The round robin bit I find hard to believe, if this has happened before…how the hell would the story get buried? Sizzled cities are not torn down and rebuilt and then….forgotten.

I find it very hard to believe that Kobol and Earth have layer upon layer of destroyed cities on them, and nobody noticed?

If you can cross interstellar space, you can keep a god damned word processing file of why you went in the first place

I mean, the Earth I/II spoiler that Aaron Douglas spilled (it’s not someone’s made up theory - unless Aaron made it up) may or may not be true.

But as for your “proof”…

a) End of Season 3 planet is obviously OUR Earth - you can see Florida . There is no other interpretation that’s clear. The end of mid-season 4 planet is near-completely cloud covered. Did you see any obvious landmass outlines that looked obviously like Earth? If you did, you’re the only one.

b) You (nor I) certainly don’t know a thing about this prior civilization and it’s technological capabilities. It’s SciFi, after all and you don’t have the show notes. And you obviously think terraforming is not a possibility for some reason, since you point to two *naturally occurring* habitable worlds as your example of how crappy all other habitable worlds - terraformed or not - are. Terraforming would be EXACLY the reason a good habitable world could be worked up nearby by an advanced civilization

c) You say, “The Earth seen at the end of season four has a moon that looks just like ours, certainly in terms of size.” No it doesn’t - there’s a sun, no surprise. But no moon. End of Season *three* planet had a big moon, briefly glimpsed, but that’s because that planet is most likely Earth.

Then you say, “The moon is even pointed out by characters, so it?s not depicted by accident.” No it most certainly is not pointed out by anyone. What version of “Revelations” did you watch? Kara mentions it back in the beginning of season 4, but that was her memory of “Earth” and there’s no indication in “Revelations” about it being THIS planet.

d) That’s the only one that has some basic validity. GalacticaSitrep posted a terrific comparison shot. One could argue that BSG took an existing skyline and basically melted it to make a convincing generic ruins (ie, it’s another planet). Or it could really be the Brooklyn bridge.

Really, was there any point to this post? Just say that either Aaron’s spilling the beans could be accurate or it’s a ploy to throw people off the track.

But totally saying the opposite of actual factual observations to prove some point… well, why would anyone do that?

http://www.battlestarvariant1.blogspot.com

The 3’s hand and the opening between Tigh and Lee suggest to me:
-The Last Cylon is in the fleet, has been to but may not be on Galactica.

Making a list of character that have been able to work with Cylon Tech:
-Dee had access to the bridge, the origin of the Pilot Ep’s beacon was never explained and this character is a fit for the pictures opening having 3 touching her temple.
-Bulldog was able to fly a Raider, fit in the photo 3’s had would be on his shoulder.

The Last Supper photo also contained “666″ in several different patterns suggesting if all the faces were together, a cataclism would occur.
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About Destroyed Earth: Did you guys consider that somethings in both “The Plan” and “The Scrolls” have not been properly processed. To start, “The Temple of 5″ sticks in my mind as never having had a group of 5 people (or Cylons) stand on the symbols together.

I’ll say that I hate the idea. I think it’s lame beyond belief. Unfortunately, unless Aaron Douglas was taking the mick (and he has before), it appears to be the truth, and may damage the overall credibility of the show.

Is it possible to make the idea fly? The star patterns shown in the Tomb of Athena in Home, Part 2 weren’t exactly right. Some of the stars were in slightly wrong positions, and we didn’t see all of the constellations. The others may have been in very incorrect positions. The appearance of Orion is irrelevant: that just shows that where the basestars fought one another was close to Orion as seen on a line-of-sight from Earth. Since Orion isn’t in the Zodiac, it’s not one of the star patterns the Colonials are looking for.

Conceivably, the ‘fake Earth’ could be at Tau Ceti or Epsilon Eridani, that is within 15 light-years of the ‘real Earth’. At that distance the constellations would broadly be similar, but with some significant variables. The absence of the Moon is even easier to explain: only Starbuck saw it, and her visions don’t have much credence with Roslin and co. The absence would tell US that it wasn’t the real Earth, but not the characters. And yes, Earth’s Moon is very distinctive for the reasons that Isaac Asimov gives at extreme length in his novel, Foundation and Earth. It is very unlikely another terrastial planet would have a moon of similar size and appearance in orbit.

I think the biggest clue that this isn’t the real Earth is that after showing us North America very clearly in the Season 3 finale, they didn’t show us any distinctive landforms in Revelations, and seemed to go out of their way not to show us anything that could be construed as such, which to me goes a long way to confirming the spoiler. It would be lame and I hope it’s disinformation, but they have done enough to make it conceivable that this wasn’t the real deal.

“The Ejected Ring Theory.It is one of many.And probably one of the least credible.”

Least credible? Hmmm:

http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/2618
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/1999/99_18AR.html
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/teacher_resources/impact_theory.html
http://www.psi.edu/projects/moon/moon.html
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/outreach/origin/
http://www.es.ucl.ac.uk/research/planetary/undergraduate/bugiolacchi/moonf.htm
http://th.nao.ac.jp/~kokubo/moon/kit/movie.html

In keeping with the cyclical nature of life and the universe, I think it would only be fitting for it to turn out that cylon created man created cylon created man until the cycle folded in on itself.

The final 5 cylons are remnants of the previous civilizations.

I can imagine scenarios where a colonial scenario might involve a technological regression — take New Caprica. New Caprica was pretty low tech, with most people living in tents. If the Cylon occupation hadn’t happened it still might have been decades (at the very least) before a single new space ship was built. Even if you have all the knowledge of the parent civilization, that’s still a long way from having the raw materials and the industrial base needed to turn knowledge into technology, not to mention the engineering culture needed. For example, right here on Earth we have (contrary to urban legend) the detailed blueprints for the Saturn V rockets: the real reason we’d find it very tough to build another one in the morning from those blueprints is because all the custom-built jigs and other manufacturing equipment that was put together in the 1960s is long gone and that is the stuff we don’t have plans for.

I mean it first in the sense of plausibility:
- if the current state of colonial technology is ‘accurate’, then it’s crazy to think that their far back anecestors would have the ability to ‘flee’ anywhere - they should have been driving around in ox-carts.
- from another perspective: if the ancestral state of colonial technology (e.g. on Kobol) was as advanced as it would have to be in order for them to have fled in spaceships, then it makes no sense that the colonials have advanced so little technologically.

In the second sense:
- Why doesn’t this fact(s) get raised more often? For all its emphasis on continuity and plausability, this has always struck me as a gaping hole in Galactica’s backstory.

All this applies even more so to the theory the blog author proffers: think about the time spans you are talking about, and what the implications would be if such far back ancestors had the ability to flee the planet (any planet) in intergalactic - or even interplanetary - spaceships. That scenario would make the present depiction of colonial technology level completely out of wack.