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What if...
...the Battlestar Galactica story were true, and our ancestors really did come to Earth out of deep space?
It would mean growing up in a world where human beings are fundamentally different from every other species of life on the planet.
Darwin's theory, if it came to be known at all, would be a mere curiosity applicable only to lower life forms; humanity would stand apart from it as uniquely favored beings guided by a beneficent God to their earthly Eden out of interstellar darkness and chaos.
Ours would be a profoundly conservative society, part of a Divinely ordained universal order, presided over by an emperor descended from a legendary hero-ancestor, with each person conforming to his or her prescribed role. At best, it might come to resemble pre-1945 Japan; but more likely, I think, we'd be stuck in permanent feudalism, an endless Dark Age punctuated only by blights, plagues, floods, and other disasters, for faith must surely so completely displace doubt in such a world that science and technology, the engines of progress, would be severely retarded.
In the end, I think, a world of faith is a world enslaved. Doubt is the mother of knowledge and of liberty.
It would mean growing up in a world where human beings are fundamentally different from every other species of life on the planet.
Darwin's theory, if it came to be known at all, would be a mere curiosity applicable only to lower life forms; humanity would stand apart from it as uniquely favored beings guided by a beneficent God to their earthly Eden out of interstellar darkness and chaos.
Ours would be a profoundly conservative society, part of a Divinely ordained universal order, presided over by an emperor descended from a legendary hero-ancestor, with each person conforming to his or her prescribed role. At best, it might come to resemble pre-1945 Japan; but more likely, I think, we'd be stuck in permanent feudalism, an endless Dark Age punctuated only by blights, plagues, floods, and other disasters, for faith must surely so completely displace doubt in such a world that science and technology, the engines of progress, would be severely retarded.
In the end, I think, a world of faith is a world enslaved. Doubt is the mother of knowledge and of liberty.
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The problem with all imagined universes is that they all have imperfections and lapses that make them impossible. Technologies are at once too reflective of the limitations of the world in which they are imagined, while at the same time violating laws of physics; characters change their natures improbably as demanded by plot; and there is never enough of the universe described to make it feel complete.
There's also the whole religious element of Galactica, but that's a topic for another time.