Talk:Cyrannus/Archive 1

I moved this to the discussion page, because I have some questions about the validity of this part of text:

Hey, My name Is Lane

Me And My Dad Came Up With A Way This Could Work.

You See IT IS POSSIBLE To Have 3 ORBITS Within A "Life-Zone" According To Everything We Are Coming Up With There Could Be Up To 4 Planets In 1 Orbit So Therefore You Could Have 12 Planets In The Orbits Of What Would Be Say VENUS,EARTH, And MARS

This sounds slightly plausable, though I have my doubts as to how 12 planets could be crammed in the orbits of Earth, Venus and Mars without adversely affecting each other with their gravimetric mass...

Though here's my primary issue...

My issue is that no actual link to a paper or entry on the Internet (or Wikipedia for that matter) is provided in support of this assertion.

To be honest, I also have an issue with how this is written. I'm not in the business of being a card holding member of the Grammar Nitpicking committee, since I am also imperfect on many levels, however this sticks out like a sore thumb when I read over the rest of the entry. It just doesn't fit...

So, until someone can provide me with some sort of technical / scientific paper on this, I'm not willing to include this above content, in any way, shape or form.

--Joe Beaudoin 23:34, 26 Feb 2005 (EST)

• • Why is everyone speculating that the home system of the 12 Colonies had to have more than one star?! They've never said anything like that. Why is it so hard to believe that they just happen to have 12 inhabitable planets in one solar system? Ron D. Moore has STATED in his blog that they are in one system, and that they are ALL inhabitable (whether they were FOUND like that or terraformed I'm not sure). What's the point of contention here? ---Ricimer, October 5, 2005

It's scientifically implausible to cram twelve planets into the habitabe zone of a single star. Three would be pushing it. Making the Colonial's home system a binary star obviates the need to suggest terafforming capabilities belied by the colonials' otherwise low-tech abilities. --Peter Farago 12:18, 5 October 2005 (EDT)

Not everything in BSG is or will be scientifically accurate, just plausible. The Colonies and their arrangement is a holdback from the original series, so this is a 30+ year argument that still has no answer. At least RDM has practically acknowledged that this isn't the cleanest scientific possibility. I'm for the binary or trinary system configuration. It may also be possible for some of Colonies to be inhabitable Earth-sized satellites of another planet in a double-planet configuration. We can make up anything to fit them into a large solar system, really, based on what we do know about astronomy. But mind you, the Colonials have FTL travel, we don't. Ficticious as they are, they may know more about certain aspects of their worlds they we can presume until presented the subject in a show. Spencerian 16:23, 5 October 2005 (EDT)

On the Goldilocks Zone, and the 'n'-body Problem

I agree with Peter Farago, for once. Information on other Wiki sources, like the one on the Goldilocks Zone of a star, clearly say that there is a very small region about any particular star, depending on that star's size, heat, type, etc. in which an Earth-like planet may retain open bodies of water, and hence life. However, there is no guarantee that the process of planet formation will produce even one significant body of mass within the hypothetical zone about any particular star. The fact of the matter is that the planetary system about which we know the most (our own) has produced at best only two or three planets within this Goldilocks Zone, of which only one (guess which) has produced and sustained life as we know it. However, the definition of a planet is ambiguous at best, I believe a more accurate interpretation of the likelihood that any body will form in the Goldilocks Zone can be obtained from an analysis of the distribution of mass in our Solar Sytem. Looking at our system from the distribution of mass, it is painfully clear that only a very small portion of the available material of our planetary system during its incipient stages coalesced into planets anywhere near the habitable zone of the sun. It is not at all certain that any material in some other planetary system would coalesce in a similar pattern. Those who are interested in this topic should look up Rare Earth by Peter Ward. In anycase, the Goldilocks Zone is really ancillary to the topic at hand.

What is really confusing people here, I think, is the concept of the n-body problem. I'm no expert on this (far from it), but basically two planet-sized objects will not be able to maintain themselves for very long if they occupy a single orbit about a star - eventually the gravitational interactions between the two planets and the planets and the sun will destabilize one or both of the planets. An exception to this rule is embodied in the concept of the Lagrange Point (also called the restricted three-body problem), which hinges on the condition that one of these three hypothetical bodies has negligent mass (and therefore negligent gravity). The Lagrange points should be familiar to fans of the Gundam anime series; the five colonies occupy the five "stable" Lagrange points.

This is why, whenever you hear on the news about some large asteroid which might pass near the Earth in forty years or something - it's not possible to predict the orbits of any body in the universe with absolute certainty. This isn't due to imperfect information, it's simply a mathematical fact. This doesn't mean that our estimation of these orbits can't be very good - this is what astronomers are paid to do. But there is always some mathematical error in these estimations.

So why am I blabbering on about the n-body problem? Because large, inert bodies of mass (read, habitable planets) which can not correct their orbits continuously to maintain some exotic orbit will eventually destabilize due to the gravitational disturbances which are the natural result of the n-body problem. Peter Ward is doubtful that even a single planet might form in the very restricted Goldilocks Zone about any particular star; but two, three, twelve? Read up on the formation of our own large moon, which was apparently formed from a tremendous impact between our planet and another Mars-sized object which was occupying the same orbit for hundreds of millions of years, until they destabilized and collided.

The Twelve Colonies are certainly situated in stable orbits about twelve separate stars, with no other significant bodies of mass within or anywhere near their orbit. As to the arrangement of these stars, I'll leave that for another day.

Jzanjani 17:04, 5 October 2005 (EDT)

Zodiac

However, the revelations presented in The Raid make it clear that the Twelve Colonies are not located in a single star system; in fact, each individual colony is situated in a separate Zodiacal constellation, as viewed from Earth. This would place the Colonies many light-years apart.

A more realistic explanation of the importance of Cyrannus in the mythology of the reimagined series may be that it was the original destination of the Twelve Tribes, perhaps a single star system predesignated as the future home of humanity. Presumably, some later event prevented the Tribes from reaching Cyrannus, causing the subsequent diaspora. However the issue of the early history of the Colonies is still under debate and considerably murky (see the Three Exodi Interpretation of the Sacred Scrolls).

This is completely innacurate. The thirteenth tribe identified star patterns and matched them to the symbols of the twelve colonies; the colonies were not located in the constellations themselves. Otherwise earth would be directly in the center of them, its location not remotely mysterious, and it would actually take longer to travel from one colony to another than from one colony to earth. --Peter Farago 02:18, 5 October 2005 (EDT)

A further strike against this edit is that the Colonies had many sub-light ships as shown in the mini-series. They had sufficient speed to gather with Roslin's rescue fleet over the few hours as Boomer (in an FTL-capable Raptor) or other ships located them, suggesting the distances (and number of ships) were small. For the Colonies to be as separated as suggested in that edit would make sub-light travel impossible since each colony would be too distant. Such travel would take months or years, instead of days or a couple of weeks. This is also presuming that only the space surrounding Caprica was searched, but space is BIG and time would still be a factor in a sub-light ship. Based on an earlier script of the mini-series, RDM considered the idea of making a single planet, Kobol, the home for all Colonies that would behave more as sovereign states like the U.S. When that idea didn't fit into the plan, RDM decided to go back to the TOS concept of separate planets in a single system. This is highly improbable to have so many inhabitable planets in such a fashion, astronomically, but it was one detail that the writers (and viewers) had to take as given (not that they would be much left of the Colonies to argue about this, anyway). Spencerian 16:14, 5 October 2005 (EDT)

Re-imagined Series definition: Battlestar Group ^{(TRS: "Water")}. It also doubles as an acronym for the television series itself.

Re-imagined Series definition: technology enabling travel across distances faster than the speed of light would permit, see: FTL