(Warning: Spoilers.) I dearly love BSG, but Bryan Caplan is absolutely right to declare absurd the idea of the Colonials abandoning their technology.

Here's my alternate ending. Instead of jumping 150,000 years ahead, we jump 150 years ahead. Almost all the Colonials' descendants are living in a single large city in what is now Iraq. They are a wealthy elite vastly outnumbered by the city's lower class residents, who are native to (this) Earth, destitute, illiterate, and capable of only very rudimentary speech. The city's deranged, vain leader, Emperor Gaius VII, has deepened the oppression of the Earth natives by conscripting a third of them to build a very tall tower that serves no purpose other than to glorify Gaius VII. Revolution is in the air...

Really though, I loved the finale, despite its flaws.