One thing that doesn't make sense about the ancients

[xarxes]

Okay so the Alterans left the ori galaxy millions of years ago and came to the Milky Way and Pegasus, and then there was the war with the wraith etc in pegasus and they all died LESS than 10,000 years ago. If we're supposed to be the second evolution of our form, how did that happen in so little time? When Dr Weir meets the council she calls them the 'gate builders' but 10,000 years is a blink of an eye if you compare it will the millions of years that the alterans have been around. Alteran history is just as ancient to the ancients themselves as it is to us, and yet it's all lumped into one.

Sorry if I haven't articulated my point very well, but I hope you see what I'm getting at? It just feels like the timeline for the ancients doesn't add up

[Infinite-Possibilities]

Humans already existed by the time the Ancients ascended, but they still evolved after the Alterrans had arrived in the Milky Way and Pegasus Galaxies.

[DigiFluid]

Okay so the Alterans left the ori galaxy millions of years ago and came to the Milky Way and Pegasus, and then there was the war with the wraith etc in pegasus and they all died LESS than 10,000 years ago. If we're supposed to be the second evolution of our form, how did that happen in so little time? When Dr Weir meets the council she calls them the 'gate builders' but 10,000 years is a blink of an eye if you compare it will the millions of years that the alterans have been around. Alteran history is just as ancient to the ancients themselves as it is to us, and yet it's all lumped into one.

Sorry if I haven't articulated my point very well, but I hope you see what I'm getting at? It just feels like the timeline for the ancients doesn't add up

Your timing is a little off, and you're missing a point or two...

The Alterans came to the MW Galaxy many millions of years ago and thrived here for millions of years--building first Destiny, then later the gate network, and many other amazing technologies we saw over the course of SG-1.

Enter the plague. Most of the Ancients (as they have now become known) die out from the infection, from which there is apparently no cure.

Sometime around 3 million years ago, the Lanteans take Atlantis and bugger off for Pegasus, leaving whatever surviving kin were here behind.

So, there's a (ballpark) 3 million years there in which life begins to re-evolve in our galaxy. This is presumably also accelerated by the Dakara device, which we learn near the end of S8 was designed to recreate life in this galaxy after the plague had run its course.

For the next three million years or so, our galaxy is in a 'dark age' where primitive proto-homo sapiens, primitive Unas, primitive Goa'uld, primitive-you-get-the-picture are the primary forms of life.

10,000 years ago, the Lanteans finally have their butts kicked by the Wraith and retreat through the Atlantis gate back to the Beta Gate on Earth. Here they find only early/primitive humans, in the galaxy that was once the pinnacle of their civilization. The Lantean survivors choose to live out their remaining years either working on ascension, or else 'elevating the primitives' a la Merlin.

[NickEast]

Sometime around 3 million years ago, the Lanteans take Atlantis and bugger off for Pegasus, leaving whatever surviving kin were here behind.

Atlantis left between 5 and 10 million years ago according to Daniel in the Atlantis pilot. The rest is accurate.

[DigiFluid]

Atlantis left between 5 and 10 million years ago according to Daniel in the Atlantis pilot. The rest is accurate.

It's been some time since I watched it, I appear to have messed up my numbers

[Aesop]

Okay so the Alterans left the ori galaxy millions of years ago and came to the Milky Way and Pegasus, and then there was the war with the wraith etc in pegasus and they all died LESS than 10,000 years ago. If we're supposed to be the second evolution of our form, how did that happen in so little time? When Dr Weir meets the council she calls them the 'gate builders' but 10,000 years is a blink of an eye if you compare it will the millions of years that the alterans have been around. Alteran history is just as ancient to the ancients themselves as it is to us, and yet it's all lumped into one.

Sorry if I haven't articulated my point very well, but I hope you see what I'm getting at? It just feels like the timeline for the ancients doesn't add up

Well the Milky Way had been seeded with human life before they departed to Pegasus, and so at the end of the Wraith War when they "sank" Atlantis, they returned to an Earth that was now essentially under the domain of the humans they had seeded there several millennia before. So realizing Earth was no longer "theirs" (the Ancients) to possess, they instead disseminated into the human population.

I think their return preceded Classical Antiquity because there are implications that Ancient language and culture influenced the Greeks and Romans. Something that was probably intentional so that humanity's development on Earth would eventually lead us to our own legacy as their successors.

Your timing is a little off, and you're missing a point or two...

The Alterans came to the MW Galaxy many millions of years ago and thrived here for millions of years--building first Destiny, then later the gate network, and many other amazing technologies we saw over the course of SG-1.

Enter the plague. Most of the Ancients (as they have now become known) die out from the infection, from which there is apparently no cure.

Sometime around 3 million years ago, the Lanteans take Atlantis and bugger off for Pegasus, leaving whatever surviving kin were here behind.

So, there's a (ballpark) 3 million years there in which life begins to re-evolve in our galaxy. This is presumably also accelerated by the Dakara device, which we learn near the end of S8 was designed to recreate life in this galaxy after the plague had run its course.

For the next three million years or so, our galaxy is in a 'dark age' where primitive proto-homo sapiens, primitive Unas, primitive Goa'uld, primitive-you-get-the-picture are the primary forms of life.

10,000 years ago, the Lanteans finally have their butts kicked by the Wraith and retreat through the Atlantis gate back to the Beta Gate on Earth. Here they find only early/primitive humans, in the galaxy that was once the pinnacle of their civilization. The Lantean survivors choose to live out their remaining years either working on ascension, or else 'elevating the primitives' a la Merlin.

That's a good timeline, except I think the Stargate network precedes Destiny. We know from Ark of Truth that Amelius had already developed the concept of the Stargate before their exodus, so by the time they arrived in the Milky Way and settled I think they built a gate network within a relatively short amount of time.

They just "upgraded" the network to more advanced gates and DHD's in the time since Destiny and the Seed Ships departed Earth...

[DigiFluid]

That's a good timeline, except I think the Stargate network precedes Destiny. We know from Ark of Truth that Amelius had already developed the concept of the Stargate before their exodus, so by the time they arrived in the Milky Way and settled I think they built a gate network within a relatively short amount of time.

They just "upgraded" the network to more advanced gates and DHD's in the time since Destiny and the Seed Ships departed Earth...

To my thinking, that just doesn't make a lot of sense. We know from SGU that Destiny departed from our galaxy, and it seeds the most primitive gates we've seen yet--they have a very limited range and can only dial other gates within a limited radius, even within the same galaxy.

The MW gates, by way of comparison, can dial anywhere in their galaxy. And the addition of both DHDs and a more easily rotatable inner ring would seem to correct the earlier design flaws of 'losing the remote' and 'not being able to spin the entire bloody ring,' respectively

[thekillman]

To my thinking, that just doesn't make a lot of sense. We know from SGU that Destiny departed from our galaxy, and it seeds the most primitive gates we've seen yet--they have a very limited range and can only dial other gates within a limited radius, even within the same galaxy.

The MW gates, by way of comparison, can dial anywhere in their galaxy. And the addition of both DHDs and a more easily rotatable inner ring would seem to correct the earlier design flaws of 'losing the remote' and 'not being able to spin the entire bloody ring,' respectively

Remember that the SGU gates serve a vastly different purpose than the MW gates. By design, there's no need for the Destiny gates to have galactic range. Besides, because of their in-situ production, limitations on the design may be needed in order to be manufactured on the other side of the galaxy.

[Aesop]

To my thinking, that just doesn't make a lot of sense. We know from SGU that Destiny departed from our galaxy, and it seeds the most primitive gates we've seen yet--they have a very limited range and can only dial other gates within a limited radius, even within the same galaxy.

The MW gates, by way of comparison, can dial anywhere in their galaxy. And the addition of both DHDs and a more easily rotatable inner ring would seem to correct the earlier design flaws of 'losing the remote' and 'not being able to spin the entire bloody ring,' respectively

I don't know, I think it makes sense.

I think the MW had a Destiny-era network that was simply upgraded to the gates we saw in SG-1 and SG-A as time went by. But the camera very deliberately zooms in on Amelius' sketches of a gate at the beginning of Ark of Truth before they even leave Celestis. Given the amount of time it took to get from the Alteran home galaxy to the Milky Way, there was probably ample time to refine the technology.

Logically, I would think that they would have the concept of a Stargate network worked out in a practical way pretty well by the time Destiny launched, since they would want to be sure that the Seed Ships and Destiny were going to do their job right, and that it would even accomplish what they hoped for.

So I would expect that the Ancients had been utilizing a Destiny-era gate network in the MW for quite some time before Destiny launched, and it was only after that when they upgraded the MW network to the gates we saw in SG-1.

[darkest1]

Wow great discussion... we actually had one similar to this some time ago on these forums that I remember and was part of.

You all have made great points on the Lantean societal evolution.

First, lets look at the beginning, the Alterans. The Alterans are the name of the race of people that the Lanteans and Ori both come from. We know from the Arc of Turth that the Alterans had a sundering and split into two factions. One faction leaves their home galaxy to find a new home, while the other stays and establishes a new order where they are the supreme beings and all others should bow before their supremicy. What was the topic of this disagreement? It was the child races that had already started to appear even then. This would have been about what 4-5 million years ago. It led to a bloody civil war that sundered one of the most advanced people in three known galaxies.

Next, the Lanteans exit thier galaxy to find peace and conduct their experiments with the human form. In this time they focused on the progress of their scientific understanding, built Atlantis and other sister city-ships and spread amongst the stars. They find Earth on the outer edge of the Milky Way and establish their new home. They re-create their servitor race/ child race and establish new civilzations. This would have been around the 4 million year mark. I don't think it took them more than a few millenia to cross the gap between galaxies not with their knowledge constantly upgrading.

They reign for probably another million years, spreading their new stargate technology across the galaxy and connecting their new city-states into a massive empire. Remeber that there are other factions in this galaxy. In the Heliopolis episode they left a message of the council of races. Four races who were equals and shared knowledge between each other; The Nox, the asgard, the ancients, and the firbolg. Were these races uplifted by the Alterans or were they already technologically sophisticated by the time the ancients arrived? Unknown at this point but I speculate that the other races were mostly on par with the ancients and that through time and understanding all forged alliances and shared their knowledge, meaning that each had something the others didn't.

So now we have ancients, an empire and alliances that span races across an entire galaxy. Galactic civilization is thriving and things are going well. Enter the Goa'uld. Parasitic and egotisitical in nature, they start to spread across the stars gathering tech and species for their own uses. To the great civilization they were nothing more than a nuicance. However, change was coming. Somehow a plague is released that decimates the Alteran numbers. Fearing extinction they leave for the new galaxy they had just begun exploring with their seed ships, Pegasus. This seems to have caused the other races of the alliance to withdraw within thier borders. Probably because the disease, while not as devastating as it was to the ancients, probably affected the others as well. It may even have wiped out the Firbolg because we hear nothing of them throughout the rest of the SG explorations. I surmise that it may have been either created by the Goa'uld and spread diliberately or it was accidentally created and escaped from the ancients, similar to the nanite and wraith in Pegasus.

So from there life goes on and Earth is on its own. Of course the Goa'uld use this time to their advantage and fill the power vacuum left behind. They spread quickly and gain power while the others are all realing from the sudden changes in galactic civilization. The disease ravaged for eons and isolated the council races from each other. When they re-emerged the goa'uld were firmly entrenched and they had to be treated with rather than suplanted because the others are too spread thin to reassert their technical dominance.

Ra finds humans on earth and establishes his star empire with himself and others as the Gods of the Galaxy. The rest is all history. What think you, does this sound like what happened? I have peiced this all together so let me know what you think!

[thekillman]

Wow great discussion... we actually had one similar to this some time ago on these forums that I remember and was part of.

You all have made great points on the Lantean societal evolution.



This would have been about what 4-5 million years ago.

50-60 millions years ago. 4-5 million years ago Atlantis was already in Pegasus.

Next, the Lanteans exit thier galaxy to find peace and conduct their experiments with the human form. In this time they focused on the progress of their scientific understanding, built Atlantis and other sister city-ships and spread amongst the stars. They find Earth on the outer edge of the Milky Way and establish their new home. They re-create their servitor race/ child race and establish new civilzations. This would have been around the 4 million year mark. I don't think it took them more than a few millenia to cross the gap between galaxies not with their knowledge constantly upgrading.

The Altera, not lanteans. Or to clarify: the Anquieta (ancients) from "fifth race" (we are the ancients). Altera are the faction from their home galaxy, the other are the Ori. In the Milky Way they were the Ancients. In pegasus they were the Lantea, though technically that only applies to ancients from Atlantis.
Atlantis' true age is not known, but that ship taking off in AOT wasn't atlantis.

It's also not a Servitor race. The human race is made by the ancients as a kind of back-up, possibly to study if they missed any evolutionary "lanes".

They reign for probably another million years, spreading their new stargate technology across the galaxy and connecting their new city-states into a massive empire.

They reigned for at least 30 million years according to "lost city"

The Nox, the asgard, the ancients, and the firbolg. Were these races uplifted by the Alterans or were they already technologically sophisticated by the time the ancients arrived? Unknown at this point but I speculate that the other races were mostly on par with the ancients and that through time and understanding all forged alliances and shared their knowledge, meaning that each had something the others didn't.

There are hints to suggest that they're uplifted, but if that's true it would bankrupt SG's creativity even further. it's something i'll never acknowledge. It seems that in SG the human form is somewhat of a perfect form, so i blame convergent evolution.

As to understanding: yes. Most of late SG1 seemed to try and debunk this, but the Alliance was made between equals, not a teacher and it's kids.

So now we have ancients, an empire and alliances that span races across an entire galaxy. Galactic civilization is thriving and things are going well. Enter the Goa'uld. Parasitic and egotisitical in nature, they start to spread across the stars gathering tech and species for their own uses. To the great civilization they were nothing more than a nuicance. However, change was coming. Somehow a plague is released that decimates the Alteran numbers. Fearing extinction they leave for the new galaxy they had just begun exploring with their seed ships, Pegasus. This seems to have caused the other races of the alliance to withdraw within thier borders. Probably because the disease, while not as devastating as it was to the ancients, probably affected the others as well. It may even have wiped out the Firbolg because we hear nothing of them throughout the rest of the SG explorations. I surmise that it may have been either created by the Goa'uld and spread diliberately or it was accidentally created and escaped from the ancients, similar to the nanite and wraith in Pegasus.

According to Rising atlantis left as early as 10 million years ago. It thoroughly predates the Goa'uld. The plague is hinted to be Ori in origin. It could just as easily mean that the plague was effective and the Ori copied it so it's no guarantee. Considering the crap the Ancients were working on, it was likely a lab experiment that developed far beyond Ancient control. It likely consisted of more than just a simple plague considering it defeated the Ancients, who could've easily sealed off a thousand planets and live among the other trillion.

The Goa'uld rise in an era of rebuilding after Dakara devastated the landscape. They are one among a group of early rising civilizations (Tollan and Ashen come to mind too). The Goa'uld gather the ancient's leftovers, but it's likely that the originals are destroyed in war and competition so the goa'uld never managed to properly reproduce Ancient tech.

The Four likely suffered heavy losses at the hands of the plague. It's clear that the Asgard and Nox withdrew. The Nox seem to be indigenous to the MW while the Asgard originated from elsewhere (not necessarily Ida). The Furlings may have left the Local Group altogether, or retreated to a galaxy we haven't seen yet (there are plenty). either way, the Asgard never reference them so it's likely option 1 or total extinction.

So from there life goes on and Earth is on its own. Of course the Goa'uld use this time to their advantage and fill the power vacuum left behind. They spread quickly and gain power while the others are all realing from the sudden changes in galactic civilization. The disease ravaged for eons and isolated the council races from each other. When they re-emerged the goa'uld were firmly entrenched and they had to be treated with rather than suplanted because the others are too spread thin to reassert their technical dominance.

Ra finds humans on earth and establishes his star empire with himself and others as the Gods of the Galaxy. The rest is all history. What think you, does this sound like what happened? I have peiced this all together so let me know what you think!

Most if not all of the original civilizations during the Alliance were wiped out by Dakara. some (e.g. Smoke Giants) may be leftovers that were spared by Dakara, but most have evolved in the ten or so million years since it's firing