Time traveling for early day Ancients.

[Rohan]

Just a thought I had.

I know by the time of the Milky Way and Pegasus gates, DHD computers generally make sure not to go anywhere near solar flares. However I can imagine in the early days when the stargate was still new that the Ancients had lost a few travelers to different points in the time line.

Makes me kind of wonder if the Ancients had set up protocols in the event they end up in the past or future by accident.

Especially would've been an interesting episode of a early day Ancient due to a gate malfunction ending up in modern day very confused by everything and more so how surprised he was seeing how much Ancient technology had advanced in the time he was gone.

[StargateMillennium]

I've never heard the Ancients set up the stargate so they don't get near solar flares before.

If that is the case, it might solve the issue I have with solar flare time travel. I mean, the first time, ok, a one in a million chance, SG1 just got lucky. And the second time, it was intentional. Then Shepard gets it by accident. Then the destiny team has it happen like what, three times?

I mean, even twice on accident is stretching it. Consider how large the galaxy is, how long stargates have been around, and how frequently the stargate is used. How many accidental time travelers are there if a single planet that infrequently uses its stargate can happen twice within 10 years?

[Rohan]

I've never heard the Ancients set up the stargate so they don't get near solar flares before.

If that is the case, it might solve the issue I have with solar flare time travel. I mean, the first time, ok, a one in a million chance, SG1 just got lucky. And the second time, it was intentional. Then Shepard gets it by accident. Then the destiny team has it happen like what, three times?

I mean, even twice on accident is stretching it. Consider how large the galaxy is, how long stargates have been around, and how frequently the stargate is used. How many accidental time travelers are there if a single planet that infrequently uses its stargate can happen twice within 10 years?

It's one of the safety protocols that the Ancients built in to avoid time traveling accidents.

It happened for SG-1 because their DHD was home built and not linked up with the rest of the Milky Way galaxy gates. Hence why in the episode '2010' and the film 'Continuum', that they had to purposely find and go through a flare.

The reason I think the Ancients are aware of this side effect in the episode 'Search and Rescue' that Mckay notes that the system isn't supposed to allow the gate to lock in the presence of a flare. But due to a system update, it caused the hiccup of Sheppard jumping to the future.

Thus bringing the case of SGU era stargates. If those are the earliest stargate models then they definitely have lost a few travelers along the way.

[Omega-TI]

I know the Ancients had a problem with causality, but life could have been so much easier for them if they had just located the beginnings of the Wraith, gone back and eliminated it instead of fighting a long drawn out war they eventually lost.

[Xaeden]

I know the Ancients had a problem with causality, but life could have been so much easier for them if they had just located the beginnings of the Wraith, gone back and eliminated it instead of fighting a long drawn out war they eventually lost.

That would be a huge sacrifice though as the generation that made the decision to travel that far back would be condemning themselves to non-existence. Stargate isn't great about showing how the butterfly effect would lead to completely different people being born the further you get away from a time travel event, but it would be pretty hard to justify the same exact genetic groupings coming together if the Wraith were time traveled out of existence as it's unlikely something anyone would have considered until the Wraith became a credible threat to Ancient civilization, and by that point the Wraith had a huge impact on the galaxy.

For example, during the evacuation, the council learned that Janus invented a reliable means of time travel for, as far as we know, the first time in Ancient history. However, if they used the jumper at that point, none of them would have ever been born as the ripples from such a change would have allowed Ancients from earlier generations to be able to contribute to the gene pool instead of dying to the Wraith, while others wouldn't have been forced to evacuate certain worlds and encounter the specific romantic partners that they did in the first timeline. Even in cases where the same partners got together, so many different changes (large and small) would have led to them conceiving children at different moments in time, resulting in different offspring being produced by the combination of different sperm and/or eggs.

The only ones who would have lived on were those who used the jumper to travel back in time, but there were still millions of living Ancients who had decades left to live and hoped to find a way to recreate their civilization in the Milky Way or achieve immortality by ascending. Agreeing to be erased so alternate Ancients can be born in their place seems like it would be a hard sell.

I've never heard the Ancients set up the stargate so they don't get near solar flares before.

If that is the case, it might solve the issue I have with solar flare time travel. I mean, the first time, ok, a one in a million chance, SG1 just got lucky. And the second time, it was intentional. Then Shepard gets it by accident. Then the destiny team has it happen like what, three times?

I mean, even twice on accident is stretching it. Consider how large the galaxy is, how long stargates have been around, and how frequently the stargate is used. How many accidental time travelers are there if a single planet that infrequently uses its stargate can happen twice within 10 years?

I would imagine that before the protocol was put into place, the Ancients tried to manually prevent this from happening by keeping track of the path a wormhole had to take to connect two Stargates and forbidding gate travel when that wormhole had to pass through or too closely to a star.

Modern day humans have gotten themselves into trouble because...

They didn't know they should not force a lock in such a situation, as Carter did in "1969."

Carter: Almost there, sir. This time of year, the direct line between P2X-555 and the Earth takes us within 70,000 miles of the sun. I have to update the computer's drift calculation to include gravitational space/time warping.

They were desperate and willing to take the risk, like in SGU's "Twin Destinies."

Rush: The ship itself must have passed very near a solar flare in the exact moment we locked the nine chevron address. Temporal event, like we've seen cause time travel through wormholes, somehow affected the entire ship. One of those unpredictable things I remember warning you about.

They didn't think to calculate a wormhole's path ahead of time. In SGU's "Time" this was likely because it didn't occur to them that those gates predated the safety protocol, while in Atlantis' "The Last Man" they thought they could rely on the safety protocol until Sheppard's mishap revealed that McKay broke it by monkeying around with the code.

Carter: Well, why didn't the Gate's failsafe prevent the wormhole from locking?
McKAY: Umm, well, we've had a number of glitches since we, uh, last updated the operating system.

For the early Milky Way Ancients, population centers would have had no problem calculating a wormhole trajectory before letting people walk through a gate and they could have informed anyone traveling to an unpopulated world of when it was safe/unsafe to make a return trip. Presumably they would have also warned travelers not to come through if, for some reason, anyone tried dialing in when a wormhole had to pass too close to a star and it's possible travelers may have carried around equipment that told them when gate travel was/wasn't safe based on solar and planetary data they collected when first seeding the Stargates. The latter would be particularly useful if circumstances forced them to gate hop between a different set unpopulated planets to get home than they originally planned to.

These are not fool proof solutions, but they would have prevented accidental time travel from becoming a common occurrence.