spaceship? How does Galactica’s faster-than-light travel work? And what the frak was up with the mitochondrial Eve thing?

To find out, Wired.com spoke with Patrick Di Justo, Wired magazine contributing editor and co-author of the new book, The Science of Battlestar Galactica. Together with the show’s science advisor, NASA scientist Kevin Grazier, Di Justo jumps beyond the red line to delve into the science behind the story — and discovers that some things lie beyond what science can reach.

Spoiler alert: Major plot points ahead.

Wired.com: What was the purpose of this book?

Patrick Di Justo: Battlestar Galactica has been called “a science fiction show without the science.” There are some episodes of Galactica that are almost like The West Wing, they dealt more with politics…. They never really highlighted the science in the show unless it drove the plot. That was very good from a dramatic point of view, but it did leave a lot of science unexplored and unexplained in the show.

So we thought, hey, no one’s really building up the science in the show, and it’s there. Why don’t we do it?

Wired.com: So in the show’s philosophy, who wins in the science-versus-drama battle?

Di Justo: There’s actually a quote in the book, where it says, “Drama wins every time.” That’s essentially it. It’s not that they completely threw science out the airlock. It’s just that there would be times when they wouldn’t mention or play up the science.

Wired.com: Can you give an example?

DiJusto: Very basically, how could Cylons pass medical tests? They never explained that, never went into any detail about it. It was just accepted that Cylons could be so wonderfully indistinguishable that it would take a demented genius like Gaius Baltar to build a special type of machine that could differentiate the two. You wouldn’t tell them apart from a standard medical test. And the show never explains how that works, how that happens — it just happens.

Same thing with the FTL drive. They never explain how it happens, it’s just spin up the drives and whoosh — off you go.

Wired.com: It seems like sometimes the physics of how the FTL drive works changes to fit what would be the most dramatic thing.

Di Justo: In the book, we explain that they never really locked down how the FTL drive worked, until they actually needed the details for a plot point. As long as you could reasonably say, okay, let’s FTL jump out of here, that’s all you needed to know — until an aspect of the drama required you need to know how it works.

Wired.com: People have raised parallels between Battlestar Galactica and our own world, and not just in the way the final episode plays out. Can you talk a bit about that?

Di Justo: Think about what the mood in this country was like in 2003. We were still scared from the Sept. 11 attacks. We had this problem of, who can you trust? People were seeing terrorists under every bridge, it seemed.

And here you had a science fiction property from nearly 25 years before that covered almost all of those fears and feelings that we were having. So the show, it did what I believe science fiction is supposed to do. It takes us to the future, out in space. It takes us away from our current day, so that we can turn around and look at ourselves through a different lens.

Wired.com: What kind of messages or cautionary tales do we get from the treatment of these questions in Battlestar?

Di Justo: One of the show’s executive producers, David Eick, said, “We’re not doing our jobs if, at least once a week, the viewer doesn’t ask. ‘Am I rooting for the wrong team?’”

Here, at least in America in 2003 when the show first came on, so many people were insisting that they knew this was right, these people were evil, we are the right people.

Then this show came along, which paralleled or mirrored that. You’ve got these Colonials who we’re sure are right, and the Cylons who we’re sure are evil and bad. But over the course of the first couple of seasons, sometimes maybe the Colonials aren’t right all the time. Sometimes maybe the Cylons aren’t evil all the time. Eventually you get to the point where the Colonials are doing suicide bombings against the Cylons. Here we are saying suicide bombing is just plain-out bad, and before you know it the good guys are doing it. Are they still the good guys?

My opinion is, if you had done that on American television with Americans and Muslim terrorists, and if you had blurred the line between the two, my God, the show would have been off the air before the episode had ended.

Yet by putting it in outer space, by making the bad guys manufactured robots, you could tell that same story, you could blur those lines. But you’re not doing it in such an obvious way that would make people get their defenses up. That’s what science fiction has been doing since the very, very beginning.

Wired.com: What are some other parallels and differences between Colonials, Cylons and Earth humans?

Di Justo: Well, we talked about blood type at Comic Con in New York. Another key thing is, in the episode “A Measure of Salvation,” a subgroup of Cylons come across an old beacon that happens to be contaminated with lymphocytic encephalitis. They’re sickened, they’re on the verge of death. If they’re not helped soon, they’re all going to die.

Doctor Cottle explains that the Colonials are immune to this disease. They’re just absolutely fine, while the Cylons are dying.

That sounds really cool, but when you start to look into it, we, the people on the planet Earth in 2010, we are not immune to lymphocytic encephalitis. We get sick. Sometimes if we’re not careful, we die.

Right there in the third season, we did not know how the show was going to end. But we got a really strong clue that Colonials are one type of people, Cylons are another type of people, and we humans really do seem to be halfway between both of them. We do seem to be a link, somehow, between them. And eventually at the end of the series we found out that we are the descendants of both groups.

Wired.com: What about Cylon neural structure? Are there brain differences between Cylons and humans?

Di Justo: At the very beginning, in the miniseries, where Commander Adama says that the radiation on Ragnar is affecting the Cylon’s silica pathways to the brain: For myself, I was thinking of dark silicon, like the stuff a CPU is made out of.

Until Dr. Grazier pointed out that a fiber-optic cable is also a silica pathway. Instead of dark silica, like a CPU, what is more likely is that they have fiber optics jacking up their neural systems. Which is how, when you see one of the Number Eight Cylons jam a fiber-optic cable into her arm and reprogram a computer, that’s how that happens. They have fiber-optic nerves.

Wired.com: And that lets them interface with any computer like a USB?

Di Justo: That’s what we’re seeing, yeah.

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Authors: Lisa Grossman

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