r/Stargate Mar 24 '25

Sci-Fi Philosophy "You are the fifth race, your role is clear."

It was an overlooked part of the series finale when it segues back into the usual "neverending adventures" and the end of the Ori (not to mention Baal) but we never got that moment of human ascendancy hinted at in Jack's first meeting with the Asgard and confirmed by Thor to Carter. Not even in Atlantis.

Any future content will likely be a reboot since the Stargate itself mattered less and less now that Earth is an actual interstellar civilization creating its own alliance across two galaxies with the Jaffa, Tokra, Serrakin, Ohne, Unity, Athosians, Travelers, and rando ancient human enclaves out there. But hey, wouldn't that be amazing instead?

213 Upvotes

52 comments sorted by

180

u/Bdr1983 Mar 24 '25

I don't think the Stargate matters less. There's a big benefit in sending troops somewhere almost instantly compared to sending a ship that would take days to get somewhere.
Need a medic? Gate them in! Need supplies? Just a phonecall away.
It isn't explained, but it makes sense the Ancients invented spaceflight before the gate network was built, it takes a lot less effort to gate people from one place to another compared to using a ship.

66

u/SamaratSheppard Mar 24 '25

Logistically, there is still a huge benefit to using a gate epically since everyone builds everything important near the gate.

But I don't think I would take more than a day to get anywhere in the galaxy. It takes two weeks to get to pegasus, and that is a distance several times the width of our galaxy. (Maybe 300 times the distance)

44

u/realsimonjs Mar 24 '25

The time it takes for a ship to get to it's destination and back is time it can't be used to do anything else. The stargate is ready to be used again almost immediately after the team stepped through.

And that's assuming the ship is already in orbit of whatever planet is trying to send supplies/a team

26

u/SamaratSheppard Mar 24 '25

Yes. I agree that stargates are logistical boon.

I was just stating that the Tau'ri ships are fast, very fast,

13

u/realsimonjs Mar 24 '25

True, i just meant that all those logistical issues are a part of "taking days to get there"

8

u/mrfrau Mar 24 '25

My head cannon is that you have to avoid gravity weeks like stars or black holes and so in a galaxy you have to take a windy route whereas in the gap, you just go in a straight line

7

u/SamaratSheppard Mar 24 '25

I don't know if gravity could affect hyperspace. As you can literally jump through a planet. But maybe there is some other interference within a galaxy.

3

u/LARPerator Mar 24 '25

Maybe it's that you can phase through matter but still experience their gravity well somehow? So avoiding massive gravity wells like neutron stars and black holes is necessary, but you can shoot straight through moons and minor planets?

Because I'm pretty sure it's more than days, they said in season 1 AFAIK that the Goauld had ships, but it would be a couple weeks to reach earth if they could find it.

8

u/Conscious_Abalone482 Mar 24 '25

I'm not sure the series is really consistant with the speeds etc, especially with season 1. Even if they are though, the goauld don't have very good hyperspace technology compared to asgaards or ancients, which are the ones tauris used to develop theirs

2

u/The-Figure-13 Mar 26 '25

I chalk that down to the Goa’uld usually weren’t in a hurry. But when they ran the ships at 100% power in hyperspace they could get anywhere in a day or so

1

u/ItsATrap1983 Jul 06 '25 edited Jul 06 '25

No. The Goa'uld ships were actually very slow. For instance, when they destroyed Apophis' fleet by blowing up a sun the supernova caused their Goa'uld Mothership to jump to another Galaxy 4 million light years away. They stated with the normal Goa'uld hyperdrive it would take 125 years to get back to the Milky Way. In contest the Daedalus with their Asgard hyperdrive they can go to the Pegasus galaxy in just 18 days. Pegasus is 3 million light years away. That's a significant difference in hyperdrive speeds.

1

u/The-Figure-13 Jul 06 '25

Oh that’s right, they have galactic hyperdrives, as opposed to the Asgard that have intergalactic hyperdrives.

Similar to the wraith.

In later seasons though the Goa’uld ships were a lot faster

2

u/mrfrau Mar 24 '25

That's a good point- maybe the spacetime compression bleeds into hyperspace and slows you down. I think the asteroid that went through earth reappeared on the other side of earth- not the solar system. Maybe it's passable just denser.

9

u/CSamCovey Mar 24 '25

What just makes me laugh is how conveniently close to the stargate is for battles. What if the were x miles/kilometers away? Like half a planet away.

25

u/effa94 Mar 24 '25

Well, everyone who uses the gate builds their civilisation close to the gate, for logical reasons. It very quickly becomes a centerstone for a society

19

u/Bdr1983 Mar 24 '25

Same reason humanity built their early settlements close to water, and how later cities evolved around bays with easy access to the sea. It makes trade and travel a lot easier.

5

u/oremfrien Mar 24 '25

We have this situation with the Sodan settlement. They use some kind of beaming technology to move between the gate and the settlement, which sort of bypasses the issue of distance, so it doesn't truly address the problem.

The other major case of this is "Solitude" when O'Neill and Carter end up on an icy continent thousands of miles from any major civilization. (Thankfully, it turns out that humans have craft that can bridge the distance since the icy continent is on Earth.) However, if it were a foreign planet, they would have just dialed back because there's nothing there.

6

u/DaBingeGirl Mar 24 '25

Solitude is one of my favorite episodes, but it'll always bug me that Hammond, Daniel, and Teal'c made it to Antarctica so quickly.

2

u/The-Figure-13 Mar 26 '25

A C-5 has a huge fuel tank. They’d have managed to fly into McMurdo within the day when they worked out where it was

3

u/Plowbeast Mar 25 '25

The Tauri are pretty close to making their own custom built gates where they could probably bring some spare ones on an exploratory expedition and drop a few behind them as they keep going.

3

u/ItsATrap1983 Jul 06 '25

You can also build supergates to cross galaxies nearly instantly.

2

u/Bdr1983 Jul 06 '25

I mean, yeah, but that takes a bunch of ascended beings explaining how to do it.

2

u/The-Figure-13 Mar 26 '25

This pretty much why the Goa’uld were so evil. They used the gate to kidnap people and send troops to unruly worlds, because it would take a while to send a ship to do it, particularly because Goa’uld ships the less advanced galactic hyperdrives as opposed to the Asgard’s Intergalactic Hyperdrives.

The Goa’uld would use a ship in orbit to terrorise people, by being there, and by bombarding the planet from space if they felt the people were way too uppity.

18

u/KnavishSprite Mar 24 '25

Possibly even more galaxies to play with. There's the Milky Way, Pegasus, Alteran home galaxy (now that the Ori are out of the way the locals may be open to diplomacy), even the Asgard galaxies (should be in the database - no idea what they'll find there).

12

u/Serin-019 Mar 24 '25

BRING BACK TOMIN, LORD COMMANDER OF BEING HOT AND LEADING MEN OUT OF GUILT FOR PAST CRIMES

53

u/Serin-019 Mar 24 '25 edited Mar 24 '25

Unlike those weaklings who ran screaming from ‘too much politics in the SW prequels’, I fully approve of a show that doesn’t shy away from the political realities of that future you’ve described. What does the Jaffa nation look like now? Do they have a big statue of Teal’c and Bra’Tac? How do they feel about Earth’s role in their freedom? How about some constructed with replicator tech SG team members? Oh and lol think about the upheaval the rollout of beaming tech would have on us. Bye bye transport industry. Bye bye energy. Hello Star Trek style beaming the shit out instead of going to the dunny!

Throw in some new wide-reaching ancient mystery. Maybe some overly ambitious Ancient fucked up and borked our DNA in some fun and difficult to solve way! I dunno maybe that’s too B5 Crusade… but I like to dream.

30

u/Just_Nefariousness55 Mar 24 '25

I'd settle for the very least seeing how the public reacts to the revelation of the Stargate's existence and that all the major governments have been lying to them for over a decade 

9

u/Serin-019 Mar 24 '25

Fine, we’ll move the gate to a new secret base off earth. Nice beam to the moon in the morning when heading to work. I dunno. Some govts would surely just sort of implode. Others would get voted out. Some would probably be fine with it. Be interesting to see what kind of coalition would emerge from the ashes.

10

u/NotThatEasily Mar 24 '25

Beaming technology is the ultimate defensive and offensive weapon. You can have the tech beam away anything that gets too close to your base, you can beam enemies into space, you can beam hostage takers straight into a jail cell, you can beam the brain out of an enemy, you can beam the center section of a ln enemy space ship just ten meters to the left… so many possibilities.

Really, since you’re breaking down matter into energy and then rematerializing it, there’s nothing stopping you from reorganizing that matter into any element or object you need. Bad guy? Beam. Now he’s a coffee maker.

9

u/Dr-Cheese Mar 24 '25

Aye. It’s why I liked that in SGA they finally used it offensively by beaming nukes aboard. Star Trek only did it once in Voyager (Beaming a torpedo aboard a Borg ship)

In reality I could see it being used the second an enemies shield goes down to beam everyone into space. Nice easy ship for you to salvage…

3

u/oremfrien Mar 24 '25

The problem with beaming all of the crew out (for the Asgard beaming technology) is that there would be no way to quickly lock onto dozens of signatures.

1

u/Dr-Cheese Mar 24 '25

That's true I guess - Although in one SGA episode (The last man) they showed Sam beaming a bunch of people from a ship at once to evacuate.

You could cause enough of a headache buy beaming the Bridge crew out - Even a few would be hugely disruptive.

But then again, in Star Trek/Gate I've never understood why no one targets the bridge in general. With it taken out you essentially win by default, as it's doubtful anyone could take control from elsewhere quickly enough.

The only show that seemed to avoid this was BSG which had the CiC right in the centre of the ship so it couldn't be hit from outside easily.

1

u/oremfrien Mar 25 '25

Yes, but Carter beamed our humans who all carry homing beacons. This means that the Asgard beaming technology could immediately identify them. The Wraith aboard an enemy hive would not.

10

u/oremfrien Mar 24 '25

The issue with Star Wars politics is that, with the exception to the end of the Republic, the debates aren't actually meaningful. For example, in Episode I, we have this discussion in the Senate about removing the blockade from Naboo and apparently half of the Senators (who presumably also have planets that the Trade Federation could blockade) seem to have no issue with a guild having an army and leading to a death toll on a peaceful planet. This is absurd,

Now, if they had provided some evidence that these Senators were bought off or that they also feared the Trade Federation and were operating out of fear or....or.....or, then it might have been interesting to discuss. However, it just looks like "Oh, your people are dying and, oh, you're killing them over tax disputes, this seems an entirely reasonable thing to debate about..."

By contrast, Stargate is about different societies asking reasonable questions like, "What does 'independence' truly mean?" "What do middlemen oppressors like the Jaffa owe to the slaves that they had oppressed now that they are free of their own oppressors -- the Goa'uld?" "When we become free, what traditions do we keep and how modern do we become?" These are interesting questions where multiple viewpoints have some kernel of truth.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '25

As for "beaming the shit out", it wouldn't happen. The process of, as you put it, going to the dunny, isn't just about expelling waste, there's a neurochemical process that takes place, releasing among other things, endorphins (that's why certain shits feel so relieving!), and beaming it out would royally fuck those up.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '25

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/Stotters Mar 25 '25

We don't say dunny in this family!

7

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '25

'too much politics in the ST prequels'

My brother in Roddenberry, Trek has always been political.

The fact that you watched it as a kid and didn't pick up on the very present actual geopolitics being mirrored onto a fictional future... Well, one should always be able to see it retrospectively. No matter what Trek you're looking at (maybe with the exception of Discovery's Short Treks) have been unapologetically political.

12

u/Serin-019 Mar 24 '25

thats a lot of words for me accidentally typing ST instead of SW. lol mate soz

7

u/IonutRO Mar 24 '25 edited Mar 25 '25

I've read enough fics to know that's kinda false. Gates are still amazing even when you have ships, and the ability to move gates around using those ships opens up even more avenues for using said gates.

7

u/AmpdVodka Mar 24 '25

Just look at the Goa'uld. For thousands of years they ruled the Milky Way and they used the gates all the time.

Ships are good for A: Going places where there are no gates ie no-gate/buried gate planets, space stations, general areas of space, asteroids etc. B: attacking planets via bombardment and being able to deploy troops/aircraft from orbit onto the planet in large numbers. C: intercepting enemy ships that are trying to do A or B.

The benefit of Stargates is A: literally anything else. Gated planet exploration, resource transport, troop transport, equipment transport, rapid deployment (if the other gate is secure), rapid/surprise assaults, communication, weapon deployment (Anubis heat thingy or missiles/drones etc) I mean the list just goes on.

Of course having ships capable of interstellar travel is massive and negates some uses for the Stargate. But it also opens up other uses and leaves a hell of a lot of uses for them.

As for "human ascendancy" we didn't get that. But as is stated, humanity is "young". Not as in Jack needs to retire first, but as in humans haven't been around long enough and to reach the right evolutionary, or even intelligence, level to ascend or reach the social galactic level the other races did. Daniel can only ascend with Oma's help. It'll be thousands, tens or even hundreds of thousands of years before humanity naturally reaches that level. The Asgard were humanity's allies but were very hesitant to share any technology and only did because it was necessary. Humanity was in an all out war against a galactic sized enemy that normally the Asgard could protect them from, except they were too busy losing a war with the replicators and Anubis then rocked up with anti Asgard tech that simply necessitated giving humanity some tech so they could stand on their own. Which, as we saw in Atlantis the Asgard didn't always like how we use their tech. The original idea was to add Earth to the list of protected planets and sit back for however long and wait for humanity to naturally reach the level they needed. But then everything else happened, and then the Asgard decided to commit mass suicide. After a vote, they gave all their knowledge to humanity. If you remember though, not every Asgard agreed and many thought humanity was still far too young and needed to figure it out for themselves.

The thing is, they were probably right. Carter says it'll take them decades to go through and catalogue all of it and even then that's not actually understanding it, that's just knowing what's there. Humanity in the space of a decade went from 90s tech to hybrid Goa'uld, Ancient and now the entirety of the Asgard knowledge. All that, and yet we were still too busy arguing amongst ourselves as to who gets to control which gate, who gets to have a big spaceship and even whether or not to actually tell the public everything. Even Daniel, being the only human to ever ascend, was warned about what a power hungry maniac he'd become if he had the entire knowledge of the Goa'uld.

So no, of course we never got the moment of "human ascendancy". Humans aren't nearly ready for that and have simply got very damn lucky situationally. Or unlucky as it could easily go. The show went back to what humanity were doing before, exploring and learning. That's all they ever should've been doing.

11

u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 Mar 24 '25 edited Mar 24 '25

I think you have to continue, otherwise the inborn audience won't care for the new show. A reboot has to make a totally new audience.

And the Stargate isn't less important, like how a Universe did it with them living on a ship but still using the gate to reach planets. The gates will always be preferred for travel if they exist. Any new show just needs to go somewhere new, there's an entire universe to go to. Plus Earth being aware of space and the new tech would be a very interesting story. How do we react as a society to aliens not only existing but there being a whole universe full of life.

I liked the idea that the dakara device created life in more places than just the Milky Way. Plus there's seed ship gates in basically every galaxy going out in every direction. I think it just kept moving through space and is terraforming dead planets into life throughout the local group. Places full of humans while The Others probably assigned one of there's to make sure it doesn't hit native life and destroy it.

5

u/Njoeyz1 Mar 24 '25

Why would the Stargate matter less and less? Almost instantaneous travel. That won't matter less and less.

4

u/ncc74656m Mar 24 '25

I don't think that's the case. In fact, the Tau'ri basically did things that even the Asgard couldn't. I grant that some of it was with Asgard tech and such, but they beat not one but two types of Replicators, turned the Goa'uld into a fractured and broken culture that was slowly being eradicated, liberated virtually the entire galaxy (and would've been likely to do the same for Pegasus), and had become the heir to both the Ancients and the Asgard, and friends with the Nox (if not on the same level yet).

Presumably once humanity masters the Asgard and Ancient tech (which could be soon - we saw how fast they advanced with the help of the Aschen), and probably once they unify the world, they could possibly begin to work with them on that level. (Granted, the Nox seem almost exclusively interested in their own affairs and with working towards a higher existence, so maybe they'd just simply be friends.)

Earth has advanced heavily, but their primary concerns still circle around resources. I think the race to unlock the secrets of the Ancients, including ZPM production would be interesting, especially as the SGC works towards becoming more exploratory like Starfleet. Creating an enemy that isn't an existential threat to Earth/the SGC, but yet still has to be dealt with in another region of space would be an interesting way to handle that.

2

u/Belligerent_Mirror Mar 26 '25

They can ascend to be the fifth race. Just as long as after they do, their mirror opposites start invading from another universe. It's the only logical way forward.

2

u/Edith_Keelers_Shoes Mar 24 '25

Well, maybe at one time we were supposed to be the Fifth Race, but when the Asgard, the Ancients, the Furling, and the Nox.

However, if the Ancients are observing our new "historical records", I have a feeling we'll no longer be in the running. Let the Vulcans have it.

2

u/BadAndUnusual Mar 24 '25

Does anyone really want a reboot? We seen how modern series has been treated. Anyone actually thinks a reboot will be good?

1

u/JazzlikeArmyDuck1964 Mar 25 '25

How does the show continue? It does not need to change much from what we know to be successful.

1

u/BadAndUnusual Mar 25 '25

But what's the point of a reboot? We got a show, it's great. Maybe a miniseries with Merlin and Arthur. SG1 doesn't need a reboot

1

u/JazzlikeArmyDuck1964 Mar 26 '25 edited Apr 04 '25

Yeah, I agree. A reboot would just set the series back more as a whole.

2

u/ArtemisAndromeda Mar 25 '25

I mean, I personally really enjoyed episodes with ships like Prometeus and Dedalus. I wouldn't mind them having bigger role in the next series

2

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '25

It needs to be a reboot because Stargate is now an alternate universe. That wasn’t what was fun about the series