"Lost" Theorizing: What the Timelines Are

If you haven't watched "Happily Ever After", the eleventh episode of the sixth season of "Lost", you might not want to continue reading. Spoilers ahead.

Filling the Gaps of Battlestar Galactica

It isn't often that I need to include a spoiler warning in my posts, but this time I do. If you haven't watched the series finale of Battlestar Galactica and don't want to find out what happens then read no further.

SPOILER AND GEEK ALERT!

Well, weirdly, somehow the final episode was at once very satisfying and very unsatisfying. The battle portion was great. Even most of the Earth part was good. We said goodbye to the characters in an emotionally satisfying way, although the idea of the Colonials being the source of Greek mythology makes no sense, considering the fact that they arrived about 140,000 years before the emergence of Greek myths. Also, the whole "God did it" thing is unsatisfying. There were so many unaswered questions here (like what's the connection between the Lords of Kobol and the Cylon God). Maybe some of this will be addressed in the prequel Caprica, but I doubt it.

Anyway, I made up my own answers for the unanswered questions. I used some background from the original series and shifted it around to suit me. Here's a time-line:

• 22,000 BCH (Before Cylon Holocaust): A reptilian race in a far away galaxy creates robots which rebel against them and wipe them out completely. The robots then go on to attack Humania, the only other inhabited planet in that galaxy. A one thousand year war begins.
• 21,000 BCH: The Humanians, a humanoid race (though not human), create their own robots to help them in their war. However, their own robots turn against them and join the original robots. The war ends in mutual annihilation, with all robots destroyed completely, and of the Humanians only 50 people aboard the Starship Kobol survive. They see that their race cannot survive through regular reproduction, so they invent resurrection technology.
• 20,000 BCH: Humanians settle upon a planet in the Milky Way Galaxy. They name it after their ship, Kobol.
• 18,000 BCH: Humanians find our Earth and primitive homo sapiens. For some reason, they decide that genetically engineering biological creatures would be safer than building robots, so they take a few thousand bone samples and try to guess how they'd naturally evolve. They call the homo sapiens Humans, after their original planet. They place them on twelve different locations on Kobol, which would later become the basis for the twelve tribes. The Humanians come to be known as the Lords of Kobol and are thought to be gods by the humans.
• 4,400 BCH: El, one of the few offspring of the original 50 Lords of Kobol, is born.
• 4,100 BCH: Humans create Cylons. The LOK are pissed, but El convinces them not to do anything.
• 4,000 BCH: A human scientist discovers that Cylon resurrection technology can be used on humans as well. The Lords of Kobol kill him before he can announce his discovery and prevent him from downloading into a new body. They decide to banish the Cylons. El is furious and leaves Kobol with them. Also joining him are five human priests who worship the Lords of Kobol.
• A few months later: The Temple of Hopes in established, where the Cylons and the five human priests pray to the Gods. They later find Cylon Earth. A few homesick Cylons take the last remaining FTL-capable ships and return to Kobol. They are the source of the information on Kobol about Earth and the Temple of Hopes. However, the LOK distort the story and make it sound as if El made the Cylons create the temple for himself and the five priests. He would use this distortion a few centuries later to reveal the identities of the Final Five (who don't really have anything to do with the five priests).
• 2,000 BCH: The Cylons create robots who attack them. The humanoids and the robots destroy each other. El, though, saw it coming because of the previous encounters with robots, so he warned the Final Five. He builds an FTL-capable ship for them, but the Lords of Kobol destroy it, so the Final Five must use a subluminal ship.
• Meanwhile, El returns to Kobol, and the Lords of Kobol, in their panic, decide to banish the twelve tribes (plus the remnants of the Cylons who returned to Kobol, which is why sometimes it is said that the 13 tribes left at this time). Athena, who disagrees with this decision, disables her own ability to resurrect and commits suicide.
• 1,990 BCH: A solar system with 12 inhabitable planets is discovered by the 12 human tribes. Meanwhile, the Kobolian Cylons go in search of Earth. Unfortunately for them, they never find it and die out.
• Towards the end of the first Cylon war, the final five finally reach Kobol, but find it abandoned. They mysteriously find a ship identical to their own orbiting the planet. They discover it is a jump-capable ship with the coordinates to humanity's current location. The Lords of Kobol, who had come to regret their actions of 2,000 years earlier, are the ones who secretly provided the ship.
• The Lords of Kobol and El partially reconcile. They both manipulate humanity, sometimes with the same goals in mind, sometimes with conflicting goals.
• When Kara Thrace is killed in the maelstrom, the LOK recreate her body and viper on Earth, and then downloads her into a new body. El, on the other hand, is the one who turns on four of the Final Five with the music.
• When the Colonials reach our Earth, the Lords of Kobol make her see her father one last time, and he tells her it is her time to go. She says so to Lee and disappears. She's actually taken to the LOK's ship, because they believe she deserves an explanation for everything that happened. She dies on the ship and is taken to Kobol to be buried.
• Colonial culture was lost, and all we got from them is DNA. However, the LOK manipulate things so that their names come up in Greek mythology.
• Head Six and Head Balter in Times Square don't really exist. It is just a representation of El's internal thoughts, using the images he made Caprica-Six and Baltar see. He himself has a side of him who thinks humanity will succeed and one side that thinks they won't. He's also joking with himself about how people see him as a god.

My BSG Theory: Colonials Are Robots, Too

Beware! Geeky Battlestar Galactica theorizing ahead, as well as possible spoilers for whoever hasn't seen the entire first three seasons.

It is now a common theory to say that humans came from Earth to Kobol and not the other way around, but I don't think this is the whole story. The saying "All this has happened before and all this will happen again" leads me to believe that the Colonials are either actually descendants of humanoid robots or of human-robot hybrids.

Humans on Earth created robots, which I will call Earthbots to distinguish them from the present-day Cylons. The Earthbots rebelled and left Earth. Later, they developed humanoid-biological models who took over Earthbot society, eventually discarding the mechanical models and losing the ability to download into a new body. After a few centuries most of their descendants forgot their Earthbot roots and started calling themselves human. Only a select few, later to be known as the Lords of Kobol, were entrusted with the secret origin of "humanity" and with the ability to download, thus achieving immortality.

The Cylon god is a Lord of Kobol who wished to reveal the secrets and grant immortality to all colonials. The other Lords banished him and his followers to protect their secrets, and outlawed his worship. He became The One Whose Name Cannot Be Spoken. The five priests of the Temple of Five are actually this god (the Final Cylon) and his four main supporters (the four of the Final Five already revealed). These are what would later be known as the 13th tribe, which starts wandering across the galaxy separately from the rest. Shortly thereafter the twelve tribes settle on Kobol. Several centuries later, the 13th tribe finds Kobol as well and asks to settle there, sparking a war that would result in the Exodus to the twelve colonies and the annihilation of the 13th tribe, except for the five priests.

Two thousands years later, the Colonials, who still think they are humans despite being Earthbots (or the descendants thereof) create the Cylons. The Cylons rebel. They leave the Colonies, however they have extensive knowledge of Colonial religion, and they start worshipping the hated Lord of Kobol. They distort the message of this god, believing he wished to destroy humanity. He somehow discovers this and wishes to thwart their plans, however he doesn't think they'll believe him if he shows up and says "hi, I'm your Lord God", so instead he somehow manages to get himself and his four priests accepted as five of the 12 humanoid Cylon models, as counterweights to the 7 militant Cylons. He implants the four into Colonial society without them knowing who they are. Because the two sets of Cylons (or rather the seven Cylons and the five Earthbots) don't communicate with each other, the Lord of Kobol is unable to prevent the destruction of the Colonies, but he is determined to prevent the destruction of "Colonial humanity" by reuniting it with the "original humanity" of Earth.

I'm most likely way off about details like the origin of the Final Five and the Cylon god, but I'll be surprised if my basic premise - the robotic origin of the colonials - turns out to be wrong.

Sci-Fi Religions Vs. Fantasy Religions

After watching an interview with an Israeli scientologist, where the interviewer mocked the idea of aliens coming to Earth 75 million years ago, I came to the conclusion there isn't really much difference between the mainstream religions and UFO religions. Of course the idea of aliens creating humanity is ridiculous, but are the mainstream creation myths any more believable?

The main difference between the more accepted religions and religions like Scientology is the literary genre of their origin stories. The myths of the bible, ancient European mythologies and Eastern religions all use the magic of fantasy fiction. Pillars of fire, virgin births, monsters and rain dances can easily be placed in the same section of the library as Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. UFO religions, on the other hand, use Science Fiction to explain how we got to where we are. What's wrong with that?

This doesn't mean that every sect and cult should be accepted as a legitimate religion. I only referred here to one aspect of the matter. There are so many other aspects, such as how the religion treats its believers and whether or not it puts them in harm's way (e.g. making them commit suicide or preventing them from taking vital medication). I don't know enough about Scientology to judge whether it should be accepted as legitimate.