Cycles of History

I was reading a post by MinutiaeMan over at the The Subspace Cafe and this part really made me start thinking:

"...Then, of course, there's the first hints of ancient prophecies that predicted the destruction of the Colonies and Humanity's search for a new home. On one level, it's easy to dismiss ancient prophecies as too vague and too distant to truly have any direct meaning. Without having direct quotes to work from, it's impossible to determine any useful context or find how accurate the prophecy may truly have been. (Heck, even today, some real-life scholars are debating the possible validity of religious prophecies that are thousands of years old.)"

Read the whole post

It isn't so much that the prophecies might be telling the future... what if they aren't prophecies at all but with the blurring of time they are actually records of the past. That would mean that the whole idea of "what happened before, will happen again" (very similar to the opening monologue from the Bruce Willis blockbuster Armageddon) is actually a commentary on the repeating of a documented event.

I may be going way out here, but what if the Cylons have actually met an entire race of machines from a previous human encounter? The situation that MinutiaeMan describes and that I agree with would be:

1. Humanity settles a planet
2. Population and society grow, slowly adopting technology
3. Eventually they forget why they ran away and the cause of their exile
4. They embrace technology again
5. They create a race of sentient machines
6. The machines revolt
7. The machines win and chase humanity off
8. Humanity escapes
9. Humanity settles a planet
10. ...

So the question is, what if the Cylons happen to meet the race of machines that scared humanity off the first time? Would they maybe perceive THOSE machines as Gods? They would probably be pretty advanced by this point. Amazingly advanced if you use the book Singularity Sky by Charles Stross as an example for advanced technologies.

Anyhow... it is an "out there" idea... but it would be one helluva mind bender if they actually wrote that into the show.