Continuing
my critique of sci-fi shows, I’ve gone back to Battlestar Galactica, the reboot. The two-part arc of how the Galactica
loses and regains its water is what I’m looking at here. In the first episode,
“Water” a bomb blows one of the water tanks, spilling the water into space.
Okay,
what’s the problem here? It would blow into space and would freeze into ice,
just like all of the ices that drift around in the Kuiper belt, comets, on
asteroids, etc. All Galactica needs to do is scoop it all back up. It’s not
like it disappeared. This shouldn’t be a challenge to the fleet. But maybe they
just don’t have the equipment to do that. I would think on a ship that is
purported to be so good at reclaiming water, that they don’t have the equipment
to scoop up some ice. But let’s just say they don’t (even though they really
should).
The second
half of this arc is in “Bastille Day” where they have found the water. The
planet has an underground ocean, but it’s 13% sodium chloride, which Col. Tigh
is ticked off about. Everyone knows that people can’t drink salt water! But in
the previous episode Galactica has the ability to reclaim 90% of the water,
purifying it. If it can filter out waste products from urine and excretion,
then why can’t it desalinate? And it’s not like they don’t need salt, anyway. This
should be a no-brainer.
This makes
no sense!
Now, I
didn’t notice any of this as I was watching the show. I was fine with the
pretense of the plot point at the time, but now it’s glaring. I’ve done my
research. I’ve looked into these ideas for my own sci-fi book, and now I’m
pretty annoyed that such simple problems plagued a culture that has created
artificial intelligence, artificial gravity, and can move faster-than-light.