The Science of Battlestar Galactica

by Di Justo, Patrick

  And it’s probably a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor from Ronald D. Moore that the show’s opening crawl says that Cylons “evolved,” when they are actually great creatures created by intelligent design. Much like the “evolution” of piston engines from the Model A Ford to the Maserati.

  Raider Cylons

  Raider Cylons (to be known in these pages as “Raiders” or “Heavy Raiders”) are meat machines. They are near-perfect examples of a cybernetic organism—living tissue, including a brain, interfaced with electromechanical devices.

  The machine part of a Raider takes the form of a vehicle able to fly through space as well as through most planetary atmospheres. They are equipped with missiles (either conventional or nuclear) and kinetic energy weapons (a.k.a. bullets) and are employed by the Cylons to attack ships in the Colonial Fleet. They seem to have similar propulsion units as Vipers, with slightly superior maneuverability, though Raiders are also equipped with faster-than-light (FTL) drives for long-distance jumping.

  The living part of a Raider is housed inside the metal exoskeleton. The ship’s viscera look very much like muscle and sinew, and use oxygen as part of their metabolism. Its brain has limited sentience and thinking ability, so Raiders are about as bright as a well-trained dog. They can resurrect just like humanoid Cylons—the consciousness of their past incarnations are placed in a new Raider body, and their memories are reborn with them. This gives them the ability to learn from past mistakes, as well as the capacity to develop and hold one hell of a grudge (as seen in the stand-alone second season episode “Scar.”). Still, while Raiders are relentless in their motivation, they’re not overly bright. Their threat to the Colonial Fleet lies more in their sheer numbers rather than any brilliant tactical skills.

  A Raider in flight.

  The fourth season episode “He That Believeth in Me” showed an interesting side of Raider cognition. During an attack on the Colonial Fleet, a Raider made some form of visual contact with Samuel Anders’s eyeball and recognized his true Cylon nature. That Raider must have immediately broadcast the word to the rest of the Raiders that they were attacking a fellow Cylon, because all the Raiders stopped the attack and returned to their basestar. This “rebellion” of the Raiders caused Cavil to advocate their reprogramming—a position that so revolted some other Cylons that it led to a civil war.

  Centurions

  Finally, there are the Centurions. Centurions are the soldier-workers of the robot world. They combine tactical knowledge with extreme firepower, making an almost unbeatable combination. We don’t know if their tactical knowledge is innate or directed, but it is not too much of a stretch to guess that Centurions are given their overall mission from their controller and are left to their own devices to carry out that mission. They have an outer skin of armor that is impervious to ordinary bullets (though they can be brought down by explosive rounds), and their arms are multiple tools, housing hands, edged weapons, and three-barreled Gatling-type guns.

  They have the capacity for sentience, but had been prevented from attaining self-knowledge by the humanoid Cylons, who are appropriately terrified of their own creations rising up and rebelling against them. The Cylons have installed a kludgen called a “telencephalic inhibitor”o that keeps the Centurions dumb and happy. After Cavil’s decision to lobotomize the Raiders, rebel Cylons removed the inhibitor from some of their Centurions, giving the Centurions the capacity to turn against Cavil’s faction.

  A Cylon Centurion.

  Also, as seen in Razor, somewhere in the galaxy there still remained a few “classic” Centurions—the original type, probably designed by Graystone Industries around 58BF. They are just as metallic as new Centurions, but they tend to be gold rather than silvery and are much more classically Egyptian in their design. One main difference between classic and modern Centurions is that the classic ones do not have integral weapons. Another is that they can speak.p Of the remaining original Centurions, those that weren’t destroyed when their basestar blew up at the end of Razor were probably destroyed along with the Colony.

  CHAPTER 3

  Are We Creating Our Own Cylons?

  Until fairly recently the story of Frankenstein was only a metaphor: the label of “crazed scientist who created a monster he couldn’t control” could be—and was—applied to any researcher working on nuclear weapons, cybernetics, industrial chemicals, and, starting in the 1960s, genetics. The stakes are even higher now. In the early twenty-first century, scientists are on the threshold of truly creating life by the manipulation of laboratory chemicals. The goal is to synthetically replicate the genome of a living creature, or to design a new, viable genome. Some researchers are even trying to physically build the structure of single-celled organisms. This raises the deep, unspoken question that pervades every episode of Battlestar Galactica: Exactly what debt, if any, do we owe to the creatures we create?

  Genetic research is no longer in the realm of brilliant Ph.D.s holed up in a high-tech laboratory. You can go to your friendly neighborhood toy store and buy a science kit that teaches you how to extract and isolate DNA from nearly any cell. You can go to any Web site specializing in science equipment for high school teachers, and you can buy all the necessary gear to allow you to modify bacteria genetically to give them resistance to ampicillin (many germs are ampicillin-resistant already, so you’re not likely to be solely responsible for breeding the next killer plague). Even better, if you’re a college student, you can enter MIT’s iGEM competition.

  Admiral William Adama.

  Admiral Adama, flanked by Lee Adama and Tom Zarek.

  iGEM stands for international Genetically Engineered Machine.q The competition is open to teams of college undergraduates from all over the world. The goal is to take public-domain standardized DNA sequences known as BioBricks—for example, the DNA sequence that codes for a specific biological function such as making luminous protein, or for detecting concentrations of various elements—and insert them into bacteria to make useful biological machines that are not evolved, but intelligently designed to perform certain tasks. The comparison with a brick is deliberate—BioBricks are designed to be as easy to use and as interchangeable as LEGO bricks. The process is very much like taking a handful of electronic components—resistors, capacitors, diodes, logic gates—and putting them together in just the right way to build a robot. Of course, life being what it is, there is never any guarantee that the interaction of all the different BioBricks will have the result you expected them to have.

  The iGEM program represents a gigantic shift in the way biology is taught. It used to be that the goal of biology was to learn as much as possible about how various life processes work. Now the cool (and scary) thing about synthetic biology is that the goal is to learn how to use those biological process as black boxes: you give these processes an input, and they give you an output. There’s no need for a synthetic biologist to understand exactly how a certain gene sequence codes for a specific protein—all they need to know is that it does.

  In past years, teams of undergraduate college students from around the globe have taken freely available predefined bits of DNA and created:1. Bacteria that eat industrial pollutants

  2. A biosensor that detects high levels of UV radiation

  3. Immunobricks to defeat the bacterium that causes ulcers

  4. A bacterium that treats lactose intolerance

  5. RNA molecules that encode nearly all of the IF . . . THEN Boolean logic of computers

  6. Intestinal bacteria that produce fart gas that smells like wintergreen.

  The resulting biological machines may be our first baby steps toward creating Cylons, but so far the iGEM students are still taking BioBricks and inserting them into already living bacteria. They haven’t tried to build an entire living organism from catalogue parts. They’re leaving that to the big guys like J. Craig Venter.

  Venter, the bad-boy genius of the modern genetics industry, was the maverick who wowed the genetics world in the 1990s by boasting
that his company would sequence the entire human genome before the federally funded Human Genome Project finished. Ever since then he has been at the forefront in many different types of genetics-related breakthroughs: his latest task was to grow a bacterium from a completely synthesized genome made from parts available in the laboratory. The announcement in May 2010 of his success was hailed as the first creation of totally synthetic life that we know of on Earth.

  It’s possible that this same type of work—discover the genetic code of an already existing creature, synthesize that code, then grow it in a lab—is what the young pilot Bill Adama stumbled upon just before the end of the first Cylon War. The hybrid on the Cylon ice planet clearly was involved in some form of experimentation: it collected Colonial civilians and probably used sections of their DNA to grow the biological parts that surrounded the hybrid’s tank. Perhaps, with the help of the Final Five, those parts became the biological components of Raiders and Centurions. They almost certainly served as the biological components that became the humanoid Cylons themselves.

  Frankenstein’s creature condemned his creator for building him without a reason. Our biological machines are not in a position to demand accountability from anyone—yet. But research clearly isn’t going to stop there, and there may come a time when our creations start to experiment on their creators. At that moment, whether we want to admit it or not, we’ll be starting down the same path as the Colonials. When our creations ask “Who am I?” we’ll be able to give our Cylons only one answer: “You’re us.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Cylon Intelligence and the Society of Mind

  What type of brain does a Cylon have? Since Cylons are intelligent organic creatures, virtually indistinguishable from Colonials, their brains must be at least superficially similar to Colonial brains. If you assume that the Colonial brain is similar or identical to a human brain of the twenty-first century, the Cylon brain should meet the following minimum requirements:• Elements: 100 billion neurons

  • Connections: 100 trillion

  • Storage: 100 million megabytes

  • Image Processing: 210 million images per year

  • Processing Speed: 0.001 Megahertz

  • Power Requirement: 20 watts

  Though it’s never specifically stated, a lot of evidence points to the idea that Cylons are considerably smarter than their Colonial counterparts.

  Cyclon model Two, also known as Leoben Conoy

  Leoben and Starbuck look down at the child she beleives is hers.

  Six in a projection of a forest.

  The most obvious example comes from the episode “Torn,” in which Six tells Baltar that Cylons can use their brains to project whatever imagery around them they wish. She gives the example of a corridor in a Cylon basestar: to Baltar it’s just a bare metallic hallway, but Six can use the powers of projection within the Cylon mind to make walking down the corridor like taking a stroll through a beautiful sun-dappled forest.

  At the very least, Cylons use what brains they have differently. One of the most common misconceptions about cognition is that humans use only 10 percent of their brain power. Anyone who has ever seen a PET scan of their own brain activity knows this isn’t true—most scans show sporadic activity happening throughout the entire brain. While it is true that not all parts of the brain are active at the same time—when you’re sitting quietly listening to instrumental music, you’re probably not using the verbal or the motor control portions of your brain—over time, you can rest assured that you use 100 percent of your brain. Cylon mental superiority might just be a result of them using more of their brain at any given time.

  If Cylon brains are more powerful than ours, they might have considerably more neurons and synapses, and possibly faster neuronal processing speeds, though that bumps up against the Cylon Indistinguishability Conjecture.r A much more reasonable way that Cylon brains might be different from Colonial brains is in the “software,” the ability to perform at a much higher level than Colonials while still maintaining the same hardware.s

  A synapse is a small gap between brain neurons, on the order of approximately tens of nanometers, which serves as a junction to bring neurons together. The complex web of connections between neurons is similar to the complex web of connections between transistors in a computer’s CPU, with one main difference. Thanks to synapses, neurons are not connected one-to-one; they are connected many-to-many. A synapse allows many neurons to connect to many other neurons by not really connecting at all.

  When a stimulus to a neuron reaches a certain threshold strength (called the neuron’s action potential), the neuron opens several vesicles within itself and releases a chemical known as a neurotransmitter, the purpose of which is to tell the other neurons, “Hey, this neuron has fired!” The neurotransmitter flows into the synapses between neurons and spreads among them, with the closest neuron obviously getting the strongest dose of neurotransmitter. More distant surrounding neurons get considerably smaller doses. Whatever message the firing neuron was trying to send, the neurotransmitter gets the message across. If the amount of neurotransmitter absorbed by any of the surrounding neurons is sufficient to reach their action potential, those neurons will then fire, reinforcing the original stimulus that caused the first neuron to signal.

  Neuroscientists understand that learning takes place when one neuron stimulates another neuron repeatedly and/or continuously for a few seconds or even minutes. When this happens, the “teacher” neuron releases an additional protein that helps the surrounding “student” neurons to grow. When these student neurons grow, they strengthen the connection between themselves and the teacher. Whenever the “teacher” fires off a signal, the “students” will over time become more receptive to receiving it. One stimulus will become tightly associated with a specific response, and the brain will have learned something new.t

  One thing brain scientists don’t yet fully understand is how a functioning brain—one like ours that can think and reason and create (or at least appreciate) music and art—can be made out of repeated units of a relatively simple object like a neuron. In this way neuroscientists have a lot in common with artificial intelligence researchers who are trying to solve essentially the same problem from the other direction—how to turn a box of computer chips into a functioning brain.

  The MIT professor Marvin Minsky is rightly described as one of the fathers of AI. Minsky built the first random neural net computer (the predecessor to Cylons) in 1951 and patented the first head-mounted computer display twelve years later. In the 1970s, Minsky and Seymour Papert started to develop their “Society of Mind” theory. They said that the complex construction we call the “mind”—the realm of language, memory, learning, consciousness, the sense of self, and of free will—is actually built brick-by-brick of much smaller subunits, which he calls agents. These agents are themselves mindless; it is through their interaction that they produce the mind.

  As Minsky said in his 1988 book Society of Mind: “What magical trick makes us intelligent? The trick is that there is no trick. The power of intelligence stems from our vast diversity, not from any single, perfect principle.” In other words, to employ another Minskyism, “Minds are what brains do.”

  As we mentioned, an important clue that Cylon brains work the same (or in a similar) way came in the episode “Six of One,” when we learned about the Centurions’ telencephalic inhibitor. The humanoid Cylons wouldn’t need that kludge if Centurion brains were a bunch of transistors running Python. Such a gadget would only be necessary if Cylon brains worked as a Society of Mind—if “mind” just naturally emerged as a consequence of connecting together a threshold quantity of smaller brain subunits. If that’s the case, then twenty-first-century AI researchers here on Earth have only one question: What is that threshold quantity?

  Sentience is another word for consciousness, or the ability to be aware of oneself. For example, you know that you are a human.uYou know that you are separate from the world around you. When yo
u think a thought or feel an emotion, you know that it only applies to you. You understand that the rest of the world does not change as your mind changes. You are aware that no one else feels or thinks the things you do. You are also aware that your thoughts and feelings come from inside you; they’re not placed in your mind from an external source. You have a memory of your thought processes—you know that you didn’t always think or feel the way you think or feel right now. And you know that you probably won’t think or feel tomorrow the way you do right now.

  This self-awareness is one of the foundations of human intelligence. Without it, humans would be nonthinking brutes, unable to plan, or remember, or relate to other people.

  Or would we? Is it possible to be intelligent without being self-aware? Social insects, such as bees and ants, display what scientists call collective intelligence. The hive or colony, acting together, has a form of intelligence that no ant or bee could possess on its own. The neural ganglia of an insect are a collection of nerve cells, just about equally divided between the insect’s head and abdomen. These neurons act as a simple brain—far too simple to allow the insect to experience anything like complex thoughts. We can safely assume that a single ant or bee has no knowledge of itself as an individual. It literally doesn’t have the brain for it. There’s no way that one ant could know enough about the colony and the outside world to be an effective administrator.