| abstract
| - Nearly 10,000 years ago, an extradimensional race called the "Beings of Light" discovered humanity and recognized the potential of the human species. A group of Beings of Light transplanted a large number of humans to another planet tens of thousands of light-years away and 'civilized' them. Upon gaining a new language, the humans named their new home planet "Kobol" and began calling the Beings of Light, the "Lords of Kobol." They developed an entire religion around these Lords of Kobol. Over time, the humans on Kobol also developed a civilization with all the amenities of an advanced society while the humans on Earth remained in the Stone Age. As the people of Kobol developed high levels of technology, they eventually developed a space-folding technology that enables space ships to make instantaneous "jumps" across vast distances in space. However, they became a wasteful people, and didn't care for their planet. Waste piled up, the air and seas became polluted, and many species of animals died out. Simultaneously, the star that Kobol orbits began showing the early stages of imminent destruction. The end result was that all life on the planet would be doomed by either humanity or nature's hands. However, the people of Kobol united to act before it was too late for them. They built great space arks to transport the majority of their population to other worlds, and they set out across the galaxy in search of a new home. At some point, explorers found Earth (and gave it that name). However, they were unaware it was their original homeworld, falsely believing the presence of humans of both Earth and Kobol to be the result of parallel evolution. Some time later, other explorers found a system which had twelve habitable planets circling three stars, and it was here that twelve of Kobol's tribes settled, and these worlds were to become the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. The worlds were Aerelon, Aquaria, Canceron, Caprica, Gemenon, Leonis, Libris, Picon, Sagittaron, Scorpia, Tauron and Virgon. Kobol was ruled by thirteen tribes, but one tribe didn't follow the other twelve. Instead, it left Kobol before the other tribes and settled on Earth. The members of this Thirteenth Tribe were the forefathers of the ancient Egyptians, the Toltecs, and the Mayans. They were also the architects of the early Greek and Roman civilizations. As for the other twelve tribes; once they landed on the twelve colonies, anger and confusion caused conflict and further rifts between the twelve tribes. The "Colonials" neglected, even rejected their past and their history and found ways to separate themselves even further than than come together as one. Civil Wars flared, and the colonists entered a dark age which stalled and in some cases even reversed much of their once proud culture and society. This dark age lasted for nearly one thousand years, and much knowledge was lost. The very infrastructure of the Colonial society was destroyed, and all efforts were stagnated - from agriculture and industry to research and rediscovery. Kobol became a mere legend and a myth as most elements of its civilization were lost. However, the Beings of Light had given their ancestors a capacity for genetic memory. This genetic memory does not take the form of passing on personal memories, but of an unconscious knowledge of certain invented concepts and ideas such as technology, language, engineering and even fashion and music along with various other aesthetic cultural aspects. Over a period of several thousand years, all the technological and cultural aspects from Kobol completely reconstituted within the Twelve Colonies because the genetic memory of these concepts and ideas 'leaked' into the subconscious minds of various people who gradually and collectively reinvented these aspects of Kobol society. At long last, the Twelve Colonies of Kobol began to rebuild their own heritage. Open warfare and destruction waned, but that did not mark the end of political conflict. The Twelve Colonies developed their own unique identities. Worlds rich in natural resources pulled ahead, developing at a faster rate than those with less to seize positions of cultural and political prominence and power, becoming leaders within the system. Peace brought progress however, and travel between the twelve worlds became more common and easier once more. Industry and education began to take the center stage, and the Colonies traded resources, products and services amongst one another. The official currency of the Twelve Colonies, the cubit, was introduced and a common measure of value further helped to stabilize colonial economies throughout the system. While this was happening, various societal ideas, concepts, and cultural aspects of Kobol's civilization were appearing on Earth as a result of genetic memory passed on from the Thirteenth Tribe. Although they appeared only in rudimentary, modified and even fragmented forms, eventually those fragments coalesced into complete reconstitution of Kobolian aspects. For instance, the Kobolian language eventually reconstituted as the "English" language. The English language did not suddenly appear, but instead evolved through centuries of modifications along with amalgamations from numerous other languages. It was all the result of the genetic memory of the language 'leaking' into the subconscious minds of people who unconsciously directed the language toward a linguistic endpoint that is an exact replication of the dominant language of Kobol (and hence also of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol). Far away amongst the stars, the Colonial civilization continued to progress at a rapid pace. Upon the reinvention of "jump drive", the Colonies turned their attention to the exploration of space. Observatories were built to explore the edge of space around them. Listening stations were next, and the colonies pointed them towards the heavens to see if there was anyone out there .. but the heavens were silent and cold. Fleets of ships were built, and for a time it appeared as if the Twelve Colonies had at last achieved a total peace with one another. Unfortunately, this was not to be. The next age of darkness came up on the Colonies slowly. It began with two events which at first glance appeared to be unrelated. First was the gradual breakdown of peace, old prejudices and new arguments clouded the political landscape of the day. No single one event can be identified as the trigger. The poor colonies wanted more from the rich. Smaller worlds wanted space on the larger worlds. Debates over prices and commodities rose and fell. Practical disputes gave way to personal biases and the return of old hatreds. The second wave of civil war was far more subdued than the first. Fighting was mostly restricted to border moons and backwater parts of the core worlds. That way, it could not interfere directly with the comfortable daily lives of the wealthy and influential. During this time, the cybernetic living organism nodes (aka "Cylons") were created. Composed of strands of synthetic brain matter encased in mechanical bodies, the Cylons began as useful, and then indispensable, robotic workers. They served the Colonials in the mines, on the ocean floor, and the cold vacuum of space, working in places where humans no longer wished to go. Eventually, they became soldiers, fighting in wars and border conflicts between the Colonies. The Cylons were the most perfect of man's war machines, intelligent and deadly, capable of logic, reason, and learning. And they were utterly without conscience. Killing, to the Cylons, was simply one of the functions for which they had been superbly designed. Under the influence of a malevolent Being of Light known as Count Iblis, the Cylons eventually revolted and decided to kill their human masters. They began an assault on humankind with one purpose in mind - the total and absolute extermination of their creators. For ten long and bloody years, humanity fought -- not just for freedom, but for survival. The Twelve Colonies of Kobol, facing a common, implacable foe, at last came together and joined as one. Many fought, and many died, in the effort to destroy the mechanized race that humanity itself had conceived and brought into being. Through valiant fighting and with the mobilization of every available resource throughout the human sphere, the Cylon "centurions" and "raiders" were gradually driven from the immediate part of space occupied by humanity. In the end, an armistice was declared. Humanity would live in peace, while the Cylons left to find another world to call their own. No one knew the location of the cylon world. But to maintain the peace, a remote space station was built on the outskirts of the Colonial system, to be a place where cylon and human would meet and maintain diplomatic relations. Once a year, every year, the Colonials sent an officer for the scheduled meeting. After the first year, the Cylons sent no one. No one saw or heard from the Cylons for forty years. During their four decades of isolation, with Iblis's help, the Cylons developed vat-grown bioengineered human bodies as replacements for their mechanical ones. Grown from constructed synthetic DNA, these humanoid Cylons are still purely artificial, yet fully organic. Twelve humanoid Cylon model lines were created, each with a personality archetype considered one of twelve human behaviors and traits. A significant aspect that was engineered into the humanoid Cylons as well as the new semi-sentient Cylon raider upgrade was that upon "death" their digital consciousness is externally transmitted and downloaded into another Cylon brain of the same model line. This "resurrection" is limited by distance, signal integrity, and proximity to a "resurrection ship." The humanoid Cylons also revised the original Cylon robotic soldier, the sentient Cylon centurion, into a more agile and dangerous version. Unlike the original version, however, the new centurion is not sentient by design, as the humanoid Cylons wanted to prevent these updated creations from forming an intra-Cylon uprising that mirrored their war with humanity. These new Cylons never stopped hating humanity. For them, the war never ended. It had simply evolved as they had evolved. The Cylons, realizing that the Colonial Fleet would likely be too strong to engage in a direct military action, devised an elaborate plan to infiltrate the Colonial ships' operating system software, leaving a backdoor that could be exploited to disable any Colonial ship with its own programming. The Cylons softened up the Twelve Colonies for attack by infiltrating their military and civilian society with numerous copies of the humanoid Cylons. One such copy seduced the brilliant Dr. Gaius Baltar, fooling him into contract work that gave her access to the Colonial Defense Mainframe. Her work compromised Baltar's Command Navigation Program, writing in the planned programmer backdoors. The plan was successful; the Colonial Fleet was destroyed, the Colonies was subjected to nuclear bombardment, and Colonial civilization was all but wiped out in a matter of hours, except for a space-dwelling caravan of approximately 50,000 humans that managed to escape the Cylon onslaught. Led by the battlestar Galactica under the command of Commander William Adama and President Laura Roslin, this rag-tag fleet is on a search for Earth, which they believe will be a new home for them. The Cylons continue to pursue the remnants of the Colonies, believing that humans will always seek vengeance against them. Meanwhile on Earth, because of genetic memory passed on from the Thirteenth Tribe, virtually every cultural aspect of Kobol civilization has reemerged: language, names, fashion, engineering, architecture, furniture, music, art, cuisine, household appliances, television, automobiles, federalized government, judicial systems, labor unions, military protocols, etc. Countries such as the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom collectively form a near perfect replication of Kobol society and therefore a near perfect duplicate of Colonial society - just without advanced technology such as jump drive and sentient machines. The people of Earth live in complete ignorance to the fact that there are brothers of man who now fight to survive beyond the heavens.
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