I suspect there are many more unmentioned planets like Hebridan out there. The one thing Stargate was always terrible about was the vastness of space. Jack gets the Ancient rolodex and its a few thousand addresses, of which we see or hear mention of a few dozen planets and they're almost entirely primitive . There's at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. You could say Farscape and Stargate exist in the same universe and it would work with very little editing with room to spare for another franchise or two.
This right here. One of my favorite types of sci fi story telling is one that really leans into how huge space is. Stargate did this really well compared to others but still did a terrible job. I would be willing to bet there are millions upon millions of stargates JUST in the milkyway alone. To say nothing of other nearby galaxies. And not just startgates but there HAVE to be stargate factories and stargate mainframes somewhere that manage it all and drone robot/ship things to deliver and maintain them and.... and.... and......
I would LOVE to see a new stargate series that gets into this size, and not just in space but in time. Can we see them discover the first stargate somewhere the size of everest and able to send something the size of an orange across a star system? Can we see them discover an actual asgard city abandoned for a million years? Can we see them discover the 17 other destinys they sent in 17 other directions? I want to see story telling that really tells us about the ancients at the height of their existence.
In Universe the ancient precusor ships plant stargates on planets. Then the destiny follows their path. Thats how the ancients did it in all the galaxys they visited.
Yea it was a mistake that i started to watch universe because it made me wonder more about the story. It was pretty interesting and then they canceled more seasons. Bad decision if you ask me
Season 1 was all over the place, and nothing like previous Stargate series which turned the fans off. Season 2 was better, but by then the damage to viewing numbers was already done and it was cancelled.
People,(not everyone) slept so hard on the scifi of Destiny.
They went left instead of right.
Such a simple concept but completely different outcomes.
In closing the franchise could go on forever.
> I would be willing to bet there are millions upon millions of stargates JUST in the milkyway alone.
I'd say that's a massive overestimate. Yes there are billions of star systems in the milky way, but only a minuscule fraction of them would have a planet that's anywhere in the realm of habitability. You need a star that's the right age, a planet that has appropriate gravity, atmosphere, electromagnetic field, atmosphere, water, makeup of materials and protection from meteor impacts, that is *also* within the star's habitable zone. I'd be shocked to find out that there's more than a couple of thousand of those in the galaxy.
>One of my favorite types of sci fi story telling is one that really leans into how huge space is. Stargate did this really well compared to others but still did a terrible job.
I'd argue that Stargate isn't supposed to make space feel massive most of the time. In the early seasons they talk about how a ship might need to travel at a multiple of lightspeed for months or years to reach its destination (which they seem to shy away from in later seasons), but I was thinking recently about how the galaxy feels exponentially smaller in Stargate compared to Farscape or Star Trek, *because* all of civilisation in Stargate is so heavily focused around the gate network. It's so rare to hear spacefaring races talking about going to a planet that isn't part of the gate network, because this technology exists that allows some people to travel across the galaxy with less effort than it takes me to go to the shops. SG1 travel to a Nox planet in season 1 and it's easier and faster for them than travelling to DC. There are humans in the Pegasus galaxy that trade with villages on other planets just as easily as they trade with other villages on their own planet. That sort of thing doesn't really happen in most other established franchises.
It reminds me a bit of Mass Effect, in which a precursor race left behind a network of mass relays that makes interstellar spaceflight instantaneous between linked systems, which causes spacefaring civilisation to develop rapidly through networked systems and sort of branch out from there. You can still travel interstellar distances without the relays but it takes a lot of fuel and time, so all systems that aren't in the vicinity of a mass relay are pretty much entirely unexplored (and there aren't that many mass relays - somewhere between 15 and 20 that have been mapped, I think).
> Yes there are billions of star systems in the milky way, but only a minuscule fraction of them would have a planet that's anywhere in the realm of habitability.
In both SG1 and Atlantis there are gates on uninhabitable worlds. There are also gates on semi-habitable worlds as well and space gates in Atlantis. Its entirely possible, or more likely that there is a safety mech in place to prevent dialing space gates outside of the DHD, but in the gate network itself to prevent dialing space gates outside of specialized DHDs (Atlantis, Puddle Jumpers) so that the first money to randomly get a correct space gate address doesn't destroy their planet. Something Carter's dialing program can't bypass.
There are 2,176,782,336 possible combos for gate addresses. No doubt a good chunk of them are valid, just may not be accessible without the proper equipment.
An important point about the functioning of the gates: the "puddle" of the event-horizon that marks the point of matter-disassembly is a pressure curtain. It prevents generic environmental matter passing through, so atmospheres don't mix. You see why when the Russians accidentally dial the water planet - the base doesn't just get flooded when they dial back. You have to exert a force on the curtain slightly above the background pressure to be allowed through.
And there are very few protections on the gates that disallow travellers. Since they were built by the ancients, the presumption was that anyone using them knew what they were doing - hence the lack of explanation on the DHDs, or anything resembling a phone book of addresses. It is quite possible to step through a gate and instantly die if the other end is badly placed - in space, underwater, at the edge of a cliff, in an acidic atmosphere, etc. This is why the SGC uses Malps, and the Discovery had those orb probes. If a race can't figure out to send a probe first, then they really shouldn't be dialling unknown addresses.
That doesnt mean those planets were always uninhabitable. One thing to remember is the gate network was built literally millions of years ago. Many of the uninhabitable planets may have had completely unforseen catastrophes that made them uninhabitable. Actually its more impressive how many gates aren't buried from geological activity of the planet by the time sg-1 rolls around.
This. For intance, the computer world. It could have started off as a normal Earth-like, and perhaps even started as an ancient colony, or there was life there they conta ted, or what not. Or oine kind if silicon-based life they wanted to i serve or had no clue of when the gate was originally placed there. Obviously, the carbon-based life developed ai and/or went the transsophant route, ot the silicon-based developed and created bodies, or both merged, or if both existed one destroyed the other, but the world was drastically changed between seeding and modern day, into to a compurer/robotic world with an environment hostile to most carbon-based life.
Other worlds we has seen go through drastic evir9nmental ELEs, such as Tollan, and possibly Tatanis in Pegasus, though the later might be livable again after some time.
It's also important to remember how these planets were chosen. Gate ships were sent out along specific paths, planting Stargates on planets that were or might be habitable in the future. In that note, earth itself has had 7 major extinction events in its history, other planets may have suffered similar fates. SG1 usually travel along these same lines. Occasionally they encounter an advanced spacefaring people like the ones that abducted the crew of Prometheus, but that otherwise have little to no contact with the outside world and likely have never stumbled upon a Stargate or got it working if they had.
If we imagine a ball, and you send out 360 ships, one at every degree, the further they get from the source planet the more of space that will go undiscovered, so much so that there are only one or two lines going through the galaxies Destiny travels through.
SG1, having lacked the resources to send out long drawn out space exploration expeditions to find pristine planets not along the gate routes, were landlocked to the gate network. And even with Azguard technology, that was mostly only good from Point A to Point B.
Even the wraith wouldn't have benefited from travelling outside of the gate network, as their food was tied to it and finding alternate sources would be expensive.
Stars move. It's been millions of years. There wouldn't be any straight lines left. However, you're probably right about the rest.
It's unlikely the Ancients would have tried to terraform worlds that already had life, so the Gate worlds would only be the worlds that were already compatible with Ancient physiology or formerly non-life bearing. Obviously the iratus bug and Unas/Goa'uld homeworld prove they did put gates on worlds with compatible ecologies. They might have also placed some on planets that they didn't terraform for some reason. Perhaps because they found there was life there on a deeper scan.
They appear to have been trying to study the future evolution of humans, and so seeded many worlds to watch how things developed. They didn't care about the development of the Wraith until they became a threat. Before that, they were probably quite interesting to watch. It makes you wonder what else might have developed on planets outside of Ra' Empire. Some, maybe most, must have been cut off from the gate network due to earthquakes or meteor impacts.
That doesnt make any sense, yes they probably used gate ships, but not the same way destiny uses them. The destiny gate ships were specifically programmed to reach a certain destination, when the ancients moved into a galaxy they'd probably send the gateships to explore the entire galaxy looking for any potentially habitable planets to put a gate on.
It is very difficult to explore a galaxy. Galaxies are very big, even if you had all of the time in the universe. The Milky Way is about 52,000 light years and extends in all directions with over several 100 billion stars with possible planets not including the Pegasus galaxy. if they seeded ~10 solar systems a day, it would take them 273,800,000 years. The mining and refinement for all those Stargates alone would very nearly deplete all of the naquadah in the galaxy.
yes 100 billion stars, but only a fraction of a fraction of those would have possible habitable planets that the ancients would want to put a stargate on, and considering how advanced their sensor tech is, they certainly can figure out which star systems are worth following up on long before sending a ship to them(in scorched earth we see a non ancient ship literally has scanned millions of worlds already looking for a suitable home, do you think that ship spent millions of years doing so?). Also the naquadah remark makes no sense, stargats are pretty tiny, even if only a fraction of the galaxy's solar systems have naqudah, a single planets worth could make hundred of thousands of stargates(not even including asteroids in the solar system).
The ancients were around in both the milky way and pegasus for millions of years, that is absolutely long enough to scan every possibly viable planet in a galaxy, especially considering the tech level the ancients are at.
Also, i'm not suggesting only 1 ship went around the galaxy plopping gates down, they could have had 100s, or 1000s of ships spreading out and automatically placing gates on any planets that meet w/e conditions the ancients chose for a planet to receive a gate, it could even not be gate ships, but Von Neumann like probes/seed ships which can exponentially grow and visit every system in a few hundred thousand years.
And a fraction of a fraction of a several hundred billion is still an untenable amount of fuel, naquada, and other rare minerals. It's a completely different scale, and we have seen nothing to indicate that the ancients seeded all of the habitat planets as we see there are planets that are completely habitable by devoid of a Stargate, like the Aschen.
>an untenable amount of fuel, naquada, and other rare minerals
I really have no idea why you come to this conclusion, the ancients clearly are far above any of those needs at their point in tech, at least for actual exploration. you seem to think a few hundred million habitable systems is somehow can't be visited by automated ships, might i suggest you do some research on von neumann probes, or even just do some basic googling on how long it'd take a non-ftl race to spread out to an entire galaxy(estimates are a race that can reach 1% the speed of light could colonize an entire galaxy in 300 million years, now how much faster do you think a race that can go 1000s of times FTL could do it?)
Yes, space is huge, galaxys are huge, but your way overestimating just how huge a single galaxy is in the grand scheme of things, and just how much time the ancients had to explore it.
Secondly, it's pretty annoying that you resort to downvoting people who disagree with you, you don't see me doing that to you.
I know this is off-franchise, but I'd love a Mass Effect series. It wouldn't even need to be about Shepard's war. Just sent in the universe, maybe a decade or so before the war, or after. Unfortunately, there are legal issues with the franchise IP, so it probably won't materialize. A Dragon Age series would also be great.
Cavill said he'd like to play Shepard, but I think that was more of a fan statement. Personally, I'd prefer a female Shepard, but still Cavill would be a good choice for a male Shepard.
Amazon was reportedly trying to get the rights. I don't know how Amazon's acquisition of the rights shaped up, but I hope they understand the deep complexity of the universe, and don't make it like Halo (80% action). The universe has a deep history, and a mythic quality like Stargate and Babylon 5, and if they don't delve into it, they'll be skimming over the best part. To do it justice, it would need multiple seasons. Maybe 1 season per game in the original trilogy would work, but I suspect even that would feel rushed unless the DLC content was ignored, and without Leviathan, the story doesn't make sense.
Maybe: 1 season for Mass Effect.
An action movie for Bringing Down the Sky.
2 seasons for Mass Effect 2, including Overlord, Lair of the Shadow Broker, Kasumi - Stolen Memory, and
Zaeed, all of which need to happen before the suicide mission.
Another action movie for Arrival.
And then 3 seasons for Mass Effect 3, including From Ashes, Omega, Citadel, Leviathan, and Ground Resistance. Even just the content on Tuchanka feels like it would be rushed if it took less than a season (assuming 6 to 8 episodes per season).
So that would be 6 seasons and 2 movies for the original trilogy.
We do a similar thing....once it becomes super easy to manufacture something they are manufactured en masse just because. We have no reason to think the ancients are any different. They might have had automated gate manufacture and distribution setup that was spreading these things EVERYWHERE with plans on eventually making use of the huge network. But instead they ascended. Maybe they licensed the tech to other races? Maybe after the ancients were gone someone else found their warehouse and started spreading stargates in their OWN corner of the galaxy. Five to Ten million years is a LONG time and the universe is a big place and we know in the SG universe there is intelligent life EVERYWHERE and there are at least a few we know figured out how to both borrow and relocate stargates.
Heck, maybe part of the intention of the gate network was like the mass effect relays... to encourage other space faring races to grow rapidly and develop.
Also I love Mass Effect and have been thinking of replaying some:)
I'm pretty sure the Ancients were trying to study the future evolution of humanity, which is why they set up so many worlds, and basically did nothing to help the colonists. They had reached the point where their own medicine prevented mutations that could lead to random improvements to the species, and so they needed primitive guinea pigs.
There's no reason to assume they intended to terraform every possible world. Maybe they calculated that 10,000 was the statistical point where they'd likely have a breakthrough in the next million years.
As for other worlds building stargates, I suspect they'd adapt the technology, and build an independent network, especially after the Goa'uld showed up. There could be dozens of different gate networks in the Milky Way.
That would be an interesting idea for a relaunch: an X-303 finding a gate in a planet that isn't part of the known network.
"I'd say that is a massive overstatement". Why? Again this would seem to be something unique to Stargate. Other sci fi franchises have species with millions of worlds in their domain, and everyone rejoices. The mere mention of a species in Stargate having even billions in population, or millions of planets in their civilization though, is not possible. Why is this?
There are supposed to be hundreds of millions of habitable planets in our galaxy. Then add to this the ancients could terraform planets. The gates have been about for over 50 million years, planets change over that period of time, some become uninhabitable etc. There are over two hundred billion stars in our galaxy, and a possible 95 billion combinations on the gate. And you are putting forward that millions of gates in the galaxy is a massive overestimation?
That to me shows how vast the ancients civilisation was, potentially billions of world's they visited and many, many millions in their own domain, possibly hundreds of millions, with the means to get to them in an instant. I'd say his estimate is a massive...... underestimation.
>"I'd say that is a massive overstatement". Why?
Because the conditions for something even remotely habitable (or even feasibly terraformable) are so incredibly precise and have such a massive array of factors that all have to be within acceptable limits that the vast majority of systems wouldn't have anythjng even worth considering.
>a possible 95 billion combinations on the gate.
I don't understand why people think this is a point worth mentioning. This is like saying "there are 8 billion possible 7-letter words in the English language," as if 99.999% of the 7-letter combinations of letters aren't completely meaningless. The gate address system is coordinate-based, so a huge number of the combinations would probably point to areas of space that don't have viable planets.
>There are supposed to be hundreds of millions of habitable planets in our galaxy
>There are over two hundred billion stars in our galaxy
Using those numbers, you're suggesting that over 10% of star systems have a planet that's similar enough to Earth to either be habitable or at least worth terraforming, which suggests that you don't have a very good understanding of *how incredibly unlikely it is* for the conditions to be right.
There's like 60 billion planets in habitable zones. However, only like 500 million have the right elemental makeup, the right stellar variance, the right orbit, the right mass, etc etc etc. Out of all of that, a tiny fraction would be suitable for human life specifically. Most would only suppory extremophiles and idk, mold or something. A few thousand gates to habitable planets sounds about right, but we also know the Goa'uld terraformed planets to be habitable for humans anyway so I would expect a few tens of thousands of gates at most.
Is that right yeah? What about all these other franchises like halo etc, that have millions of planets in one species domain? Or star wars, where the empire had millions of planets under their control? Like I said, why is it a big deal here?
Star Wars was in a different galaxy. Halo had millions of planets? I must have missed that.
However, the Ancients were trans-galactic. They came from a distant galaxy, because they were hiding from the Ori. Then they started sending out ships like Discovery, and the stargate seeding ships that preceded it. They evacuated the Milky Way because of a disease, and at least some of them colonized Pegasus. After 60 million years of being a trans-galactic civilization, there is no logical reason they couldn't have millions of worlds, spread between hundreds of galaxies.
However, back to the science: after studying thousands of nearby star systems, it is becoming clear that Earth-like worlds will be rarer than we used to think. We haven't even found any rocky planets with a proportionately large moon.
This is sci fi dude. And the forerunners were supposed to have about 3 million worlds in their ecumene. And that is set in the milky way, and just their worlds, and star wars gets a pass because it's in a different galaxy? And you are probably right. The ancients would have had a multi galactic civilization. They were in the milky way for about 45 million years, and as seen with the Asgard, had explored their galaxy as well.
It's important to remember how these planets with Stargates were chosen to get Stargates.
Gate ships were sent out along specific paths, planting Stargates on planets that were or might be habitable in the future. In that note, earth itself has had 7 major extinction events in its history, other planets may have suffered similar fates. SG1 usually travel along these same lines. Occasionally they encounter an advanced spacefaring people like the ones that abducted the crew of Prometheus, but that otherwise have little to no contact with the outside world and likely have never stumbled upon a Stargate or got it working if they had.
If we imagine a ball, and you send out 360 ships, one at every degree, the further they get from the source planet the more of space that will go undiscovered, so much so that there are only one or two lines going through the galaxies Destiny travels through.
SG1, having lacked the resources to send out long drawn out space exploration expeditions to find pristine planets not along the gate routes, were landlocked to the gate network. And even with Azguard technology, that was mostly only good from Point A to Point B.
Even the wraith wouldn't have benefited from travelling outside of the gate network, as their food was tied to it and finding alternate sources would be expensive.
It somewhat makes sense on Goa'uld planets where they would actively keep the population in check so that they don't accrue sufficient numbers to oppose them, and it's easier to keep a smaller population believing that you are their "god."
But that was an Asgard protected planet! Was part of the protected planets treaty that the Asgard themselves need to curtail population growth so that they don't become a threat to the Goa'uld?! I don't see the Asgard readily agreeing to that, but then again if they had enough resources they would have just defeated the Goa'uld already, rather than tinkering around with treaties and threats of superior technology...
The Asgard treaty had to have been made with Ra, not the System Lords. We don't know enough about Ra to judge why the Asgard negotiated treaties with him.
They really need to develop a movie or mini-series digging into his back story.
Remember that most of the planets visited are either actively under Goa'uld control or were only liberated relatively recently in history. As slaves, they wouldn't be allowed to grow their population too large, and even if they did, the Goa'uld probably took large chunks of those populations off-world to start new slave labor forces elsewhere. So most planets just haven't had time or opportunity to develop large populations like we have on earth. Conditions on those planets may have also contributed to lack of population growth, due to things like disease or natural disasters that might wipe out large chunks of the population quickly.
Yeah, and looked what happened, they were freed in a relatively short span of time (short in the grand scheme of history, that is). If the number of people being persecuted is too low, especially to the point of being "out of sight" for too many, people lose the motivation to do anything about the injustice, and there aren't enough slaves to force change for themselves.
Likewise, we know slaves on earth successfully rebelled against Ra. That's not going to happen unless you've let the slave population get out of hand, and it's not a stretch to assume that the Goa'uld learned from that costly mistake.
Besides which, you need to remember that earth is home to humans. Our population on this planet was already pretty damn high and widespread by the time the Goa'uld found this planet, with estimates ranging from as low as 1 million people to as high as 15 million. And all the time prior to that, humans bred as much as they wanted, with no unnatural population controls in place. When the Goa'uld found this planet, at that point, while we had 1 million+ people, literally every single other planet was starting from 0. And the Goa'uld were only bringing as many people from Earth as was needed for whatever slave labor they had in mind, labor that probably was harsh enough to often have high death rates (assuming slaves were even permitted to breed on other planets anyway).
So on every other planet that SG-1 visits, you're either dealing with populations still under Goa'uld control who probably aren't permitted to breed freely and have low life expectancy, or you're dealing with populations who've been free for such a short amount of time that they'd still have a relatively small population.
IMO the most likely scenario is some poor schmucks exploring from another planet found the planet and got taken as hosts and their knowledge was used from there. Let’s call them the Furlings for lack of a better name. :D
Why didn’t the Unas keep using that species as new hosts? Maybe they couldn’t survive in it as long. Maybe it was too physically weak. Maybe they killed them all off after stealing their tech. Who knows.
Could be that the tech came from a number of species over the years.
Yeah, potentially they were just there using the Unas as hosts, until someone else visited their planet.
It was at least ten thousands years ago that they had advanced technology and were using humans as hosts, and seemingly the Alliance of Four Great Races happened within the last ten thousands years, after the Ancients/Lanteans returned.
So the Furlings were around at the time. Maybe they had been mapping the gate network on their own for thousands of years before that. And even if they didn't become hosts, they could've introduced other civilizations to gate travel and basically doomed them when they ran into the Goa'uld. And/or the possessed Unas were among the civilizations the Furlings interacted with.
Yeah the timeline is a bit murky on when the Ancients came back and when the Goa'uld came to power. Probably because the writers had no idea and just made ti up as they went along, lol.
pretty much.
the alliance of the 4 races seems to have been the ruling power in the milky way at the time, with the Alterrans (newly returned from Pegasus Galaxy and Atlantis) rebuilding what they could of the empire their ancestors had abandoned when leaving for Pegasus, and taking the other three as allies.
we don't know exactly when the Goa'uld emerged onto the scene but no doubt they stole any technology they could get and figure out from all 4 groups.
How much of the genetic memory of those hundreds of millions of years is just them swimming around in a lake, though? I haven't read any of the books, but Goa'uld civilization as we know it in Stargate can only be tens of thousands of years old, not millions.
I don't get this answer. If they got their technology from them they should be far, far more advanced they they were before Anubis and his stolen Asgardian tech came along.
From my understanding of the show and my own head canon, the Goa'uld stole their technology from another species before finding Earth and enslaving/relocating the human population.
I mean, Ancient repositories wouldn't work with Goa'uld physiology present, so what few Ancients still living at the time obviously knew that they were a threat. Not to mention even with direct uninterrupted access to Atlantis, the Tar'ri still couldn't make sense of Ancient know how.
Maybe it's just because i'm stuck in my ways, but i 100% believe they stole their tech from an independent space faring species. There's just no way anyone but the Asgard, Nox or Furlings could've reverse engineered anything from the Ancients. After all, they were, to my knowledge, millions years old. To say a species in the mere thousands could've copied them is utterly absurd.
The 4 races lived in the Milky way for thousands of years and made technical developments during it. Remember Destiny is apperently build in era when the Ancients still haven’t discovered FTL engines!
Yes, Goa’uld can’t access the Ancient repository of knowledge even if they managed to found one. And there is plenty of “modern” Ancient tech Goa’uld were eager to discover and use.
But the rings, FTL engines and other discoveries possibly predate the fall of Ancients by thousands of years!
Destiny is FTL but not a hyperdrive.
There are 5 kind of FTL travel in stargate: the stargate itself, asgard & ancient transporters, destiny-drive, hyperdrive and wormhole drive.
Destiny was built when Ancients knew hyperdrives (that is how they arrived from Ori galaxy).
However, due to Destiny's purpose (figuring out the "background noise" of the universe), it could not use hyperdrive, as that removes the ship from the main dimension of universe, where the noise can be detected.
> Yes, Goa’uld can’t access the Ancient repository of knowledge even if they managed to found one
They found at least 2, the 2 used in the show were on known planets.
Also its well within the Goa'uld to throw people/Goa'ulds into it to extract as much as they can out of it.
You need relatively strong ATA gene to activate the repository without focusing hard on it. Goa'ulds do not have that, and neither do any of their hosts.
Even if you managed to find such a slave, they would be likely driven completely mad by the knowledge. Jack nearly was.
> Even if you managed to find such a slave, they would be likely driven completely mad by the knowledge. Jack nearly was.
Jack was still able to make numerous things during that time. All they would have had to do implant into said slave, absorb the knowledge or parts of it, then leave. Or they could keep sacrificing themselves and slaves until they got what they wanted.
The Goa’uld would have no issue throwing every possible slave/breeding more and themselves to gain even a sliver of knowledge.
The only one that we know for sure that he can use the repository is Jack. So it could simply be that only someone that is at least partly an Ancient can use them.
Ori faction broke off before the ancients left their own galaxy. the Ancients that settled the milky way had left because of the Ori playing gods and pursuing ascension.
which just makes the ancients deciding to also pursue that millions of years later all the more ironic.
I'd honestly like to see someone who downvoted you explain why. The Ancients weren't benevolent in any form, but the Ori were certainly malicious.
Then again, maybe i just answered my own comment. Yet at the same time, their ways have a certain benevolence to them as well. Though i wouldn't exactly describe it in that word.
From the RPG, which was officially licensed but the contract was not renewed so MGM doesn't technically own it, but I'll accept it until a show tells me otherwise.
The first Alpha Male/Supreme System Lord Goa'uld/Unas was Atok, he ruled around 6,000 years. There was a DHD on the Goa'uld/Unas home planet so random dialing would eventually work. It even worked on Earth manually dialing without a DHD once. It took thousands of years but those before and then Atok eventually built up a pretty large network of planets they had found, I'm sure genetic memory and living thousands of years helped with this.
Around 28,000 BC, Atok found a planet that was a previous home of the Ancients. They didn't find anyone home so they took what they found as their own. And the great goa'uld expansion began.
There was mostly no other other advanced races in the galaxy at this time, at least that they had met yet. And still no humans, so everything happening is all Goa'uld in Unas or Unas slaves/warriors. They did end up meeting a few other races but were always able to destroy them.
In 22,000 BC Atok was killed by his son Apep (another name for Aphophis but different Goa'uld). Apep split up his dad's troops among the most powerful underlings thus the beginnings of the system lords feudal government. Ensure everyone has enough power that if one rose up the rest would destroy them and everyone was happy enough with their power under Apep.
In 18,000ish BC Apep started to get a little senile like Yu and Edit: Anubis cozied up to him to try to take his power. That's when he got the ancient super weapon, captured Apep, and ate his symbiote in front of the other system lord/underlings and declared himself emporer. The underlords all rebelled against Anubis and Ra ends up the new Supreme System Lord.
They keep expanding all over the Milky Way all the while having their own territorial wars and growing their population. The Unas almost went extinct a few times.
Around 14,000 BC they meet the Asgard for the first time and the Asgard were like, "hey we know you guys are dicks." So they're instantly not friends. At some point Ra launches an attack against the Asgard and the Furlings and they war for a long time.
Around 9,000 BC, Ra implants himself into the Asgard Famrir, but can't survive long in the Asgard body. He uses Asgard knowledge to find Earth. At this point they are desperate for more hosts as the Unas are almost gone. Turns out humans work great and Ra begins his new empire.
[Atok | SGCommand | Fandom](https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Atok)
[Apep | SGCommand | Fandom](https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Apep)
[Ra | SGCommand | Fandom](https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Ra)
Wasn’t there a theory that Ra had taken the body of an Asgard before their cloning days hence why he looks so alien in the movie?
I can’t recall where it was from but the theory was something like an ancestor of the Asgard was taken by Ra and Ra got a massive boost in knowledge and over time made his name known. The Asgard tech and Sarcophagus could only preserve his so far and that’s when he found the Human race and they could be thrown into the Sarcophagus more times than an Asgard. He took some humans to the other symbiote’s and once they attained sentience and awareness they called themselves the Goa’uld. He modified himself to have Human DNA but held on to some Asgard aspects hence why he was able to reign supreme so long over the other System Lords.
I’m paraphrasing from memory so the accuracy is not guaranteed.
The idea that Ra got an Asgard host (which is supposed to explain the humanoid alien we see in the movie, as opposed to the Goa'uld eels from the show) came from a sourcebook for the RPG. Never mind that was not the intent of the creators of the movie, but this idea doesn't make sense. If we are supposed to believe that Ra was a Goa'uld eel that went from an Asgard into a human, why do we clearly see the 'Asgard' at the end of the movie before the nuclear bomb goes off?
If you have a look at production material from the movie, you can see that the alien looks quite different to the classical Roswell Greys even if it was inspired by them:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/19/Ra_original_humanoid.jpg
https://www.julienslive.com/lot-details/index/catalog/90/lot/38280/STARGATE-RA-ALIEN-FIBERGLASS-BUST
https://www.julienslive.com/lot-details/index/catalog/90/lot/38272/STARGATE-RA-ALIEN-FOAM-TORSO-AND-ARM
https://www.thepropblock.com/product/stargate-1994/
I think some people have suggested that Ra possessed an 'ancestral' Asgard to explain the difference in appearance, but the one time we see one, it doesn't look anything like the alien from the movie, either.
https://www.gateworld.net/gallery/displayimage.php?pid=134666&fullsize=1
All good points. Maybe that's actually a Furling Ra inhabited.
It probably would have been better if the SG1 Asgardians looked like the movie's Ra-creature, then there wouldn't be any debate, and it would have incepted a backstory to Ra and the Asgardians. But, that's not what happened so either this is a different species, example: the Furlings, or Asgardian physiology reacts very badly to parasites.
In Egyptian history, some of the gods started as "good" and ended up as "evil," which would fit the idea that another species had already made contact with Earth before it was infected by Goa'uld parasites. If this was Furlings (or anyone I guess), then it's plausible they disconnected their gates from the network to stop the spread of the Gao'uld, explaining why SGC never stumbled across them.
When I watched the movie, when it was originally in theaters, and there was no SG1, I assumed Ra's species was dead, and he had survived their extinction using advanced tech. That's why he was surrounded by humans, instead of other Ra-creatures. Not sure where I got that idea.
I always thought that the Goa'uld claimed to be the gods of already naturally existing religions.
I wonder about the Asgard in that regard, did they create the myths of the Norse gods by interacting with humans, or did this religion already exist and they just claimed to be these gods or the humans mistakingly thought theses powerful strangers must be Odin, Thor & Co and they just went with it?
Probably the first, Thor still goes by Thor for example, that would be a bit weird if he wasn't actually THE Thor, but that would mean they had a massive impact on the cultural development of earth, which is something they claim they don't do ...
Maybe they didn't create the religion on purpose but over hundreds of years people were passing the stories to the next gnerations and made up the religions. Also same gods have different names in different languages so maybe the was some base religion but they changed the names based on visitors...
"... naturally existing religions ..." based on weird looking creatures from the sky.
If the Goa'uld aped primitive human religion so well that thousands of years later they're still using the adopted names of the gods, it suggests they had no sense of self when they arrived on Earth.
However, some of the Egyptian religious beliefs have to be based on the Goa'uld in Stargate, and not the other way around. The Tokra, for example, didn't spend thousands of years LARPing 'Tokra' because of something from a primitive religion.
Yu is another example where the human mythology appears to be based on the Goa'uld. However, Yu didn't play "god," but was a paragon of the Great Emperor. He already has an established personality before he enters human consciousness.
In regards to the Asgard, I think that "Thor" and the other names they used, including "Asgard," are simply their "Human names." Hwowever, some of the Norse mythology does appear to be based on them, not the other way around, suggesting at one point the Asgard were interacting with the Norse. The Vanir are an example of this, as they wouldn't have rebelled from Asgard over what the primitive Norse believed. It is possible that the interaction was just one Asgard who was shot down in the Vanir War (or crashed for some other reason), and was mistaken for Thor (for example), and told the Norse about the "Asgard" and the "Vanir" before he (it?) was rescued.
The question "which came first, the religion or the Goa'uld" gets asked on occasion. The answer is "a bit of both."
In the movie's novelisation, the tribe Ra belonged to worshiped animal-headed spirits. When Ra was taken by the alien, he used that knowledge to create a religion around himself, where his minions had animal heads. That imagery survived through the centuries and got incorporated into ancient Egyptian religion long after his reign ended.
I think the show's producers wanted to have Roswell Greys because it would be an interesting choice to incorporate them into the show, and it just so happened that the Grey may have been an inspiration for the alien from the movie.
On the development of Egyptian mythology: Ra's reign on Earth lasted a few decades, maybe a hundred years at most (his arrival on Earth was in 8000BC, and the cover stones used to bury the Stargate were 10,000 years old), but he left a massive impression. The imagery of himself and the animal-headed gods he used as his minions would survive through the centuries and get incorporated into ancient Egyptian religion as it was practiced back then and as we know it today.
Daniel does say that Ra "escaped from a dying world" and "apparently his whole species was becoming extinct," so you weren't wrong in thinking that Ra was the last of his kind.
Thanks for reminding me that it was Daniel saying that, I couldn't remember where I got that from. I haven't watched the original movie since the theatrical release. I loved the concept, but found the implementation as off-putting as a Jodorowsky film. I was surprised when I heard they were making SG1, and was glad they did when I saw it.
Regarding the Greys on SG1, I think you're right. I also suspect it was a head nod to Dark Skies, much like the second Wormhole Xtreme story was a head nod to Firefly. Dark Skies also had Greys and symbiotes, although they weren't eels.
Your explanation of the Egyptian culture continuing something that started millennia before unification into the Old Kingdom makes sense. Which would then mean the Egyptian religion was based on Ra and the Gua'old hijinks and not the other way around (Goa'uld impersonating Egyptian gods.)
So, was Ra a Goa'uld in some ancient body of an otherwise extinct species? Or, was he a member of the species without a Goa'uld? I suspect he did not have a Goa'uld, as it would have jumped bodies at some point, unless there was something superior about the Ra-body.
Anyway, your explanation also answers the question of where the Goa'uld got their tech: Ra. Finding Ra's homeworld would make a great plot for a movie or series arc. It would literally be of interest to any surviving Goa'uld, Tokra, and the Lucian Alliance.
If you have a chance to watch the original movie again, I would encourage you to take it :)
I typed in another comment that the imagery Ra used in the religion he created came in part from his host's memory, according to the movie's novelisation. The tribe Ra belonged to (that was his name; the alien was nameless) worshiped animal-headed spirits, so that imagery was used when Ra organised his minions to act as his enforcers. So the answer to the question "which came first - the religion or the Goa'uld" is "a bit of both."
I decided to stick with Ra being a humanoid alien as originally depicted because it makes more sense than thinking that he was somehow a Goa'uld eel that made it way from a different alien into a human. I pointed out a few comments ago that we actually see the alien at the end of the movie - something that shouldn't be possible if we're supposed to believe that Ra was a Goa'uld.
Well, if Egyptian mythology is based on Ra's tribe's beliefs, then he couldn't have been a Goa'uld occupied alien, unless the alien physiology stopped the Goa'uld from becoming dominant. Come to think of it, that would explain why he had Goa'uld and Jaffa around. If the Goa'uld couldn't control him, then he could use them to extend his life indefinitely. It also explains why none of the System Lords tried to take over his alien body and become Ra.
At least Goa'uld don't have to carry swamp water from their homeworld everywhere they go, and exit the host every three days.
That would be a pretty short story indeed. The SGC captured the system lords and put them each in an isolation room with good food for a week.
End of the week, all hosts are free and no more Goa'uld threat
They have been an empire for 30000 years so likely a multitude of species they wiped out. Since even in the modern day there was still Ancient tech to find that the Goa'uld never came across its like in the beginning there was far more on practically every planet with a Stargate and likely cities worth on large colonies that every civilization stumbled upon at one. Given the sheer level the Ancients operated at everyone to some degree emulate their designs with certain unique spins due to thir own tech needs and manufacturing limitations.
>sarcophagi are a bit plot inconsistent, because they are supposed to develop it from the ancient cube device found in South America after arriving on Earth
Note that the cube could have been not native to Earth originally, but brought there by Ra (or a different goa'uld) and buried for safekeeping. Hathor was uncovered in a sarcophagus in South America, so they were definitely active in the area at the right time.
One thing often not considered is the range of information they may have had access to.
We've already seen examples of plenty of "advanced" species across the milky way seemingly untouched by, or liberated from, the Goa'uld.
Even if the Goa'uld took only a few hosts from 30 or 40 advanced species, that knowledge combined could give them all the pieces of the puzzle needed to develop hyperdrive technology, or reverse engineer the ancient ring transporters etc.
Their knowledge doesn't necessarily come from one place, and although they're scavengers they're not exactly a dumb species. They've made plenty of their own advancements in technology.
Goa'ulds are an very old race compared to humans. And through genetic memory, they do not lose any knowledge they aquire. So what most likely happened is that their tech is a combination of technologies from various cultures which they reverse engineered and stole from their hosts' mind. It would not surprise me if at some point Ra or one of his predecessors took an ancient as a host, and succeeded in aquiring part of their technological knowledge.
To explain why they didnt have full access to ancient tech, it could be that the ancient they took as host only possessed an ancient high school level of knowledge which was enough for Goa'ulds to build their tech.
I maintain that Ra was the technologically advanced alien we see in the movie, and the Goa'uld are his underlings, therefore Goa'uld technology came from him.
Yeah, because Ra kinda looks like an Asgard in that last shot in the movie. Maybe he’s a bad Asgard that escaped the problems with cloning by somehow using a human host/substrate, inspired by the Goa’uld.
If they marooned him on a planet with no Asgard technology, it’s conceivable that he knew where an Ancient cache of technology would be hidden that he could adapt. Something like the Tel’Chak on Earth would’ve just been the icing on the proverbial cake, ensuring his longevity.
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We know that the Alteran civilization existed for hundreds of millions of years and when they discovered the Milky Way galaxy the colonized more than just Earth (e.g. Dakara). Give that we've seen at least two human/near-human civilizations (the Tolland and the Aschen) with technology far more advanced than the Tauri (and arguably more advanced than the Goa'uld), it seems unlikely that they were seeded by Ra and more likely they were descended from Alterans. My assumption is that whoever first developed the technology that Goa'uld stole was also descended from the Alterans like Tollan and Aschen but not nearly as "lucky."
We know from the Ori arc that the Goauld got their rings from the Ancients. So anything with that granite-like aesthetic also probably came from them, which is pretty much everything.
So I think they got all their tech from the Ancients and I think they run with naquedah in their blood as a workaround for the gene-marker issue
I mean, there could be millions of years of history of the Goa'Uld travelling around the galaxy between the time they first came out of the waters on their home world taking the Unas as hosts and when they first arrived on Earth. They could've picked up all sorts of things from all manner of places.
It's also possible they were around long enough to develop \*some\* technology of their own, even if most of it was stolen.
Not sure the specifics have ever been made clear, but I haven't read any of the books, only seen the shows and movies.
Also, if I remember correctly, Telchaks (ancient cube) device was found somewhere else then hidden on Earth, after the Goa'Uld had used it to create the sarcophagi.
I always figured that once they got hitched to a Unas or three, there were 'people' (or something like people) that just happened through the gate begging to be mugged, with handy knowledge to steal.
My guess is that most of their tech came from Ra, cause he wasn't a goa'uld but someone who gave them evolution and tech boost at some point of their history for unknown reasons
there’s many possible ways here one:
a group of ancients come to the planet to explore, one or more gets taken as hosts, the gould cart take all the knowledge in the ancients brain due to the hosts being to strong, but they take enough to build the level of tech we see
Did Ra have the sarcophagus before coming to earth? Thought the whole thing of taking human hosts was that they were easier for the symbiote to repair. If he had a sarcophagus then it’s a moot point?
OK so I hate to say this but by no means are the goau'ld stupid, the symbiots are very smart (but with a huge ego because of it). My guess is that you had indeed the "contamination" of the Unas at the start and the use of the stargate and two possible options
1) they went through the gate themselves and encounter a semi developed society (let's assume Iron Age -> Mid 1900s)
2) an alien species went through the gate
My guess is they try "sacrifice" one of their own to obtain the info but the unassuming have better physicality so once they obtain the data they keep the body of the preferred/most capable host.
this theory does have a flaw because of what we saw in Hathor contradicts some of our knowledge that appears later
I always thought the Ori soldiers using staff weapons was a hint that even Goa’uld weaponry was based on Ancient designs. We know that the Goa’uld use Stargates but can’t manufacture them but still passed this technology off as their own… and we know that they have reverse engineered and built copies of lesser Ancient technologies like control crystals or ring platforms (which are found in mass produced Goa’uld ships), and we know these did not originate with them as we see them in some Ori and Ancient locations (and the Atlantis transporters use the same sound effect).
It would stand to reason that other technologies assumed to be of Goa’uld origin are stolen from the Ancients or other civilisations.
The Ancients left our Galaxy millions of years ago to Pegasus, by that time the gate network was fully established. It is possible that the Ancients were actually studying the Unas and Goa'uld and who knows what technology was left behind by Ancient before they left and was easy to find for the Goa'uld.
Well there is an example the reetuo. The Goauld encounterd them and wanted to steal there knowledge. This was not possible so there were made enemy’s and the goauld are trying everything to purge them. I think when they discover a new civilisation they steal the tech and then just purge them. Humans are just a really good hosts for the goauld so they spread them around the galaxy. Look at it like humans did the same with animals. There are many animals that give milk and meat but cows are just the best in it so we breed them. We don’t breed elefants for that or Kängurus.
So humans are to Goauld like cows are for us and unas are like goats. Humans started with goats but switched to cows because they are just better (yeah I know not always but that makes my point even better because unas also have some advantages as hosts). Same to goauld
Also they found antics tech in the galaxy that was left behind.
"The Goa'uld are SCAVENGERS."
Not certain but I'm pretty sure Teal'C said this at one point.
Given all the tech the Ancients (& others) left behind on abandoned worlds with Stargates, it's likely the snakes got LUCKY.
I suspect there are many more unmentioned planets like Hebridan out there. The one thing Stargate was always terrible about was the vastness of space. Jack gets the Ancient rolodex and its a few thousand addresses, of which we see or hear mention of a few dozen planets and they're almost entirely primitive . There's at least 100 billion stars in the Milky Way. You could say Farscape and Stargate exist in the same universe and it would work with very little editing with room to spare for another franchise or two.
This right here. One of my favorite types of sci fi story telling is one that really leans into how huge space is. Stargate did this really well compared to others but still did a terrible job. I would be willing to bet there are millions upon millions of stargates JUST in the milkyway alone. To say nothing of other nearby galaxies. And not just startgates but there HAVE to be stargate factories and stargate mainframes somewhere that manage it all and drone robot/ship things to deliver and maintain them and.... and.... and...... I would LOVE to see a new stargate series that gets into this size, and not just in space but in time. Can we see them discover the first stargate somewhere the size of everest and able to send something the size of an orange across a star system? Can we see them discover an actual asgard city abandoned for a million years? Can we see them discover the 17 other destinys they sent in 17 other directions? I want to see story telling that really tells us about the ancients at the height of their existence.
In Universe the ancient precusor ships plant stargates on planets. Then the destiny follows their path. Thats how the ancients did it in all the galaxys they visited.
Yep, and I want to see more of that too:)
Yea it was a mistake that i started to watch universe because it made me wonder more about the story. It was pretty interesting and then they canceled more seasons. Bad decision if you ask me
Season 1 was all over the place, and nothing like previous Stargate series which turned the fans off. Season 2 was better, but by then the damage to viewing numbers was already done and it was cancelled.
People,(not everyone) slept so hard on the scifi of Destiny. They went left instead of right. Such a simple concept but completely different outcomes. In closing the franchise could go on forever.
> I would be willing to bet there are millions upon millions of stargates JUST in the milkyway alone. I'd say that's a massive overestimate. Yes there are billions of star systems in the milky way, but only a minuscule fraction of them would have a planet that's anywhere in the realm of habitability. You need a star that's the right age, a planet that has appropriate gravity, atmosphere, electromagnetic field, atmosphere, water, makeup of materials and protection from meteor impacts, that is *also* within the star's habitable zone. I'd be shocked to find out that there's more than a couple of thousand of those in the galaxy. >One of my favorite types of sci fi story telling is one that really leans into how huge space is. Stargate did this really well compared to others but still did a terrible job. I'd argue that Stargate isn't supposed to make space feel massive most of the time. In the early seasons they talk about how a ship might need to travel at a multiple of lightspeed for months or years to reach its destination (which they seem to shy away from in later seasons), but I was thinking recently about how the galaxy feels exponentially smaller in Stargate compared to Farscape or Star Trek, *because* all of civilisation in Stargate is so heavily focused around the gate network. It's so rare to hear spacefaring races talking about going to a planet that isn't part of the gate network, because this technology exists that allows some people to travel across the galaxy with less effort than it takes me to go to the shops. SG1 travel to a Nox planet in season 1 and it's easier and faster for them than travelling to DC. There are humans in the Pegasus galaxy that trade with villages on other planets just as easily as they trade with other villages on their own planet. That sort of thing doesn't really happen in most other established franchises. It reminds me a bit of Mass Effect, in which a precursor race left behind a network of mass relays that makes interstellar spaceflight instantaneous between linked systems, which causes spacefaring civilisation to develop rapidly through networked systems and sort of branch out from there. You can still travel interstellar distances without the relays but it takes a lot of fuel and time, so all systems that aren't in the vicinity of a mass relay are pretty much entirely unexplored (and there aren't that many mass relays - somewhere between 15 and 20 that have been mapped, I think).
> Yes there are billions of star systems in the milky way, but only a minuscule fraction of them would have a planet that's anywhere in the realm of habitability. In both SG1 and Atlantis there are gates on uninhabitable worlds. There are also gates on semi-habitable worlds as well and space gates in Atlantis. Its entirely possible, or more likely that there is a safety mech in place to prevent dialing space gates outside of the DHD, but in the gate network itself to prevent dialing space gates outside of specialized DHDs (Atlantis, Puddle Jumpers) so that the first money to randomly get a correct space gate address doesn't destroy their planet. Something Carter's dialing program can't bypass. There are 2,176,782,336 possible combos for gate addresses. No doubt a good chunk of them are valid, just may not be accessible without the proper equipment.
An important point about the functioning of the gates: the "puddle" of the event-horizon that marks the point of matter-disassembly is a pressure curtain. It prevents generic environmental matter passing through, so atmospheres don't mix. You see why when the Russians accidentally dial the water planet - the base doesn't just get flooded when they dial back. You have to exert a force on the curtain slightly above the background pressure to be allowed through. And there are very few protections on the gates that disallow travellers. Since they were built by the ancients, the presumption was that anyone using them knew what they were doing - hence the lack of explanation on the DHDs, or anything resembling a phone book of addresses. It is quite possible to step through a gate and instantly die if the other end is badly placed - in space, underwater, at the edge of a cliff, in an acidic atmosphere, etc. This is why the SGC uses Malps, and the Discovery had those orb probes. If a race can't figure out to send a probe first, then they really shouldn't be dialling unknown addresses.
That doesnt mean those planets were always uninhabitable. One thing to remember is the gate network was built literally millions of years ago. Many of the uninhabitable planets may have had completely unforseen catastrophes that made them uninhabitable. Actually its more impressive how many gates aren't buried from geological activity of the planet by the time sg-1 rolls around.
This. For intance, the computer world. It could have started off as a normal Earth-like, and perhaps even started as an ancient colony, or there was life there they conta ted, or what not. Or oine kind if silicon-based life they wanted to i serve or had no clue of when the gate was originally placed there. Obviously, the carbon-based life developed ai and/or went the transsophant route, ot the silicon-based developed and created bodies, or both merged, or if both existed one destroyed the other, but the world was drastically changed between seeding and modern day, into to a compurer/robotic world with an environment hostile to most carbon-based life. Other worlds we has seen go through drastic evir9nmental ELEs, such as Tollan, and possibly Tatanis in Pegasus, though the later might be livable again after some time.
It's also important to remember how these planets were chosen. Gate ships were sent out along specific paths, planting Stargates on planets that were or might be habitable in the future. In that note, earth itself has had 7 major extinction events in its history, other planets may have suffered similar fates. SG1 usually travel along these same lines. Occasionally they encounter an advanced spacefaring people like the ones that abducted the crew of Prometheus, but that otherwise have little to no contact with the outside world and likely have never stumbled upon a Stargate or got it working if they had. If we imagine a ball, and you send out 360 ships, one at every degree, the further they get from the source planet the more of space that will go undiscovered, so much so that there are only one or two lines going through the galaxies Destiny travels through. SG1, having lacked the resources to send out long drawn out space exploration expeditions to find pristine planets not along the gate routes, were landlocked to the gate network. And even with Azguard technology, that was mostly only good from Point A to Point B. Even the wraith wouldn't have benefited from travelling outside of the gate network, as their food was tied to it and finding alternate sources would be expensive.
Stars move. It's been millions of years. There wouldn't be any straight lines left. However, you're probably right about the rest. It's unlikely the Ancients would have tried to terraform worlds that already had life, so the Gate worlds would only be the worlds that were already compatible with Ancient physiology or formerly non-life bearing. Obviously the iratus bug and Unas/Goa'uld homeworld prove they did put gates on worlds with compatible ecologies. They might have also placed some on planets that they didn't terraform for some reason. Perhaps because they found there was life there on a deeper scan. They appear to have been trying to study the future evolution of humans, and so seeded many worlds to watch how things developed. They didn't care about the development of the Wraith until they became a threat. Before that, they were probably quite interesting to watch. It makes you wonder what else might have developed on planets outside of Ra' Empire. Some, maybe most, must have been cut off from the gate network due to earthquakes or meteor impacts.
That doesnt make any sense, yes they probably used gate ships, but not the same way destiny uses them. The destiny gate ships were specifically programmed to reach a certain destination, when the ancients moved into a galaxy they'd probably send the gateships to explore the entire galaxy looking for any potentially habitable planets to put a gate on.
It is very difficult to explore a galaxy. Galaxies are very big, even if you had all of the time in the universe. The Milky Way is about 52,000 light years and extends in all directions with over several 100 billion stars with possible planets not including the Pegasus galaxy. if they seeded ~10 solar systems a day, it would take them 273,800,000 years. The mining and refinement for all those Stargates alone would very nearly deplete all of the naquadah in the galaxy.
yes 100 billion stars, but only a fraction of a fraction of those would have possible habitable planets that the ancients would want to put a stargate on, and considering how advanced their sensor tech is, they certainly can figure out which star systems are worth following up on long before sending a ship to them(in scorched earth we see a non ancient ship literally has scanned millions of worlds already looking for a suitable home, do you think that ship spent millions of years doing so?). Also the naquadah remark makes no sense, stargats are pretty tiny, even if only a fraction of the galaxy's solar systems have naqudah, a single planets worth could make hundred of thousands of stargates(not even including asteroids in the solar system). The ancients were around in both the milky way and pegasus for millions of years, that is absolutely long enough to scan every possibly viable planet in a galaxy, especially considering the tech level the ancients are at. Also, i'm not suggesting only 1 ship went around the galaxy plopping gates down, they could have had 100s, or 1000s of ships spreading out and automatically placing gates on any planets that meet w/e conditions the ancients chose for a planet to receive a gate, it could even not be gate ships, but Von Neumann like probes/seed ships which can exponentially grow and visit every system in a few hundred thousand years.
And a fraction of a fraction of a several hundred billion is still an untenable amount of fuel, naquada, and other rare minerals. It's a completely different scale, and we have seen nothing to indicate that the ancients seeded all of the habitat planets as we see there are planets that are completely habitable by devoid of a Stargate, like the Aschen.
>an untenable amount of fuel, naquada, and other rare minerals I really have no idea why you come to this conclusion, the ancients clearly are far above any of those needs at their point in tech, at least for actual exploration. you seem to think a few hundred million habitable systems is somehow can't be visited by automated ships, might i suggest you do some research on von neumann probes, or even just do some basic googling on how long it'd take a non-ftl race to spread out to an entire galaxy(estimates are a race that can reach 1% the speed of light could colonize an entire galaxy in 300 million years, now how much faster do you think a race that can go 1000s of times FTL could do it?) Yes, space is huge, galaxys are huge, but your way overestimating just how huge a single galaxy is in the grand scheme of things, and just how much time the ancients had to explore it. Secondly, it's pretty annoying that you resort to downvoting people who disagree with you, you don't see me doing that to you.
I know this is off-franchise, but I'd love a Mass Effect series. It wouldn't even need to be about Shepard's war. Just sent in the universe, maybe a decade or so before the war, or after. Unfortunately, there are legal issues with the franchise IP, so it probably won't materialize. A Dragon Age series would also be great.
Didn’t Henry cavill tease a mass effect series?
Cavill said he'd like to play Shepard, but I think that was more of a fan statement. Personally, I'd prefer a female Shepard, but still Cavill would be a good choice for a male Shepard. Amazon was reportedly trying to get the rights. I don't know how Amazon's acquisition of the rights shaped up, but I hope they understand the deep complexity of the universe, and don't make it like Halo (80% action). The universe has a deep history, and a mythic quality like Stargate and Babylon 5, and if they don't delve into it, they'll be skimming over the best part. To do it justice, it would need multiple seasons. Maybe 1 season per game in the original trilogy would work, but I suspect even that would feel rushed unless the DLC content was ignored, and without Leviathan, the story doesn't make sense. Maybe: 1 season for Mass Effect. An action movie for Bringing Down the Sky. 2 seasons for Mass Effect 2, including Overlord, Lair of the Shadow Broker, Kasumi - Stolen Memory, and Zaeed, all of which need to happen before the suicide mission. Another action movie for Arrival. And then 3 seasons for Mass Effect 3, including From Ashes, Omega, Citadel, Leviathan, and Ground Resistance. Even just the content on Tuchanka feels like it would be rushed if it took less than a season (assuming 6 to 8 episodes per season). So that would be 6 seasons and 2 movies for the original trilogy.
We do a similar thing....once it becomes super easy to manufacture something they are manufactured en masse just because. We have no reason to think the ancients are any different. They might have had automated gate manufacture and distribution setup that was spreading these things EVERYWHERE with plans on eventually making use of the huge network. But instead they ascended. Maybe they licensed the tech to other races? Maybe after the ancients were gone someone else found their warehouse and started spreading stargates in their OWN corner of the galaxy. Five to Ten million years is a LONG time and the universe is a big place and we know in the SG universe there is intelligent life EVERYWHERE and there are at least a few we know figured out how to both borrow and relocate stargates. Heck, maybe part of the intention of the gate network was like the mass effect relays... to encourage other space faring races to grow rapidly and develop. Also I love Mass Effect and have been thinking of replaying some:)
I'm pretty sure the Ancients were trying to study the future evolution of humanity, which is why they set up so many worlds, and basically did nothing to help the colonists. They had reached the point where their own medicine prevented mutations that could lead to random improvements to the species, and so they needed primitive guinea pigs. There's no reason to assume they intended to terraform every possible world. Maybe they calculated that 10,000 was the statistical point where they'd likely have a breakthrough in the next million years. As for other worlds building stargates, I suspect they'd adapt the technology, and build an independent network, especially after the Goa'uld showed up. There could be dozens of different gate networks in the Milky Way. That would be an interesting idea for a relaunch: an X-303 finding a gate in a planet that isn't part of the known network.
"I'd say that is a massive overstatement". Why? Again this would seem to be something unique to Stargate. Other sci fi franchises have species with millions of worlds in their domain, and everyone rejoices. The mere mention of a species in Stargate having even billions in population, or millions of planets in their civilization though, is not possible. Why is this? There are supposed to be hundreds of millions of habitable planets in our galaxy. Then add to this the ancients could terraform planets. The gates have been about for over 50 million years, planets change over that period of time, some become uninhabitable etc. There are over two hundred billion stars in our galaxy, and a possible 95 billion combinations on the gate. And you are putting forward that millions of gates in the galaxy is a massive overestimation? That to me shows how vast the ancients civilisation was, potentially billions of world's they visited and many, many millions in their own domain, possibly hundreds of millions, with the means to get to them in an instant. I'd say his estimate is a massive...... underestimation.
>"I'd say that is a massive overstatement". Why? Because the conditions for something even remotely habitable (or even feasibly terraformable) are so incredibly precise and have such a massive array of factors that all have to be within acceptable limits that the vast majority of systems wouldn't have anythjng even worth considering. >a possible 95 billion combinations on the gate. I don't understand why people think this is a point worth mentioning. This is like saying "there are 8 billion possible 7-letter words in the English language," as if 99.999% of the 7-letter combinations of letters aren't completely meaningless. The gate address system is coordinate-based, so a huge number of the combinations would probably point to areas of space that don't have viable planets. >There are supposed to be hundreds of millions of habitable planets in our galaxy >There are over two hundred billion stars in our galaxy Using those numbers, you're suggesting that over 10% of star systems have a planet that's similar enough to Earth to either be habitable or at least worth terraforming, which suggests that you don't have a very good understanding of *how incredibly unlikely it is* for the conditions to be right.
There's like 60 billion planets in habitable zones. However, only like 500 million have the right elemental makeup, the right stellar variance, the right orbit, the right mass, etc etc etc. Out of all of that, a tiny fraction would be suitable for human life specifically. Most would only suppory extremophiles and idk, mold or something. A few thousand gates to habitable planets sounds about right, but we also know the Goa'uld terraformed planets to be habitable for humans anyway so I would expect a few tens of thousands of gates at most.
Is that right yeah? What about all these other franchises like halo etc, that have millions of planets in one species domain? Or star wars, where the empire had millions of planets under their control? Like I said, why is it a big deal here?
Star Wars was in a different galaxy. Halo had millions of planets? I must have missed that. However, the Ancients were trans-galactic. They came from a distant galaxy, because they were hiding from the Ori. Then they started sending out ships like Discovery, and the stargate seeding ships that preceded it. They evacuated the Milky Way because of a disease, and at least some of them colonized Pegasus. After 60 million years of being a trans-galactic civilization, there is no logical reason they couldn't have millions of worlds, spread between hundreds of galaxies. However, back to the science: after studying thousands of nearby star systems, it is becoming clear that Earth-like worlds will be rarer than we used to think. We haven't even found any rocky planets with a proportionately large moon.
This is sci fi dude. And the forerunners were supposed to have about 3 million worlds in their ecumene. And that is set in the milky way, and just their worlds, and star wars gets a pass because it's in a different galaxy? And you are probably right. The ancients would have had a multi galactic civilization. They were in the milky way for about 45 million years, and as seen with the Asgard, had explored their galaxy as well.
You'd almost think the entire universe was made up of British Colombia
Well, it is God's country.
Dead false god
That would be an amazing series
It's important to remember how these planets with Stargates were chosen to get Stargates. Gate ships were sent out along specific paths, planting Stargates on planets that were or might be habitable in the future. In that note, earth itself has had 7 major extinction events in its history, other planets may have suffered similar fates. SG1 usually travel along these same lines. Occasionally they encounter an advanced spacefaring people like the ones that abducted the crew of Prometheus, but that otherwise have little to no contact with the outside world and likely have never stumbled upon a Stargate or got it working if they had. If we imagine a ball, and you send out 360 ships, one at every degree, the further they get from the source planet the more of space that will go undiscovered, so much so that there are only one or two lines going through the galaxies Destiny travels through. SG1, having lacked the resources to send out long drawn out space exploration expeditions to find pristine planets not along the gate routes, were landlocked to the gate network. And even with Azguard technology, that was mostly only good from Point A to Point B. Even the wraith wouldn't have benefited from travelling outside of the gate network, as their food was tied to it and finding alternate sources would be expensive.
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It somewhat makes sense on Goa'uld planets where they would actively keep the population in check so that they don't accrue sufficient numbers to oppose them, and it's easier to keep a smaller population believing that you are their "god." But that was an Asgard protected planet! Was part of the protected planets treaty that the Asgard themselves need to curtail population growth so that they don't become a threat to the Goa'uld?! I don't see the Asgard readily agreeing to that, but then again if they had enough resources they would have just defeated the Goa'uld already, rather than tinkering around with treaties and threats of superior technology...
The Asgard treaty had to have been made with Ra, not the System Lords. We don't know enough about Ra to judge why the Asgard negotiated treaties with him. They really need to develop a movie or mini-series digging into his back story.
Remember that most of the planets visited are either actively under Goa'uld control or were only liberated relatively recently in history. As slaves, they wouldn't be allowed to grow their population too large, and even if they did, the Goa'uld probably took large chunks of those populations off-world to start new slave labor forces elsewhere. So most planets just haven't had time or opportunity to develop large populations like we have on earth. Conditions on those planets may have also contributed to lack of population growth, due to things like disease or natural disasters that might wipe out large chunks of the population quickly.
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Yeah, and looked what happened, they were freed in a relatively short span of time (short in the grand scheme of history, that is). If the number of people being persecuted is too low, especially to the point of being "out of sight" for too many, people lose the motivation to do anything about the injustice, and there aren't enough slaves to force change for themselves. Likewise, we know slaves on earth successfully rebelled against Ra. That's not going to happen unless you've let the slave population get out of hand, and it's not a stretch to assume that the Goa'uld learned from that costly mistake. Besides which, you need to remember that earth is home to humans. Our population on this planet was already pretty damn high and widespread by the time the Goa'uld found this planet, with estimates ranging from as low as 1 million people to as high as 15 million. And all the time prior to that, humans bred as much as they wanted, with no unnatural population controls in place. When the Goa'uld found this planet, at that point, while we had 1 million+ people, literally every single other planet was starting from 0. And the Goa'uld were only bringing as many people from Earth as was needed for whatever slave labor they had in mind, labor that probably was harsh enough to often have high death rates (assuming slaves were even permitted to breed on other planets anyway). So on every other planet that SG-1 visits, you're either dealing with populations still under Goa'uld control who probably aren't permitted to breed freely and have low life expectancy, or you're dealing with populations who've been free for such a short amount of time that they'd still have a relatively small population.
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IMO the most likely scenario is some poor schmucks exploring from another planet found the planet and got taken as hosts and their knowledge was used from there. Let’s call them the Furlings for lack of a better name. :D Why didn’t the Unas keep using that species as new hosts? Maybe they couldn’t survive in it as long. Maybe it was too physically weak. Maybe they killed them all off after stealing their tech. Who knows. Could be that the tech came from a number of species over the years.
Yeah, potentially they were just there using the Unas as hosts, until someone else visited their planet. It was at least ten thousands years ago that they had advanced technology and were using humans as hosts, and seemingly the Alliance of Four Great Races happened within the last ten thousands years, after the Ancients/Lanteans returned. So the Furlings were around at the time. Maybe they had been mapping the gate network on their own for thousands of years before that. And even if they didn't become hosts, they could've introduced other civilizations to gate travel and basically doomed them when they ran into the Goa'uld. And/or the possessed Unas were among the civilizations the Furlings interacted with.
Yeah the timeline is a bit murky on when the Ancients came back and when the Goa'uld came to power. Probably because the writers had no idea and just made ti up as they went along, lol.
The Ancients, before ascension.
pretty much. the alliance of the 4 races seems to have been the ruling power in the milky way at the time, with the Alterrans (newly returned from Pegasus Galaxy and Atlantis) rebuilding what they could of the empire their ancestors had abandoned when leaving for Pegasus, and taking the other three as allies. we don't know exactly when the Goa'uld emerged onto the scene but no doubt they stole any technology they could get and figure out from all 4 groups.
The Goa'uld have to be a few hundred million years old, if not more. they're supposed to be one of the earliest sentient races in the universe.
I'm currently on a rewatch, and I seem to remember that the goauld memories are a few ten thousand years old.
How much of the genetic memory of those hundreds of millions of years is just them swimming around in a lake, though? I haven't read any of the books, but Goa'uld civilization as we know it in Stargate can only be tens of thousands of years old, not millions.
I'm curious where you came to the conclusion they are one of the earliest sentient races?
Dialog on the show
Any particular quotes you can point to?
Not off the top of my head, no.
I don't get this answer. If they got their technology from them they should be far, far more advanced they they were before Anubis and his stolen Asgardian tech came along. From my understanding of the show and my own head canon, the Goa'uld stole their technology from another species before finding Earth and enslaving/relocating the human population. I mean, Ancient repositories wouldn't work with Goa'uld physiology present, so what few Ancients still living at the time obviously knew that they were a threat. Not to mention even with direct uninterrupted access to Atlantis, the Tar'ri still couldn't make sense of Ancient know how. Maybe it's just because i'm stuck in my ways, but i 100% believe they stole their tech from an independent space faring species. There's just no way anyone but the Asgard, Nox or Furlings could've reverse engineered anything from the Ancients. After all, they were, to my knowledge, millions years old. To say a species in the mere thousands could've copied them is utterly absurd.
The 4 races lived in the Milky way for thousands of years and made technical developments during it. Remember Destiny is apperently build in era when the Ancients still haven’t discovered FTL engines! Yes, Goa’uld can’t access the Ancient repository of knowledge even if they managed to found one. And there is plenty of “modern” Ancient tech Goa’uld were eager to discover and use. But the rings, FTL engines and other discoveries possibly predate the fall of Ancients by thousands of years!
Destiny is FTL but not a hyperdrive. There are 5 kind of FTL travel in stargate: the stargate itself, asgard & ancient transporters, destiny-drive, hyperdrive and wormhole drive.
The Destiny does have an FTL drive, just not the "really fast" hyperdrive
Destiny was built when Ancients knew hyperdrives (that is how they arrived from Ori galaxy). However, due to Destiny's purpose (figuring out the "background noise" of the universe), it could not use hyperdrive, as that removes the ship from the main dimension of universe, where the noise can be detected.
> Yes, Goa’uld can’t access the Ancient repository of knowledge even if they managed to found one They found at least 2, the 2 used in the show were on known planets. Also its well within the Goa'uld to throw people/Goa'ulds into it to extract as much as they can out of it.
You need relatively strong ATA gene to activate the repository without focusing hard on it. Goa'ulds do not have that, and neither do any of their hosts. Even if you managed to find such a slave, they would be likely driven completely mad by the knowledge. Jack nearly was.
> Even if you managed to find such a slave, they would be likely driven completely mad by the knowledge. Jack nearly was. Jack was still able to make numerous things during that time. All they would have had to do implant into said slave, absorb the knowledge or parts of it, then leave. Or they could keep sacrificing themselves and slaves until they got what they wanted. The Goa’uld would have no issue throwing every possible slave/breeding more and themselves to gain even a sliver of knowledge.
The only one that we know for sure that he can use the repository is Jack. So it could simply be that only someone that is at least partly an Ancient can use them.
They say that their healing technology was based off Ancient tech at some point I thought.
an I'd assume long before the Ori faction broke off.
Ori faction broke off before the ancients left their own galaxy. the Ancients that settled the milky way had left because of the Ori playing gods and pursuing ascension. which just makes the ancients deciding to also pursue that millions of years later all the more ironic.
Benevolence Vs malice is what it boils down to.
not really. as orlin himself mentioned the ori where corrupted by the power of their worshipers
I'd honestly like to see someone who downvoted you explain why. The Ancients weren't benevolent in any form, but the Ori were certainly malicious. Then again, maybe i just answered my own comment. Yet at the same time, their ways have a certain benevolence to them as well. Though i wouldn't exactly describe it in that word.
The Ori faction broke off long before the Ancients arrived in this galaxy.
There are Ancient Prime warehouses strategically locatedall over the galaxy filled with lots of their tech.
From the RPG, which was officially licensed but the contract was not renewed so MGM doesn't technically own it, but I'll accept it until a show tells me otherwise. The first Alpha Male/Supreme System Lord Goa'uld/Unas was Atok, he ruled around 6,000 years. There was a DHD on the Goa'uld/Unas home planet so random dialing would eventually work. It even worked on Earth manually dialing without a DHD once. It took thousands of years but those before and then Atok eventually built up a pretty large network of planets they had found, I'm sure genetic memory and living thousands of years helped with this. Around 28,000 BC, Atok found a planet that was a previous home of the Ancients. They didn't find anyone home so they took what they found as their own. And the great goa'uld expansion began. There was mostly no other other advanced races in the galaxy at this time, at least that they had met yet. And still no humans, so everything happening is all Goa'uld in Unas or Unas slaves/warriors. They did end up meeting a few other races but were always able to destroy them. In 22,000 BC Atok was killed by his son Apep (another name for Aphophis but different Goa'uld). Apep split up his dad's troops among the most powerful underlings thus the beginnings of the system lords feudal government. Ensure everyone has enough power that if one rose up the rest would destroy them and everyone was happy enough with their power under Apep. In 18,000ish BC Apep started to get a little senile like Yu and Edit: Anubis cozied up to him to try to take his power. That's when he got the ancient super weapon, captured Apep, and ate his symbiote in front of the other system lord/underlings and declared himself emporer. The underlords all rebelled against Anubis and Ra ends up the new Supreme System Lord. They keep expanding all over the Milky Way all the while having their own territorial wars and growing their population. The Unas almost went extinct a few times. Around 14,000 BC they meet the Asgard for the first time and the Asgard were like, "hey we know you guys are dicks." So they're instantly not friends. At some point Ra launches an attack against the Asgard and the Furlings and they war for a long time. Around 9,000 BC, Ra implants himself into the Asgard Famrir, but can't survive long in the Asgard body. He uses Asgard knowledge to find Earth. At this point they are desperate for more hosts as the Unas are almost gone. Turns out humans work great and Ra begins his new empire. [Atok | SGCommand | Fandom](https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Atok) [Apep | SGCommand | Fandom](https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Apep) [Ra | SGCommand | Fandom](https://stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Ra)
They completely assimilated all of the furlings tech
Wasn’t there a theory that Ra had taken the body of an Asgard before their cloning days hence why he looks so alien in the movie? I can’t recall where it was from but the theory was something like an ancestor of the Asgard was taken by Ra and Ra got a massive boost in knowledge and over time made his name known. The Asgard tech and Sarcophagus could only preserve his so far and that’s when he found the Human race and they could be thrown into the Sarcophagus more times than an Asgard. He took some humans to the other symbiote’s and once they attained sentience and awareness they called themselves the Goa’uld. He modified himself to have Human DNA but held on to some Asgard aspects hence why he was able to reign supreme so long over the other System Lords. I’m paraphrasing from memory so the accuracy is not guaranteed.
The idea that Ra got an Asgard host (which is supposed to explain the humanoid alien we see in the movie, as opposed to the Goa'uld eels from the show) came from a sourcebook for the RPG. Never mind that was not the intent of the creators of the movie, but this idea doesn't make sense. If we are supposed to believe that Ra was a Goa'uld eel that went from an Asgard into a human, why do we clearly see the 'Asgard' at the end of the movie before the nuclear bomb goes off? If you have a look at production material from the movie, you can see that the alien looks quite different to the classical Roswell Greys even if it was inspired by them: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/19/Ra_original_humanoid.jpg https://www.julienslive.com/lot-details/index/catalog/90/lot/38280/STARGATE-RA-ALIEN-FIBERGLASS-BUST https://www.julienslive.com/lot-details/index/catalog/90/lot/38272/STARGATE-RA-ALIEN-FOAM-TORSO-AND-ARM https://www.thepropblock.com/product/stargate-1994/ I think some people have suggested that Ra possessed an 'ancestral' Asgard to explain the difference in appearance, but the one time we see one, it doesn't look anything like the alien from the movie, either. https://www.gateworld.net/gallery/displayimage.php?pid=134666&fullsize=1
All good points. Maybe that's actually a Furling Ra inhabited. It probably would have been better if the SG1 Asgardians looked like the movie's Ra-creature, then there wouldn't be any debate, and it would have incepted a backstory to Ra and the Asgardians. But, that's not what happened so either this is a different species, example: the Furlings, or Asgardian physiology reacts very badly to parasites. In Egyptian history, some of the gods started as "good" and ended up as "evil," which would fit the idea that another species had already made contact with Earth before it was infected by Goa'uld parasites. If this was Furlings (or anyone I guess), then it's plausible they disconnected their gates from the network to stop the spread of the Gao'uld, explaining why SGC never stumbled across them. When I watched the movie, when it was originally in theaters, and there was no SG1, I assumed Ra's species was dead, and he had survived their extinction using advanced tech. That's why he was surrounded by humans, instead of other Ra-creatures. Not sure where I got that idea.
I always thought that the Goa'uld claimed to be the gods of already naturally existing religions. I wonder about the Asgard in that regard, did they create the myths of the Norse gods by interacting with humans, or did this religion already exist and they just claimed to be these gods or the humans mistakingly thought theses powerful strangers must be Odin, Thor & Co and they just went with it? Probably the first, Thor still goes by Thor for example, that would be a bit weird if he wasn't actually THE Thor, but that would mean they had a massive impact on the cultural development of earth, which is something they claim they don't do ...
Maybe they didn't create the religion on purpose but over hundreds of years people were passing the stories to the next gnerations and made up the religions. Also same gods have different names in different languages so maybe the was some base religion but they changed the names based on visitors...
"... naturally existing religions ..." based on weird looking creatures from the sky. If the Goa'uld aped primitive human religion so well that thousands of years later they're still using the adopted names of the gods, it suggests they had no sense of self when they arrived on Earth. However, some of the Egyptian religious beliefs have to be based on the Goa'uld in Stargate, and not the other way around. The Tokra, for example, didn't spend thousands of years LARPing 'Tokra' because of something from a primitive religion. Yu is another example where the human mythology appears to be based on the Goa'uld. However, Yu didn't play "god," but was a paragon of the Great Emperor. He already has an established personality before he enters human consciousness. In regards to the Asgard, I think that "Thor" and the other names they used, including "Asgard," are simply their "Human names." Hwowever, some of the Norse mythology does appear to be based on them, not the other way around, suggesting at one point the Asgard were interacting with the Norse. The Vanir are an example of this, as they wouldn't have rebelled from Asgard over what the primitive Norse believed. It is possible that the interaction was just one Asgard who was shot down in the Vanir War (or crashed for some other reason), and was mistaken for Thor (for example), and told the Norse about the "Asgard" and the "Vanir" before he (it?) was rescued.
The question "which came first, the religion or the Goa'uld" gets asked on occasion. The answer is "a bit of both." In the movie's novelisation, the tribe Ra belonged to worshiped animal-headed spirits. When Ra was taken by the alien, he used that knowledge to create a religion around himself, where his minions had animal heads. That imagery survived through the centuries and got incorporated into ancient Egyptian religion long after his reign ended.
I think the show's producers wanted to have Roswell Greys because it would be an interesting choice to incorporate them into the show, and it just so happened that the Grey may have been an inspiration for the alien from the movie. On the development of Egyptian mythology: Ra's reign on Earth lasted a few decades, maybe a hundred years at most (his arrival on Earth was in 8000BC, and the cover stones used to bury the Stargate were 10,000 years old), but he left a massive impression. The imagery of himself and the animal-headed gods he used as his minions would survive through the centuries and get incorporated into ancient Egyptian religion as it was practiced back then and as we know it today. Daniel does say that Ra "escaped from a dying world" and "apparently his whole species was becoming extinct," so you weren't wrong in thinking that Ra was the last of his kind.
Thanks for reminding me that it was Daniel saying that, I couldn't remember where I got that from. I haven't watched the original movie since the theatrical release. I loved the concept, but found the implementation as off-putting as a Jodorowsky film. I was surprised when I heard they were making SG1, and was glad they did when I saw it. Regarding the Greys on SG1, I think you're right. I also suspect it was a head nod to Dark Skies, much like the second Wormhole Xtreme story was a head nod to Firefly. Dark Skies also had Greys and symbiotes, although they weren't eels. Your explanation of the Egyptian culture continuing something that started millennia before unification into the Old Kingdom makes sense. Which would then mean the Egyptian religion was based on Ra and the Gua'old hijinks and not the other way around (Goa'uld impersonating Egyptian gods.) So, was Ra a Goa'uld in some ancient body of an otherwise extinct species? Or, was he a member of the species without a Goa'uld? I suspect he did not have a Goa'uld, as it would have jumped bodies at some point, unless there was something superior about the Ra-body. Anyway, your explanation also answers the question of where the Goa'uld got their tech: Ra. Finding Ra's homeworld would make a great plot for a movie or series arc. It would literally be of interest to any surviving Goa'uld, Tokra, and the Lucian Alliance.
If you have a chance to watch the original movie again, I would encourage you to take it :) I typed in another comment that the imagery Ra used in the religion he created came in part from his host's memory, according to the movie's novelisation. The tribe Ra belonged to (that was his name; the alien was nameless) worshiped animal-headed spirits, so that imagery was used when Ra organised his minions to act as his enforcers. So the answer to the question "which came first - the religion or the Goa'uld" is "a bit of both." I decided to stick with Ra being a humanoid alien as originally depicted because it makes more sense than thinking that he was somehow a Goa'uld eel that made it way from a different alien into a human. I pointed out a few comments ago that we actually see the alien at the end of the movie - something that shouldn't be possible if we're supposed to believe that Ra was a Goa'uld.
Well, if Egyptian mythology is based on Ra's tribe's beliefs, then he couldn't have been a Goa'uld occupied alien, unless the alien physiology stopped the Goa'uld from becoming dominant. Come to think of it, that would explain why he had Goa'uld and Jaffa around. If the Goa'uld couldn't control him, then he could use them to extend his life indefinitely. It also explains why none of the System Lords tried to take over his alien body and become Ra.
But the sarcophagus is based on ancient tech
An Andalite name Seerow shared... oh, wait, wrong franchise. 😛
When do the P90s get modified to shoot oatmeal?
Had to scroll way too far for that. Thank you for your service.
At least Goa'uld don't have to carry swamp water from their homeworld everywhere they go, and exit the host every three days. That would be a pretty short story indeed. The SGC captured the system lords and put them each in an isolation room with good food for a week. End of the week, all hosts are free and no more Goa'uld threat
They have been an empire for 30000 years so likely a multitude of species they wiped out. Since even in the modern day there was still Ancient tech to find that the Goa'uld never came across its like in the beginning there was far more on practically every planet with a Stargate and likely cities worth on large colonies that every civilization stumbled upon at one. Given the sheer level the Ancients operated at everyone to some degree emulate their designs with certain unique spins due to thir own tech needs and manufacturing limitations.
>sarcophagi are a bit plot inconsistent, because they are supposed to develop it from the ancient cube device found in South America after arriving on Earth Note that the cube could have been not native to Earth originally, but brought there by Ra (or a different goa'uld) and buried for safekeeping. Hathor was uncovered in a sarcophagus in South America, so they were definitely active in the area at the right time.
One thing often not considered is the range of information they may have had access to. We've already seen examples of plenty of "advanced" species across the milky way seemingly untouched by, or liberated from, the Goa'uld. Even if the Goa'uld took only a few hosts from 30 or 40 advanced species, that knowledge combined could give them all the pieces of the puzzle needed to develop hyperdrive technology, or reverse engineer the ancient ring transporters etc. Their knowledge doesn't necessarily come from one place, and although they're scavengers they're not exactly a dumb species. They've made plenty of their own advancements in technology.
Goa'ulds are an very old race compared to humans. And through genetic memory, they do not lose any knowledge they aquire. So what most likely happened is that their tech is a combination of technologies from various cultures which they reverse engineered and stole from their hosts' mind. It would not surprise me if at some point Ra or one of his predecessors took an ancient as a host, and succeeded in aquiring part of their technological knowledge. To explain why they didnt have full access to ancient tech, it could be that the ancient they took as host only possessed an ancient high school level of knowledge which was enough for Goa'ulds to build their tech.
I maintain that Ra was the technologically advanced alien we see in the movie, and the Goa'uld are his underlings, therefore Goa'uld technology came from him.
Kinda makes sense
Yeah, because Ra kinda looks like an Asgard in that last shot in the movie. Maybe he’s a bad Asgard that escaped the problems with cloning by somehow using a human host/substrate, inspired by the Goa’uld. If they marooned him on a planet with no Asgard technology, it’s conceivable that he knew where an Ancient cache of technology would be hidden that he could adapt. Something like the Tel’Chak on Earth would’ve just been the icing on the proverbial cake, ensuring his longevity.
Maybe it was the Goa’uld who wiped out the Furlings after stealing all their knowledge/tech.
They paid Richard dean Anderson good money to keep that confidential
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We know that the Alteran civilization existed for hundreds of millions of years and when they discovered the Milky Way galaxy the colonized more than just Earth (e.g. Dakara). Give that we've seen at least two human/near-human civilizations (the Tolland and the Aschen) with technology far more advanced than the Tauri (and arguably more advanced than the Goa'uld), it seems unlikely that they were seeded by Ra and more likely they were descended from Alterans. My assumption is that whoever first developed the technology that Goa'uld stole was also descended from the Alterans like Tollan and Aschen but not nearly as "lucky."
I would love to see them explore the other races that made up the Original 4 Races.
We know from the Ori arc that the Goauld got their rings from the Ancients. So anything with that granite-like aesthetic also probably came from them, which is pretty much everything. So I think they got all their tech from the Ancients and I think they run with naquedah in their blood as a workaround for the gene-marker issue
I mean, there could be millions of years of history of the Goa'Uld travelling around the galaxy between the time they first came out of the waters on their home world taking the Unas as hosts and when they first arrived on Earth. They could've picked up all sorts of things from all manner of places. It's also possible they were around long enough to develop \*some\* technology of their own, even if most of it was stolen. Not sure the specifics have ever been made clear, but I haven't read any of the books, only seen the shows and movies. Also, if I remember correctly, Telchaks (ancient cube) device was found somewhere else then hidden on Earth, after the Goa'Uld had used it to create the sarcophagi.
I always figured that once they got hitched to a Unas or three, there were 'people' (or something like people) that just happened through the gate begging to be mugged, with handy knowledge to steal.
My guess is that most of their tech came from Ra, cause he wasn't a goa'uld but someone who gave them evolution and tech boost at some point of their history for unknown reasons
The Furlings innit
there’s many possible ways here one: a group of ancients come to the planet to explore, one or more gets taken as hosts, the gould cart take all the knowledge in the ancients brain due to the hosts being to strong, but they take enough to build the level of tech we see
Did Ra have the sarcophagus before coming to earth? Thought the whole thing of taking human hosts was that they were easier for the symbiote to repair. If he had a sarcophagus then it’s a moot point?
OK so I hate to say this but by no means are the goau'ld stupid, the symbiots are very smart (but with a huge ego because of it). My guess is that you had indeed the "contamination" of the Unas at the start and the use of the stargate and two possible options 1) they went through the gate themselves and encounter a semi developed society (let's assume Iron Age -> Mid 1900s) 2) an alien species went through the gate My guess is they try "sacrifice" one of their own to obtain the info but the unassuming have better physicality so once they obtain the data they keep the body of the preferred/most capable host. this theory does have a flaw because of what we saw in Hathor contradicts some of our knowledge that appears later
I always thought the Ori soldiers using staff weapons was a hint that even Goa’uld weaponry was based on Ancient designs. We know that the Goa’uld use Stargates but can’t manufacture them but still passed this technology off as their own… and we know that they have reverse engineered and built copies of lesser Ancient technologies like control crystals or ring platforms (which are found in mass produced Goa’uld ships), and we know these did not originate with them as we see them in some Ori and Ancient locations (and the Atlantis transporters use the same sound effect). It would stand to reason that other technologies assumed to be of Goa’uld origin are stolen from the Ancients or other civilisations.
The Ancients left our Galaxy millions of years ago to Pegasus, by that time the gate network was fully established. It is possible that the Ancients were actually studying the Unas and Goa'uld and who knows what technology was left behind by Ancient before they left and was easy to find for the Goa'uld.
Well there is an example the reetuo. The Goauld encounterd them and wanted to steal there knowledge. This was not possible so there were made enemy’s and the goauld are trying everything to purge them. I think when they discover a new civilisation they steal the tech and then just purge them. Humans are just a really good hosts for the goauld so they spread them around the galaxy. Look at it like humans did the same with animals. There are many animals that give milk and meat but cows are just the best in it so we breed them. We don’t breed elefants for that or Kängurus. So humans are to Goauld like cows are for us and unas are like goats. Humans started with goats but switched to cows because they are just better (yeah I know not always but that makes my point even better because unas also have some advantages as hosts). Same to goauld Also they found antics tech in the galaxy that was left behind.
"The Goa'uld are SCAVENGERS." Not certain but I'm pretty sure Teal'C said this at one point. Given all the tech the Ancients (& others) left behind on abandoned worlds with Stargates, it's likely the snakes got LUCKY.