, and soundtrack :p
Really everything is better there. Every side has got their understandable motivations. You can understand the antagonists as well. And the protagonists are no saints like in the old series.
The cylons are computers, machines... so a highly advanced navigation system is very much at the core of abilities. If I remember right, they actually covered the navigation issue and how the Cylons were able to perfectly locate where the fleet went in later seasons.
Also... If you've already suspended disbelief for FTL travel, it shouldn't be any trick at all to accept FTL navigation.
They answered how the cylons were tracking the fleet in this same episode - there was a cylon beacon hidden on the galactica.
2 min ad in 12 min video. this is reaching television levels. lol.
And the rest of the video is just her not understanding the most basic facet of a "jump drive". The three largest segments are FTL/Time Dilation tangents that are completely irrelevant to what is literally shown unambiguously on the screen.
I like Dr. Becky but this video ain't it.
On "days without sleep", when I was in the military, I did have one stretch where I was "on" for 4 days straight. Had two 30 minute naps during that span. And much like the show, I was operating a vehicle for long periods of that, with other people as passengers. (Or really cargo, _they_ got to sleep.)
Adrenaline is a hell of a drug. When I watched this episode, I *FELT* the exhaustion, anger, frustration, all of it. The performances were very accurate for people operating on extreme sleep exhaustion.
I love when vets look at military themes in sci-fi shows, and confirm that writers with past military history did a good job.
They don't make shows like that anymore, even if they call it the same.
The original idea of the FTL was to fold space but the graphics were difficult and slow so they opted for the stretch look. They don’t accelerate, they fold space then jump to the new location. Not that its a thing it was the concept to get around acceleration.
Very cool of you to do a react to Battlestar Galactica. This reboot series is considered by some to be one of the finest ever sci fi shows on television.
With regards to the point about the crew not sleeping and there being over 49,000+ humans. That population total was for the entire fleet of ships. Most of those humans were civilians, on ships other than Galactica. The military crew on Galactica, and those pilots were a much smaller number of people. They were also military professionals. As in today’s world, a pilot is a highly trained person. You can’t simply plug a civilian into a pilot’s seat. This was the first episode of the series and as a result, there has not been time to train civilians for military roles.
With regards to the word “frack”, yes, it is a curse word. And yes, I think that it is the equivalent for the other “F” word. But since it’s a made up word, they could use it in the program without worry of it having to be censored for broadcast television.
I hope that you watch more of the series, even if you don’t “react” to it in videos. It is a fun series to watch.
Keep up the good work on your videos.
I also like to imagine that the entire BSG civilization is still griping about extracting petroleum resources by shattering the water table with mildly toxic slurry.
Ergo, 'frack' being a good swear word.
ron moore is the same guy that used emotion over logic in TNG. just sayin.
A later episode does go into navigation errors that build up over a series of Jumps. Catastropically so, one space vessel ends their Jump inside a mountain. Time dilation does not come into it as the Humans and Cylons were always in the same frame of reference, the Jump used dimensional translation ie the ship does not pass thru real space between Jump points. The reason for the Cyclons requiring 33 minutes to Jump after the fleet was never explained, presumably it was because the Cyclons (being expert infiltators) had left a tracking device on one or more of the ships and it took 33 minutes to receive it's signal (the Cyclons did posess some sort of FTL communication as shown by their Resurrection Ships).
I started watching this show YESTERDAY, does everyone ahve the same schedule for this
Also. There’s a miniseries that comes first, you gotta watch it.
8:10 The cylons are also stationary. They use the same jump drive tech, basically a Minecraft cheat command teleport
There is a guide that shows the watch order for the extra movies. start at the pilot movies before the series.
Enjoy one of the best series ever made and by far the best soundtrack of a series.
Basically, BSG jump drives give up locality. They circumvent SR by using basically quantum teleportation, so no time dilation.
The reason they were suspicious of the Olympic Carrier was that being missing for over three hours, which did _not_ involve time dilation, coincided with the Cylons not showing up for about six jump cycles, which is... _quite_ the coincidence. But yes, definitely overthinking it, because you were thinking relativistically, where their drives use nonlocality instead.
“I’m always overthinking.”
Yes, please! That’s what makes the “astrophysicist reacts” series fun!
Just a note that the 50k people includes all remaining civilians (and even prisoners). It's not 50k crew on one ship, the Galactica, which at just under 2,000 crew members. The remnants of the fleet had approx. 2,800 military crew, with the remainder of the population being civilians.
Frak is a work around for a swear word beginning with f, in the original series feldercarb was used as a work around for bullplop
You made the mistake many others have made: “33” is NOT the real first episode. The “Miniseries” is actually the first episode. Because you missed the true beginning, you probably couldn’t figure out what was happening.
This show is actually wonderful and is relatively "light" on Science, focusing instead on the psychological tolls of being at war.
For instance, what you missed is that the captions said "150 hours the Battlestar CREW without sleep" - they are the only war ship in the human fleet and simply don't have enough fighterpilots, jets or staff to man constant rotation of battle.
If you do decide to go ahead and watch the series for your enjoyment (which I highly recommend, by the way) I would recommend you go back first and watch the mini-series, as it serves as an extended pilot episode and explains most of what the crew will experience throughout the series.
They were down to a skeleton crew because Galactica was being decommissioned when the Cylons attacked, so they didn't have adequate personnel to staff multiple shifts, and Galactica was the only Battlestar on hand to protect the fleet.
You have to watch them in the right order. You missed the miniseries that preceded this. You need to go back and watch it.
My favorite Sci-FI, other than The Hitchhiker Guide to the Galaxy, is BSG. I also love playing the the game Starfield visuals for planets is magical.
I always tell my grandchildren that there is a bigger number than infinity and it is infinity+1.
I used to sleep on Sunday I used to work at Oxford Icerink at night and working in computing during the day having a show at the Icerink at 4am before going to work.
I used to do that many times a month not sleeping Monday-Sunday and only 10 hours on Sunday sleep. I did so many jobs like night security/Ice carts/bouncer/Dispatch riding and also used to drive to Perth for meetings on Monday for a 9am in Perth Scotland. Sleep to me was a waste of time.
Doc have you ever reviewed Alien?
If you want to understand Battlestar Galactica you have to watch the 3 hour miniseries that precedes "33" which sets up the universe.
Galactica is the last surviving colonial war ship. The cylons destroyed the colonials entire civilisation killing 78 billion humans, nuking all 12 of their colonies into oblivion and destroying the entire colonial fleet. Their fleet are the few civilian ships that survived the slaughter. President Roslin gathered them up and managed to meet up with the Galactica which was taking on new munitions as it was being decommissioned and turned into a museum - the fact Galactica was old and had a squadron of antique vipers in its museum exhibit is one of the only reasons she survived. Roslin convinces Commander Adama their only hope is to run for it and try and find another habitable planet and get away from the cylons. Galactica fights a massive battle with the cylons who have followed them and manages to escape but obviously "33" opens with them being chased. It's a really good series.
If you look at what was in vogue at the time pop culture wise - we had, had Babylon 5 and Deep Space Nine in the 90's which did more serial story telling. CGI had become more affordable. You had war films like Black Hawk Down and series like 24 which had a much grittier darker feel to them and you had shows like The West Wing which were quite politically astute. There are also unmistakable elements of Blade Runner in it that become more apparent as time goes on - the Cylons have the ability to mimic human form. Battlestar tried to bring these elements into TV science fiction.
Looking back on the series something it reminds me of - and its themes that become more pronounced as the series goes on is a weird kind of apocalyptic religious revivalism. It reminds me of "The Stand" by Stephen King. You might not be very religious but how might you feel if you survived the death of your entire race? Maybe you might think god was at work.
Becky, I'm sure everyone's telling you this, but the ships don't actually move faster than light. The magical FTL drives create some sort of wormhole or something and almost instantly "jump" the ships from one point in space to another. So there is no time dilation.
p.s. I'm sure you have better things to do than watch 57 hours of a TV show, but if you do have a few hours to kill, please start with the mini-series, which introduces the characters and the universe. And the technology. It's not like TNG with a bunch of technobabble and pseudoscience.
That's still technically faster than light. Basically if something is moved from one point to another faster than light is able to in ordinary space, then that is FTL. And could well cause time dilation. Stars tend to move quite fast relative to one another, although low compared to the speed of light. When they "jump" to a star system, they would need to adjust their velocity to match that of the star, so that they do not fly off into deep space. That could cause time dilation when compared to a system with a different velocity.
The Cylons were "just waiting" for the "supposed" homing beacon to reach them at the previous contact point, given that the Colonials could only safely FTL "jump" 33 light minutes (probably less) in a spherical direction from the origin--also taking into account any detritus at the emergence point. Given that the straight line distance is something between 3 to 4 AU (or SU), the signal would not have to be that "powerful" for the Cylons to receive it (and "jump" in again).
The precision and synchronization of the jump drives is a plot point in a later episode. So, yes, the writers thought about your commentary at about 9:15 a couple decades ago.
In the show faster than light travel as you’re imagining it is not possible. Theirs is more of teleportation. Time dilation due to near light speed sunlight travel is brought up.
I can't believe you've never watched the series?! Don't get me wrong, I was a bit skeptical as well when my friends first mentioned it.. But it's shot beautifully and it actually plays alot in favor of what might actually happen in space! There's only 1 other series that does that currently and that's for All Mankind. It really irritates me when you "hear" spaceships fire and them maneuvering around as if there' an atmosphere.. 🙂
Yes, the navigation systems on all these shows are the finest measurements ever devised. They can jump and reappear within a meter or 2 of wherever they want... 😂. But again, it's Sci-fi.. gotta give a little for the story to unfold.. 🙂
It makes more sense if you’ve seen the two episode mini-series that preceded the first episode. Almost all of the 50,000ish people in the fleet are refugees and the one warship an old, if not obsolescent, battlestar that was to be retired and whose modern fighters and pilots had mostly been wiped out when the war began. They don’t have enough pilots to go in shifts, at least not until things can settle down and they can check out the other survivors for people who might be suitable for training. But at this point in the story they’ve been on the run constantly and simply haven’t had time.
This is one of my favorite sci-fi shows of all time, but trying to understand the "science" of the show unviverse will lead you down a deep rabit hole of "just because" macguffins and inconsistencies. They'll talk about the time dilation of near speed of light travel in one episode then have a massive battle in the orbit of a black hole a few episodes later. Still an amazing story tho, I definitely recommend it
There was a later episode where Galactica hadn't given up to date timing to the rest of the fleet and they jumped to different points due to the minor timing discrepancy.
Are there any shows you did a react video on that you kept watching?
So it takes exactly 33 minutes fleet time for the Cylons to find the fleet. The Cylons might be experiencing different time intervals due to time dilation. Then it stands to reason that the delay is on the fleet side. The Cylons are jumping to the fleet as soon as they receive a message from Olympic Carrier.
FTL is not Faster Than Light in BSG, because ship doesn't move faster than light. It is more like folding fabric of space with gravity, first by anchoring ship in place by device that is powered by compound known as Tylium, and punching or rather moving that folded space on ship. It's also not teleportation as some may say. Galactica's FTL computer computing core is size of footbal field, that's a lot of computing power, so it can calculate precise jumpoints by nanoseconds, which has to be manually entered into system that operates drive as ships's systems are not connected, the problem is recharge of drive itself. 33 minutes takes to power up reaction chamber in FTL engines on Cylon ships as their systems are connected. Their ships are much faster than Colonial Fleet, which needs 35-40 minutes, that's why Vipers are on hot standy each time.
Irony is that this method indeed is faster than light, because ship gets moved to new position instantly.
Basically, just about all FTL in science fiction is indistinguishable from magic. Its properties are driven by plot.
As others have mentioned, you should have watched the miniseries. There they have to make FTL calculations manually, and you see Gaeta skimming through massive binders of numbers.
The term "frack" comes from the original series and was a way to swear without using any actual swear words.
Miss the Frack’in 70’s … Starbuck … a man w/great feathered blonde hair … not blonde crappy coffee!
Dirk Benedict ... FYI.
Serenity
"Motherfracker!"
Yeah it's a common enough device. The BBC show _Red Dwarf_ did exactly the same thing in their show in the 1980s, except they used "smeg" instead -- as in "smeg off!" -- which they adapted from the real word "smegma" which is "the harmless combination of oils, skin cells, sweat and other fluids that accumulate around your genitals." So the writers did their research on that one!
Another of my favorite sci-fi shows from that era -- _Farscape_ -- uses "frell/frelling" as their broadcast-friendly swearword.
Oh, and I almost forgot. _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ surpassed them all. In that show, "Belgium!" is the most offensive swearword in the Galaxy.
Frack is kind of obvious. But don't forget "felgercarb" from the original series!
(whispers) "Miranda" :) Actually, that's really just all very disturbing. I wonder what other Slang dictionary I've got lying around..... And.. BOOKS!
The 49988 was the total population across the entire fleet, most of which were civilians. The Galactica was the leader of the fleet of the surviving humans and the principle military ship.
Bless you.
I wonder if the Cylons were using a gravitational wave detection device to find small fluctuations in spacetime to track the fleet. Its like dropping a rock in a pond and using the waves to track where the rock dropped.
I prefer the old style cylon raiders
Lorne Greene was great as Adama. I liked the 1978 show.
@@charliestevenson3500 Starbuck was male then as well.
GALACTICA's FTL is folding space, which doesn't violate the lightspeed barrier. I've also read that while objects can't move faster than light but space can. But I've always concider this shows use of FTL as a jump drive or a space folding drive...it's the reason they can't jump to a locate they don't know about. It takes 33 minutes for the Cylons to triangulate the fleets position and jump to them.
i grew up watching the original BG show... i was GIDDY with excitment when they said the new one was coming out!! loved it!!!
I actually liked the original better, without the "who is a Cylon this week" nonsense
re: FTL in BSG (reboot)... I think it's an instantaneous relocation. re: "xxx hours without sleep"... there are some 50,000 humans in the "fleet", of which there are many civilians and only a limited number of operation crew, fighter pilots, etc.. Also... a lot of details in the show have drawn inspiration from the real-world US military in that "alert status" means *everyone* is on duty; the brief gaps between jump complete and arrival of the pursuing Cylons is all the time any of the crew has for rest - essentially no time at all, especially for the ship's operational crew who are in a near constant state of preparation for the next jump. As to FTL navigation, yeah, it takes time for the "Colonial" crew to compute each of their jumps so they know where they will end up, and I believe the notion is that the 33 minutes is the amount of time it takes the Cylons to detect where the Colonial fleet has jumped to and execute their own pursuit jump. In the BSG universe, I don't think anyone is "travelling through" space at superluminal velocity, just instantaneous translocation. Not sure there is any time dilation going on in the show because no-one is even approaching the speed of light.
I love the new BSG: it's one of my all-time favorite shows. The 70's version, though, is absolutely unwatchable. Lol
1. The miniseries should be watched first to understand more like what ftl actually is.
2. Ftl is not travelling but a jump from point to point skipping space.
Thats also the reason why time dilation isnt a thing.
For anyone who doesn’t know, this show was created post 9/11 and captured the sense of doom and gloom that Fox News was putting out. American media took pride in repeatedly showing the towers collapse regularly for the first year and this traumatizing the nation repeatedly. The sense of despair and trauma on the show is a reflection of the insane American psyche that lead up to the invasion of Iraq. This will hopefully help non Americans understand why we keep waging wars in the Middle East. Shows like this captures an element of that type of thinking.
Yeah, and it pretty much captures the paranoia of "sleeper cells" and "they walk among us." It was very much a product of the George Bush years.
@zeitgeistx5239
"This will hopefully help non Americans understand why we keep waging wars in the Middle East."
Ya Really Don't Know Much About This do Ya?
No
This is a remake of a 1980s show.
This show was made in the 70s. Long before 9/11.
@@RJ420NLThe original series was made in the late 70s. However this video is a reaction to the remake that ran from 2004 to 2009.
Some of what you bring up is covered in the show itself. For example: the calculations you mention are part of why ships just can't jump over and over, as well as cooldown and 'spinning up' the engines.
Go watch the pilot miniseries soon. It’s incredible. 33 takes place immediately after the miniseries, same characters and actors.
I can't lie, the signal light Morse code in that episode was the moment I fell in love with the "hard scifi" genre.
Yes I know bsg isn't that scientifically realistic, but it undeniably tries hard not to hand wave basic space human things like food, sleep, cancer, radiation, line of sight, communication, etc.
It's called 'suspension of belief' for a reason.
It is a very old show, as well.
It's called a "jump", it's not travel... This was precisely why the writers came up with it, to avoid the whole light speed issue!
You're over-thinking the time dilation. It's not that different amounts of time pass between them. Within 33 minutes of arriving at their new location they're found and the Cylons arrive. They both travel the same distance at the same speed. It's just taking the Cylons 33 minutes to find their new location.
@DrBecky As for navigation accuracy, assuming we know π to 200T places, wouldn't that be in the realm of accuracy needed to adjust for faster than light navigation? 3.14...→ 200,000,000,000,000 places. Maybe I am not fathoming the depth of the math needed.
I’m not gonna repeat what others have said about the way FTL works in this series cause that would likely get repetitive but in the miniseries it is made clear that you can physically feel when a ship makes a jump and it’s not something you could likely sleep through so even if they had enough people to take shifts with the people that aren’t actively working would still be unable to get any decent amount of sleep without being jolted awake every half hour. Also on the precision thing around 9:24 with ftl being an instantaneous teleport you just have to enter in coordinates on a map and you’ll end up exactly at those coordinates which is part of why it takes them a few minutes to actually jump as the computers have to read the coordinates and spin up the FTL drives. But the benefits are that it’s extremely precise and instant once the drives are spun up. Only downside is that the distance you can go is entirely dependent on how powerful your ships computer is which is why the galactica does most of the calculations and then relays those coordinates to the rest of the fleet
Is anything about Aliens a hard Sci-fi.
What is hard science. Yiu always argue a technology makes possible. Is it how of tech is do able or basis of technology is the factors being acknowledged
Aside from the artificial gravity and the FTL, the technology isn't too far ahead of what we could make now. The space ships mostly move like they would in real spaces and there are scenes of the vipers flipping end for end or shooting their cannons sideways to the direction of travel. The weapons are missiles or railguns (some of the missiles wiggle back and forth like snakes). Ships also have to be very efficient at recycling water and air.
military chain of command has an executive officer precisely so the commanding officer can sleep and vice versa when things get tough.
I think Dr Becky is digging a little too deep to find problems. There comes a point where you have to trust the (fictitious) technology to perform perfectly. That is why we need not bother testing the navigational tolerances of FTL drive. They may call it FTL, but it doesn't mean that is how it works. It is based on some old distant/foreign technology to achieve the effect protrayed it doesn't necessarily encounter acceleration limits or increasing mass side effects or complex causality.
It's been a while since I watched this show, but IIRC its attempts at physics realism were really focused on how the ships moved in conventional travel. There was a lot of that using thrusters to change direction, etc. As other commenters have pointed out, the FTL system was purposefully vague, and how Cylons could have all of their non-human abilities while being indistinguishable from humans at a very small level was also never explained, IIRC, because that wasn't the point. The movement of the ships looked really good, added drama to fight scenes, and some of that ground had been broken in other sci-fi shows. The real heart of the series is the kind of tension and personal drama that makes up so much of this episode, which is why there wasn't a ton of physics to talk about. I remember being enthralled by this show when it was originally airing.
Thank god the series did not adhere strictly to the laws of physics or we would have been denied the greatest sci-fi series on TV ever!
There are a couple real-life theories for faster than light travel. Alcubierre drive was proposed by Miguel Alcubierre in 1994 in his doctoral thesis. It uses General Relativity and reverse calculates that way an engineer does. It showed that warp drive like Star Trek is possible. However, it required a mass the size of planet Jupiter in front of the spacecraft, and another mass of equal mass but a special type of matter called negative mater that theoretically should exist, but no one has been able to prove does exist. Carrying two plants the size of Jupiter in your back pocket is not practical. However, going from absolutely impossible to absolutely impractical is progress. In the 21st century Dr Sonny White has done calculations that energy optimize Alcubierre drive. By reducing speed and using some exotic physics he calculated you should be able to propel a spacecraft to a significant fraction of the speed of light with a spacecraft the size of Skylab. "We" launched Skylab into space, so that's practical. Furthermore he showed it wasn't necessary to use exotic matter. He set up a laboratory experiment, funded by DARPA. He claimed he "accidentally" produced a static warp bubble. Uh huh! He deliberately created an experiment to create exactly that, and succeeded in doing it. That isn't an accident, it's deliberate. I call that a success! The warp bubble was microscopic, and required a laser to prove the warp bubble existed. But he did it. Yea! Very rudimentary research, a lot more work is required before we get anything that will propel a spacecraft.
Another theory states that if you could exceed the speed of light, then energy calculations reverse. That is once you exceed the speed of light, the faster you go the less energy required. This implies that exceeding the light speed barrier would result in a massive acceleration to incredible speed! The more energy you start with when you cross the light speed barrier, the faster and farther you go. As you accelerate to speeds faster than the speed of light, you lose energy. Eventually you lose enough energy that you cross back below the speed of light. This is a real physics theory, and it's the basis of jump drive. How you "bump" across the light speed barrier to start the jump? Well, that's the catch.
There is a mole and GPS-like trackers planted in the battleship that is allowing the Cylons to know the human fleets' location... it is intentionally psychologically on the Cylon's part.
Finally.... Really missed it you doing exactly THAT!
do more of those reactions♥️
You should have gone for the mini-series pilot because out of context 33 does not make much sense without knowing the backstory where the lack of military pilots/crew is explained.
The biggest thing you are missing is that the travel they do is more of a space fold jump wormhole... not actual speed of light so time dilation is negligible or non existent.
They don't actually travel faster than the speed of light. I know they call it FTL, but that's purely for the purpose of explaining that, relative to where they are going, they have traveled a distance, faster than light. But if you listen to the dialogue, they are "jumping" instantly to that point. So they are probably traveling using Quantum entanglement teleportation. As for their navigation, that's why they can't just jump at "FTL" for a long time. The farther away they go, the more difficult the jump.
Regarding time dilation, when they are using their FTL drive, they essentially go from rest to rest... So the 33 minute interval should be counting approximately the same time for both since both are presumably at the state of rest at the same time other than the instantaneous moment when an FTL jump happens.
As others have said, FTL in Battelstar is more of a space-fold drive than it is an 'accelerate real fast' drive, which is why they make instantaneous jumps. Accuracy of the navigation system also becomes something of a plot point later in the series. The longer the distance of a jump, the less accurate it is. They also have a 'red line' which is the distance beyond which jump calculations become so inaccurate that it's dangerous to make them. Off the top of my head I don't recall them ever explicitly stating how long the average jump distance is, but I'm pretty sure it's less than a light year. The star system they're fleeing from is a trinary system with 12 habitable bodies, and the jump drives are for fast in-system travel and they don't really do any travel outside of that star system. The Cylons have much more advanced navigation systems and can accurately jump significantly longer distances than the humans. There are no relativistic ships.
You've put far more thought into the physics of BSG than the creators did. They never considered anything like time dilation or how their FTL works. It's just cool spaceships go pew pew.
The thing I like about FTL in this science fantasy show is, they did not accelerate to go faster than light. The speed they were going in space had no relation to their FTL travel. Do I think FTL is possible? Probably not. If it ever does happen, it will likely not be related to movement in space. (The one exception to this is if they ever find some way to play with the Higgs field and give an object zero mass. If they ever did manage to do this, they would probably kill anyone in that object. If you play around with the basic parameters of the universe, things like chemistry will probably not work the same.)
"There's no number bigger than infinity..." except, of course, infinity is _not_ a number...
What makes me curious is the rule where an object in motion stays in motion in space unless acted upon or approaching the speed of light, but the space ships and missiles have continuous trust. Isn't that acceleration in action? Is that the point of continuous thrust cause all you need is side thrusters to correct for course corrections, but the main thrusters are there to reach the max speed? And when max speed is approached you shut your thrusters off saving fuel? Ion drives on some satellites have continuous thrust.
As others have pointed out, a ton of your "common sense" questions would have been solved by looking at the miniseries first.
This IS, technically, the "first episode" of the series, but it relies heavily on the miniseries for not having to explain some of the basics.
2:00 I remember vividly the high school physics class where they dropped this nugget of info on us and my 16-year old brain exploded.