Ancients seeding?

[RoMUS]

Hey do you guys know if the ancients seeded other galaxies? I mean did they ever say on the show etc that when they left for Pegasus some ancients split and went other galaxies?

[MMartin839]

without looking it up, i seem to remember daniel jackson talking to (Morgan Lafey?) briefly about this subject. Though i do not recall offhand exactly what was said. Im thinking it was somewhere around the time when Jackson went to Atlantis and discovered that the hologram was not just a hologram, but actually Morgan.

[Xaeden]

In "The Fifth Race," the Asgard told O'Neill that "the Ancients moved on from our region of space long ago."

It used to be assumed that this was a reference to the Ancients moving to the Pegasus galaxy. However, in "The Lost Tribe" (Atlantis: Season 5, Episode 11) one of the rogue Asgard referred to their civilization as being only 100,000 years old...
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"My people are dying. The fact that -- as you tell us -- our brothers are already gone only reinforces the need. If we do not do this, our whole civilization -- a hundred thousand years of history -- will be wiped out forever. I cannot allow that to happen."

We also know that the Asgard only mastered intergalactic travel at some point in the last 30,000 years.

That the plague/relocation to Pegasus happened 5-10 million years ago and that the Pegasus Ancients seemed to have never traveled to the Milky Way prior to the evacuation of Atlantis (they believed there was a possibility they'd find enough old Milky Way Ancient technology to rebuild their civilization) suggests the Alliance of Four Great Races was likely formed ~10,000 years ago and involved some of the Ancients who retreated to Earth at the end of the Wraith war.

The discussion between Morgan le Fay and Daniel in "The Pegasus Project" (Sg-1: Season 10, Episode 3) that MMartin839 mentioned does reference a group of surviving Ancients who haven't been fully accounted for...
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Morgan le Fay: "When we first abandoned Atlantis all those millennia ago, the Earth was so harsh, its people so primitive by comparison, there was no hope of living among them as Lantians or rebuilding our society. So, instead we spread out to many lands, some of us planting a few small seeds of civilization among the first tribes of man. Others making their way to the Stargate at your southern pole. Still others choosing to live the remainder of our lives in seclusion and meditation. Merlin and I both chose the latter path."

Janus would have been among the Ancients who chose to leave Earth. He ended up rebuilding his time traveling jumper and leaving it on the planet the Tok'ra left Maybourne on.

What the others did remains a mystery, but if they were not content to work toward ascension on Earth or integrate with the human population, there's a good possibility that this was because they didn't want to give up on trying to rebuild their civilization. In which case, they may have initially been motivated to try to find remnants of their past Milky Way civilization and when they encountered friendly advanced aliens, they may have agreed to an alliance and knowledge exchange to further help get back on their feet.

There's not a lot to go on, but if the Asgard were indeed referring to this group as the ones who moved on from their region of space, that means there may still be a group of living Ancients in some other galaxy. They may not be as technologically advanced as the Ancients we're familiar with as rebuilding all the infrastructure necessary to construct the same kinds of highly advanced ships, cities, devices, and replacement parts for existing technologies that they found in the Milky Way or brought back with them from Pegasus is a long and grueling process. That could even explain why they left the Milky Way as they may not have had the resources necessary to challenge the Goa'uld.

Aside from all that, there's no indication that the Ancients populated other nearby galaxies before or while fleeing the plague and it seems unlikely to me. Otherwise, you'd think that the Pegasus Ancients would've been able to ask them for help against the Wraith or tried to take refuge in their galaxy instead of returning to Earth. The only reasons why those things may not have been possible is if there was a schism over ideological differences or a group of Ancients traveled to a far away galaxy and didn't know that there were other survivors in Pegasus.

Additionally, we don't know for certain that the Alterans stayed together for the entire journey between the Ori and Milky Way galaxies, so there could very well have been breakaway groups that settled in galaxies along the way. However, we know nothing about that period in their history other than they, for some unknown reason, spent thousands of years traveling through space before settling on Dakara.

[FarOutSpaceNut]

Is SGU so hated that it is deemed non-canonical? Is it so nefas the Ori will strike down those who speak of it? It is revealed in SGU by Dr. Rush (and important to the plot of season 2) that the ship is following the path of ancient "seed ships" which put the gates on the worlds (in at least several galaxies not this one) Destiny is visiting.

I just saw SGU and while it has many faults, I thought it was getting better toward the end of season 2. One thing I was pleased about was the writers seem to have a better handle on plausible timescales (really the Ancients had to be many millions (not thousands) of years old to have spread gates so far and for isolated human populations to have diverged to the point where they look different from us.

Season 1 was pretty painful, though.... I felt the writers/showrunner(s?) were unsure what to do with the Dr. Rush and Col Young: both are flakey and not really much fun to watch. It was also a waste to spend the first 3 episodes hunting for calcium cabonate for the scrubbers. The over-the-top emo pop musical montages at the ends of many season 1 episodes were also terrible. But I'm getting off topic....

[Xaeden]

Seed means different things. In the different shows, the Ancients have been said to seed Stargates, but they've also been said to seed humans and in the "Stargate: Atlantis" pilot Daniel used the term when speculating that the Ancients themselves relocated to the Pegasus galaxy.

Daniel: "Why'd they leave? Um, who knows? We know the Ancients on Earth were suffering from a plague. Um, maybe some of them were trying to start over, seeding life in a new galaxy. Maybe that's what Ancients do. The point is, we know where they went."

That last meaning is how we were using the term in this thread as the OP clarified that by asking if the Ancients "seeded other galaxies," what he really wanted to know is if the Ancients personally colonized other galaxies.

As far as we know, the Ancients didn't live long enough to have a chance to use the gates distributed by the seed ships in "Stargate: Universe" as, according to Destiny's computer, the Ancients never gated to the ship. It's possible they instead directly dialed an individual galaxy's gate network created by the seed ships, but it would be very difficult to rebuild their civilization with just what they can carry through a Stargate to another galaxy. A lot of infrastructure and existing technology is necessary to build things like ships, cities, ZPMs, etc., which is why their evacuation to Earth 10,000 years ago didn't result in the Ancients retaking the Milky Way. As they were limited in what they could bring back with them through the gate, they were hoping they'd find the remnants of the pre-plague Ancient civilization and use those recovered assets to rebuild. When they instead discovered that so much of it had been lost to time, many of them gave up.

However, as mentioned in my last post, the group of Atlantis evacuees who left through Earth's Stargate 10,000 years are largely unaccounted for and the Asgard were quite possibility referring to them when they said the Ancients left this region of space long ago. It's possible they recovered some ships and resources from their pre-plague civilization before doing so. If they left to find a galaxy that was uninhabited so they could try to rebuild without having to worry about alien threats, having an existing seed ship distributed gate network would make things easier for the initial, resource strapped colonists.

A potential problem with that is that all of the surviving Stargates built by seed ships may quite possibly be very far away from the Milky Way. They weren't designed to be nigh indestructible like the later models, so it's probable that environmental conditions will eventually cause them to decay. We know the seed ships are at least 2,000 years ahead of the Destiny because of the outcome of the "Twin Destinies" time travel mishap, but would any of those gates still be there if they had been distributed a million years ago? 5 million? 50 million?