BattleStar Galactica:Season 3.0--11/10/06--Arc 6

[LightPhoenix]

Of course, we know 1) is almost true, because otherwise building a 'Cylon detector' would be a trivial exercise, and Hera wouldn't exist without the help of a team of genetic engineers and cyberneticists.

Whatever the people on Galactica and the Cylon basestars claim, the 'skinjob' Cylons are essentially human (or certainly closer to humans than anything else).

Point 1 is false because Cylons didn't get sick, according to various people in the series. They very much do have Human DNA (Caprica alludes to this last episode, I believe, about a common gene pool), and various almost-human components (ie RBCs without markers). Since they don't get sick, the only explanation is that they have perfect immune systems. Which was point 2.

I'm beginning to suspect (based on people here and elsewhere) that the reason I have such a problem with the bioweapon isn't that it was truly bad, but because I have too much knowledge on the subject, and that makes it very difficult to suspend disbelief.

 

[Fast Learner]

But I either believe in preserving human life, or I don't. Given that I do believe in preserving human life as much as possible, if faced with an external threat dedicated to wiping out humanity, then I'd have to support a decision in favour of using methods we previously questioned to end the threat, if such a means became available. I couldn't in good conscious not use those tools at hand to resolve the situation.

This and your later example about "do you eat every day" both don't work for me because you're making it black and white: either you're for us or you're not.

If you were starving to death, would you steal the food from two starving children in order to survive, if you knew they'd starve instead? You have to ask, in my opinion, "at what cost my survival?"

If my daughter was about to be hit by a car and I could save her, but I know that I'd be hit and killed instead, her survival trumps mine, pure and simple. A kid that I don't know? I hope that I would take that risk, but I'm not certain. A school bus full of 'em? Without hesitation.

My survival does not trump all circumstances, and the same is true of the survival of my species. From what I've seen, the Cylons are not irredeemably evil, they are simply incredibly immature and confused. You can see their adolescent idiocy work itself out again and again. If I'd judged my daughter's fitness to survive based on some of the crap she pulled in early high school, she'd have been voted off the island ages ago, but today she's an amazing human being who helps the needy and is incredibly loving.

Survival is not an automatic trump card, at least not from where I stand.

 

[DonTadow]

The cylons began as machines, as just robots. Hence the epithet "toasters" to describe them. However, now Cylons are much more advanced. They are apparently using cloned and genetically engineered bodies that are so close to human that a detailed medical examination cannot tell the difference, only a very specialized test or exposure to high levels of radiation for hours. Sleeper agents can even think they are human, and pass for being human for years in the human population. They have their own religion, their own culture. They can even sexually reproduce with humans.

That's not just a "machine", when members of the fleet start to wonder if they could be sleeper agents and not know it, your enemy is not just a machine.

It's one of the oldest tactics in warfare, to dehumanize your enemy, to make them seem less human or less civilized than you, so you can feel a lot better about killing them. It's been going on for millennia, and it still goes on today, and it goes on in BSG. It's easier because the original cylons were inhuman, they were just renegade machines out to destroy all humans. Now they've become something more, something beyond normal limits of humanity.

Helo was having a moment of actual morality, it's been a recurring theme of the show, since the miniseries, of what is the real virtue of mankind. As Adama asked at Galactica's decommissioning ceremony, what had humanity done to deserve to exist? If mankind resorts to genocide, how are they any better than the Cylons? Roslin is quite moral. . .with regards to humanity, but she also sees the cylons as inhuman and has no qualms about torturing or throwing them out an airlock. Adama has gained some degree of insight from the year spent above New Caprica with Athena, hence his reluctance to go ahead with the plan, and being willing to drop the matter when Helo apparently makes a stand (perhaps realizing that in his place he may well would have done much the same).

Individual cylons apparently do have some degree of free will, hence Athena, seen as a traitor by her kind, and Caprica-Six, a huge walking scandal of a human-sympathizer among her kind. New Caprica was a huge failure as an attempt at peace, because the Cylons understand humanity very poorly, just like apparently the humans understand the Cylons very poorly.

I dont care what version of windows they are running, they are still machines. Yes they walk, talk and slice bread, their origins are from the modern day vaccuum cleaner. Humans actually evolved from mammals and/or other living beings. That is the big difference. This is no more genocide than a person running mcafee on their computer .

 

[IcyCool]

Well, if they deserve to be genocid-ed, by the definition of deserve, the genocide-r is justified.

Who's going to do the genocide-ing? The Cylons would be dead, as humanity would have committed genocide on them. Someone new would have to come along and wipe the humans out. And then, of course, those new genocide-ers would no longer deserve to survive, etc., etc. It's a vicious circle, and I'm happy they didn't take that step this time around.

The problem of whether or not one "deserves" to survive is subjective......and whether or not the Cylons deserve to survive, since they're actively pursuing genocide, has no bearing on whether they will.

Correct. Just because that incompetent fool you work with gets promoted doesn't mean he deserved to get promoted. Lot's of people get what they deserve, and lots of people don't.

I guess that's my problem with the situation. I'm firmly against the idea of genocide, but as depicted (apparently) in the show, I don't see that there are many options.

The question is, do you think genocide is humanity's only option?

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I dont care what version of windows they are running, they are still machines. Yes they walk, talk and slice bread, their origins are from the modern day vaccuum cleaner. Humans actually evolved from mammals and/or other living beings. That is the big difference. This is no more genocide than a person running mcafee on their computer .

I don't see why it is neccessarily important for a thing to live or come from a living being?
In fact, we might have evolved from mammals, but if we go even further back, we evolved from molecular strings of carbon and a few other chemicals - that didn't really live until they somehow began to replicate their patterns (or whatever happened "then"). Does that really give us any rights or a moral value?

I don't think so. I think our sentience, our ability to feel emotions, or abilities to think, that is what makes us special and what makes us different from a rock or a machine, and possibly animals. But Cylons also have these features.

 

[ThirdWizard]

I dont care what version of windows they are running, they are still machines. Yes they walk, talk and slice bread, their origins are from the modern day vaccuum cleaner. Humans actually evolved from mammals and/or other living beings. That is the big difference. This is no more genocide than a person running mcafee on their computer .

Your assertion seems to be that organic and/or biological life is the only kind of life possible or that it is inherently "better" than other forms of life. That seems to be an unwinnable argument in a sci-fi context, especially considering the cyber-punkishness of the BSG human-form cylons. Plus, everyone knows that Transformers are alive.

 

[Falkus]

I dont care what version of windows they are running, they are still machines. Yes they walk, talk and slice bread, their origins are from the modern day vaccuum cleaner. Humans actually evolved from mammals and/or other living beings. That is the big difference. This is no more genocide than a person running mcafee on their computer .

They qualify as living beings under the standard definition of the term, so I really don't see what you're talking about.

 

[DonTadow]

They qualify as living beings under the standard definition of the term, so I really don't see what you're talking about.

How?
They're created in a factory unlike every other living being on earth. They "download" into another body (also manufactured) when they are terminated. They may contain more organic material but are still limited by the basic logic thought structure that limits a computer.

Are you saying that when windows oblivion is released, we should grant it the notion of life because we have managed to create them out of human tissue and get them to flush?

 

[drothgery]

I dont care what version of windows they are running, they are still machines. Yes they walk, talk and slice bread, their origins are from the modern day vaccuum cleaner. Humans actually evolved from mammals and/or other living beings. That is the big difference. This is no more genocide than a person running mcafee on their computer .

I'm getting more and more of a feeling that the mechanical exterior of the raiders and centurions is the put-on that the creators of the first Cylons built in to make them less creepy; all of the Cylons are mostly bioengineered constructs, derived mostly from humans. They all bleed, think (there's no indication other than the existance of the Cylons that colonial computer technology can produce sophisticated AI, so I claim they don't have it -- the Cylons have human brains), can catch diseases, and, in the case of the 'skinjob' types, apparently can breed with humans.

I don't think this really affects the moral question at all, though; if the Cylons were just another group of humans and had done what they did (even complete with the whole slave uprising undertones), the Colonials would be pretty justified in trying to wipe them out.

 

[Dingleberry]

Point 1 is false because Cylons didn't get sick, according to various people in the series. They very much do have Human DNA (Caprica alludes to this last episode, I believe, about a common gene pool), and various almost-human components (ie RBCs without markers). Since they don't get sick, the only explanation is that they have perfect immune systems.

Is another option that the immune systems of the "skin-job" cylons were designed to be immune to *current* biological threats, but not to, e.g., a virus that hasn't been seen in the 12 colonies for several thousand years?