The Asgard should be more powerful than the ancients - they had 10,000 years

[jaseman45]

I am confused as to how powerful the Asgard really were. Don't get me wrong I am a huge Asgard fan, they are my favorite race. However the Asgard and the ancients seemed just as powerful 10,000 years ago when the ancients were still alive as they were currently when earth met them. Earth advanced exponentially over 10 years of having the stargate. By definition the Asgard should have advanced alot more than they had.

[StevenSG1]

All species grow and advance at different rates of evolution. From 'The Fifth Race' we know that the Ancients and the Asgards were allies and were both very technologically advanced, in contrast though, you could say The Nox were not technologically advanced (in our sense), but were still way ahead of Humans and in some aspects were ahead of the other races, as the Asgard were in some ways to the rest as well.

If you look at there technology as it is, there's only so far you can actually go in terms of advancement, they had perfected ships,cloning technology,holograms,star travel etc, they had substances that Earth didn't or hadn't even heard of, but it may have been as far as they could advance.

[jelgate]

The series makes it quite clear that the Ancients were far more advanced technologically than the Asgard

[mr_kennedy]

They also had a little cloning issue that they were trying to solve probably halted any technological advancements not to mention they had a little bug problem

on top of that we don't exactly know just how advanced they were before the ancients ascended to a higher plain

[StevenSG1]

They also had a little cloning issue that they were trying to solve probably halted any technological advancements not to mention they had a little bug problem

on top of that we don't exactly know just how advanced they were before the ancients ascended to a higher plain

You bring up a good point on the Replicators. It forced the Asgard to build their most sophisticated battleship ever. That could imply that maybe where they were technologically (minus the cloning issues) they may not have needed to advance further, unless forced to.

[destiny khan]

I am confused as to how powerful the Asgard really were. Don't get me wrong I am a huge Asgard fan, they are my favorite race. However the Asgard and the ancients seemed just as powerful 10,000 years ago when the ancients were still alive as they were currently when earth met them. Earth advanced exponentially over 10 years of having the stargate. By definition the Asgard should have advanced alot more than they had.

you are taking it all too logically... you should know that this show was "Written" which means it is full of plot holes as big as black holes... just accept things after the fact as the canon can be pretty stupid in sci fi sometimes or most of the times

[StevenSG1]

Like I said, when you look at the Asgard building the O'Neill to fight the replicators, and it was there most advanced warship, I think they could develop further technology if they had to, they were probably at a point in their civilization where (apart from needing a better cloning technology for their survival), they probably had everything they needed.

[destiny khan]

Like I said, when you look at the Asgard building the O'Neill to fight the replicators, and it was there most advanced warship, I think they could develop further technology if they had to, they were probably at a point in their civilization where (apart from needing a better cloning technology for their survival), they probably had everything they needed.

you are right... they were pretty much happy with what they had as they had the greatest traveling ships in any scifi verse i have ever seen(asgard ships are by far and foremost the fastest way to travel)... they didn't make many enemies and the only ones that they had were goauld who were afraid of the asgard which had superior weapons and shields... but then along came the replicators and the asgard had to advance their military tech quite rapidly but the replicator kept absorbing them... if it weren't for the replicators we might not have seen the asgards make plasma beam weapons... but this shows that they had the means to advance a lot further than they were shown as they didn't have the need for it... just like the ancients didn't really invents any serious offensive weapon after their drones as no one can stand them anyways and they were still flying around in atlantis which was more than 5-10 million years old... and this might go to show that when they got desperate they didn't really know what to do against the wraith as their main attention was towards peace etc... e.g they could have installed beam weapons powered on atlantis and basically kept it flying in space rather than landing it and being held under siege for years... that too whent hey could see the wraith coming thousands of light years away... well it is what the writers came up with anyways, no matter how stupid it is...

as atlantis left milky way 5-10 million years ago and asgard civilization is about 100k years old only... they might have made the alliance with the nox, furlings and ancients after the ancients came back from the pegasus... and who knows, the nox and asgard gathered all their knowledge by studying ancient databases left behind when the ancients went to pegasus.. as thor said they have only scratched the surface with the ancient database even though they exracted it long long ago... ancients were super advanced even 50 million years ago when they made destiny... after some time the advancement becomes stale.. we are advancing rapidly and come a long way from being "young" to having the most powerful ships around....with asgard and ancient databases tauri are the fifth race and they are going to go stale after a 1000 years easily...

advancement in technology and weaponry is as much as an art as it is knowledge so that is why advancement occur rapidly in military tech when there is a war on... and the writers of the series clearly don't belong to warring faction as is apparant by their blunders and plot holes which they forced races like ancients into making... i cannot believe for one bit that ancients with common sense would have lost to wraith(there is just no way they were stupid enough)

[bigrob904]

the thing about the ancients is there where so much more advanced than the other races that it would be hard to compete with them fully. the ancients where over 50 million years old, and could have been about 100 millions years old maybe more. the asgard by comparison were only about 200 to 300 thousand years at the most. thor even acknowledged that they had taken one of the repositories of knowledge and had only scratched the surface of what it had. Thor even went as far as to say that it held infinite knowledge. now we know it doesn't have infinite knowledge but that's just a testament to how much info it actually had. now with that said they could have surpassed them in certain aspects, like maybe in hyperdrive engines. but we know that ancients traveled between galaxies easily, an even had a warmhole drive on atlantis, so thats debatable as to what specifically they had that was better. they still couldn't beat them in weaponry either. even with their new plasma weapons they couldn't touch drone tech. but asgard were advanced enough compared to everyone else. the only aliens that may be able to touch them is those aliens from from stagate universe that created that planet, and brought back some of the crew.

[fems]

I am confused as to how powerful the Asgard really were. Don't get me wrong I am a huge Asgard fan, they are my favorite race. However the Asgard and the ancients seemed just as powerful 10,000 years ago when the ancients were still alive as they were currently when earth met them. Earth advanced exponentially over 10 years of having the stargate. By definition the Asgard should have advanced alot more than they had.

I think this is a rather short-sighted statement because, following your logic, one could say that Africa should be at the same level of technological advancement as, say, the US, or even further considering the human race most likely started out in Africa and the current Americans (not counting the Native Americans or whatever today's PC term is) are much "younger".

Also, it was never clarified whether the Four Races were on equal footing at the time of their alliance and whether their interests were all the same. We know from other episodes that the Ancients basically experimented with everything from time travel to (inter)galactic (re)population, but the "city" the Nox showed SG-1 [before they went back to the SGC] seemed pretty technological advanced too even though that race was clearly more focused on going back to nature and enhancing one's natural abilities. We don't know where the Asgard started out, what their goals were and what they have accomplished so far: the few things we were told showed that their comprehension of technology and meaning of life stuff is far superior than anything on Earth (and perhaps even the Ancients at the time). However, the Asgard clearly have awesome spaceships, cloning technology and what appeared to be a thriving galaxy until the Replicators ate everything. If we assume the Ancients would be at a similar level of the Ori had they not ascended then I'd say the Asgard did pretty well, especially if warfare wasn't their main goal (unlike the Ori) but they were forced into it by the threat of the Goa'uld and Replicators.

[thekillman]

I am confused as to how powerful the Asgard really were. Don't get me wrong I am a huge Asgard fan, they are my favorite race. However the Asgard and the ancients seemed just as powerful 10,000 years ago when the ancients were still alive as they were currently when earth met them. Earth advanced exponentially over 10 years of having the stargate. By definition the Asgard should have advanced alot more than they had.

First and foremost: stargate advancement is messed up as it is so you can only apply "realism" so far. From what we've seen, the ancients technologically stagnated for some 50 million years.

By definition the Asgard should have advanced alot more than they had.

Our idea of the Asgard is extremely distorted by the Replicators: much of their civilization was already destroyed by the time we met them. For all we know, the Asgard had an empire that made the Ancient's empire look like peanuts.

[StevenSG1]

The main thing to look at (from my point of view anyway) and the best example of what I said before, was that they did develop new technology to fight the Replicators, so I going back to what I said, I think if they had to, they could have developed a lot more if they needed it, but it was rarely needed that they had to advance them selves from what we seen from SG1.

Besides, technologically superior is only relative to what one race doesn't have. As Thor said, the Asgard would never think of developing the weapons that we use on Earth, but they were effective against the Replicators for the most part, so does that make us (in terms of weapons) technologically more advanced than the Asgard and the Replicators?

Main point for me is that, when you are as advanced as the Asgard, and minus the Replicators, you have no real natural enemies to a point, and your only danger is not developing a new cloning technology, I think you would be developing new things for the fun of it, rather than it serving a purpose.

[thekillman]

But in 10 000 years there would still be problems to solve. Different ones, yes. But technology isn't determined by how much war you have.

Radical new technologies frequently come from spaceflight and war development, but that's for a very specific reason: both have circumstances where the normal pricing is different.

Space is a place where materials pay most of their cost in terms of weight. I bet it's pretty doable to make a spaceship completely out of (quality) steel but launching it would absolutely destroy any budget because it's too expensive to launch. One can resort to extremely high-tech materials because their production cost is relatively small to your launch cost. Simultaneously you have to deal with unique problems and you have the budget to solve them. Ducttape was invented for space. Fly by Wire (electronic controls) was invented for space.

The military has a similar focus: they have to deal with an enemy effectively and it's the effectiveness that's important, not (as much) how much it costs.

[Alyana]

It's not because on our planet we evolved a certain way, that everyone else did. First of all, it is a show, so it can be totally illogical. Secondly, technological evolution isn't has linear as it may seem, and isn't as "logical" as you believe it can be.
A Human example is in ancient america where they "didn't invent" the wheel. I know it's a wheel, nothing next to a spaceship, but it is a pretty significant technology for the time. They did invent the wheel, in fact, they just used it only on toys. They didn't use the wheel to make transportation devices because it wasn't an effective mean of transportation there due to the terrain. When people realized they didn't invent the wheel, they thought they were very primitive, but when they found they did, they just didn't use it, it means it was a choice.

Technology is often based on environment and what is needed. Another example is the way we research about sicknesses and diseases. There are more research out there to find solutions and cures than there is to find why these sicknesses exist. Fundamental research is rare. Technology is often invented as a mean to respond to something, as a consequence, it's basically problem solving.

Technology is also limited to knowledge. We didn't sail around the world when we thought it was flat. We didn't go on the moon until we found out we could and how we could do it. It's not because we think that one day we might be able to travel in space that we have the ability to do it.

Now, you are an Asgard and for thousands of years, no one is more powerful than you. You're not going to develop technology to kill an invisible enemy. You will probably keep an eye on the others, just to make sure, but they make it pretty obvious that the Goa'uld are prehistoric compared to them or the tollans for that matter. They only invented a new ship when the war against the replicators went from sour to catastrophic. They started cloning each other, then it went bad and they need to find a solution. Of course, it doesn't mean that they don't do research on other things, but research takes a lot of time...and they have all the time they need.

The Ancient left Atlantis because of how few they were, not because of the inferiority of their technology. I think it is pretty clear that they didn't have the man power to run enough ships to defeat the Wraiths. I mean, the Wraiths still can't detect a Jumper in furtive mode, and how long has it been since the war with the Ancients ? They didn't try to solve it because the Ancient left and they didn't need to find Jumpers. After they left, Atlantis stayed untouched, which shows that their technology was still superior.
You can also argue that in the end, the Ancients wanted to evolve in another way that isn't exactly technological, but...spiritual I guess.

As someone else said, technological superiority is relative...to a lot of things.
The real question is : who would you bet on and ally with ?

[StargateMillennium]

I'm with Alyana. People think technologically advanced too linearly. If you study technology on Earth, different countries are more advanced than others in some aspects but more primitive in others. That's the point of an alliance. I am more advanced to you in this but you are more advanced than me in that, so I'll give you my 'this' for your 'that'. The Ancients have the shield-penetrating drones but still need a pod in order to transport objects while the Asgard simply transport things with a flash of light. The Ancients need their stasis pods built into a wall because of the space it needs. The Asgard have stasis pods the size of a bed. The pacifistic Nox probably have top of the line shields. All advanced but in different ways.