Yet thousands of ants can, by working together, engage in agriculture, fight battles, build cathedrals, and organize complex foraging expeditions. They do this without any orders from a more intelligent entity. The colony regulates itself. It can adapt itself very easily to changes in the outside environment. The ants do this all without being aware of what they’re doing and without control from any organizer at the top.
In the years after World War II, the insect researcher Karl Von Frisch discovered that honeybees perform an incredibly intricate dance after returning to the hive from a successful foraging mission that tells other bees where the food is. Studies have shown that the dance accurately conveys the distance and direction of the food source, which can sometimes be as much as five kilometers from the hive! This nonsentient type of group intelligence is known as emergent intelligence.
When Raiders swarm out of a basestar, or when Centurions use coordinated tactics to execute an attack, are they exhibiting emergent intelligence? Up until “Six of One,” the answer would have been a qualified “most likely.” There always remains the possibility that Centurions are dumb hunks of metal controlled wirelessly by humanoid Cylons in a nearby basestar—a drone or RPV,v in modern military vernacular. But seeing how they operate, you get the feeling that Centurions and Raiders are like characters in an ultrareal present-day video game. They follow a few simple rules of action (which every game designer likes to call “artificial intelligence”), which can result in amazingly complex behaviors that seem almost “intelligent.”
Cylon Raiders swarming.
Learning and memory alone are not enough for sentience. Dogs can learn and remember tasks and events. They are marvelously intuitive about the character and emotions of the people around them. When a dog jumps into the air to catch a Frisbee, it is performing a heuristic act that is the equivalent of doing complex mathematical calculations in its head, involving changes in position and velocity. But a dog looking at its reflection in a mirror does not know that it is looking at itself. A dog does not “think” of itself as a dog, or indeed as any sort of independent entity apart from the world. A dog thinks (to the extent that a dog thinks) that it is the world.w
On the other hand, a chimpanzee will, after some initial confusion, eventually understand that the ape in the mirror is actually itself, not another ape.x Before long a bright chimpanzee will use the mirrors as grooming tools (much as we do). In other words, chimpanzees, and all the great apes, are almost certainly sentient.
Are Raiders and Centurions more like dogs or chimpanzees? This presents viewers of Battlestar Galactica with an interesting problem. In the episode “A Measure of Salvation,” we were reluctantly led to the conclusion, along with the leaders of the Colonial Fleet, that killing off all the humanoid Cylons would be genocide. If we accept that all three “species” of Cylon are intelligent to some degree, and that apes are intelligent as well, why do only the humanoid Cylons have the right not to be exterminated en masse? Is it simply easier for us to accept the personhood of other beings the more they look like us?
A 2008 study by scientists at Università degli Studi di Bologna would seem to verify this. You know how, sometimes, if another person is hit or touched, you can actually feel it yourself? Scientists collected pictures of other people having their faces touched by fingers and showed them to test subjects of different ethnic groups. When the person in the photograph was the same ethnic group as the subject, the subjects were more likely to report their own perception of being touched. Then the scientists wanted to see if the phenomenon worked with other groupings. They gathered pictures of left- and right-wing politicians having their faces touched and showed them to the subjects. Once again, more test subjects reported a perception of touch when the observed face belonged to his/her own political group. If we’re more likely to share feelings with someone when they’re like us, what does this say for our ability to recognize consciousness or sentience in others? What does this say for our own intelligence?
CHAPTER 5
How Can Cylons Download Their Memories?
In an article in Wired magazine,1 Kevin Kelly took a look at the computational parameters of the human brain. While the human brain probably can never be compared one-to-one to a computer (at least until computers are built like human brains), there are some similarities. For example, the available evidence seems to indicate that there are approximately 100 billion neurons in the brain, giving rise to 100 trillion synapses. These give the average human brain a data storage capacity of about 100 million megabytes—or 100 terabytes.y This is roughly equivalent to all the printed material in the British Library, New York Public Library, Bodleian Library of Oxford University, and the Library of Congress taken together, or the hard-drive storage of two hundred high-capacity DVRs. If we assume that 100 million megabytes is also the storage capacity of both Colonial and Cylon brains, we can get some kind of handle on the most intriguing ability of Cylons—their ability to resurrect.
Cylon models Eight and Six.
Cylon models Eight and Six.
Eight awakens in a pool of reanimation goo.
We first learned about Cylon resurrection in the miniseries, when Six and Leoben respectively told Baltar and Bill Adama that when Cylons die, they wake up in another body. The realization that Cylons could come back to life filled the Colonials with a mixture of fear and wonder. Fear, because the ability to resurrect made the Cylons seem almost like the mythical Hydra—no matter how many heads you cut off, another one would take its place. Wonder, because any sentient creature, aware that they’re eventually going to die, is going to be in awe of a creature that has managed to beat death.
We’ve learned precious little about the actual download and resurrection process since,z but we do know this much: in the episodes “Exodus, Parts I and II,” it took Brother Cavil approximately two days to resurrect successfully. Knowing that can help us to figure out how the process works.
If Cylon resurrection is roughly equivalent to restoring a computer hard drive by way of a backup, we can assume that most of the duration of a data restore is spent transferring the information from one source to another. Since Cylons don’t have to be plugged directly into a Resurrection Ship in order to download their memories, data transfer must be handled wirelessly. For a dead Cylon to transmit 100 terabytes of information over the course of two days requires transmissions of 50 terabytes per day, which is equivalent to 2 terabytes per hour, 34 gigabytes per minute, or 578 megabytes per second. Is such a thing even possible?
As of this writing, commercial wireless data protocols (specifically 802.11n, a.k.a. WiFi-n) offer data transfer rates of about 12 megabytes per second. If Brother Cavil had such a data plan to connect him to the Resurrection Ship, it would take him somewhere in the neighborhood of ninety-seven days to upload the content of his brain. Also, such speedy data protocols like WiFi-n only work over relatively short distances, on the order of a few dozen meters. To send digital data across vast distances through space necessitates using a slower, more reliable data standard. It takes up to seven minutes on a bad day to get a single 12-million-bit image from one of the cameras in orbit around Saturn aboard the Cassini spacecraft; downloading an entire brain might take years. On the other hand, it takes approximately fourteen minutes to download a 5-billion-bit image from the much newer, albeit much closer, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft—a 36-fold improvement. So our ability to send vast amounts of data across space is improving rapidly.
To download Brother Cavil in two days, either the Cylons have developed a long-distance data transfer method that sends 45 times as much data as WiFi-n, or they use another method of communication altogether.
One of the most intriguing possibilities for the makeup of Cylon brains is that they may use quantum entanglement.
Quantum entanglement could use a book of its own to explain. The short version is that it is entirely possible to create two subatomic particles in such a way that one particle is intimately linked to t
he other particle. If the first particle takes on certain attributes, the second particle will take on exactly the same attributes, instantaneously, much like adolescents and fashion accessories. If the Cylons have figured out a way to store brain states in entangled particles, then they technically don’t need to upload their consciousness at the moment of death. Everything they think or experience throughout their lives is automatically and simultaneously reflected in a separate Cylon brain on the Resurrection Ship.
Perhaps it takes two days to place a consciousness into a body. If that’s the case, then one answer to Cylon backups might be much simpler than quantum entanglement or wide-channel broadcasting. It’s entirely possible that Cylons use incremental backups. How much data would a Cylon have to broadcast if it only sent a day’s worth of experience at a time? We can make some simple assumptions and come up with a conservative estimate. Let’s assume that an average Cylon lives to be a hundred, that the 100-terabyte brain storage capacity will hold an entire lifetime’s worth of experience, and we ignore any age-induced memory loss. The Cylon would then live 36,500 days. One day’s allocation of that is a “mere” 2.74 gigabytes (or just shy of 22 gigabits). That is less than four and a half times larger than a single high-resolution image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). At the rate MRO sends data from Mars, it could transmit that much information in slightly over an hour. So it’s reasonable to believe that every night as they sleep, Cylons’ thoughts and memories of the day are processed and broadcast to the nearest Cylon basestar or Resurrection Ship. The Cylons would probably interpret this nightly rush of images through their head as dreaming. When they die, as their consciousness fades out, only their thoughts and experiences since their last backup need to be sent. Perhaps, with the proper encoding, it can all be sent before the last Cylon brain cell dies.
CHAPTER 6
A Dialogue between a Smartass Fanboy and a Real Scientist, viz: The “Silica Pathways” into the Cylon Head
Smartass Fanboy: It’s so frustrating that Cylons are supposed to be indistinguishable from Colonials, yet they can shove fiber-optic cabling into their arms and interface with a computer!
Real Scientist: Wait a minute. I don’t think the Cylons are particularly frustrating at all, given the right context. Remember what Commander Adama said: “Context matters.”
SF: But if there’s supposed to be no way to tell the difference between a Cylon and a Colonial—
RS: But there is. First, let’s recall that Baltar’s Cylon detector worked. It just wasn’t in his best interest to admit that it did at the time, and he never really had occasion to do so later. His detector wasn’t a particularly high-tech form of equipment [which you’ll see if you go read “Baltar’s Cylon Detector” later in this chapter]. I see his detector as, essentially, a mass spectrometer. He has a detector for silicon, and he sees an anomalously high amount of it.
Athena connects to the Galactica via a fiber-optic cable.
SF: A mass spectrometer?
RS: Just as a regular spectrometer separates light into its component colors and measures the relative intensities, a mass spectrometer takes a sample of a material and determines the sample’s chemical composition and relative abundances of different elements.
SF: Okay, but you still haven’t answered how the Cylons can connect to a computer!
RS: There is a lot of active research going on, as we speak, on brain/machine interfaces. Let’s assume that Cylons are expert at this.
SF: They’d have to be.
RS: Shh. Let us also define what we mean by “silica pathways.” Silica has the chemical formula SiO2, which is the same formula as the mineral quartz or . . . wait for it . . . glass. So when we say “silica pathways,” what we are talking about is fiber optics. (I’m shocked nobody picked up on this.) Nerve impulses travel at about 200 mph. Pulses of light travel along fiber-optic cables travel at, well, the speed of light. Okay, slightly slower, since the light is traveling through glass and not a vacuum, but you get the point. If the Cylons could create a microscopic interface between the neurons in their head and their fiber-optic nervous system, that would explain a lot. They would have faster reactions, yet could have biologically indistinct brains when compared to humans, but with different programming. They could go for years without being detected, Sharon could “plug in,” they would still be nigh-undetectable . . . except with a mass spectrometer.
Cyclon model Eight Sharon "Boomer" Valerii.
Saul Tigh, William Adama, Karl "Helo" Agathon, and Sharon "Athena" Agathon.
SF: Ah, but Chief Tyrol has been in the military since he was eighteen.
If he’s in his early thirties, he’s undergone twelve or more years of military physicals without anyone noticing anything strange . . . RS: . . . which is not inconceivable. Silica is chemically inert—that’s why you store acid in glass, that’s why beach sand is overwhelmingly quartz (except in places like Hawaii, where the most common local rock, basalt, has little or no quartz). Having had numerous military physicals—including flight physicals—myself, I’ve never had a test that would find silica in my body. It’s simply not a chemical for which they would check. Most physicals check for things like proteins, enzymes, antibodies, sugars . . . all of which could reasonably be within normal human limits for a Cylon. The military does not check for silica because there is no reason to check for it. Nor is there any reason to expect that it would end up in the bloodstream in any way.
SF: Colonel Tigh’s military medical record has data going back forty years, and no one has picked up anything weird about him?
RS: Tigh’s bloodwork would be expected to be out of the ordinary.
Saul Tigh: high-functioning alcoholic.
SF: Aha!
RS: It would show anomalously high amounts of glucose and ethanol, but that simply means that he’s a high-functioning alcoholic. Nothing would have detected a type of anomaly that would “out” him as a Cylon. It is also not unreasonable to expect that the Final Five were programmed to avoid doctors as much as possible. All part of “The Plan.” Further, I think you overestimate the thoroughness of (non-flight) military physicals. If your blood isn’t too out of whack and your pee is okay, you’re good to go. They simply don’t do X-rays, CAT scans, or MRIs as a matter of course.
SF: I’m not done.
RS: Of course you’re not.
SF: Sam Anders was a professional athlete—he might have been more thoroughly medically scrutinized than the military men, assuming Colonial society had the same problems of athletes and steroid use that our society does!
RS: In all likelihood Anders would have been more highly scrutinized, but it’s still unlikely they’d have found him out. He may be considered a physical freak, sorry, outlier, like Lance Armstrong, but there would be no reason to suspect he’s a Cylon. Then again, it’s not unreasonable to think that his software had “governor” routines so that he didn’t stand out too much.
SF: Under those circumstances—under “normal” medical procedures—none of those Cylons would have been detected?
RS: Now you’re catching on. Cylons passing routine physicals with their silica pathways going unnoticed is completely possible—given that these glass fibers are much, much thinner than a human hair, given that silica is chemically nonreactive, given that it’s not something that doctors would look for, and given that it also does not have a dipole moment, it makes perfect sense.
SF: Dipole moment? I used to know what a dipole moment was . . .
RS: I allude, of course, to MRI scans. An MRI scanner starts by subjecting the object being scanned, usually a person, to an extremely high magnetic field. Water, which composes the bulk of living tissue, reacts strongly and aligns itself with the field. Water does this because it is a polar molecule. There are two hydrogen atoms bonded to one oxygen atom—but the hydrogen atoms have a 108-degree angle between them. So, essentially, water has a “positive” side and a “negative” side—it has “poles” like a magnet. Silica, in its two mo
st common forms, is symmetrical. It does not react to a magnetic field in the same way as does water, hence it would not show up on an MRI. Remember also that the numbered Cylons haven’t been in Colonial society that long, maybe a few years tops, so none of them may have ever had reason to be subjected to an MRI scan.
Sam Anders played professional Pyramid on Caprica.
BALTAR’S CYLON DETECTOR
We don’t yet know the physical makeup Weof Cylons. Or do we? If Athena can get pregnant by Helo, certainly there exist some major similarities at a fundamental level between their biological makeup and that of humans. If Cylons have silica pathways, then they have a much higher concentration of silicon in their systems, even if at the “parts per million” level, than do Colonials. So how can we analyze the basic makeup of Cylons versus Colonials? What if we could take a tissue sample, then split all the molecules of the sample into constituent atoms, and determine the relative concentrations of the various species of atoms? There’s a fairly simple technique called mass spectrometry that Baltar may have used to do just that.
Blood samples in Gaius Baltar’s lab.
Mass spectrometers (or simply “mass specs,” as scientists often call them) use both electrical charge and mass ratio to separate atoms. If a charged particle is moving within a magnetic field it experiences a force perpendicular to its motion and tends to follow a spiral pattern. If you’ve ever seen an image of particle tracks in a bubble chamber (a device filled with superheated fluid that is used for detecting charged subatomic particles passing through it), the paths of the charged particles form all manners of curlicues. The radius of curvature—or how tightly wound the spirals are—of a trajectory is related to the charge-to-mass ratio of the particle. The tighter the spiral, the higher the charge-to-mass ratio. The direction of curvature is caused by the particle’s charge, positive or negative.
The Science of Battlestar Galactica Page 4