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Earth Gate and Destiny Gate: Could Carter and Dr Rush both be right?

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    #16
    Also, in the episode in which they find the chair Rush tells them that the chair could be the key to turning the ship back to Earth and Young comments "And how long would that take? Another million years?". The fact that he said another million years suggests that it took at least that amount of time for the ship to reach it's current position.

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      #17
      Originally posted by Ben 'Teal'c would WIN!!' Noble View Post
      I'm sure he only said it once the rest are just sound bites.

      I think we are readiing too much into it.
      You're right he didn't personally repeat it later, but he does confirm it later after he has had a chance to look at the logs of the ship's computer.

      SGU S1E04 Darkness:
      RUSH: (sighing) Right. I'm concerned that Destiny is on the verge of losing power. Look for yourself.
      [Volker draws closer to Rush's console. Rush does not look away from the controls but points Volker towards another console on the far side of the room. Silently, Volker obeys.]
      VOLKER: This ship's been flying around for the better part of a million years.
      RUSH: I know.

      The "This ship's been flying around for the better part of a million years." is in perfect agreement with Rush's statement of "Launched…hundreds of thousands of years ago.".

      I kind of agree that people are reading into this to much as well. I don't know why people need to discount what is explicitly said by one of the brightest people on the ship and then repeatedly quoted by the writers as part of the ships historical info at the start of each episode.

      They don't quote it at the start of each episode just to misinform people. If they meant for Rush to be incorrect it seems like an odd thing to do to go out of your way to highlight his wrong information at every opportunity.

      Comment


        #18
        Except that time dilation still wouldn't explain the quote: he says that it was launched hundreds of thousands of years ago. At the same time, he says that he "knows" that the Destiny predates the 5+ million year old ATA technology.



        Originally posted by Sqrl View Post
        They don't quote it at the start of each episode just to misinform people. If they meant for Rush to be incorrect it seems like an odd thing to do to go out of your way to highlight his wrong information at every opportunity.
        Actually, IIRC, Mollozzi already said that Rush mispoke.


        As for the quote at the beginning of the episode, that is just meant to drive home the point that the ship is really *&^$ old.
        "From East Middle School. Suzumiya Haruhi. I have no interest in ordinary humans. If there are any aliens, time travelers, sliders, or espers here, come join me."
        - The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya; Best Character Introduction Ever.

        "And can we lose the ten thousand year old dead plants?!"
        - Stargate: Atlantis (1x03) "Hide and Seek"

        "Hammerheads do not load/unload units immediately – they must descend to ground level first. Initial experiments involving jump-jetting infantry into the Hammerhead’s cargo compartment met with unfortunate results."
        - Command&Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath Hammerhead Unit Spotlight

        Comment


          #19
          I'm going to reply post by post.
          Please note that this means a fresher reply may seem contradictory to an older one in the same post, but I leave it like that to give an idea of the evolution.
          OK?
          Right.

          Originally posted by Sqrl View Post
          Carter points out that the original earth stargate is ~50 million years old.

          Dr Rush speculates that the Destiny is "hundreds of thousands of years old" and contains a stargate that predates the MW gates.

          Given the damage Destiny has sustained we know it is far from invincible, so it seems at least plausible that at some point Destiny became stranded without hyper-drives between galaxies and had to accelerate to near light speeds. As a result it actually could be possible for Destiny to have only experienced 100,000 years while back in the MW it has been 50 million years. Eventually the Destiny would make it to a star and as per Mallozzi's comment on his blog that the ship can repair itself at least somewhat it could have repaired it's hyper-drives and continued onwards.

          To be clear I seriously doubt that this was what the writers were thinking but it is at least a possible solution to this continuity error and one that does not requite a lot of stretching or twisting to accomplish.

          I'm open to any thoughts or criticism.
          Aside from arguing the Destiny moved at sublight speed, near c, are you also suggesting that the ship might have maintained her steampunky stargate, or something, so whatever method Rush would have used for datation would be trumped?
          Odd. Didn't he use the Destiny core computer?
          You'll excuse me my porous memories, I've only watched the episodes once thus far.

          Originally posted by Sqrl View Post
          I'm not sure what point you're making about a million years being 10 instances of 100,000 years. Time dilation can still explain it and there is existing canon where the ancients have been known to use this tactic to travel between galaxies when their hyper-drives were irreparable (see Atlantis S3 E10 - The Return Part 1) .

          In fact we can calculate exactly how fast the ship would need to go to account for only 100,000 years passing in the 50 million years.

          The formula is t = t0/(1-v^2/c^2)^1/2

          So they should need ~0.999998c.

          Considering that in the episode I mentioned McKay estimates that the ship is about a million years away from the MW and that it would only feel like maybe 12 years to them. Those two numbers tell us that the ship was flying at ~0.99999999993c which establishes the plausibility of the Destiny being able to reach "only" ~0.999998c.
          That would prove that when McKay "only" said 0.999c, he just didn't bother with the other decimals.
          It also means that the relative deceleration of 23 gees observed by McKay, from the Daedalus' point of view, points to very incredible amounts of power being used to slow down the Tria so fast. It's even higher than I thought (well above e19~20 W with sort of Newtonian thrusters).

          Also I want to state again, I think this is obviously a writer mistake, but one that can be explained away with very little fuss. My point isn't that they didn't mess up, but that there is a very plausible way that they could both have been correct.
          Well truth being said the writers of SGA once messed up on the Wraith war dates. I think the first contradiction against "Rising" or "Before I Sleep" appeared in "Echoes", but I'm not sure. I just know that they screwed up, and there just was no time dilation rationalization possible.

          But it's funny cause after reading your first post I was sure that time dilation would make a good explanation here.
          In another older thread, I remember talking about the dates of when Atlantis left, when the Alterans inhabited the Milky Way, and when the Destiny was supposedly launched, and it didn't make sense.
          I argued that the Destiny was actually finished building, or near so, before Atlantis departed, but the plague hit them hard and the project was put on standby. They left the place and no one bothered with Destiny anymore. Then eons later, still well before the Lanteans returned, some of the few who remained reactivated Destiny (or perhaps it wasn't the Alterans at all??), maybe as a legacy of some sort, or even trying to reboot once again their civilization, or perhaps misplaced curiosity from another race.
          Now I'll have to check the dates again because I've not seen the 1.5 season and I'm not sure about what either Rush or Carter said, both about the stargates and the Destiny departure date.

          Note that the standby could also be a time dilation field. They just put it there and the ship would barely age or something like that. It would also explain how the Destiny gate appeared fresher.

          Ah, now I remember. All that extrapolation was to explain what the writers said about how the Destiny's gate was a prototype, which didn't make sense. That's why I argued that Destiny was a rather very old project (the ship seems to be closer in style to the ship Alterans used to move from Altera than anything they used around Atlantis-era).

          Originally posted by Quadhelix View Post
          For the record, she never actually said that the 'Gate was 50 million years old; she said that it could be up to 50 million years old but she never gave a confident estimate of its age.
          What gate was she talking about?

          The point is that time dilation is not necessary to explain the "contradiction" because no contradiction actually exists: 50+ million years could still be described as "hundreds of thousands of years."
          That's a bit stretching it. In general, you try to use numbers which fit the appropriate range/order of magnitude, especially when you bother using several words.
          When she spoke of gigaton nukes for example, in early SG-1, she said thousands of megatons. Same for the overloading gate in "Redemption". But after that all the military staff was used to deal with gigaton stuff and then, for example, for the Mark IX, they used "multi-gigaton".

          Originally posted by Sqrl View Post
          Ah I see what you're getting at now. My fault, I thought you were saying the time dilation effects of near-c speeds couldn't explain it due to the vast difference in time.

          Still, I'd have to disagree that there is no contradiction. Hundreds of thousands of years quite literally means between 100 and 999 thousand years. It is hundreds (100-999) of instances of 1000 years. If he meant several million years or more he would have just said "tens of millions of years".
          Agreed. it even gets worse if you compare 50 e6 Y and 100,000 Y.

          The big reason I don't think he was mistaken is because aside from his comment in Air Part 1 of just having boarded the ship he also repeats later once he's had a chance to look at the ship's computers and get a better handle on it. What's more than that, and what should really settle any doubt that the writers are declaring the ship to be 100's of thousands of years old is that nearly every episode begins with the quote from rush about it being launched hundreds of thousands of years ago - and barring some sort of odd theory about trying to fake us out it seems extremely unlikely that the ship isn't hundreds of thousands of years old.

          Given the persistence of their stating the Destiny's age, I think if anything Carter got it wrong (a fairly rare occurrence). But I have a hard time believing her estimate is off by a factor of 500 or really even a factor of 10. Especially given that she was basing the estimate off the age of the ice around the gate which by that point would have been established (to within a reasonable MOE) by tests.
          The Alterans/Lanteans left several millions of years ago ("Rising"), and there's little reason to believe the stargate network wasn't already in place, so her statement seems to be corroborated to a significant degree.

          Originally posted by Alx View Post
          my two cents on this topic:

          IF destiny was due to its FTL affected by time dialation how come the communication stones work?
          if the destiny while in FTL were subject to time dialation no contact with earth would be possible.

          i still believe that "hundreds of thousands" IS and ALLWAYS will be an epic writer screw up a true inconsistency, and that itself shows to prove that TPTB have no idea or intrest in the show they are making.
          The stones never seem to give a crap about if Destiny is at FTL or not.
          The Al'kesh is not a warship - Info on Naqahdah & Naqahdria - Firepower of Goa'uld staff weapons - Everything about Hiveships and the Wraith - An idea about what powers Destiny...

          Comment


            #20
            Continued.

            Originally posted by thekillman View Post
            let us look at it from the writer's POV.

            "how old would the ship be? "
            *checks the history*
            "approximately.... 10 million years or so"
            "new audience is NEVER going to believe that."
            "you're right. how about something more...unspecified"
            "hundreds of thousands of years."
            "that sounds nice"
            "good, add it to the script then"
            Oh no come one that sucks. I know, the writers proved to be EXTREMELY lazy at times, but I believe they're doing *a bit* of efforts here.
            They already have a race that's been around for many millions of years, they may have already had time dilation fields millions of years ago (although that's speculation because the only evidence of TD is from the presence of such a field in Pegasus.

            seriously, with no knowledge of the ancients, would you EVER buy that something can be millions of years old?
            It's Stargate. Silly (yet good for stories) Von Daniken stuff. TV SciFi. Dude, come on!

            i mean, the ship degrades because of the solar wind and cosmic radiation. without thorough repair, the ship degrades quite fast. it's never gonna make it to the next millenia. granted, this is an advanced piece of tech. i find it hard to believe, however, that the ancients themselves are 50 million years old and over that. 1 million years would've explained EVERYTHING, and made it more realistic. our society is a few thousand years old. the stuff we have now, well, 1000 years ago they could've never comprehended the possibility. just as we can never comprehend the possible stuff of the future. add several extra millenia to our advancement, and we'd be goauld-like. add some more, some more, some more. surpassed the wraith, surpassed most of the PG. by the time we're at 100 000 years in the future, our technology surpasses Asgard and well, 1 million surpasses everything stargate. i'm not sure what the ancients did in all that time, but it was mostly picking their noses.
            Seems the ship could repair itself to some degree at some point.
            Who knows, perhaps aside the kinos, there's a room full of droids as well, besides small scale integrated repair systems?

            Oh, sidenote. The idea that the Destiny would have integrated self repair systems is cool. The Goa'uld largely used Ancient tech (although they also invented stuff on their own).
            Remember "Exodus", and how Jacob and SG-1 repaired the entire Ha'tak's damaged systems (even the weapons located outside) just from a console and the pillars room?
            Doesn't it formidably mesh altogether?

            TBH i've never seen them so dedicated to this show. aside from some unexplained stuff, it hasn't even contradicted itself yet. no major retcons in the same episode. SG1 retoconned bulletproof armor in 1 episode.
            If you're talking about Jaffa armour, you may want to read this.

            Atlantis made the wraith vulnerable in a season or 2.
            Yeah, that they royally screwed up. Wraith all losing their powers. But SGA is not really a good example of storytelling either.

            SG1 has MANY inconsistencies, retcons, and continuity errors,...
            Not so much actually. They even had a character bible for several seasons.

            Atlantis adds a dozen more, and the wraith storyline makes no sense either. in comparison, SGU does a very nice job. if it takes just some minor changes, then i'm fine with it.
            Agreed, SGU seems tighter, thus far and because there's not much info on it yet.
            I'm worried that there's not much to tell about Destiny though, and that the most interesting revelations about Destiny would be about the project's infancy, why it was started, who worked on it, who finally launched the ship and under what conditions. There's a lot of mystery there and the writers could really come with something big, but they would have to work very hard to find something that's not lame and about just another evil force or some such.

            we don't know what destiny has and hasn't done in it's past 10 million year travel. there are two things which bug me and i'll adress them here.
            Destiny looks like an axe so there are couple things she could have done.

            Jackson makes a clear timeline: 5-10 million years ago, atlantis left. the ancient empire was already destroyed by the plague by then.

            if the Destiny is a billion lightyears from home, (10^9 LY's,) , then it travelled a meagre 1000 Ly per year. it would take 1000 years for Destiny to travel across the Milky Way. amp it up with a factor 10 and we got 10^4 LY per year. well, that's a decade for the MW. which is an incredibly long time. even the goauld didn't need that long, and they seem to use pretty old stuff. still, we're talking averages. we don't know how long it takes to refuel. so this is the average speed. still, it seems quite slow to me.

            but if it's just a few billion lightyears away, a million years of age fits closer than 10k years. so, was Jackson wrong then?
            But didn't the Destiny actually stop at each galaxy and do some stuff here? I mean, the Destiny is following the Seeder ship, which itself is a HUGE mystery on itself.I really cross my fingers that if we ever see how a stargate is built, some huge amounts of cash are put into that to make it look EPIC, and not some silly half assed plastic prop stuck in some dimly lit cardboard room with a few skeletons.
            The way one guy in his basement came with the idea was such a huge disappointment which put the final nail into a mediocre TV film -although I said to myself "that's OK, it's just one guy drawing about a stargate, we never saw the majectic labs and the first tests and the ships and all that used for that most important project."

            I mean, it's Stargate FFS, it's practically THE thing they have to do 1000000% correctly. Capice?

            Originally posted by Andru10 View Post
            Also, in the episode in which they find the chair Rush tells them that the chair could be the key to turning the ship back to Earth and Young comments "And how long would that take? Another million years?". The fact that he said another million years suggests that it took at least that amount of time for the ship to reach it's current position.
            Ouch.
            Let's just say that Young just threw a figure here, one that was short enough to make his point clear.

            Originally posted by Sqrl View Post
            You're right he didn't personally repeat it later, but he does confirm it later after he has had a chance to look at the logs of the ship's computer.

            SGU S1E04 Darkness:
            RUSH: (sighing) Right. I'm concerned that Destiny is on the verge of losing power. Look for yourself.
            [Volker draws closer to Rush's console. Rush does not look away from the controls but points Volker towards another console on the far side of the room. Silently, Volker obeys.]
            VOLKER: This ship's been flying around for the better part of a million years.
            RUSH: I know.

            The "This ship's been flying around for the better part of a million years." is in perfect agreement with Rush's statement of "Launched…hundreds of thousands of years ago.".
            Better part clearly being between 500,000 and 1,000,000 years.
            I'd wish they exploit this fact, instead of trying to slowly "correct" what may not need to be corrected, assuming a bit of imagination and planning for future material.
            You know, like when one manages a franchise on the long term -which seems pretty much rare these days.


            Originally posted by Quadhelix View Post
            Except that time dilation still wouldn't explain the quote: he says that it was launched hundreds of thousands of years ago. At the same time, he says that he "knows" that the Destiny predates the 5+ million year old ATA technology.
            Yep, it wouldn't explain the launch date figure, but at least it could have explained the stargate dating assuming something tried to scan the Destiny's stargate with some advanced sensors and got a reply like *beep* *beep* approx. +500,000 years old *beep*.

            Actually, IIRC, Mollozzi already said that Rush mispoke.
            Oh sh**.
            Now that's bad.
            Still, it's Mallozi. I'm not surprised here. I just wish he could come to his senses and for once assume his job properly. Well of course it's just a detail and the rest he does it well thus far (SGU relative), but still.

            As for the quote at the beginning of the episode, that is just meant to drive home the point that the ship is really *&^$ old.
            No, it's really screwing up hard.
            The Al'kesh is not a warship - Info on Naqahdah & Naqahdria - Firepower of Goa'uld staff weapons - Everything about Hiveships and the Wraith - An idea about what powers Destiny...

            Comment


              #21
              well before we blame it ALL on the writers, check the TV tropes site, the parts about "writer screwups" and "network screwups" and stuff related. it explains a lot. for example, it's not a big stretch of imagination that some network ******* thought the ship would be too old and turned it to hundreds of thousands of years

              Comment


                #22
                Originally posted by Mister Oragahn View Post
                Aside from arguing the Destiny moved at sublight speed, near c, are you also suggesting that the ship might have maintained her steampunky stargate, or something, so whatever method Rush would have used for datation would be trumped?
                Odd. Didn't he use the Destiny core computer?
                You'll excuse me my porous memories, I've only watched the episodes once thus far.
                I'm not totally sure I follow what you're asking but the computer core and its logs, the appearance of the ship, age of the stargate, etc.. would all be consistent with each other in terms of their age if time dilation is the actual reason for the discrepancy.

                Originally posted by Mister Oragahn View Post
                That would prove that when McKay "only" said 0.999c, he just didn't bother with the other decimals.
                It also means that the relative deceleration of 23 gees observed by McKay, from the Daedalus' point of view, points to very incredible amounts of power being used to slow down the Tria so fast. It's even higher than I thought (well above e19~20 W with sort of Newtonian thrusters).
                Yep, McKay definitely truncated the speed he gave, but the time to arrive in MW and the estimate of how long it would feel like to the people on board are plenty to get a more precise fix on their speed.

                As for the deceleration, it isn't quite as impressive as you might think. Well it is pretty impressive given the size of the ship but it is still 'only' 740 ft/sec^2 or put another way their velocity in feet per seconds is reduced by 740ft/sec every second. It would actually take them about 2 weeks to (relatively) come to a stop at those speeds, but iirc the 304s are capable of like 0.5c on their own so they would only need to reduce speed by half (so about a week to match speed). Luckily in the episode they just cut ahead to the ancients beaming down to Atlantis so they don't indicate that they came to a stop, how much they actually slowed down, or how long it took. So there were no inconsistencies there.


                Originally posted by Mister Oragahn View Post
                The Alterans/Lanteans left several millions of years ago ("Rising"), and there's little reason to believe the stargate network wasn't already in place, so her statement seems to be corroborated to a significant degree.
                Oh don't get me wrong, I don't think carter was wrong at all. I was just saying that of the two it seemed more likely that Carter was the one who was off to me, and mainly because I thought there would be a lot more uncertainty in dating the ice near the gate than the ship's logs. But if Quadhelix is right and Mallozzi has said Rush misspoke I'd like to see that.

                Comment


                  #23
                  Hmm, this thread again...

                  http://josephmallozzi.wordpress.com/...njoy-if-i-did/
                  Michael writes: “If Atlantis left for Pegasus “Several Million Years Ago” according to “Rising”, was Rush mistaken in his estimate that Destiny left Earth “Hundreds of Thousands” of years ago?”

                  Answer: He misspoke or was speaking sort of off-hand, assuming he wasn’t going to be called on it by a knowledgeable fan.
                  /end
                  Carter: "The singularity is about to explode!"

                  Comment


                    #24
                    Originally posted by Mike. View Post
                    Good enough for me.

                    Comment


                      #25
                      as other people have said, 900 billion years can still be described as hundreds of thousands, so you never know, it might be just a simple way of saying it
                      An Axe age, A Sword age, Shields are sundered,
                      A Wind age, A Wolf age, Ere the World falls,
                      And no Man shall spare Another.

                      Driving fast has never killed anyone. Suddenly coming to a halt, that has killed many, many people

                      The Pope, an Irishman and an Italian are walking down a street, when one of them says "Hey look guys! A bar!"

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                        #26
                        i have a theory about this, the earth gate is the first it is the prototype and the end result of the work to build a stargate but it requires naquadah to build it the ancients want to send out seeder ships but cant rely that they will always be able to find naquadah to use so they come up with a basic model gate one that can be built easily and would allow the ancients to get to whatever planet its on once there they could upgrade it or build whatever the latest model is just throwing that one out there

                        Comment


                          #27
                          Originally posted by Sqrl View Post
                          Dr Rush speculates that the Destiny is "hundreds of thousands of years old" and contains a stargate that predates the MW gates.
                          TPTB said on some blog or tweet somewhere that when Rush said this, he was just speaking off hand and he wasn't expected to be called on it by a knowledgable fan
                          I dunno what to put in here now..

                          Comment


                            #28
                            I'd like to know how Carter even got the 50 million year date for the Antarctic stargate. She couldn't have dated using Ice Cores because Antarctica wasn't even near the South Pole 50 million years ago. It did not reach its current position until 25 million years ago. So any ice that far deep won't date that far back. If she did use ice cores, then it is a writer's error.

                            Did she date the Stargate itself?

                            The material used to build it may say it is 50 million years old, but that does not mean that the stargate was built 50 million years ago. It's like randomly picking a stone out of a stone made house and dating it, finding that stone is 1 million years old and therefore the house must be 1 million years old, even though the house was only built 50 years ago.

                            I would say that Carter and Rush are both wrong. The study of ancient civilizations and dating their history is more for archeologists (such as Daniel Jackson), paleontologists, anthropologists, and geologists than astrophysicists and whatever Rush is.

                            Comment


                              #29
                              How much do the writers care about errors? You look at Sabotage, the drive bar at the back of the ship was fully lit at the end of the episode, despite the fact they just removed one of the drive modules in that very episode.

                              Comment


                                #30
                                Originally posted by ONeill4tW View Post
                                I'd like to know how Carter even got the 50 million year date for the Antarctic stargate.
                                An analysis of the DHD's power core.


                                Originally posted by kwlafayette View Post
                                How much do the writers care about errors? You look at Sabotage, the drive bar at the back of the ship was fully lit at the end of the episode, despite the fact they just removed one of the drive modules in that very episode.
                                Which is not an error.

                                They had removed one of the FTL nodes. However, the "drive bar," as you put it, is quite apparently some sort of STL thruster strip (for example, see here). The fact that it uses STL engines while in FTL does not make those thrusters FTL engines.
                                "From East Middle School. Suzumiya Haruhi. I have no interest in ordinary humans. If there are any aliens, time travelers, sliders, or espers here, come join me."
                                - The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya; Best Character Introduction Ever.

                                "And can we lose the ten thousand year old dead plants?!"
                                - Stargate: Atlantis (1x03) "Hide and Seek"

                                "Hammerheads do not load/unload units immediately – they must descend to ground level first. Initial experiments involving jump-jetting infantry into the Hammerhead’s cargo compartment met with unfortunate results."
                                - Command&Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath Hammerhead Unit Spotlight

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