How did the Ancients use their healing devices?

[Alteran Prior]

Did the Ancients use their healing devices only to heal injuries, or did they also use them to cure diseases? Did they use them to extend their lifespans and youthspans, like the Goa'uld used their sarcophagus? If so, did they not have the flaws that the Goa'uld sarcophagus has (like making its Ancient user insane or only allowing the person to extend their life for tens of thousands of years instead of indefinitly)? If the Ancients had decided to create a healing device that would be safe for humans (or Goa'uld) to use in order to allow such beings to live indefinitly, could they have built such a device? Could a de-ascended Ancient like Merlin have created a perfected healing device? Could an ascended Ancient do so? If the ascended Ancients chose to (or were allowed to) interfer in the non-ascended world, could they use their power to extend non-Ascended beings lifespans, youthspans, and health spans indefinitly? Why didn't the Ori make their followers immortal in the non-ascended world so they could live indefinitely as worshiping batteries that never died and never needed to be replaced?

[gateraid]

It's my understanding that the Ancients didn't use gadgets to heal people, they did it with their magic hands The Goa'uld devices were technological, and required the presence of naquadah in the user's bloodstream for operation (hence why both Carter and Vala could use them, given they'd been former hosts). I'm sure someone will come along with a better explanation

[Alteran Prior]

It's my understanding that the Ancients didn't use gadgets to heal people, they did it with their magic hands

In the 7th season two-part episode "Evolution," Daniel Jackson and Bill Lee find a cube-shaped Ancient healing device in Central America. See:
http://www.gateworld.net/wiki/Ancient_healing_device
http://stargate.wikia.com/wiki/Ancient_healing_device

[thekillman]

it's my understanding that the mental effect is an inherent byproduct of the technology. therefore, it can't be removed.

however, given the Ancient's vastly superior physiology, it's very likely they would've been able to withstand the effects without going crazy after a while.


as to how they used them:

it's very likely that the Ancients built the cube to fight the Plague, rather than using it on a daily basis

[Pharaoh Hamenthotep]

It was mentioned a few times that the Sarcophagus was a flawed technology. It was based on the Healing Cube but it didn't work as well.. The madness and desire for galactic domination being unfortunate side effects..

[Coremae]

There was a theory that our universe is nothing more than a projection from a source that is located where the big bang should have been. And perhaps, this projection is so much data being represented from else where. it's a bit much, and is an incredible stretch I know, but bear with me on this one; let's say that the universe and everything we see is a program that is loaded from memory, and we're fuctioning in a RAM, of a sort, and all the Ancients healing device do, is restore us to a previous version before whatever event happened that frakked us up.

http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/zuse.html

And here's a link to Mr Konrad Zuse's wikipage which speaks of his marvelous book, Calculating Space

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_Space

http://io9.com/5133776/are-we-living...giant-hologram

Of course it all could be so much bullocks, but it could lend itself to explain why the ancients healing devices could literally alter reality and recreate bone, flesh and any injury even resurrecting the recent dead.

Unless of course it was Orihime Inoue's: power manifests itself as the Shun Shun Rikka (?????, literally "six flowers of the shielded hibiscus"; and her power of denying reality and undoing fate, literally restoring lost limbs and such.

[thekillman]

It was mentioned a few times that the Sarcophagus was a flawed technology. It was based on the Healing Cube but it didn't work as well.. The madness and desire for galactic domination being unfortunate side effects..

well, it's basically a toned-down Telchak device so..

[The Urban Spaceman]

Did the Ancients use their healing devices only to heal injuries, or did they also use them to cure diseases? Did they use them to extend their lifespans and youthspans, like the Goa'uld used their sarcophagus? If so, did they not have the flaws that the Goa'uld sarcophagus has (like making its Ancient user insane or only allowing the person to extend their life for tens of thousands of years instead of indefinitly)? If the Ancients had decided to create a healing device that would be safe for humans (or Goa'uld) to use in order to allow such beings to live indefinitly, could they have built such a device? Could a de-ascended Ancient like Merlin have created a perfected healing device? Could an ascended Ancient do so? If the ascended Ancients chose to (or were allowed to) interfer in the non-ascended world, could they use their power to extend non-Ascended beings lifespans, youthspans, and health spans indefinitly? Why didn't the Ori make their followers immortal in the non-ascended world so they could live indefinitely as worshiping batteries that never died and never needed to be replaced?

Wow... that's a question or two. Let me try to answer them one at a time.

Did the Ancients use their healing devices only to heal injuries, or did they also use them to cure diseases?

AFAIK, the Ancients didn't really use healing devices -- they had an innate ability to heal themselves and others. The exceptions of course being the device found by Doctors Jackson and Lee found in Honduras. Why did the Ancients create this device? Maybe to stave off the plague that was killing them. Maybe to help the local people stay healthy.

It could even be that the presence of an ascended Ancient is capable of providing health benefits to humans. In SGA, Chaya says that all the people of her world 'as healthy as her and completely free from disease' which is (apparently) quite uncommon in Pegasus.

Did they use them to extend their lifespans and youthspans, like the Goa'uld used their sarcophagus?

Possibly. It could be that since they had to leave their ascension-device behind in Atlantis, they needed to find some way to extend their life-spans to give them more time to work on ascending. If that's the case, it's likely they didn't live too close to the Telchak device, because it may have had the same effect on them as on humans.

Perhaps the fact that the device is capable of re-animating the dead was supposed to have been a way to bring back to life the deceased who had been unable to achieve ascension, to give them another try. Clearly this technology is flawed. Standard fare really, for Ancient devices.

If so, did they not have the flaws that the Goa'uld sarcophagus has (like making its Ancient user insane or only allowing the person to extend their life for tens of thousands of years instead of indefinitly)?

I'm pretty sure that the Ancients didn't use any other life-extension devices other than the fountain of youth. Although in SGA, they create a paradise in a time-dilation field designed to speed up time, to give other races (like humans) a chance at fast evolution and the chance of ascension.

If the Ancients had decided to create a healing device that would be safe for humans (or Goa'uld) to use in order to allow such beings to live indefinitly, could they have built such a device?

If they thought they could have built it, they would probably have built it. I suspect that very few species are capable of surviving indefinitely. The Goa'uld seem to have the same protein structure as humans, which causes aging. The human body (and possibly the goa'uld body) simply aren't designed to keep going forever. You would have to re-write the genome to do that, and what you would end up with would not be genetically human.

Could an ascended Ancient do so?

Probably. They're pretty clever guys. But consider that if Anubis was capable of creating such a device, it's likely he would have been able to create a similar device to give him back his life (or allow him to ascend fully).

If the ascended Ancients chose to (or were allowed to) interfer in the non-ascended world, could they use their power to extend non-Ascended beings lifespans, youthspans, and health spans indefinitly?

As I speculated above, it's possible Chaya's influence on Proculus gave all of the people there unnaturally good health and long lives -- but that could be because the planet had a space-gate, so the people there rarely ever saw other humans (most in the galaxy not possessing space ships) and so had little or no contact to bateria or pathogens. And since the Wraith can't cull there, the people could reach their maximum life span. Maybe it's a case of both explanations working in tandem.

Why didn't the Ori make their followers immortal in the non-ascended world so they could live indefinitely as worshiping batteries that never died and never needed to be replaced?

Probably because they couldn't. If the effect of immortality on the human psyche is to drive one insane, then they wouldn't have been much good as worshippers. And you can hardly threaten your followers with death if they know they can't die. Take away that threat (or the promise of eternal happiness in the afterlife) and you take away the very foundation of organised religion.