A bit ragged, since it was from own notes, but here it is. Note this specifically lets people know that therebe no ship of lightsThe transcendent species in the Battlestar Galactica universe dated from only a few tens or hundred thousand years for the ‘youngest’ members to elder members that actually predated the current universe. Ancient and in many respects incomprehensible to younger species, they existed on their own plane with interests that the greatest human genius could no more comprehend than an ant could comprehend a battlestar. It should be noted that any interactions between the transcendent species and humanity (or cylons) were by ‘probes’ for lack of a better word, designed specifically to be able to meaningfully work with the mayfly species. No human has ever met a true member of these ascended societies.However, as they sprang from the mayfly species, they did have some interest in seeing that at least some of them would rise to join them, new seeds and new potentialities. It is important to note that when considering how many sapient species exist, it is better to ask: how many galaxies per species rather than how many species in a galaxy. Intelligent life is tremendously rare and life that survives the long crawl to the stars even rarer still.For the most part the transcendent species are content to wait. They have, literally, more time than exists in the current universe and attempts to accelerate the process sometimes go poorly.But sometimes, younger members of these groupings, beings that have only been transcendent for a few hundred thousand years, attempt to speed up the process.As happened in the Milky Way Galaxy.150,000 years ago, a newly transcendent grouping noted the primitive primates of earth and realized that they were sapient…but a single world was so dangerous. Warding them from all danger would both be obvious to any later scientific society, and might weaken them. Rather, they choose to seed them in several widely separated parts of the galaxy, as well as a few other regions in other galaxies. The rest of society watched, and noted that there appeared to be a number of success stories. One world in particular seemed to be moving along quite rapidly, and less than 100,000 years ago, also transcended—a notable, if not unique experience.But with youth comes a desire to hurry things along, and some representatives of the species actually incarnated, sending probes down to become known as the Lords of Kobol, bringing representatives to a new world, hopefully to speed up the process. They assumed they had managed to prevent their fellows from learning of their actions, but in truth, the elder members of society determined to let the lesson play out.And it did. Direct contact with transhuman beings, even those who had limited their powers, warped the proto-colonial society. The events recorded in the Colonial histories were not so much the Lords making their plans, but them trying to recover some benefit from the wreckage of what had seemed to be a good idea— but they were at once too old to understand their younger brothers, and tooto understand the wisdom of the ancient beings they had joined. The scattering from Kobol was an attempt to retrieve the disaster rather than a punishment.Today, any contact is handled by the elder members of the transcendent societies and is very limited and restricted to trying to mitigate the impact of those earlier and unwise actions. The “Lords of Kobol” have no more contact with their children, not due to any punishment by their fellows, but due to their awareness of just how much they have to learn and how badly they damaged the Colonials. Thereason the higher races continue to observe is the fact that FTL drives are normally not developed until far later in a species’ development, requiring technologies and theories that are very hard to develop before the fact. But that is not the case with Colonial society. Fortunately, the technology they have obtained remains very crude compared to later FTL methods and these new humans will remain strictly local in their impact, which is important given the current development of another, non-human species in what earth knows as the Andromeda galaxy…What contact there is very carefully measured. The “Baltars” and “Sixes” who have popped up in people’s minds do not give orders, nor do they give firm suggestions. Their goal is to try and convince a few individuals to, and hopefully mitigate the damage done by their overly enthusiastic juniors.But there is interest— for the first time in literally millions of years,sapient species now occupy the same time and space and the results are likely to be… unusual.