Originally posted by Rohan
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What you just said is an analysis of Earth's situation that you and I understand from watching multiple episodes showing how long it takes Earth to construct a ship, how few ships they have, and from a general idea of how numerous their various enemies are throughout the galaxy. A new viewer doesn't know any of that.
Instead of looking at how you perceive the first episode, imagine how you would perceive it if you didn't have the knowledge you do from watching 300+ existing episodes. Would you then understand why these ships that Earth was one hitting would be a serious threat to Earth? And would you take the Lucian Alliance as a serious threat after watching that?
After 5 seasons of Atlantis there are still lots of fans who don't think of the Wraith as a serious threat. I've spoken to many of them, and I've observed that they don't see them a threat to Earth today because they don't see how they could have been a threat to the Ancients. To me, this is not a problem because I understand that the Wraith were much more numerous when the Ancients were around, but their overfeeding caused their population to decline to the point where they're now a challenge to Earth, but not anywhere near the overwhelming force that hammed the Ancients with swarm after endless swarm. Knowing this means I know they can become as dangerous as they once were (or somewhere between where they were then and where they are now) if they ever find a way to grow their population. However, this has gone over the heads of many fans who have watched all 100 episodes of the show.
If a new program came out that tried to the establish the Wraith as a threat to brand new viewers in a pilot that showed Earth destroying Wraith ships in 1-2 shots, I'd fully expect to be on here explaining to the Wraith can in fact seriously threaten Earth to a deluge of online commenters.
In retrospect it really doesn't matter. But in hindsight it's 50/50 as it does have a meaningful purpose but at the same time is irrelevant as time travel just creates new branches in the time line to account for the changes. The only real way to counteract it is to avoid a butterfly effect to which if SG-1 stole the ZPM without getting caught then everything should have been fine. Otherwise if time was truly linear from cause to effect and vice versa then time travel for the purpose of changing events become impossible due to paradoxes. SGU 'twin destinies' makes this whole point valid as the Destiny appeared in another time line along with her crew. With the 'past' Destiny crew not repeating their actions then the event should have fallen apart due to a paradox. The crew who ended up on Novus should have not been there either. There was another SGU time travel event, but the point still holds true.
Stargate subscribes to a range of ideas that are non-scientific. For example, we know that humans do not use only 10% of their brains here in the real world, but within the confines of this fictional setting, humans do indeed only use a portion of their brain power and can gain greater intelligence and even magical powers by using technology to unlock more of their brain's potential (or through evolution). It's fair to critique this for not being scientific or being an overused trope or whatever else, but I don't think anyone would try to say that's not how things work within Stargate's fictional setting.
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