Twelve Colonies - Society and Homeworlds - The Outer Colonies

The Outer Colonies

The Outer Colonies are a scattered assortment of a few marginally habitable planets or moons within the double-binary Cyrannus star cluster, which are the site of some human habitation. According to Ron Moore in a blog post, the "Twelve" Colonies are the only human colonies in the system of any significance: they do loosely maintain a few scientific outposts, military bases, or mining outposts on some of the uninhabitable moons or asteroids in the system, but none of them are fully functional or in any way self-sustaining, and few if any have been terraformed. Moreover, even the combined population of all of these "outer colonies" is so low - 1.4 million, compared to the total 28.5 billion population of the star system as a whole - that they have little social or political significance, and are truly more "outposts" than "colonies". Nonetheless the mining resources of several airless rocks, or Tylium mining operations in asteroid fields, are vital enough that different colonies have fought interplanetary wars over them.

Only Troy was mentioned within the 2004 TV series. Espenson and Grazier's 2011 "Map of the Twelve Colonies" goes into some more detail, stating that minor colonies were located on four planets or moons in the star cluster:

  • Minos - a moon of Tauron, located in Helios Alpha, and the largest moon in the entire star cluster. While it lacks an atmosphere, it is the location of several scientific outposts and domed mining colonies. More of an extension of Tauron than a world in its own right, and like Tauron it was fought over by Virgon and Leonis during their old imperial wars.
  • Troy - a small but metal rich planet in Helios Beta, whose material resources were fought over for centuries by nearby Virgon and Leonis. Troy's mining outposts required sealed domes, indicating that it either doesn't have an atmosphere or that it is toxic to humans.
  • Pallas - a Mars-like planet whose atmosphere gradually leaked away into space over millions of years, located in Helios Beta. Today its dry, barren, desert-like surface has an atmosphere that is too thin to breathe, and terraforming efforts have failed. It is nonetheless the site of several domed colonies and a military research station. Although marginally more habitable than Troy, and fought over between Virgon and Leonis as it was, Pallas does not have the rich metal resources of Troy, and thus the planet was not as heavily contested between the two powers as Troy was.
  • Hibernia - a marginally habitable moon of Virgon, settled centuries ago by the Celtans, an ethnic group fiercely opposed to Virgon rule. Along with Virgon it is located in Helios Beta. Although easily the most habitable of the Outer Colonies (the others all require domed habitats), its small population combined with centuries of domination by nearby Virgon have precluded it from ever being considered close to an equal of the main "Twelve Colonies". Administratively, it remains a province of Virgon.

Some of the moons of the gas giants in the star cluster are stated to have atmospheres, but whether these atmospheres are breathable is not clear. Moreover, it is not established if any of these moons were large enough to be inhabitable, atmosphere or not. If that is the case, of the four known "outer colonies", none are located in the Helios Gamma/Helios Delta binary star system, one (Tauron's moon Minos) is located in Helios Alpha, and three (Troy, Pallas, and Virgon's moon Hibernia) are located in Helios Beta.

The exact legal and political status of the inhabitants of the Outer Colonies is not clear, and may have been vague within the fictional universe as well. The Twelve Colonies only shifted to a unified federal government 50 years ago, and before that defined their political allegiances along ethnic lines to each of the "Twelve Tribes" that controlled an entire planet, like Caprica or Virgon. The falsified identity that the Number Eight Cylon on Galactica presented was that she was the child of colonists from Aerilon who were living on Troy (while her cover story was fake, what is relevant is that others thought it was a believable background). it's not clear if miners on marginally habitable planets like Troy would still retain absentee-citizenship with their mother-planet like Troy; its possible that so few colonists were actually born and raised on minor colonies like Troy that they never developed a group or cultural identity, even on worlds like Troy whose resources had been fought over for centuries. Permanent habitation of these minor colonies seems to not have occurred on a large scale. Again the one major exception to this is the mention that the Celtans of Virgon's habitable moon Hibernia actually strove to assert their independence but were forced into submission by Virgon; it is plausible that they strove for equal representation in the new unified federal government.

Read more about this topic:  Twelve Colonies, Society and Homeworlds

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