Caprica - First Impressions

Caprica

I'd been looking forward to watching this series since I completed my second straight through viewing of Battle Star Gallactica. I was really interested in the origins of the Cylons, how they came about... what stupid mistakes did humanity make?

What I'm hoping to learn is "How did this...

Now I must confess, I've only watched the pilot so far, but I've got a sneaking suspicion that this series will either be one I absolutely love or abjectly hate. The pilot, "Pilot" (come on, you could have given it a subtitle - 'Choices' or 'Avatar' or something), has already set the ground work. All the pieces are there for me to really enjoy... but I have this innate fear that they will not be put together correctly.

deserve to become this?"

TV does that a lot. Starts with a great idea and fails.

Without giving too much away, since there may be others out there like me who are sometimes slow to watch certain programs, I'll lay out the pieces that are going to make this interesting.

The first piece is a biggie, Ethics (morals). Since this is a BSG precursor we can expect this ethical issue to arise in the form of Religion. And it has. The issues brought up in just the first episode are quite poignant, and I'm waiting to see how they are going to be used, going to unfold.

The next one is, Epistemology. Knowledge. How do we know a thing? What are our grounds for accepting it? This is going to be quite interesting in the series. This will link with the prior issue of Ethics when discussing such things as; 'What is normal/natural?' 'What constitutes life?' 'Abomination or not?'

And lastly, Cybernetics. I love good solid sci-fi. Robots are cool, what can I say? This is the realm of hard sci-fi. The more accurate they portray robots the more I will like the show. It will help though if they actually do research.

I have less storage memory than an old 486.

Yes, Caprica begins by starting us off with a stunning bit of sci-ignorance. They assert that the human brain can only hold 300mb of data. The Human Brain actually holds between 1tb and 2.5pb (that's petabytes) with most estimates between 10tb and 1000tb.1 Even assuming the estimates are being very generous, and we're at the bottom of the scale, 1tb is good for a mass of squishy jelly. 300mb is laughable... its so bad that I'm shocked we've not heard the old chestnut that 'the average person only uses 10% of their brain.' Which is of course terribly terribly wrong. Actively you use roughly 30% at once, and if you are delving into your memory you can use upwards of 70% at once (as memory activates all across the brain with ocular and auditory sensation, etc). 

So we'll see where this goes. This could be very good, this also has the potential to be very bad...