Battlestar Galactica and Technology

The question was raised at the Science of Battlestar Galactica as to whether a human population of 39,000 people is genetically viable. The answer would seem to be "yes," since at one point, the human population on this planet was down to 2,000 or so.

I think, however, the more significant question is whether a human population of 39,000 is technically viable at the level of technology shown in BSG. I think the answer is "no."

One of the hard facts of technology seems to be that the higher you go up the scale, the more work and the more people it takes to bring about the end result. A primitive hunter probably could knap out a flint point and strap it to a stick in very little time. A simple knife or sword may be as far up the technological scale that a single individual can proceed from ore to a finished product. The 16th Century gunsmiths who developed wheel locks and flintlocks were not mining their own ore nor smelting the iron.

By the time you get to revolvers, you're dealing with the need to have some sort of powered machining capability; it was no accident that the factories of the early gun makers were located next to rivers. You need carpenters to build the building, wheelsmiths to make the water wheels and/or turbines and then the rotation of those wheels has to be fed into the plant. You need farmers to raise the cattle and butchers and leather workers in order to make the belts to drive the machinery, which has to be made by other people. Meanwhile, other factories are making the gunpowder and the shot. Woodworkers have to make the stocks. And all the raw material for every factory along the way has to be transported, so you needed wagons and teams and railroads and ships, all of which in turn has to be supported. All of those people have to be housed, fed and clothed.

When you get up to 100 years ago, you now need precision machinery to make the fine parts and, since it costs so much to set up a machine to make a part, you make a lot of them at any one time. Move up to the modern era and now you need oil and petrochemical plants to make the plastics for many of the parts. Few people remember that, until the development of electrically-powered furnaces, it was so difficult to smelt aluminum ore into the metal that aluminum, pound for pound, was far more expensive than gold.

The same progression appears with electrical and electronic components. Wiring insulation used to be problematical, which is why knob & tube wiring was used from the earliest days of electricity. Electrical generation requires power plants, which have to be maintained. The distribution network has to be maintained. You need plants to make components and, as those plants become more and more sophisticated, you need more and more investment to build new ones. A modern semiconductor chip fabrication plant costs well over a billion dollars to build and equip, maybe several billion dollars. The costs of building plants are so high for some products that unless you can sell tens of millions of copies, it makes no sense to even try, which is probably why there are so few makers of LCD displays. If you were to blow up two or three strategic plants, you could probably shut down the electronic device manufacturing industries for months.

Hell, just look sometime at what effort it takes to mass-produce paper. Movable type was vital, but it was cheap paper that brought literacy to the masses in Europe.

39,000 people are not going to cut it in order to keep their technology running forever. I will bet that if you examined what it takes to make everything the Colonial Fleet has and uses, some critical skills are already nonexistent (or extinct). Which means that the Colonials will, sooner or later, have to start cannibalizing their ships to keep others running. If they settle on another world like New Caprica, they will have to cannibalize almost all of their ships in order to build a town and get the level of technology they are used to. Sooner or later, the last Mk.3574 Doomiflatcher will break down and everything that needs one of those to function will be useless. Worse, everything that needs what was made by the machine which used a Mk.3574 Doomiflatcher will be useless.

Assuming the Colonials settle on an uninhabited planet, which is likely, for they are in their 4th season and have met no sentient life other than the Cylons (a rarity in TV SF, by the way, only Firefly was like that), within two or three generations of landing, the Colonials will be at an Iron Age (or Stone Age) existence. They seem to have no farm or draft animals, they have encountered no life above plants on the livable worlds they have visited, so everything will have to be done by human power (which may result in the use of slaves) and the struggle for protein will be enormous. Their civilization will surely collapse.

Unless the Colonials can strike a deal with the Cylons, the Colonials as a society are doomed.