Comments on: Battlestar Galactica: Watched the Finale? Exclusive Interview With Kevin Grazier, Science Advisor

By: The Brains Behind Battlestar’s Science: A Conversation With NASA’s Kevin Grazier « ScriptPhD

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 16:43:09 +0000

[...] and I was a baby science advisor back then! And more recently I admitted something about the Tomb of Athena episode people were like, “You suck! You suck! You screwed up and you suck! And for that matter, you [...]

By: Bro

Bro — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 22:35:54 +0000

It’s a TV show maybe you should just relax.

By: Marlene Affeld

Marlene Affeld — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 03:06:53 +0000

Marlene Affeld

I was delighted to find your site when I was doing a search on Tuesday for the phrase “constellations”. Thanks for the helpful information. I have bookmarked your site and will visit again.

By: Hot News » Mitochondrial Eve

Hot News » Mitochondrial Eve — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 07:40:23 +0000

[...] [...]

By: Kindle Shots: Ubiquitous BSG | Spontaneous Derivation

Kindle Shots: Ubiquitous BSG | Spontaneous Derivation — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 04:11:28 +0000

[...] Not Fiction” also has an interesting finale interview with Kevin Grazier, BSG’s science [...]

By: Hot News » Chariots Of The Gods

Hot News » Chariots Of The Gods — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 00:14:28 +0000

[...] » Blog Archive » How to Download the Chariots of the Gods – Unlimited Movie Downloads…Battlestar Galactica: Watched the Finale? Exclusive Interview With Kevin Grazier, Science Advisor | …tayler » Blog Archive » Watch Chariots of the Gods Online…javier5064912 » Blog [...]

By: coolstar

coolstar — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:30:42 +0000

BT has corrected a lot of the bad science from the “science adviser” along with other comments about the DNA stupidities. A few others that haven’t been mentioned: Adama saying the last jump was 1 million light years is of course nonsense, and any science adviser should be ashamed it made it into the script. And of course, everyone is ignoring stellar proper motion, which would have made most all constellations unrecognizable 150 -200 thousand years ago (much sooner for many). The accretion disk was also nonsense: no stable orbits, by defintion!, in an accretion disk along with the temps of millions of kelvins wouldn’t make it a very nice place to live. Oh, and real accretion disks do NOT look like every science illiterates’s convention for an asteroid belt. Saying the creators wanted to HONOR the original by keeping in all the religious BS is actually the worst indictment I’ve ever heard of this series as the original was of course total crap (we used to laugh at it around the tv room in my grad school science dorm).
John Scalzi, take this as an example of how bad things can get for a science adviser in your work on the new Stargate!
(oh, MH did mention proper motions, just saw it. Pulsars would make good beacons for locating yourself also, but over that short a period of time (in astronomical terms) it’s not a hard problem locating yourself using visible light giants and supergiants, as long as you’re within 10,000 light years or so. Further than that, pulsars are the way to go. Of course, as someone mentioned, bootstrapping locations doing FTL jumps using visible light also works easily. So many stupidities, so little time……

By: Brian

Brian — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 15:51:56 +0000

I’m not sure “God” as presented in the finale requires any sort of supernatural being. Modern human evolved nearly 50,000 years before the events depicted in Daybreak. The Colonials only think they evolved on Kobol – but Colonial history at best only goes back 10,000 years to a period of time they lived on Kobol with some sort of advanced beings (The Lords), plenty of time for said beings to have picked up humans and other animals from Earth and “uplifted” them in some fashion (with apologies to David Brin). For me, a big clue for this is the FTL drives, which seems much more like a “found” technology – as it is way more advanced than anything else seen in the show.

By: Frank

Frank — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:27:23 +0000

To Stephen Cass: thanks for clearing that up; I’ll have to watch it again…

By: Brad Templeton

Brad Templeton — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 09:57:13 +0000

The creationist view, which could have been easily remedied with some side comments, was Baltar’s proclamation that the impossible coincidence of the natives and the alien colonials having the same DNA is the result of the hand of god. He could have fixed it by proposing that the Kobolians must have been taken from this planet originally.

We have no alien DNA. We share all our genes with our cousins right here on the planet.

Chariots of the gods has no DNA manipulation going on, nor do the aliens breed with natives to become the ancestors of modern humans.

Not that promoting Chariots of the Gods would have been better!

By: Jake

Jake — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 06:51:56 +0000

Artistic license people, it’s a show. There’s bound to be mistakes and errors.

To the guy who said it promotes a creationist view, no it doesn’t. It promotes a “Chariots of the Gods” view that Aliens built the pyramids and were here with humans. Not God.

By: Pace

Pace — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 04:37:09 +0000

The scientific gaffe that got me in the last episode was at the very end when six said that mitochondrial Eve was “the name scientists have given to the most recent common ancestor for all human beings now living on Earth.” But that’s something different (MRCA), and much more recent than mitochondrial Eve. (That’s in fact the #1 misconception about mitochondrial eve in it’s wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_eve ).

By: Stephen Cass

Stephen Cass — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 02:26:07 +0000

@Frank — the hanger deck was was torn to shreds — that’s why they jumped from the “gift shop” instead of the functioning hanger pod — you can see things being whipped around behind the glass, and then whole side of the pod blows out.

By: Alex

Alex — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 01:04:40 +0000

Gotta love how folks seem to be conveniently ignoring the fact Grazier gave the show an A for its science…

By: Frank

Frank — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:42:50 +0000

The attack on the Cylon colony had the raptors jumping directly from the museum/hangar deck to their attack positions. What happened to the spatial distortions? That hangar deck (not to mention the other raptors) should have been torn to shreds!