If you haven't watched the two-part miniseries that preceded this, please do so. This episode is essentially episode 3 immediately following that. It''ll give you more context of what's going on.
33 is not the first episode, it is but it isn't... Let me explain. The miniseries, that predates the series, can be viewed as season zero episodes 1 2 and 3. I would highly recommend watching that first
@DrBecky That's so funny, I just started rewatching Battlestar Galactica a couple of days ago. If you're looking for something to watch and react to next, I can highly recommend Stargate Atlantis and specifically pretty much every scene that has Dr Rodney McKay (David Hewlett) in it. Maybe S03E08 (McKay and Mrs Miller) , that episode is about an Einstein Rosen bridge but again, anything with Rodney McKay in it is great fun to watch.
Their FTL is more teleportation than travel across space. It’s instantaneous, so time dilation wouldn’t really be a factor. There is no difference in time between the people experiencing it, and an observer.
Best example of that is the Adama Manoeuvre, which by the way is probably the MOST epic FTL jump in all of SciFI. Who ever thought that up deserves an award all for himself.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 When i first saw that, it was so epic that i felt a little bit emotional for some reason. One of the most epic scenes in SciFi
I suspect this is the intention of the writers; but I don't actually think the mechanics of it was ever discussed in enough detail to call anything much more than assumption. Its unclear to me whether the jump is like some sort of instant jump like a momentary wormhole or if they just "jump" directly to a velocity faster than light, thus appearing to just vanish instantly. However I am not aware of any actual explicit discussion of whether jumps are instant, or whether FTL means "we move with a speed faster than light" or "we arrive at our destination faster than light would" both seem reasonable, and the total lack of discussion of travel time does seem to support the later.
@@mooferoo Yeah I was like,"This is frakkin incredible" when I saw it first time. And Hot Dog casually stating "Well, this should be different" as he launches himself towards a plasma storm...
Yep. I don't remember how much of the Galactica crew is left alive, but a HUGE chunk of that number is civilians; kids, politicians, doctors, etc. Those folks don't know how to operate anything on the Galactica, so it would be pretty hard to get them going in shifts...
Didn't Becky watch the Miniseries first? You should always start with that, as it becomes clear what that number means, and really how the cylons really did a thorough job, all because of Cavill's daddy/mommy issues (But that is not revealed until much later in the series).
IIRC, the jump was jarring enough that you would wake up/it would disrupt your sleep patterns. So at best they were surviving on 33 minute naps. The fleet itself, as seen elsewhere was fine enough. The issue was the poor flight crews who had to scramble every time in case the drive failed or had a problem. So, jump, deploy, set up a perimeter, fly back. But since they can't live in their suits, it takes time to refuel and prep the fighters, they need bio-breaks, food, and so on, more like grab 5 minutes when you can. Or every new parent ever. lol.
episode 1 of the series doesn't make much sense out of context, I made that mistake and then realized my mistake and went and found the miniseries. isn't the 33 minutes the time it takes for the cylons to make the ftl calculation ? and it's just the pilots and command that had been awake for 5 days , not everyone else.
The premise of the series is that the 49k survivors counted on the whiteboard are whoever just happened to be on long-haul transports at the moment of the attack, and the overwhelming majority of them are untrained civilians. Worse, the one military vessel that survived to shepherd this "Rag-Tag Fleet" (the titular Battlestar _Galactica)_ is running with a skeleton crew - she was in the process of being decommissioned and turned into a museum at the start of the pilot miniseries. So in-universe, the reason they can't just send half the crew off-duty to rest is that they risk leaving critical stations unmanned during a continuing crisis. Out of universe, of course, the reasons they don't send half the crew of-duty to rest are 1) to ratchet up the drama and 2) so they don't have to bring in a bunch of new faces the audience hasn't seen before and doesn't have any attachment to.
Correct, at the start, Galactica doesn't have its full 3000 member full crew, but only a few hundred people, some tourists, and various media crews and dignitaries and the like as it was on its way to being decommissioned. By combining assets with other military ships in the miniseries/launch episodes, they had about 1700-1800 people on board when this happened, and only 60 fighters/one launch bay was inoperative. Of the 120 fighters they were supposed to have, only about 30 were working and one launch bay was inoperative.
See this is the problem with a lot of this "reacts video" culture, they react to things completely out of context. I remember she did one on The Expanse a few years back and didn't know what was going on and thought they had "anti-gravity". I feel when these people do these reacts things they should at least watch a few episodes and get acquainted with a summary premise of what the movie or show actually is.
The jump drives are less "FTL", more "folding space". They instantly connect two regions of space as if through a very wide and short-lived wormhole, and the entire ship is effectively teleported. Different principle, just as wildly improbable.
Only the crew of Galactica is staying awake. The rest of the fleet can rotate. The reason is the number of enemy fighters attacking every 33 minutes. They are folding space, not actually moving at "c." If memory serves, they can only jump some 30 light years before the inaccuracies in the guidance system bites them.
15 LY maximum, but the civilian drives could only do 10LY. The issue was the rest of the fleet as Galactica could spool up and jump in 20 minutes but the fleet was full of many older ships that took longer. Every few jumps they would lose another ship. In theory the lost ship could find them again, but for story purposes, it rarely happened.
But it was wearing on the other people as well as jumping appears to interrupt your sleep. Meaning you never got any REM sleep. If you re a new parent, you know exactly what this is like.
Dr Becky, you should have watched the miniseries first. If you had, you would know that Galactica was about to be decommissioned and turned into a museum. They are not going a relativistic speeds when they are traveling in normal space.
33 is technically the first episode. However it was preceded by a miniseries that was also the pilot for the show. It explains why they are all running, etc. You may want to check it out before getting too far into the show to fill in the back story.
"Frak" is a way of swearing with a four-letter swear word without getting censored for TV. The series Farscape used "Frell" for exactly the same reason. There's a UA-cam video they put out for one of the later series in BSG called "All The Fraks of BSG" which is just all the swearing edited together. You really need to watch the Mini-Series that preceded S1 to get a proper idea of what's going on here and how desperate the situation is. Those 49,000-odd lives aren't just on the Galactica itself, they're the population of the entire fleet, who are, as far as they know, the last survivors of the human race. Galactica is the ONLY warship: everything else is a rag-tag collection of civilian vessel, some of them stuffed with thousands of desperate people and with none of their crews trained to fight. BSG was always very good about attitude jets. Even in the middle of huge space battles, you can still see them, at least on the fighter-sized craft. BTW there IS another way for a spacecraft to change attitude without reaction jets, and that's gyroscopic reaction wheels. Lots of satellites, icluding the Hubble Space Telescope, use these.
Remember that this is a remake of a 1978 series that was broadcast OTA, so there were words they couldn't use, instead substituting "Frak" and for BS "Felgercarb". And the remake continued that usage.
@@Sehlat Well, yes and no. "Smeg" isn't totally made up, it's an abbreviation of "smegma", which is a real word that I'll leave you to look up for yourself...
@@MrHws5mp "Frak" is obviously a slightly changed "frag", which is real military slang, so it isn't totally made up either. I know about smegma, but the writers on Red Dwarf insist that "smeg" doesn't come from that, and that the similarity is a coincidence. I know that's impossible to verify, but why should they lie about that?
While there's a reason for a spesific timeframe(as far as lore goes without spoilers), the 33 minutes is interesting; "Moore stated in an interview that they picked 33 minutes because it was a decent amount of time to allow people to do small stuff like shower and shave or take a nap and they purposefully decided not to create some technobabble reason of why it was 33 minutes." :D
I always figured it was related to the original show's airing period, 1978 and 1979. 1980 seconds is exactly 33 minutes. Kind of disappointing to learn it was just randomly picked.
One of BG's "better" points was that C+C (Command & Control) was deep within the ship. Instead of right in front with a big glass window that just screams "hit me"!
@@havok6280 And in the original series it was loaded with state of the art Tektronix graphics terminals, which today seem unbelievably primitive but looked quite advanced at the time.
One of the best things that happened during covid is the BBC broadcast the entire of Battlestar Galactica, including mini series and TV spinoff movies inserted at the correct points, at two episodes per week solidly from start to finish. This was broadcast in HD and with 5.1 surround sound on digital terrestrial and satellite. iPlayer streaming only had stereo sound as always.
Missing SO MUCH context. The 50k people have nothing to do with the no-sleep-pilots. The 50k is the survivor count as of their census, and the count of pilots is much lower. Also, I think I recall that the pilots are actually using amphetamines to stay awake for preposterous amounts of time, just like we used to do with our US pilots during cold war crises or whatever. Amphetamines to pop them up, Bennies to let them sleep again after.
TL;DR: Very few popular, well-established sci-fi settings' FTL physics were created or maintained by people who "just don't understand physics". Quite the opposite. The good ones very consciously choose one or two subtleties of either GR, SR, or QM to work around, usually using plausible, or at least not-impossible things that we "just haven't discovered yet" in the real world. Assuming a sci-fi author "just didn't think of time dilation" is generally unwise, and there's usually a _ton_ more going on behind the scenes with how they're rationalizing their workarounds. Anyway, yeah... what spawned this was: "Nothing can go faster than c." That's _kind of_ true... Except for the fact that literally _anything_ can go faster than c, and indeed many many things _are_ going faster than c; they're just very far away from us while they do it. (And, in fact, _we_ are moving faster than c relative to very distant galaxies near the cosmological horizon). The sci-fi FTL drive types are, for the most part, based on some sort of _plausible_ real-world work-around to relativity. Warp drive takes advantage of the nuance that _should_ be in the above statement, that "nothing can travel faster than c *relative to its local spacetime"* by manipulating the spacetime _itself_ into moving faster than c relative to neighboring spacetime. The real-world plausible version of it was theorized by Miguel Alcubierre in 1994. Initial versions required negative mass/energy and _vast_ amounts of it, and were completely impractical even in principle (requiring something like a galaxy-mass of negative energy, which probably doesn't even exist, to move a very small craft at v>c). Over the decades, it's been refined, first down to a Jupiter mass, and now a medium-sized asteroid's worth, and there are even versions that _don't_ need exotic matter or energy, that have been successfully simulated in computers. Star Trek's warp drive in particular invents a hypothetical energy field they call 'subspace' that grants this negative energy density. It's also how the ships can move so nimbly at sub-light speeds (impulse drive = fusion rockets + inertial dampers a.k.a. mass reduction of the ship via negative energy density thanks to 'subspace'.) Of all sci-fi FTL drives, this is by _far_ the most plausible, which is why there's serious research going into it. Hyperdrive invents a parallel dimension we can move in and out of with enough energy, called "hyperspace" in which the laws of physics are different than in our universe, but which is similar enough that they map onto each other... so you slip or punch into hyperspace, travel at what is in _that_ universe, sub-light speeds, but either c is far, far greater or, more usually, distance is vastly compressed... then you pop back into normal space, and you've gone 100 light-years in our universe while only traveling a few hundred kilometers in hyperspace. Star Wars hyperspace is the "different laws of physics" kind, where the maximum speed is much much higher than c, but gravity gradients act to significantly slow ships down in hyperspace, which is (in Star Wars fan-canon anyway) why the Millenium Falcon "ran the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs". People make fun of that for being the use of a measure of distance, seemingly to measure time, but it isn't. The speed of the ship is "She'll make point-five past light-speed" which is... poorly defined, but basically the smaller the number between 0 and 1, the faster the ship is going relative to real-space. The "12 parsecs" is literally the _distance_ the ship had to travel to complete the Kessel Run. The boast is "My ship's navigation computers are so good, and my sensors and galaxy map so accurate and detailed, that I managed to find a path in and around and through intervening stars that stayed gravity-neutral enough to only be a 12-parsec path length while still maintaining 0.5 past light speed". This is also why travel times in the Star Wars galaxy are so strange. If you want to fly from one side of the galaxy to the other, it's _much much_ faster to go all the way around the circumference, than to go along the _physically_ shorter path through the core, because dipping down into the galaxy's gravity well that far makes it significantly slower... which is also why the galaxy's socioeconomics works in vaguely ring-shaped regions, rather than proximity-based regions. The "outer rim" is all closer to itself via hyperspace, even when it's farther in real-space, than the "mid rim" is, or the "outer core" or "core systems". Babylon 5's hyperspace is the "physically smaller space mapped onto our space" kind, with fluid within the space that includes eddies and currents, with islands of stability between jump gates where jump beacons can maintain stable positions. If a ship slips off course and loses track of the beacon network, it can be irrevocably lost, literally just pulled off-course into the depths of the hyperspace 'sea' giving it a very Rennaisance nautical sort of feel, with pioneering Explorer-class ships able to venture off of the beacon network (at great risk), and if they discover a new island of stability, they can construct a jump gate and a beacon trail to establish a new colonizable region. Wormhole drives obviously create stable, traversable wormholes, which are, like warp fields, not expressly _forbidden_ by relativity, but which, as you've covered yourself many times, require exotic matter or energy to hold open the throat and negate the gravity well and tidal forces near the mouth. And then there are jump drives, which abandon relativity workarounds altogether and go with pure quantum physics, usually some sort of large-scale coordinated quantum teleportation or tunneling (which would indeed require _immense_ computational precision, which is why in BSG, it's the only time they network their computers, to provide enough computing power to achieve it, because unfortunately the amount of computing power it takes to calculate jumps is equivalent to the amount of computing power it takes to run a machine sentience as well, making Cylon viruses semi-sentient and ridiculously sophisticated, and networked computers basically suicide for humans. In BSG, later on, it's kind of loosely implied that it's more of a just "locality isn't such a hard and fast rule after all". In real-world quantum theory terms, I would describe BSG jump drives as entanglement drives. Some advanced research in quantum mechanics, especially within the Many Worlds/Everettian theory, has found some promising leads in the idea that what it _means_ to be near another object, or a portion of space-time, is to be highly entangled with that portion of spacetime, and what it _means_ to be far away is to be weakly entangled. So... if you could directly manipulate entanglement with some massive quantity of exotic energy in a jump drive, such that the ship crosses a threshold at which it's more highly entangled with some distant point in spacetime, than with the point it's at now, then *blink.* It's not there anymore; it's in the new, more-highly-entangled spot, and they spin down the drive and allow the universe to sort it out and diminish the old entanglement with the old location. So... yes, you were overthinking things, but not so much in a "science vs. fiction" standpoint; sci-fi writers are very smart and generally pretty well-versed in science. Rather, you were overthinking things in an "astrophysics vs. quantum mechanics" standpoint, which given that you're an astrophysicist, makes perfect sense. ;) Personally, I think it's almost certain that FTL travel really is impossible, that whatever future paradigms successfully merge Relativity and Quantum Mechanics in a non-perturbative way that doesn't break at high energy scales, will have new features that prevents it... but I'm holding out a _tiny_ bit of hope for Alcubierre-style warp drive, and for BSG-style jump drive. Hyperdrive and wormhole drives are non-starters IMO, and if anything remotely like them does turn out to be possible, it'll be a total black swan, with completely new physics, where Warp and Jump are both at least tied to tiny threads of physical reasoning that are not yet completely disproven.
@RJM1972 Thanks! I keep getting told that lately for some reason... I'm starting to think maybe there's something to it. Now if only I didn't loathe editing videos, hate the sound of my own recorded voice, and hate how I look on camera...
One minor change: They are experimenting with warp drives and figured out that you can use one very soon - in the next decade or two - if you want to go LESS than C. Speeding up a probe's transit time to even 1/100 C is an immense difference. Imagine going from Earth to Mars in a day. 1500 minutes (~25 hours) is absurdly fast but might be required to dal with the radiation issues in transit. Even if it was 1/1000th (about 70K mph), 10 days is a snap. Current speeds are about 0.0005 with conventional rickets. Every jump forward is huge. Imagine going from Jupiter to Earth in days.
Note that a recent paper was published that discusses subluminal speeds without the need for exotic matter. UA-cam won't allow me to post links, but it's easy enough to find online.
The way I interpret it, FTL is more like a jump from place to place, no acceleration, no deceleration and no journey time, like a worm hole or similar. I think the series was praised for the way things like rapters and fighters manoeuvred in space. The population count was for the entire fleet, most of which was civilian, similar to a naval convoy escorting cargo ships.
I don't want to be mean but it's the same with all of these. There is lots to criticise in sci fi but she just imagines things up or doesn't pay attention. The SG1 ep is the same.
On "days without sleep", when I was in the military, I did have one stretch where I was "on" for 4 days straight. Had two 30 minute naps during that span. And much like the show, I was operating a vehicle for long periods of that, with other people as passengers. (Or really cargo, _they_ got to sleep.) Adrenaline is a hell of a drug. When I watched this episode, I *FELT* the exhaustion, anger, frustration, all of it. The performances were very accurate for people operating on extreme sleep exhaustion.
I love when vets look at military themes in sci-fi shows, and confirm that writers with past military history did a good job. They don't make shows like that anymore, even if they call it the same.
This show is actually wonderful and is relatively "light" on Science, focusing instead on the psychological tolls of being at war. For instance, what you missed is that the captions said "150 hours the Battlestar CREW without sleep" - they are the only war ship in the human fleet and simply don't have enough fighterpilots, jets or staff to man constant rotation of battle. If you do decide to go ahead and watch the series for your enjoyment (which I highly recommend, by the way) I would recommend you go back first and watch the mini-series, as it serves as an extended pilot episode and explains most of what the crew will experience throughout the series.
I once went six days with a total of between ten and twelve hours of sleep. It's certainly not pleasant, I can tell you that much. At some point you start to sort of hallucinate, hear indistinct whispers, see shadows or movements out of the corner of your eye and feel like you're being watched. Pictures, wallpaper patterns or plants seem to move, tunnel vision is enormous, concentrating is almost impossible and sometimes I was standing in a corridor somewhere and didn't know, for example, whether I was already in the bathroom or in the canteen or whether I was still on my way there.
I once drove at the tail end of about 50 hours awake. The Vivarin (caffeine pills) and Jolt Cola were not working anymore, and I woke up as I was headed, at about 35MPH, for the stone wall of a cemetery. I hyperventilated the remaining 15 or so minutes home and slept for a day and a half, then went cold turkey on caffeine. Worst. Week. Ever.
The cylons are computers, machines... so a highly advanced navigation system is very much at the core of abilities. If I remember right, they actually covered the navigation issue and how the Cylons were able to perfectly locate where the fleet went in later seasons.
You should have gone for the mini-series pilot because out of context 33 does not make much sense without knowing the backstory where the lack of military pilots/crew is explained.
Sleep deprivation used to be part of certain army training exercises. After about 3 days the chances of being coherent drop and the chances of visual and audible hallucinations increase. The longer you stay awake [with no chemical help inc caffeine] these effects will escalate, chances of injuring yourself or others is dangerously high.
@@johannesbowers7467 Well.. I left the forces a long time ago and don't have any current experience lol and it also depends on which forces and which regiments we are talking about :)
Really everything is better there. Every side has got their understandable motivations. You can understand the antagonists as well. And the protagonists are no saints like in the old series.
The original Battlestar Galactica was my initiation to nerdhood. I was around 5 to 7 y.o. when Battlestar Galactica was shown on TV in Finland in the 80's. I forced my mother to read the subtitles out loud, as I couldn't read yet. I built the ships and the laser guns out of Lego, a Viper cockpit out of cardboard and had several dreams related to space and Galactica. I have a vivid memory of one in kindergarten, where I had the watch that would make me invisible. Later once I learned to read, I read copious amounts of science fiction and joined the local astronomy club. As a sophmore at college I built my own Dobsonian telescope. Seeing the rings of Saturn with it was an emotional moment :) This eventually led me to the path of science. I was very close to studying astronomy at university, but went for theoretical physics instead. This in the end changed to computer science. And here I am now, an AI researcher (no cylons on my resume yet, though) with big love for physics and astronomy remaining...
Lovely story. Although if the epilogue of battlestar is anything to go by your new career in AI will do its part in pushing us into the next cycle of man and machine conflict and resolution.
The amount of people still alive are primarily civilians on civilian transports. The Miniseries explains the concept that the series picks up with. 12 Colonies based on the Tribes of Mankind, have progressed to a point where they have space travel and created A.I. in the form of androids called Cylons. The Cylons and humans fought a 12-year war to a stalemate, and the Cylons left for deep space, only to return some 40 years later attacking the colonies with nuclear weapons. 13 Earth-type worlds, almost their entire military structure, and billions of humans...and 49,000 plus escape on 200 plus civilian ships, mainly civilians with no military training, to find a new home. A myth called Earth, the 13th Tribe of Kobol, the Cradleworld of Mankind. If you can get past all of the hand-waving that accounts for the science in the show (the FTL drive, some of the Cylon lore, etc.) Battlestar Galactica is an exceptional series that looks at human nature, what it means to be human, the power of faith, the recurring patterns of history, and how civilizations survive. The funny thing is that this is a reboot of a series that lasted a single season in 1978-79 on ABC TV in the US. That series is even less science-based, and much more spiritual...with a fair amount of 1970s cheeziness. The original ended for two reasons...1) the cost to produce the show. 2) George Lucas tried to sue that BSG was too similar to Star Wars, especially the effects which were done by John Dykstra (who won an Oscar for the first Star Wars). I was 6 years old when the first series aired and it is still one of my favorite childhood shows. I was in my 30s when the reboot happened...and it was one of the best shows ever. Its in my top 10 all-time favorites. The concepts of both versions were by Glen A. Larson, who was a major sci-fi series developer in the 70s and 80s (The Six Million Dollar Man and its spin-off, The Bionic Woman, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Knight Rider, and Automan), and both series also have a healthy dollop of Mormonism (Larson was raised Mormon), along with Ancient Greek, and Egyptian mythologies blended together. The reboot was spearheaded by Ronald D. Moore, who started as a Star Trek: The Next Generation writer. Since BSG, Moore has also headed up the time-travel romance Outlander based on the Diana Gabaldon novels.
And the rest of the video is just her not understanding the most basic facet of a "jump drive". The three largest segments are FTL/Time Dilation tangents that are completely irrelevant to what is literally shown unambiguously on the screen. I like Dr. Becky but this video ain't it.
Basically, BSG jump drives give up locality. They circumvent SR by using basically quantum teleportation, so no time dilation. The reason they were suspicious of the Olympic Carrier was that being missing for over three hours, which did _not_ involve time dilation, coincided with the Cylons not showing up for about six jump cycles, which is... _quite_ the coincidence. But yes, definitely overthinking it, because you were thinking relativistically, where their drives use nonlocality instead.
About the timing and time dilation: In Galactica, the only FTL travel are those jumps which are more or less instantanious. In between, they actually travel very slowly at non-relativity speeds. They plot the next jump, distribute the coordinates to all ships in the fleet, then jump again. Time delation is not really a problem here.
Very cool of you to do a react to Battlestar Galactica. This reboot series is considered by some to be one of the finest ever sci fi shows on television. With regards to the point about the crew not sleeping and there being over 49,000+ humans. That population total was for the entire fleet of ships. Most of those humans were civilians, on ships other than Galactica. The military crew on Galactica, and those pilots were a much smaller number of people. They were also military professionals. As in today’s world, a pilot is a highly trained person. You can’t simply plug a civilian into a pilot’s seat. This was the first episode of the series and as a result, there has not been time to train civilians for military roles. With regards to the word “frack”, yes, it is a curse word. And yes, I think that it is the equivalent for the other “F” word. But since it’s a made up word, they could use it in the program without worry of it having to be censored for broadcast television. I hope that you watch more of the series, even if you don’t “react” to it in videos. It is a fun series to watch. Keep up the good work on your videos.
I also like to imagine that the entire BSG civilization is still griping about extracting petroleum resources by shattering the water table with mildly toxic slurry. Ergo, 'frack' being a good swear word.
The precision and synchronization of the jump drives is a plot point in a later episode. So, yes, the writers thought about your commentary at about 9:15 a couple decades ago.
I started watching this show YESTERDAY, does everyone ahve the same schedule for this Also. There’s a miniseries that comes first, you gotta watch it. 8:10 The cylons are also stationary. They use the same jump drive tech, basically a Minecraft cheat command teleport
It's funny, you're so spot on that the writers addressed many of these issues with little lines here and there in future episodes. Gaeta always talks about navigation and drift for example - it's his job.
I'd like to see her cover B5 too, although my spidey sense tells me she'd find lots to pick apart ;) If you want to see her go off on a tangent about rotational gravity, watch the video she did about The Expanse. The space stations in that one rotate to generate gravity, too.
WAIT, aren't you supposed to watch the mini-series first (essentially a long pilot episode that sets everything up)?! I almost did the same thing and started S1E1 and could tell they had some kind of pilot since the plot was already full forward.
You made the mistake many others have made: “33” is NOT the real first episode. The “Miniseries” is actually the first episode. Because you missed the true beginning, you probably couldn’t figure out what was happening.
This is one of my favorite sci-fi shows of all time, but trying to understand the "science" of the show unviverse will lead you down a deep rabit hole of "just because" macguffins and inconsistencies. They'll talk about the time dilation of near speed of light travel in one episode then have a massive battle in the orbit of a black hole a few episodes later. Still an amazing story tho, I definitely recommend it
"Motherfracker!" Yeah it's a common enough device. The BBC show _Red Dwarf_ did exactly the same thing in their show in the 1980s, except they used "smeg" instead -- as in "smeg off!" -- which they adapted from the real word "smegma" which is "the harmless combination of oils, skin cells, sweat and other fluids that accumulate around your genitals." So the writers did their research on that one! Another of my favorite sci-fi shows from that era -- _Farscape_ -- uses "frell/frelling" as their broadcast-friendly swearword. Oh, and I almost forgot. _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ surpassed them all. In that show, "Belgium!" is the most offensive swearword in the Galaxy.
You mention the need for very precise navigation, and mentioned “drifting” in space. Actually, in a later episode Galactica gets lost because they “jumped” to the wrong coordinates. They specifically mentioned the need to correct for “inertial drift”. Coordinates were not updated for the other ships, so they ended up in the wrong place. So the writers indeed thought of this stuff.
1:00 from what I read about the FTL devices utilized in this series they don't accelerate beyond the threshold of light speed but make use of the "connect point of origin and point of target" approach bending the space-time fabric, also illustrated by the expansion/shrinking effects shown in interior shot just immediately prior to the jump happening (right after the jump-drive has been triggered by turning the key, can clearly be seen in the pilot/miniseries)
FTL is not Faster Than Light in BSG, because ship doesn't move faster than light. It is more like folding fabric of space with gravity, first by anchoring ship in place by device that is powered by compound known as Tylium, and punching or rather moving that folded space on ship. It's also not teleportation as some may say. Galactica's FTL computer computing core is size of footbal field, that's a lot of computing power, so it can calculate precise jumpoints by nanoseconds, which has to be manually entered into system that operates drive as ships's systems are not connected, the problem is recharge of drive itself. 33 minutes takes to power up reaction chamber in FTL engines on Cylon ships as their systems are connected. Their ships are much faster than Colonial Fleet, which needs 35-40 minutes, that's why Vipers are on hot standy each time. Irony is that this method indeed is faster than light, because ship gets moved to new position instantly.
33 is actually episode 3. For some reason they streamed episodes 1 and 2 as an entire season and then started the next season on episode 3. It really screws up the continuity for a lot of people who have never seen the show before.
Its not just a matter of course adjustment due to directional drift, but the navigation system also has to be able to calculate where a targeted location is going to be when you get there, because every location in space is changing constantly, so the apparent location as judge from the starting point, current local time, is not the targets' "current" location (more accurately, where and when it will have moved to at the time of your arrival). Factors: where does it appear to be "now" (local time); how far away does it appear to be in spacetime according to what we can observe from our starting point; in what direction/directions has the target location traveled from its currently observed location (local time); how long will it take (adjusting for relativity) to travel to where it will/should be when we arrive at the targeted location - local time there; and how do we navigate in such a way as to accurately intercept the target location within its local spacetime frame? And the problem grows as the distances in time and space grow. Needless to say, collectively, this is a very, very high bar to clear.
I can't believe you've never watched the series?! Don't get me wrong, I was a bit skeptical as well when my friends first mentioned it.. But it's shot beautifully and it actually plays alot in favor of what might actually happen in space! There's only 1 other series that does that currently and that's for All Mankind. It really irritates me when you "hear" spaceships fire and them maneuvering around as if there' an atmosphere.. 🙂 Yes, the navigation systems on all these shows are the finest measurements ever devised. They can jump and reappear within a meter or 2 of wherever they want... 😂. But again, it's Sci-fi.. gotta give a little for the story to unfold.. 🙂
Just popping in for a tangential anecdote: I experienced a significant thyroid event as a young man. Coupled with working two jobs, I went two weeks without sleep. I managed to walk into my apartment one afternoon and I literally passed out as I entered my living room. Roommate heard me fall and woke me up off the floor. Those two weeks were hell.
Becky, I'm sure everyone's telling you this, but the ships don't actually move faster than light. The magical FTL drives create some sort of wormhole or something and almost instantly "jump" the ships from one point in space to another. So there is no time dilation. p.s. I'm sure you have better things to do than watch 57 hours of a TV show, but if you do have a few hours to kill, please start with the mini-series, which introduces the characters and the universe. And the technology. It's not like TNG with a bunch of technobabble and pseudoscience.
That's still technically faster than light. Basically if something is moved from one point to another faster than light is able to in ordinary space, then that is FTL. And could well cause time dilation. Stars tend to move quite fast relative to one another, although low compared to the speed of light. When they "jump" to a star system, they would need to adjust their velocity to match that of the star, so that they do not fly off into deep space. That could cause time dilation when compared to a system with a different velocity.
My thought process whenever a bunch of ships does a ftl jump at the same time: if one of them is off by a 0.000000001%, they will end up either several millions of kilometers apart, or they will briefly turn into a supernova when a ship that is still running at the speed of light runs through another that just decelerated. Which is why i frigging love Avatar because they canonically accelerate and decelerate for months and with the size of those ships, ships in the fleet seem to be traveling at closest 1km from one another
Through the show, an FTL jump is written as an instant jump...like an instant wormhole or a quantum tunneling effect. It has zero acceleration component. It's space magic. There is a comment on precision on the jumps called the Red Line
A later episode does go into navigation errors that build up over a series of Jumps. Catastropically so, one space vessel ends their Jump inside a mountain. Time dilation does not come into it as the Humans and Cylons were always in the same frame of reference, the Jump used dimensional translation ie the ship does not pass thru real space between Jump points. The reason for the Cyclons requiring 33 minutes to Jump after the fleet was never explained, presumably it was because the Cyclons (being expert infiltators) had left a tracking device on one or more of the ships and it took 33 minutes to receive it's signal (the Cyclons did posess some sort of FTL communication as shown by their Resurrection Ships).
You are absolutely right about the difficulty of calculating an FTL jump. That's why the computers need a fair amount of time to calculate the "jump coordinates". At a certain point, the time the onboard computers require for this even becomes an important plot point of an episode. In the miniseries, prior to this episode, it is also made clear that the slightest error in the calculations could cause the Galactica to end up in the middle of a star.
For anyone who doesn’t know, this show was created post 9/11 and captured the sense of doom and gloom that Fox News was putting out. American media took pride in repeatedly showing the towers collapse regularly for the first year and this traumatizing the nation repeatedly. The sense of despair and trauma on the show is a reflection of the insane American psyche that lead up to the invasion of Iraq. This will hopefully help non Americans understand why we keep waging wars in the Middle East. Shows like this captures an element of that type of thinking.
@zeitgeistx5239 "This will hopefully help non Americans understand why we keep waging wars in the Middle East." Ya Really Don't Know Much About This do Ya?
I think Dr Becky is digging a little too deep to find problems. There comes a point where you have to trust the (fictitious) technology to perform perfectly. That is why we need not bother testing the navigational tolerances of FTL drive. They may call it FTL, but it doesn't mean that is how it works. It is based on some old distant/foreign technology to achieve the effect protrayed it doesn't necessarily encounter acceleration limits or increasing mass side effects or complex causality.
I usually like these reaction videos, but this one had almost no reaction to the footage, but rather a lecture on physics which is fine but more reaction to what is actually happening in the show would seem warranted.
I vaguely recall the science advisor, Kevin Grazier, throwing out ideas for what could be happening in the episode. One idea is that, as established in the mini-series and in later episodes, Galactica takes absolutely ages (maybe 12 hours) to calculate jump coordinates without the networked computer system (due to Cylon hacking abilities) up to their maximum safe range (roughly 5 light years). Because they don't have 12 hours here, they're fast-crunching what FTL coordinates they can and then jumping, but can only safely jump a few light minutes away. The Cylons then use their telescopes to spot the fleet emerging from hyperspace when the light reaches them, and jumps after them. Waiting exactly 33 minutes each time was just the Cylons messing with them for the hell of it. There's also no FTL communications in the setting, so it's a bit nebulous if having a tracker on the Olympic Carrier would even help.
The FTL system is actually explained in a book for the complete series box set but sold separately. I actually purchased one when it was on sale at Barnes and Nobles. So when a “jump” is being calculated 3 things are happening. Mass Vs. energy in an area is being scanned. Like using a very powerful electric telescope in a direction. They then use star maps from record to compare. They then estimate the distance of mass of regular matter to mass of plasma. Then they jump. Each jump is not really a jump in a sense. They cut a hole in the 5th dimension to cut across space. The theory is high dimension are technically smaller for travel. A more interesting theory is that every time they “jump” they go in to the 5th dimension for a second and come out the 5th dimension a second later. While in the 5th dimension the rules of the 3rd and 4th dimension don’t apply allowing to travel the universe technically faster than the speed of light.
In addition to spacecraft turning in a vacuum as if it was comprised of dense air, they also ALWAYS have all these sounds in the vacuum of space for their spaceship drives, for lasers firing, or even astroids whizzing by - they all produce sound in these productions, when there can be no sound. Only the Kubrick movie 2001 adhered quite nicely to most principals of physics.
FTL - fair enough, except are they doing FTL? I'd say they are disappearing from one point and appearing at another with no change to their velocity, so I would suggest they are actually folding space-time to move rather than accelerating...
i've been a hard core sci-fi fan for over 40 years now, and i never get tired of it, as much as i like realism in shows, and appreciate when production teams weave it into stories ( expanse for example) we have to suspend belief in some things to appreciate the mastery of the story as a whole.
They weren't approaching lightspeed in normal space, but "jumping" which we have to imagine is some fantasy way to create a temporary wormhole / space-bend or perhaps extradimensional transit. I'd recommend the episodes 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'Lay Down Your Burdens' to critique various interaction with exoplanets. Also 'The Passage' and "Eye of Jupiter' to critique radiation / how bad nebulae could get and then possible lifecycle and effects of a supernova.
Your point about computational power for the jump drive is actually a plot point. The uncertainty gives them a distance limit for every jump. Presumably past a certain "red line" the uncertainty noticably goes up exponentially and jumps become unpredictably dangerous. Later in the series they collaborate with a cylon faction and use hybrid computers greately increasing that distance if I remember correctly.
Faster than light travel is possible in my book. Accelerating an object does not increase its mass, relativistic mass is an outdated concept. So there's nothing in space stopping an object from accelerating FTL. If you look at the equations, instead of mass increasing, the potential kinetic energy increases as the objects velocity approaches the speed of light until it reaches a limit. But the limit does not indicate that it takes an infinite amount of energy to accelerate the object. It indicates a limit on the amount of potential kinetic energy the object would deliver upon collision. The energy needed to propel the object would be expelled and decrease the mass of the object. So, something like a nuclear reaction onboard traveling at near light speeds should accelerate the spacecraft just the same as if it was stationary. The source of the energy should be relative. And FTL wouldn't violate causality either. There's a misconception that light has something to do with time. It does not. These are brand new concepts so not everyone is going to get it. But, let me know what you think.
"relativistic mass is an outdated concept" It is not outdated, it never existed in the first place. People who talk about relativistic mass are just wrong.
This is truly one of the best sci-fi shows of all time. Not necessarily because of it's real science, but the way it ties evolution, the soul, god and science together. What does it mean to be human? To be alive? To feel and fear and love and be reborn
My favorite Sci-FI, other than The Hitchhiker Guide to the Galaxy, is BSG. I also love playing the the game Starfield visuals for planets is magical. I always tell my grandchildren that there is a bigger number than infinity and it is infinity+1. I used to sleep on Sunday I used to work at Oxford Icerink at night and working in computing during the day having a show at the Icerink at 4am before going to work. I used to do that many times a month not sleeping Monday-Sunday and only 10 hours on Sunday sleep. I did so many jobs like night security/Ice carts/bouncer/Dispatch riding and also used to drive to Perth for meetings on Monday for a 9am in Perth Scotland. Sleep to me was a waste of time.
Before the series aired, the creative team talked about how they would be more true to space physics than most shows, but there were two fictional technologies that they absolutely needed to make the story work, so fans would have to accept these without explanation: FTL drives and artificial gravity. If you can just accept those two, then the only other physics problem is lighting and sound in space. Initially they tried true physics sounds, watching explosions but not hearing anything, but they decided that this doesn't work on TV, so they compromised and just muffled sounds in space. In a few later episodes where they fly ships in planetary atmospheres, you can hear the ships much more loudly and clearly there. If you had started with the miniseries, which is the correct order both chronologically and in release order, you would have seen discussion of how precise the calculations need to be for FTL jumps. They never show it on camera in this episode (people doing complicated math is usually boring to watch), but that's understood to be part of why it is so complicated to jump every 33 minutes: complex and high precision math has to be done by very tired people for each jump. The idea of this episode is that even for people who are not actively working, being in a ship which does an FTL jump would still wake you up. No one is going to be able to sleep for more than 33 consecutive minutes here. A much later (season 4) episode will mention time dilation, and how it affected an older ship that did not have FTL technology. Since FTL itself is fictional, there is no "wrong" way to portray time dilation's effect (or lack thereof) on FTL jumps.
BSG - Best TV in well over a decade. Watch it all!!! If you think 33 was the 1st episode, you MISSED 2 huge episodes already. 🤦♂🤦♂ No wonder everything is confusing you...
Wait. In her compass analogy, she proposed that you were given a compass and told to head straight North, but you could only check your compass every mile to correct your direction. She then said that if you were traveling at a slow walk, you'd be more accurate than at a run, because you wouldn't deviate as much. That's not true. Your speed is irrelevant, since you're checking the compass every mile, not every minute, hour, etc. I also love the beginning - 'FTL travel is definitely fiction, because you can't travel faster than light.', (followed by), 'But there may be some way to do it we don't understand yet.'. How many things have been deemed impossible only to be achieved later? The best way to say it is, "Given our current understanding of physics, we don't think it's possible.". Not to mention that the FTL drives in the show were more 'jump' drives (not accelerating past light speeds, but more 'folding space'), and there would be no time dilation (or, if there were, their time estimates would account for that, since this is tech they all grew up with). I like Dr. Becky, but it irritates me when scientists made definitive statements about things, while grudgingly admitting that our understanding of how things work is deeply flawed. It gives all the deniers a big foothold to dispute any real progress in our quest to understand the mysteries of the Universe...
@RJM1972 But you can still only check the compass every mile, so going slow offers no advantage. You're probably more likely to deviate going slow, because you have more time to make mistakes, which then compound. At any rate, the analogy doesn't work because the travel is instantaneous, rather than just 'traveling fast'. It further falls apart when you learn (later in the show) that there are Cylon spies on board (possibly feeding the Cylon Fleet new coordinates - I admit, I don't remember that detail for sure, since it was 20 years ago)...
In the mini series or series 0 you can see one of the minor protagonists sitting on toolbox as they enter the jump and she says I really hate this part. So its clearly setting the in universe distortion for moving between 2 points. It also talks about 'beyond the red line' which where the safety limits for normal jumps were, about 30 ly or so. This is lead into the series 1 episode you are watching. Not all the ships made that first jump, so setting the dark pace for 33.
Original battlescared oklatica was within five years of t o, s, so they were required to create alternate versions of all the swear words. Those alternate versions were already in universe, lore of the fandom when they did the reboot
I remember watching reruns of the original BSG as a child. I’m so glad someone revisited the story. Dr. Becky, thanks for the reaction video! It was interesting to see what you picked out as ludicrous and your explanations for feeling that way.
I'd also recommend you look at the spaceflight sequences in Babylon 5 (1994-1999) and in Space: Above and Beyond (1995-1996). They tried to depict Newtonian physics in spaceflight in greater detail than most 1990s space-based science fiction series. And Star Trek: The Next Generation also had an early 1990s episode called "Booby Trap", where orbital mechanics and the Enterprise pulling a more grounded slingshot manoeuvre is a key part of that episode's plot.
I flew in the USAF in a variety of fighters. The sophistication of the navigation systems continually advanced. While the speeds were not near that of C, they were significant. For example my speed on a routine bases was 10nm a minute and could easily be double or more of that. When referencing ground navigation where straight lines were rare, I constantly would be updating my position despite navigation systems such as GPS, INS, and radar. If in an air to air situation where the adversary would be at similar velocity to mine navigation precision would be exponentially more complex. All that being said we still did it quiet effectively. My point is that humanity, Cylons are a part of humanity, would find a way to adjust navigationally to the velocity of C and FTL.
Go to piavpn.com/Becky to get 83% off Private Internet Access with 4 months free!
If you haven't watched the two-part miniseries that preceded this, please do so. This episode is essentially episode 3 immediately following that. It''ll give you more context of what's going on.
I was did up 4 days off of 12 -1ltr Mtn Dews & Coffee(family issues)....but crashed for 48hrs....
33 is not the first episode, it is but it isn't... Let me explain. The miniseries, that predates the series, can be viewed as season zero episodes 1 2 and 3. I would highly recommend watching that first
Actually the Guy at Fermi lab did a video on this and he said your mass doesn’t increase the Energy increases ( the mass of the energy increases)
@DrBecky
That's so funny, I just started rewatching Battlestar Galactica a couple of days ago.
If you're looking for something to watch and react to next, I can highly recommend Stargate Atlantis and specifically pretty much every scene that has Dr Rodney McKay (David Hewlett) in it. Maybe S03E08 (McKay and Mrs Miller) , that episode is about an Einstein Rosen bridge but again, anything with Rodney McKay in it is great fun to watch.
Their FTL is more teleportation than travel across space. It’s instantaneous, so time dilation wouldn’t really be a factor. There is no difference in time between the people experiencing it, and an observer.
Best example of that is the Adama Manoeuvre, which by the way is probably the MOST epic FTL jump in all of SciFI. Who ever thought that up deserves an award all for himself.
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 When i first saw that, it was so epic that i felt a little bit emotional for some reason. One of the most epic scenes in SciFi
Yes, FTL has to be like that or it would be too complex for a series with a fair amount of action scenes.
I suspect this is the intention of the writers; but I don't actually think the mechanics of it was ever discussed in enough detail to call anything much more than assumption. Its unclear to me whether the jump is like some sort of instant jump like a momentary wormhole or if they just "jump" directly to a velocity faster than light, thus appearing to just vanish instantly. However I am not aware of any actual explicit discussion of whether jumps are instant, or whether FTL means "we move with a speed faster than light" or "we arrive at our destination faster than light would" both seem reasonable, and the total lack of discussion of travel time does seem to support the later.
@@mooferoo Yeah I was like,"This is frakkin incredible" when I saw it first time. And Hot Dog casually stating "Well, this should be different" as he launches himself towards a plasma storm...
They don't have enough people to work in shifts. The number on the whiteboard is the total number of people left alive.
Yep. I don't remember how much of the Galactica crew is left alive, but a HUGE chunk of that number is civilians; kids, politicians, doctors, etc. Those folks don't know how to operate anything on the Galactica, so it would be pretty hard to get them going in shifts...
Didn't Becky watch the Miniseries first? You should always start with that, as it becomes clear what that number means, and really how the cylons really did a thorough job, all because of Cavill's daddy/mommy issues (But that is not revealed until much later in the series).
I believe the approximate compliment of enlisted personnel on the ship was 2,000.
IIRC, the jump was jarring enough that you would wake up/it would disrupt your sleep patterns. So at best they were surviving on 33 minute naps. The fleet itself, as seen elsewhere was fine enough. The issue was the poor flight crews who had to scramble every time in case the drive failed or had a problem. So, jump, deploy, set up a perimeter, fly back. But since they can't live in their suits, it takes time to refuel and prep the fighters, they need bio-breaks, food, and so on, more like grab 5 minutes when you can. Or every new parent ever. lol.
Yea the pilots they have are everyone who is qualified, and it's not many at all.
A better "first episode" would have been the miniseries that precedes and ties into episode 1.
Agreed, the miniseries is combined into 1 big movie last I watched it on Amazon. Jumping right into this feels kinda weird as a first episode.
came here to say this
Yes you started at episode 3
episode 1 of the series doesn't make much sense out of context, I made that mistake and then realized my mistake and went and found the miniseries. isn't the 33 minutes the time it takes for the cylons to make the ftl calculation ? and it's just the pilots and command that had been awake for 5 days , not everyone else.
Agreed. You need to start with the mini series. It established so much that's needed for not only "33" but the ENTIRE series.
The premise of the series is that the 49k survivors counted on the whiteboard are whoever just happened to be on long-haul transports at the moment of the attack, and the overwhelming majority of them are untrained civilians. Worse, the one military vessel that survived to shepherd this "Rag-Tag Fleet" (the titular Battlestar _Galactica)_ is running with a skeleton crew - she was in the process of being decommissioned and turned into a museum at the start of the pilot miniseries. So in-universe, the reason they can't just send half the crew off-duty to rest is that they risk leaving critical stations unmanned during a continuing crisis.
Out of universe, of course, the reasons they don't send half the crew of-duty to rest are 1) to ratchet up the drama and 2) so they don't have to bring in a bunch of new faces the audience hasn't seen before and doesn't have any attachment to.
Correct, at the start, Galactica doesn't have its full 3000 member full crew, but only a few hundred people, some tourists, and various media crews and dignitaries and the like as it was on its way to being decommissioned. By combining assets with other military ships in the miniseries/launch episodes, they had about 1700-1800 people on board when this happened, and only 60 fighters/one launch bay was inoperative. Of the 120 fighters they were supposed to have, only about 30 were working and one launch bay was inoperative.
Ya, I’m thinking she might be missing the point. I mean… it is entertainment not a thesis.
See this is the problem with a lot of this "reacts video" culture, they react to things completely out of context. I remember she did one on The Expanse a few years back and didn't know what was going on and thought they had "anti-gravity". I feel when these people do these reacts things they should at least watch a few episodes and get acquainted with a summary premise of what the movie or show actually is.
The jump drives are less "FTL", more "folding space". They instantly connect two regions of space as if through a very wide and short-lived wormhole, and the entire ship is effectively teleported. Different principle, just as wildly improbable.
The Adama manoeuvre is in my opinion the GOAT of all FTL jumps in scifi.
Dune. Improbable Drive? (Hitchhiker's Guide). Also, 33, not Dr. Becky.
@@ryanchicago6028 I believe you mean the "Infinite Improbability Drive"
what he said
@@EnglishMike Oh he doth protest... Are you a Volgun?
Only the crew of Galactica is staying awake. The rest of the fleet can rotate. The reason is the number of enemy fighters attacking every 33 minutes.
They are folding space, not actually moving at "c."
If memory serves, they can only jump some 30 light years before the inaccuracies in the guidance system bites them.
15 LY maximum, but the civilian drives could only do 10LY. The issue was the rest of the fleet as Galactica could spool up and jump in 20 minutes but the fleet was full of many older ships that took longer. Every few jumps they would lose another ship. In theory the lost ship could find them again, but for story purposes, it rarely happened.
@@plektosgaming thank you for the correction! 😀
But it was wearing on the other people as well as jumping appears to interrupt your sleep. Meaning you never got any REM sleep. If you re a new parent, you know exactly what this is like.
@@plektosgaming I'm pretty sure Galactica also crunched the numbers and did the calcs for the other ships.
Dr Becky, you should have watched the miniseries first. If you had, you would know that Galactica was about to be decommissioned and turned into a museum.
They are not going a relativistic speeds when they are traveling in normal space.
33 is technically the first episode. However it was preceded by a miniseries that was also the pilot for the show. It explains why they are all running, etc. You may want to check it out before getting too far into the show to fill in the back story.
yeah watching BSG without the Miniseries is like watching a headless snake trying to ascertain if it is poisonous or not
"Frak" is a way of swearing with a four-letter swear word without getting censored for TV. The series Farscape used "Frell" for exactly the same reason. There's a UA-cam video they put out for one of the later series in BSG called "All The Fraks of BSG" which is just all the swearing edited together.
You really need to watch the Mini-Series that preceded S1 to get a proper idea of what's going on here and how desperate the situation is. Those 49,000-odd lives aren't just on the Galactica itself, they're the population of the entire fleet, who are, as far as they know, the last survivors of the human race. Galactica is the ONLY warship: everything else is a rag-tag collection of civilian vessel, some of them stuffed with thousands of desperate people and with none of their crews trained to fight.
BSG was always very good about attitude jets. Even in the middle of huge space battles, you can still see them, at least on the fighter-sized craft. BTW there IS another way for a spacecraft to change attitude without reaction jets, and that's gyroscopic reaction wheels. Lots of satellites, icluding the Hubble Space Telescope, use these.
And then there's Firefly, where the curses were in Chinese. (English subtitles are available.)
Remember that this is a remake of a 1978 series that was broadcast OTA, so there were words they couldn't use, instead substituting "Frak" and for BS "Felgercarb". And the remake continued that usage.
A famous UK one would be "smeg" from Red Dwarf.
@@Sehlat Well, yes and no. "Smeg" isn't totally made up, it's an abbreviation of "smegma", which is a real word that I'll leave you to look up for yourself...
@@MrHws5mp "Frak" is obviously a slightly changed "frag", which is real military slang, so it isn't totally made up either. I know about smegma, but the writers on Red Dwarf insist that "smeg" doesn't come from that, and that the similarity is a coincidence. I know that's impossible to verify, but why should they lie about that?
While there's a reason for a spesific timeframe(as far as lore goes without spoilers), the 33 minutes is interesting; "Moore stated in an interview that they picked 33 minutes because it was a decent amount of time to allow people to do small stuff like shower and shave or take a nap and they purposefully decided not to create some technobabble reason of why it was 33 minutes." :D
Utopia?
I always figured it was related to the original show's airing period, 1978 and 1979. 1980 seconds is exactly 33 minutes. Kind of disappointing to learn it was just randomly picked.
So say we all ❤
so say we all
So say we all
So say we all
So say we all
So say we all
One of BG's "better" points was that C+C (Command & Control) was deep within the ship. Instead of right in front with a big glass window that just screams "hit me"!
CIC (combat information center) not C+C.
@@havok6280 And in the original series it was loaded with state of the art Tektronix graphics terminals, which today seem unbelievably primitive but looked quite advanced at the time.
@@havok6280 I stand corrected.
@@kennethswenson6214I’m standing behind you.
So, now way to take out the leadership with an out-of-control A-wing?
One of the best things that happened during covid is the BBC broadcast the entire of Battlestar Galactica, including mini series and TV spinoff movies inserted at the correct points, at two episodes per week solidly from start to finish. This was broadcast in HD and with 5.1 surround sound on digital terrestrial and satellite. iPlayer streaming only had stereo sound as always.
Hmmm 🤔 check out the mini-series/pilot episode which was released before this episode. This is a great episode, but you're missing context.
Missing SO MUCH context. The 50k people have nothing to do with the no-sleep-pilots. The 50k is the survivor count as of their census, and the count of pilots is much lower. Also, I think I recall that the pilots are actually using amphetamines to stay awake for preposterous amounts of time, just like we used to do with our US pilots during cold war crises or whatever. Amphetamines to pop them up, Bennies to let them sleep again after.
TL;DR: Very few popular, well-established sci-fi settings' FTL physics were created or maintained by people who "just don't understand physics". Quite the opposite. The good ones very consciously choose one or two subtleties of either GR, SR, or QM to work around, usually using plausible, or at least not-impossible things that we "just haven't discovered yet" in the real world. Assuming a sci-fi author "just didn't think of time dilation" is generally unwise, and there's usually a _ton_ more going on behind the scenes with how they're rationalizing their workarounds.
Anyway, yeah... what spawned this was: "Nothing can go faster than c."
That's _kind of_ true... Except for the fact that literally _anything_ can go faster than c, and indeed many many things _are_ going faster than c; they're just very far away from us while they do it. (And, in fact, _we_ are moving faster than c relative to very distant galaxies near the cosmological horizon).
The sci-fi FTL drive types are, for the most part, based on some sort of _plausible_ real-world work-around to relativity.
Warp drive takes advantage of the nuance that _should_ be in the above statement, that "nothing can travel faster than c *relative to its local spacetime"* by manipulating the spacetime _itself_ into moving faster than c relative to neighboring spacetime. The real-world plausible version of it was theorized by Miguel Alcubierre in 1994. Initial versions required negative mass/energy and _vast_ amounts of it, and were completely impractical even in principle (requiring something like a galaxy-mass of negative energy, which probably doesn't even exist, to move a very small craft at v>c). Over the decades, it's been refined, first down to a Jupiter mass, and now a medium-sized asteroid's worth, and there are even versions that _don't_ need exotic matter or energy, that have been successfully simulated in computers. Star Trek's warp drive in particular invents a hypothetical energy field they call 'subspace' that grants this negative energy density. It's also how the ships can move so nimbly at sub-light speeds (impulse drive = fusion rockets + inertial dampers a.k.a. mass reduction of the ship via negative energy density thanks to 'subspace'.) Of all sci-fi FTL drives, this is by _far_ the most plausible, which is why there's serious research going into it.
Hyperdrive invents a parallel dimension we can move in and out of with enough energy, called "hyperspace" in which the laws of physics are different than in our universe, but which is similar enough that they map onto each other... so you slip or punch into hyperspace, travel at what is in _that_ universe, sub-light speeds, but either c is far, far greater or, more usually, distance is vastly compressed... then you pop back into normal space, and you've gone 100 light-years in our universe while only traveling a few hundred kilometers in hyperspace.
Star Wars hyperspace is the "different laws of physics" kind, where the maximum speed is much much higher than c, but gravity gradients act to significantly slow ships down in hyperspace, which is (in Star Wars fan-canon anyway) why the Millenium Falcon "ran the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs". People make fun of that for being the use of a measure of distance, seemingly to measure time, but it isn't. The speed of the ship is "She'll make point-five past light-speed" which is... poorly defined, but basically the smaller the number between 0 and 1, the faster the ship is going relative to real-space. The "12 parsecs" is literally the _distance_ the ship had to travel to complete the Kessel Run. The boast is "My ship's navigation computers are so good, and my sensors and galaxy map so accurate and detailed, that I managed to find a path in and around and through intervening stars that stayed gravity-neutral enough to only be a 12-parsec path length while still maintaining 0.5 past light speed". This is also why travel times in the Star Wars galaxy are so strange. If you want to fly from one side of the galaxy to the other, it's _much much_ faster to go all the way around the circumference, than to go along the _physically_ shorter path through the core, because dipping down into the galaxy's gravity well that far makes it significantly slower... which is also why the galaxy's socioeconomics works in vaguely ring-shaped regions, rather than proximity-based regions. The "outer rim" is all closer to itself via hyperspace, even when it's farther in real-space, than the "mid rim" is, or the "outer core" or "core systems".
Babylon 5's hyperspace is the "physically smaller space mapped onto our space" kind, with fluid within the space that includes eddies and currents, with islands of stability between jump gates where jump beacons can maintain stable positions. If a ship slips off course and loses track of the beacon network, it can be irrevocably lost, literally just pulled off-course into the depths of the hyperspace 'sea' giving it a very Rennaisance nautical sort of feel, with pioneering Explorer-class ships able to venture off of the beacon network (at great risk), and if they discover a new island of stability, they can construct a jump gate and a beacon trail to establish a new colonizable region.
Wormhole drives obviously create stable, traversable wormholes, which are, like warp fields, not expressly _forbidden_ by relativity, but which, as you've covered yourself many times, require exotic matter or energy to hold open the throat and negate the gravity well and tidal forces near the mouth.
And then there are jump drives, which abandon relativity workarounds altogether and go with pure quantum physics, usually some sort of large-scale coordinated quantum teleportation or tunneling (which would indeed require _immense_ computational precision, which is why in BSG, it's the only time they network their computers, to provide enough computing power to achieve it, because unfortunately the amount of computing power it takes to calculate jumps is equivalent to the amount of computing power it takes to run a machine sentience as well, making Cylon viruses semi-sentient and ridiculously sophisticated, and networked computers basically suicide for humans. In BSG, later on, it's kind of loosely implied that it's more of a just "locality isn't such a hard and fast rule after all". In real-world quantum theory terms, I would describe BSG jump drives as entanglement drives.
Some advanced research in quantum mechanics, especially within the Many Worlds/Everettian theory, has found some promising leads in the idea that what it _means_ to be near another object, or a portion of space-time, is to be highly entangled with that portion of spacetime, and what it _means_ to be far away is to be weakly entangled. So... if you could directly manipulate entanglement with some massive quantity of exotic energy in a jump drive, such that the ship crosses a threshold at which it's more highly entangled with some distant point in spacetime, than with the point it's at now, then *blink.* It's not there anymore; it's in the new, more-highly-entangled spot, and they spin down the drive and allow the universe to sort it out and diminish the old entanglement with the old location.
So... yes, you were overthinking things, but not so much in a "science vs. fiction" standpoint; sci-fi writers are very smart and generally pretty well-versed in science. Rather, you were overthinking things in an "astrophysics vs. quantum mechanics" standpoint, which given that you're an astrophysicist, makes perfect sense. ;)
Personally, I think it's almost certain that FTL travel really is impossible, that whatever future paradigms successfully merge Relativity and Quantum Mechanics in a non-perturbative way that doesn't break at high energy scales, will have new features that prevents it... but I'm holding out a _tiny_ bit of hope for Alcubierre-style warp drive, and for BSG-style jump drive. Hyperdrive and wormhole drives are non-starters IMO, and if anything remotely like them does turn out to be possible, it'll be a total black swan, with completely new physics, where Warp and Jump are both at least tied to tiny threads of physical reasoning that are not yet completely disproven.
Dude musta got a PhD in faster than light travel. Cause this post be a dissertation 😂
@RJM1972 Thanks! I keep getting told that lately for some reason... I'm starting to think maybe there's something to it. Now if only I didn't loathe editing videos, hate the sound of my own recorded voice, and hate how I look on camera...
One minor change: They are experimenting with warp drives and figured out that you can use one very soon - in the next decade or two - if you want to go LESS than C. Speeding up a probe's transit time to even 1/100 C is an immense difference. Imagine going from Earth to Mars in a day. 1500 minutes (~25 hours) is absurdly fast but might be required to dal with the radiation issues in transit. Even if it was 1/1000th (about 70K mph), 10 days is a snap. Current speeds are about 0.0005 with conventional rickets. Every jump forward is huge. Imagine going from Jupiter to Earth in days.
Reply of the month, across all UA-cam! 😊
Note that a recent paper was published that discusses subluminal speeds without the need for exotic matter. UA-cam won't allow me to post links, but it's easy enough to find online.
The way I interpret it, FTL is more like a jump from place to place, no acceleration, no deceleration and no journey time, like a worm hole or similar. I think the series was praised for the way things like rapters and fighters manoeuvred in space.
The population count was for the entire fleet, most of which was civilian, similar to a naval convoy escorting cargo ships.
Seriously, how can someone so smart be so dense!?
I love that every comment is pointing out the same thing
I don't want to be mean but it's the same with all of these. There is lots to criticise in sci fi but she just imagines things up or doesn't pay attention. The SG1 ep is the same.
Go watch the pilot miniseries soon. It’s incredible. 33 takes place immediately after the miniseries, same characters and actors.
A FTL jump can be achieved by simply surprising a cat with a cucumber.
A VPN to watch Battlestar Galactica?
Nah! Just get the entire DVD set! You can even watch it without an Internet connection! 😂
On "days without sleep", when I was in the military, I did have one stretch where I was "on" for 4 days straight. Had two 30 minute naps during that span. And much like the show, I was operating a vehicle for long periods of that, with other people as passengers. (Or really cargo, _they_ got to sleep.)
Adrenaline is a hell of a drug. When I watched this episode, I *FELT* the exhaustion, anger, frustration, all of it. The performances were very accurate for people operating on extreme sleep exhaustion.
I love when vets look at military themes in sci-fi shows, and confirm that writers with past military history did a good job.
They don't make shows like that anymore, even if they call it the same.
This show is actually wonderful and is relatively "light" on Science, focusing instead on the psychological tolls of being at war.
For instance, what you missed is that the captions said "150 hours the Battlestar CREW without sleep" - they are the only war ship in the human fleet and simply don't have enough fighterpilots, jets or staff to man constant rotation of battle.
If you do decide to go ahead and watch the series for your enjoyment (which I highly recommend, by the way) I would recommend you go back first and watch the mini-series, as it serves as an extended pilot episode and explains most of what the crew will experience throughout the series.
You have to watch them in the right order. You missed the miniseries that preceded this. You need to go back and watch it.
I once went six days with a total of between ten and twelve hours of sleep. It's certainly not pleasant, I can tell you that much. At some point you start to sort of hallucinate, hear indistinct whispers, see shadows or movements out of the corner of your eye and feel like you're being watched. Pictures, wallpaper patterns or plants seem to move, tunnel vision is enormous, concentrating is almost impossible and sometimes I was standing in a corridor somewhere and didn't know, for example, whether I was already in the bathroom or in the canteen or whether I was still on my way there.
I once drove at the tail end of about 50 hours awake.
The Vivarin (caffeine pills) and Jolt Cola were not working anymore, and I woke up as I was headed, at about 35MPH, for the stone wall of a cemetery.
I hyperventilated the remaining 15 or so minutes home and slept for a day and a half, then went cold turkey on caffeine.
Worst. Week. Ever.
Those are not hallucinations. You're starting to see through the Veil.
(This is a joke, in case anyone worries about their sanity... or mine)
@@MonkeyJedi99 Uh... So you fell asleep, almost crashed and then continued to drive? Shows how sleep deprivation affects judgement as well.
@@galacticminx I will not deny your assessment.
@@galacticminx Actually the adrenalin kicks in which usually gets you over the hump into the next alert cycle.
The cylons are computers, machines... so a highly advanced navigation system is very much at the core of abilities. If I remember right, they actually covered the navigation issue and how the Cylons were able to perfectly locate where the fleet went in later seasons.
Also... If you've already suspended disbelief for FTL travel, it shouldn't be any trick at all to accept FTL navigation.
They answered how the cylons were tracking the fleet in this same episode - there was a cylon beacon hidden on the galactica.
According to Einstein...sci-fi is better with ice cream.
You should have gone for the mini-series pilot because out of context 33 does not make much sense without knowing the backstory where the lack of military pilots/crew is explained.
Sleep deprivation used to be part of certain army training exercises. After about 3 days the chances of being coherent drop and the chances of visual and audible hallucinations increase. The longer you stay awake [with no chemical help inc caffeine] these effects will escalate, chances of injuring yourself or others is dangerously high.
Can confirm, by day 3 of us all burning about 10,000 calories a day I was hallucinating and knew it. My platoon went 5.5 days like that. Frak that.
Whaddaya mean "used to be"
@@johannesbowers7467 Well.. I left the forces a long time ago and don't have any current experience lol and it also depends on which forces and which regiments we are talking about :)
I'm afraid to say you started in the wrong "order". The Show starts with a mini series. 33 is like an actual "second" episode.
3rd it goes Day 1 then day 2
They aren't going FTL, they are jumping point to point. No less fictiony :)
If you jump to a point faster than light can get there, what's that called?
@@Jesse-cw5pv Since speed is just distance divided by time, if it's instantaneous (t=0) then by definition it's undefined.
@@johnmcgimpsey1825 In effect, you go back in time.
@@Jesse-cw5pv Magic?
@@FLPhotoCatcher aren´t you just skipping time?
This version seems to have gotten the physics better than the 1970's series. The thrusters of the Vipers are more realistic.
The physics, along with the writing, acting, storylines, effects, and soundtrack :p
Really everything is better there. Every side has got their understandable motivations. You can understand the antagonists as well. And the protagonists are no saints like in the old series.
The original Battlestar Galactica was my initiation to nerdhood. I was around 5 to 7 y.o. when Battlestar Galactica was shown on TV in Finland in the 80's. I forced my mother to read the subtitles out loud, as I couldn't read yet.
I built the ships and the laser guns out of Lego, a Viper cockpit out of cardboard and had several dreams related to space and Galactica. I have a vivid memory of one in kindergarten, where I had the watch that would make me invisible. Later once I learned to read, I read copious amounts of science fiction and joined the local astronomy club. As a sophmore at college I built my own Dobsonian telescope. Seeing the rings of Saturn with it was an emotional moment :)
This eventually led me to the path of science. I was very close to studying astronomy at university, but went for theoretical physics instead. This in the end changed to computer science. And here I am now, an AI researcher (no cylons on my resume yet, though) with big love for physics and astronomy remaining...
Lovely story. Although if the epilogue of battlestar is anything to go by your new career in AI will do its part in pushing us into the next cycle of man and machine conflict and resolution.
The amount of people still alive are primarily civilians on civilian transports. The Miniseries explains the concept that the series picks up with. 12 Colonies based on the Tribes of Mankind, have progressed to a point where they have space travel and created A.I. in the form of androids called Cylons. The Cylons and humans fought a 12-year war to a stalemate, and the Cylons left for deep space, only to return some 40 years later attacking the colonies with nuclear weapons. 13 Earth-type worlds, almost their entire military structure, and billions of humans...and 49,000 plus escape on 200 plus civilian ships, mainly civilians with no military training, to find a new home. A myth called Earth, the 13th Tribe of Kobol, the Cradleworld of Mankind.
If you can get past all of the hand-waving that accounts for the science in the show (the FTL drive, some of the Cylon lore, etc.) Battlestar Galactica is an exceptional series that looks at human nature, what it means to be human, the power of faith, the recurring patterns of history, and how civilizations survive. The funny thing is that this is a reboot of a series that lasted a single season in 1978-79 on ABC TV in the US. That series is even less science-based, and much more spiritual...with a fair amount of 1970s cheeziness. The original ended for two reasons...1) the cost to produce the show. 2) George Lucas tried to sue that BSG was too similar to Star Wars, especially the effects which were done by John Dykstra (who won an Oscar for the first Star Wars). I was 6 years old when the first series aired and it is still one of my favorite childhood shows. I was in my 30s when the reboot happened...and it was one of the best shows ever. Its in my top 10 all-time favorites.
The concepts of both versions were by Glen A. Larson, who was a major sci-fi series developer in the 70s and 80s (The Six Million Dollar Man and its spin-off, The Bionic Woman, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Knight Rider, and Automan), and both series also have a healthy dollop of Mormonism (Larson was raised Mormon), along with Ancient Greek, and Egyptian mythologies blended together. The reboot was spearheaded by Ronald D. Moore, who started as a Star Trek: The Next Generation writer. Since BSG, Moore has also headed up the time-travel romance Outlander based on the Diana Gabaldon novels.
"Frak" is a fun bit of Galactica profanity that is also family friendly. Another one from the original series was "feldercarb".
Pretty sure that rando people can't run the battleship or fly the fighters.
“I’m always overthinking.”
Yes, please! That’s what makes the “astrophysicist reacts” series fun!
2 min ad in 12 min video. this is reaching television levels. lol.
And the rest of the video is just her not understanding the most basic facet of a "jump drive". The three largest segments are FTL/Time Dilation tangents that are completely irrelevant to what is literally shown unambiguously on the screen.
I like Dr. Becky but this video ain't it.
Basically, BSG jump drives give up locality. They circumvent SR by using basically quantum teleportation, so no time dilation.
The reason they were suspicious of the Olympic Carrier was that being missing for over three hours, which did _not_ involve time dilation, coincided with the Cylons not showing up for about six jump cycles, which is... _quite_ the coincidence. But yes, definitely overthinking it, because you were thinking relativistically, where their drives use nonlocality instead.
About the timing and time dilation: In Galactica, the only FTL travel are those jumps which are more or less instantanious. In between, they actually travel very slowly at non-relativity speeds. They plot the next jump, distribute the coordinates to all ships in the fleet, then jump again.
Time delation is not really a problem here.
Very cool of you to do a react to Battlestar Galactica. This reboot series is considered by some to be one of the finest ever sci fi shows on television.
With regards to the point about the crew not sleeping and there being over 49,000+ humans. That population total was for the entire fleet of ships. Most of those humans were civilians, on ships other than Galactica. The military crew on Galactica, and those pilots were a much smaller number of people. They were also military professionals. As in today’s world, a pilot is a highly trained person. You can’t simply plug a civilian into a pilot’s seat. This was the first episode of the series and as a result, there has not been time to train civilians for military roles.
With regards to the word “frack”, yes, it is a curse word. And yes, I think that it is the equivalent for the other “F” word. But since it’s a made up word, they could use it in the program without worry of it having to be censored for broadcast television.
I hope that you watch more of the series, even if you don’t “react” to it in videos. It is a fun series to watch.
Keep up the good work on your videos.
I also like to imagine that the entire BSG civilization is still griping about extracting petroleum resources by shattering the water table with mildly toxic slurry.
Ergo, 'frack' being a good swear word.
ron moore is the same guy that used emotion over logic in TNG. just sayin.
By your command....What is totally frakkin awesome is that we are still talking intelligently about the best TV show ever.
The precision and synchronization of the jump drives is a plot point in a later episode. So, yes, the writers thought about your commentary at about 9:15 a couple decades ago.
I saw this show on first Deployment in Afghanistan, the mini series… I had to wait 9 months to get my hand on season 1-2. What a great show.
I started watching this show YESTERDAY, does everyone ahve the same schedule for this
Also. There’s a miniseries that comes first, you gotta watch it.
8:10 The cylons are also stationary. They use the same jump drive tech, basically a Minecraft cheat command teleport
There is a guide that shows the watch order for the extra movies. start at the pilot movies before the series.
Enjoy one of the best series ever made and by far the best soundtrack of a series.
I just think you have to watch scifi and accept as is. I used to enjoy this back in the day. Will have to dig it out.
It's funny, you're so spot on that the writers addressed many of these issues with little lines here and there in future episodes. Gaeta always talks about navigation and drift for example - it's his job.
I would be fascinated in seeing her react to an episode of Babylon 5 and talk about the artificial gravity generated by the space station rotating.
And the Starfury fighters
I'd like to see her cover B5 too, although my spidey sense tells me she'd find lots to pick apart ;)
If you want to see her go off on a tangent about rotational gravity, watch the video she did about The Expanse. The space stations in that one rotate to generate gravity, too.
@@stewi009 Yes but that station is not ten miles long nor has a giant diverse multi-mile long garden inside it....
B5 did thrusters a decade before NuBSG.
@@oghus Yeah. I always liked that they don't launch from the station, rather they just drop/eject from it using angular momentum.
WAIT, aren't you supposed to watch the mini-series first (essentially a long pilot episode that sets everything up)?! I almost did the same thing and started S1E1 and could tell they had some kind of pilot since the plot was already full forward.
Frak is a work around for a swear word beginning with f, in the original series feldercarb was used as a work around for bullplop
Watch the prologue dear. I wouldn't call this the start of the series. Starting here would be confusing without knowing why they are running.
You made the mistake many others have made: “33” is NOT the real first episode. The “Miniseries” is actually the first episode. Because you missed the true beginning, you probably couldn’t figure out what was happening.
BG is one of the best SciFi shows ever. It and Firefly are my #1 and #2. Must watch shows for Every SciFi fan!!
This is one of my favorite sci-fi shows of all time, but trying to understand the "science" of the show unviverse will lead you down a deep rabit hole of "just because" macguffins and inconsistencies. They'll talk about the time dilation of near speed of light travel in one episode then have a massive battle in the orbit of a black hole a few episodes later. Still an amazing story tho, I definitely recommend it
Finally.... Really missed it you doing exactly THAT!
do more of those reactions♥️
The term "frack" comes from the original series and was a way to swear without using any actual swear words.
Miss the Frack’in 70’s … Starbuck … a man w/great feathered blonde hair … not blonde crappy coffee!
Dirk Benedict ... FYI.
Serenity
"Motherfracker!"
Yeah it's a common enough device. The BBC show _Red Dwarf_ did exactly the same thing in their show in the 1980s, except they used "smeg" instead -- as in "smeg off!" -- which they adapted from the real word "smegma" which is "the harmless combination of oils, skin cells, sweat and other fluids that accumulate around your genitals." So the writers did their research on that one!
Another of my favorite sci-fi shows from that era -- _Farscape_ -- uses "frell/frelling" as their broadcast-friendly swearword.
Oh, and I almost forgot. _The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy_ surpassed them all. In that show, "Belgium!" is the most offensive swearword in the Galaxy.
Frack is kind of obvious. But don't forget "felgercarb" from the original series!
(whispers) "Miranda" :) Actually, that's really just all very disturbing. I wonder what other Slang dictionary I've got lying around..... And.. BOOKS!
You mention the need for very precise navigation, and mentioned “drifting” in space. Actually, in a later episode Galactica gets lost because they “jumped” to the wrong coordinates. They specifically mentioned the need to correct for “inertial drift”. Coordinates were not updated for the other ships, so they ended up in the wrong place.
So the writers indeed thought of this stuff.
DR.Becky you are missing out on a fantastic series
1:00
from what I read about the FTL devices utilized in this series they don't accelerate beyond the threshold of light speed but make use of the "connect point of origin and point of target" approach bending the space-time fabric, also illustrated by the expansion/shrinking effects shown in interior shot just immediately prior to the jump happening (right after the jump-drive has been triggered by turning the key, can clearly be seen in the pilot/miniseries)
FTL is not Faster Than Light in BSG, because ship doesn't move faster than light. It is more like folding fabric of space with gravity, first by anchoring ship in place by device that is powered by compound known as Tylium, and punching or rather moving that folded space on ship. It's also not teleportation as some may say. Galactica's FTL computer computing core is size of footbal field, that's a lot of computing power, so it can calculate precise jumpoints by nanoseconds, which has to be manually entered into system that operates drive as ships's systems are not connected, the problem is recharge of drive itself. 33 minutes takes to power up reaction chamber in FTL engines on Cylon ships as their systems are connected. Their ships are much faster than Colonial Fleet, which needs 35-40 minutes, that's why Vipers are on hot standy each time.
Irony is that this method indeed is faster than light, because ship gets moved to new position instantly.
Basically, just about all FTL in science fiction is indistinguishable from magic. Its properties are driven by plot.
33 is actually episode 3. For some reason they streamed episodes 1 and 2 as an entire season and then started the next season on episode 3. It really screws up the continuity for a lot of people who have never seen the show before.
Its not just a matter of course adjustment due to directional drift, but the navigation system also has to be able to calculate where a targeted location is going to be when you get there, because every location in space is changing constantly, so the apparent location as judge from the starting point, current local time, is not the targets' "current" location (more accurately, where and when it will have moved to at the time of your arrival). Factors: where does it appear to be "now" (local time); how far away does it appear to be in spacetime according to what we can observe from our starting point; in what direction/directions has the target location traveled from its currently observed location (local time); how long will it take (adjusting for relativity) to travel to where it will/should be when we arrive at the targeted location - local time there; and how do we navigate in such a way as to accurately intercept the target location within its local spacetime frame? And the problem grows as the distances in time and space grow. Needless to say, collectively, this is a very, very high bar to clear.
Are there any shows you did a react video on that you kept watching?
What's the objection to FTL travel in interstitial space if relativistic mass isn't real?
I can't believe you've never watched the series?! Don't get me wrong, I was a bit skeptical as well when my friends first mentioned it.. But it's shot beautifully and it actually plays alot in favor of what might actually happen in space! There's only 1 other series that does that currently and that's for All Mankind. It really irritates me when you "hear" spaceships fire and them maneuvering around as if there' an atmosphere.. 🙂
Yes, the navigation systems on all these shows are the finest measurements ever devised. They can jump and reappear within a meter or 2 of wherever they want... 😂. But again, it's Sci-fi.. gotta give a little for the story to unfold.. 🙂
Please keep making sci-fi tv/movie reaction videos.
Doc have you ever reviewed Alien?
Just popping in for a tangential anecdote: I experienced a significant thyroid event as a young man. Coupled with working two jobs, I went two weeks without sleep. I managed to walk into my apartment one afternoon and I literally passed out as I entered my living room. Roommate heard me fall and woke me up off the floor.
Those two weeks were hell.
Becky, I'm sure everyone's telling you this, but the ships don't actually move faster than light. The magical FTL drives create some sort of wormhole or something and almost instantly "jump" the ships from one point in space to another. So there is no time dilation.
p.s. I'm sure you have better things to do than watch 57 hours of a TV show, but if you do have a few hours to kill, please start with the mini-series, which introduces the characters and the universe. And the technology. It's not like TNG with a bunch of technobabble and pseudoscience.
That's still technically faster than light. Basically if something is moved from one point to another faster than light is able to in ordinary space, then that is FTL. And could well cause time dilation. Stars tend to move quite fast relative to one another, although low compared to the speed of light. When they "jump" to a star system, they would need to adjust their velocity to match that of the star, so that they do not fly off into deep space. That could cause time dilation when compared to a system with a different velocity.
Isn’t it cute how guys with cocoa milk stained avengers shirt and still leave with mommy, try to explain science to Dr. Becky Smethurst.
I prefer the old style cylon raiders
Lorne Greene was great as Adama. I liked the 1978 show.
@@charliestevenson3500 Starbuck was male then as well.
My thought process whenever a bunch of ships does a ftl jump at the same time: if one of them is off by a 0.000000001%, they will end up either several millions of kilometers apart, or they will briefly turn into a supernova when a ship that is still running at the speed of light runs through another that just decelerated.
Which is why i frigging love Avatar because they canonically accelerate and decelerate for months and with the size of those ships, ships in the fleet seem to be traveling at closest 1km from one another
Bless you.
Through the show, an FTL jump is written as an instant jump...like an instant wormhole or a quantum tunneling effect. It has zero acceleration component. It's space magic.
There is a comment on precision on the jumps called the Red Line
i grew up watching the original BG show... i was GIDDY with excitment when they said the new one was coming out!! loved it!!!
I actually liked the original better, without the "who is a Cylon this week" nonsense
A later episode does go into navigation errors that build up over a series of Jumps. Catastropically so, one space vessel ends their Jump inside a mountain. Time dilation does not come into it as the Humans and Cylons were always in the same frame of reference, the Jump used dimensional translation ie the ship does not pass thru real space between Jump points. The reason for the Cyclons requiring 33 minutes to Jump after the fleet was never explained, presumably it was because the Cyclons (being expert infiltators) had left a tracking device on one or more of the ships and it took 33 minutes to receive it's signal (the Cyclons did posess some sort of FTL communication as shown by their Resurrection Ships).
I love the new BSG: it's one of my all-time favorite shows. The 70's version, though, is absolutely unwatchable. Lol
You are absolutely right about the difficulty of calculating an FTL jump. That's why the computers need a fair amount of time to calculate the "jump coordinates". At a certain point, the time the onboard computers require for this even becomes an important plot point of an episode.
In the miniseries, prior to this episode, it is also made clear that the slightest error in the calculations could cause the Galactica to end up in the middle of a star.
For anyone who doesn’t know, this show was created post 9/11 and captured the sense of doom and gloom that Fox News was putting out. American media took pride in repeatedly showing the towers collapse regularly for the first year and this traumatizing the nation repeatedly. The sense of despair and trauma on the show is a reflection of the insane American psyche that lead up to the invasion of Iraq. This will hopefully help non Americans understand why we keep waging wars in the Middle East. Shows like this captures an element of that type of thinking.
Yeah, and it pretty much captures the paranoia of "sleeper cells" and "they walk among us." It was very much a product of the George Bush years.
@zeitgeistx5239
"This will hopefully help non Americans understand why we keep waging wars in the Middle East."
Ya Really Don't Know Much About This do Ya?
No
This is a remake of a 1980s show.
This show was made in the 70s. Long before 9/11.
@@RJ420NLThe original series was made in the late 70s. However this video is a reaction to the remake that ran from 2004 to 2009.
I think Dr Becky is digging a little too deep to find problems. There comes a point where you have to trust the (fictitious) technology to perform perfectly. That is why we need not bother testing the navigational tolerances of FTL drive. They may call it FTL, but it doesn't mean that is how it works. It is based on some old distant/foreign technology to achieve the effect protrayed it doesn't necessarily encounter acceleration limits or increasing mass side effects or complex causality.
I usually like these reaction videos, but this one had almost no reaction to the footage, but rather a lecture on physics which is fine but more reaction to what is actually happening in the show would seem warranted.
I vaguely recall the science advisor, Kevin Grazier, throwing out ideas for what could be happening in the episode. One idea is that, as established in the mini-series and in later episodes, Galactica takes absolutely ages (maybe 12 hours) to calculate jump coordinates without the networked computer system (due to Cylon hacking abilities) up to their maximum safe range (roughly 5 light years). Because they don't have 12 hours here, they're fast-crunching what FTL coordinates they can and then jumping, but can only safely jump a few light minutes away. The Cylons then use their telescopes to spot the fleet emerging from hyperspace when the light reaches them, and jumps after them. Waiting exactly 33 minutes each time was just the Cylons messing with them for the hell of it. There's also no FTL communications in the setting, so it's a bit nebulous if having a tracker on the Olympic Carrier would even help.
Nothing can accelerate to the speed of light, but special relativity doesn't state that travelling faster than light being impossible.
Yay! It's been a while since the last Becky reacts!
The FTL system is actually explained in a book for the complete series box set but sold separately. I actually purchased one when it was on sale at Barnes and Nobles.
So when a “jump” is being calculated 3 things are happening. Mass Vs. energy in an area is being scanned. Like using a very powerful electric telescope in a direction. They then use star maps from record to compare. They then estimate the distance of mass of regular matter to mass of plasma. Then they jump.
Each jump is not really a jump in a sense. They cut a hole in the 5th dimension to cut across space. The theory is high dimension are technically smaller for travel.
A more interesting theory is that every time they “jump” they go in to the 5th dimension for a second and come out the 5th dimension a second later. While in the 5th dimension the rules of the 3rd and 4th dimension don’t apply allowing to travel the universe technically faster than the speed of light.
In addition to spacecraft turning in a vacuum as if it was comprised of dense air, they also ALWAYS have all these sounds in the vacuum of space for their spaceship drives, for lasers firing, or even astroids whizzing by - they all produce sound in these productions, when there can be no sound. Only the Kubrick movie 2001 adhered quite nicely to most principals of physics.
FTL - fair enough, except are they doing FTL? I'd say they are disappearing from one point and appearing at another with no change to their velocity, so I would suggest they are actually folding space-time to move rather than accelerating...
i've been a hard core sci-fi fan for over 40 years now, and i never get tired of it, as much as i like realism in shows, and appreciate when production teams weave it into stories ( expanse for example) we have to suspend belief in some things to appreciate the mastery of the story as a whole.
The only 2 things they couldn't get around was the FTL and artificial gravity. That's pretty good going for the production team :)
They weren't approaching lightspeed in normal space, but "jumping" which we have to imagine is some fantasy way to create a temporary wormhole / space-bend or perhaps extradimensional transit. I'd recommend the episodes 'You Can't Go Home Again' and 'Lay Down Your Burdens' to critique various interaction with exoplanets. Also 'The Passage' and "Eye of Jupiter' to critique radiation / how bad nebulae could get and then possible lifecycle and effects of a supernova.
Your point about computational power for the jump drive is actually a plot point. The uncertainty gives them a distance limit for every jump. Presumably past a certain "red line" the uncertainty noticably goes up exponentially and jumps become unpredictably dangerous.
Later in the series they collaborate with a cylon faction and use hybrid computers greately increasing that distance if I remember correctly.
Faster than light travel is possible in my book. Accelerating an object does not increase its mass, relativistic mass is an outdated concept. So there's nothing in space stopping an object from accelerating FTL.
If you look at the equations, instead of mass increasing, the potential kinetic energy increases as the objects velocity approaches the speed of light until it reaches a limit. But the limit does not indicate that it takes an infinite amount of energy to accelerate the object. It indicates a limit on the amount of potential kinetic energy the object would deliver upon collision. The energy needed to propel the object would be expelled and decrease the mass of the object. So, something like a nuclear reaction onboard traveling at near light speeds should accelerate the spacecraft just the same as if it was stationary. The source of the energy should be relative.
And FTL wouldn't violate causality either. There's a misconception that light has something to do with time. It does not.
These are brand new concepts so not everyone is going to get it. But, let me know what you think.
"relativistic mass is an outdated concept" It is not outdated, it never existed in the first place. People who talk about relativistic mass are just wrong.
This is truly one of the best sci-fi shows of all time. Not necessarily because of it's real science, but the way it ties evolution, the soul, god and science together. What does it mean to be human? To be alive? To feel and fear and love and be reborn
My favorite Sci-FI, other than The Hitchhiker Guide to the Galaxy, is BSG. I also love playing the the game Starfield visuals for planets is magical.
I always tell my grandchildren that there is a bigger number than infinity and it is infinity+1.
I used to sleep on Sunday I used to work at Oxford Icerink at night and working in computing during the day having a show at the Icerink at 4am before going to work.
I used to do that many times a month not sleeping Monday-Sunday and only 10 hours on Sunday sleep. I did so many jobs like night security/Ice carts/bouncer/Dispatch riding and also used to drive to Perth for meetings on Monday for a 9am in Perth Scotland. Sleep to me was a waste of time.
Before the series aired, the creative team talked about how they would be more true to space physics than most shows, but there were two fictional technologies that they absolutely needed to make the story work, so fans would have to accept these without explanation: FTL drives and artificial gravity. If you can just accept those two, then the only other physics problem is lighting and sound in space. Initially they tried true physics sounds, watching explosions but not hearing anything, but they decided that this doesn't work on TV, so they compromised and just muffled sounds in space. In a few later episodes where they fly ships in planetary atmospheres, you can hear the ships much more loudly and clearly there.
If you had started with the miniseries, which is the correct order both chronologically and in release order, you would have seen discussion of how precise the calculations need to be for FTL jumps. They never show it on camera in this episode (people doing complicated math is usually boring to watch), but that's understood to be part of why it is so complicated to jump every 33 minutes: complex and high precision math has to be done by very tired people for each jump.
The idea of this episode is that even for people who are not actively working, being in a ship which does an FTL jump would still wake you up. No one is going to be able to sleep for more than 33 consecutive minutes here.
A much later (season 4) episode will mention time dilation, and how it affected an older ship that did not have FTL technology. Since FTL itself is fictional, there is no "wrong" way to portray time dilation's effect (or lack thereof) on FTL jumps.
BSG - Best TV in well over a decade. Watch it all!!!
If you think 33 was the 1st episode, you MISSED 2 huge episodes already. 🤦♂🤦♂
No wonder everything is confusing you...
Wait. In her compass analogy, she proposed that you were given a compass and told to head straight North, but you could only check your compass every mile to correct your direction. She then said that if you were traveling at a slow walk, you'd be more accurate than at a run, because you wouldn't deviate as much. That's not true. Your speed is irrelevant, since you're checking the compass every mile, not every minute, hour, etc.
I also love the beginning - 'FTL travel is definitely fiction, because you can't travel faster than light.', (followed by), 'But there may be some way to do it we don't understand yet.'. How many things have been deemed impossible only to be achieved later? The best way to say it is, "Given our current understanding of physics, we don't think it's possible.". Not to mention that the FTL drives in the show were more 'jump' drives (not accelerating past light speeds, but more 'folding space'), and there would be no time dilation (or, if there were, their time estimates would account for that, since this is tech they all grew up with).
I like Dr. Becky, but it irritates me when scientists made definitive statements about things, while grudgingly admitting that our understanding of how things work is deeply flawed. It gives all the deniers a big foothold to dispute any real progress in our quest to understand the mysteries of the Universe...
@RJM1972 But you can still only check the compass every mile, so going slow offers no advantage. You're probably more likely to deviate going slow, because you have more time to make mistakes, which then compound.
At any rate, the analogy doesn't work because the travel is instantaneous, rather than just 'traveling fast'.
It further falls apart when you learn (later in the show) that there are Cylon spies on board (possibly feeding the Cylon Fleet new coordinates - I admit, I don't remember that detail for sure, since it was 20 years ago)...
In the mini series or series 0 you can see one of the minor protagonists sitting on toolbox as they enter the jump and she says I really hate this part. So its clearly setting the in universe distortion for moving between 2 points.
It also talks about 'beyond the red line' which where the safety limits for normal jumps were, about 30 ly or so. This is lead into the series 1 episode you are watching. Not all the ships made that first jump, so setting the dark pace for 33.
Original battlescared oklatica was within five years of t o, s, so they were required to create alternate versions of all the swear words. Those alternate versions were already in universe, lore of the fandom when they did the reboot
I remember watching reruns of the original BSG as a child. I’m so glad someone revisited the story. Dr. Becky, thanks for the reaction video! It was interesting to see what you picked out as ludicrous and your explanations for feeling that way.
I'd also recommend you look at the spaceflight sequences in Babylon 5 (1994-1999) and in Space: Above and Beyond (1995-1996). They tried to depict Newtonian physics in spaceflight in greater detail than most 1990s space-based science fiction series. And Star Trek: The Next Generation also had an early 1990s episode called "Booby Trap", where orbital mechanics and the Enterprise pulling a more grounded slingshot manoeuvre is a key part of that episode's plot.
I flew in the USAF in a variety of fighters. The sophistication of the navigation systems continually advanced. While the speeds were not near that of C, they were significant. For example my speed on a routine bases was 10nm a minute and could easily be double or more of that. When referencing ground navigation where straight lines were rare, I constantly would be updating my position despite navigation systems such as GPS, INS, and radar. If in an air to air situation where the adversary would be at similar velocity to mine navigation precision would be exponentially more complex. All that being said we still did it quiet effectively. My point is that humanity, Cylons are a part of humanity, would find a way to adjust navigationally to the velocity of C and FTL.