I watch way too much TV
Like, for instance, I think tau'ri tech is almost up to the same level needed to make a startgate. And stargates don't need as much tech as we would think. Let me try to explain this. In show lore, the ancients built the stargates. On the show, I think I see evidence of three technology levels for the ancients. I call them low, medium, and high (creative, eh?). I'll start at the beginning and move through the different levels of tech.
Imagine if you will, the Ancients are an older hominid species from earth. I think they have a disposition more akin to current bonobos, while we have a disposition more akin to chimpanzees. Bonobos are noted for thier peaceful social structure, with conflicts often resolved using sex. Chimpanzees are noted for their aggressive behavior and personal conflicts resulting in fighting. Bonobos apparently don't go to war, like chimpanzees have been observed to do. Modern humans seem to behave like a mix of bonobo and chimp, but I think more toward the chimp side. The Ancients, I would imagine also behave like a mix of bonobo and chimp, but more toward the bonobo side. This makes the Ancients more lovers than fighters. It also helps explain how they were able to populate, not just one galaxy, but at least three (in the show, the Ancients were crawling all over the Milky Way, the Pegasus Galaxy and whatever galaxy the Ori are from). They were constantly having sex to resolve personal conflicts. And with multiple galaxies of growing room, and resources, there was no need for birth control or self control really.
Anyway, the point being they evolved on earth. Being so similar to us humans, they probably developed a high tech society relatively swiftly. No going to war on a constant basis would allow them to develop tech even more quickly. What with not having to worry about their civilization falling apart because of invading forces. What's taken us six millennia to achieve, they might have achieved in two. They went from mud huts, to writing and cities, to agriculture, to complex machines and advanced metal working, to the industrial revolution very, very fast.
This brings me to the Ancient level of tech known as "low". They figured out the basics of hyperspace and probably sent relatively slow ships to nearby stars. They also figured out how to make the ring transporter system. Other things of note, their computer interaction consisted of pushing stone cubes to various levels into a panel. Then they figured out how to make a wormhole. Apparently the wormholes have some property that only allows energy to move through. Not a problem they have ring transporters, that transform matter to energy and back again, just squirt the energy from a specialized ring transporter through a wormhole and blammo, near instant transport from one side of the galaxy to another. It should be noted, that these very early stargates were developed when their tech was just slightly higher than ours.
I think the earliest DHD's built by the Ancients had that goofy as hell stone pushing interface. But that's ok, there were only a few worlds to go to anyway. They were probably sending unmanned probes with these simple gates via slow hyperspace. The kind of hyperspace described by T'ealc in the first season, where it takes years to travel between the stars.
Now we get to some evidence. An Ancient fell in love with Sam, and de-ascended, and built a star gate in Sam's basement, with parts he ordered on e-bay. So our technology is almost on par with Ancient Low tech. We just don't know the physics yet to come up with a theory to build one yet, but we're probably close, since we're able to make some sense of the stargates, and are able to build our own DHD. The scientists in StarGate command probably DO have the physics and math to build a star gate, but don't because it would be pointless.
So after the Ancients have sent slow probes and primitive gates to a few worlds, they run across deposits of Naquada. They are probably able to synthesize a few atoms at a time here on earth, but it takes horrendous amounts of energy. They just mine the stuff on a couple of their colony worlds, and are suddenly swimming in high grade energy. Now they can build high speed hyper drives, and explore the galaxy on manned ships. Now they start thinking about MASS producing stargates. By this time they've got those (still quite goofy) control crystals. So they design a new DHD, something smaller, and sleeker, and a new stargate. They start roaming the galaxy with manned and unmanned vessels and drop stargates and DHDs everywhere. These are for future explorers and colonists to use. This is the era of the the Ancient's Medium tech. Mass produced stargates, crystals instead of stones on their computers, fast hyper drives. The G'ould seem to be straddling low and medium at the beginning of the series, and are apparently firmly in the medium level when Anubis is defeated.
This medium level of tech is what the Ancients used to build Atlantis and colonize the Pegasus galaxy. But it being a new galaxy they redesigned the stargates and DHD's with new tech, like zero point energy modules. The Ancients and the Wraith use some late medium tech, but it's not their high level of tech. The Ancients didn't get into their high level stuff until around the time they came back from the Pegasus galaxy. And right before they ascended.
The Ancients high tech level is noted with almost living machines, direct mind-computer interfaces, and, ultrafast hyper drives. The Asgard have hyper drives that allow them to traverse intergalactic distances in minutes. The Ancients made the replicators which are arguably alive, and their repositories of knowledge inject knowledge directly into your brain. The Asgard use similar brain tech to move between computer storage and clones. But after acquiring all that knowledge the ancients still succumbed to a rampant plague of some sort. I wonder if it was an STD and the Ancient's rampant sexual promiscuity might be responsible for their demise. But probably not. It was probably some kind of anti-wraith (maybe) weapon, or they were doing research into ascension that backfired and released the plague that decimated them.
Apparently after reaching the high level of tech, a species either ascends or does something horribly stupid to itself and it destroys itself. It happened to the Ancients. And it happened to the Asgard. They released a plague that would kill them if they let it. But they couldn't ascend because they weren't biological anymore. They were more like consciences stored in high-bio-tech robots. Their civilization was stagnant, dead. When they realized this they decided to end their existence and give their knowledge to the tau'ri, probably in the hopes that we wouldn't repeat their same fundamental mistake.
Those are the three levels of tech used in the StarGate universe. Tau'ri are at a low, low level, the Gould are in a medium low, the wraith are at kind of a high medium, and the Asgard were at a low high level.
Next Time I'll get into why the Ancients suck at warfare, or, why we are able to kick butt on a galactic scale.
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