I’ve figured out the real way that the Battlestar Galactica reboot ended (versus the Hollywood version we saw on TV). The real BSG story was just too dang sad. After all they’d been through, the fleet (and not just the leader) was dying. They arrived at Earth during the last ice age. They’d already taken major losses, only to discover that a combination of toxins in Earth’s food, new diseases, and a slightly different biochemistry meant that they wouldn’t survive more than a generation on this new world. At the end of their resources, they chose to stay anyway to help the local humans, who were experiencing a population bottleneck. The fleet arranged for the destruction of their advanced technology not because they didn’t want to use it anymore, but because they couldn’t allow such technology to fall into the hands of a bunch of hunter-gatherers, and there wasn’t enough time to uplift them to a technological civilization. If they held on to the tech for too long as their numbers dwindled, the locals would overwhelm them and take it. But before the fleet destroyed their tech, they took measures to decrease the albedo of the ice caps to end the ice age sooner. And they had another plan–they’d give these hunter-gatherers the knowledge of agriculture.

Only one person was biochemically equipped to survive indefinitely on this new world–the human/Cylon hybrid named Hera. It was she who continued the project of the spread agricultural knowledge among the local humans after the rest of the fleet was dead. With her unique genome, she may have lived for hundreds of years (she may be alive still). She told stories about the fleet that had brought her to this new world; if she was capable of having children with the locals, she gave them the names she remembered in the fleet’s honor (Adama, Apollo, etc.). Besides inspiring the obvious goddess’s name, she also became the inspiration for Demeter and the other goddesses of agriculture. But she never forgot what she’d lost.

The war with the Cylons became the revolt of the Anunnaki, among other stories