My girlfriend and I gave each other a gift from us to us over the holidays: the gift of Galactica. So we've been watching it episode after episode and I was stunned by how much there were bioconservative elements involved. Battleship First off the Galactica itself, an old ship that as one character said: "Comes from a time where we looked to the past for security." So the Galactica itself is very very analog for such an advanced warship. Still has good old hatches, no on-board networks and built with ridiculous amounts of armor and pressure doors, much more submarine than aircraft carrier. In this way this "retro-chic" aspects reminds me a lot of how a Jovian Battleship could be like in a Post Fall era. The Jovians would be generally distrustful large networks because of the possibility of virus outbreaks. The ships would also be very sturdy and easy to repair. In fact pretty much a brick in space made to stay up and shoot things down. Drones, autonomous cruise missiles and other remotes could easily act as a Battleship's teeth. Tactics Speaking of the Jovian's hardware also makes me think tactics. As in the episode "Resurrection Ship" the first thing a Jovian force would try to identify hit as hard as it could would be re-sleeving and egocasting facilities. That would actually go a LONG way towards evening out the odds. After re-sleeving facilities are down the Transhumans lose their edge, their resurrection, in a way similar to how the Cylons are much more careful after their re-sleeving ship, gets taken down. In a way thinking along the re-sleeving infrastructure the transhumans are actually much more vulnerable because their backups are in a secure location well shielded but you have entire cities and habitat backups that are also intregrated in the re-sleeving facilities. Once that infrastructure is removed transhuman final death is possible. Feelings towards transhumans Another way that the Characters on Galactica are similar to bioconcervatives is that fact that since they believe mostly in souls any emotions or humanity displayed by Transhumans are could be instantly seen as fake. "You may think your human but you are a computer program that thinks it has emotions." This kind of thinking may lead bioconcervatives to be comfortable with having no mercy or compassion for transhumans in a way similar to the humans having no mercy or compassion towards cylons. For this example I'm brought back to the cylon prisoner aboard the Battlestar Pegasus that has been mistreated, raped, abused and generally used as a form of entertainment. Once humans can remove personhood from another it leaves the door wide open for a host of unthinkable acts that can be enacted on the non-person. This thinking pattern can leave options open that would make any normally ethical individual blanch. Epiteth Now the only thing that bioconservatives need is a "Toaster" equivalent. A derogatory name to makes the transhumans not as individuals but as a block of contemtuous nonhuman creatures that oput them on equal ground as exhumans... So any ideas? The idea I had was to that the bioconservatives could call the Transhumans, Tango (or Tangos for plural). In a way similar to the Viet Cong that were named Victor Charlie (Charlie for short) according to the Nato sound alphabet the Tango could be short for T for transhuman but it also has the grim designation in the military as the T being also short for Target. So with Tango you have a military diminutive For T and the designation of Transhumans as well Targets. "Get the fuck out of my face Tango!" Just saying that reminds the bioconcervative that not only is he talking to something dirty and unhuman but that he is also talking to a target, not a person, thus it becomes a self reinforcing meme. Thoughts?