Kobol - Original Series

Original Series

As depicted in the original Battlestar Galactica series (1978–79), particularly the series episode "Lost Planet of the Gods", Kobol orbits an irregular variable star, and its encompassing system of planets lies immediately adjacent to a "magnetic void". The people of Kobol developed space-faring technology, and within the story it is suggested that their population likely reached the limits inherent in occupying a single planet, and, coupled with other disasters or factors (such as the star around which Kobol revolves), motivated humans to leave the planet. Eden was the name of a city on the planet, and, according to Commander Adama (Lorne Greene), was "the first to fall" to some unknown cataclysm.

In scenes that were filmed, but deleted from the final broadcast of the episodes, Captain Apollo explains that in its final days, Kobol was stricken with terrible overpopulation and waste. The surface and atmosphere of the planet were in fact so polluted that only the absolute strongest of creatures could still survive. After the human inhabitants of Kobol fled the planet and founded the colonies, they deliberately destroyed all of their technology and spacecraft; it took several centuries to rebuild even the most primitive ships for exploring the stars. The scene where this dialogue takes place was filmed for the episode "Lost Planet of the Gods", but only appears onscreen in the expanded telemovie version (it was edited out of the original airing).

Also unexplained is the culture of then-Kobolian society and its division into thirteen distinct tribal cultures. Twelve of these groups traveled through the magnetic void and eventually settled a group of habitable planets in a common stellar system. These settlements became the colonies depicted in the series, known collectively as the Twelve Colonies of Man. For some unexplained reason, the thirteenth tribe presumably traveled a greater distance and in another direction, settling on Earth. At the time the original series began, there had been no contact between the thirteenth tribe and the Twelve Colonies. As the centuries pass, the people of the Twelve Colonies generally considered the existence of Earth and the thirteenth tribe a myth.

Kobol is rediscovered in the aforementioned "Lost Planet of the Gods", which depicts at least part of the planet as being a desert, with ruins similar (or possibly identical) to the Egyptian Pyramids of Giza; parts of the episode were filmed on location at Giza.