2x18 - Epilogue (Page 4 of 4)

So when two dumb people produce an offspring the kids are born dumber?
No - both statements are wrong. Smart people can get dumb kids and dumb people can get smart kids

True - but the distractions only work, when there's nothing 'important' to do. You can ask the people in Africa how many tv shows they watch (not everywhere in Africa of course!) and then ask the same question in the USA
So yes - knowing the planet will die soon has a nice effect on the invention effort

One other thing I like to know is if they invented 'money'. Of course the Detiny people knew money, but they didn't use it and didn't have it. The whole crew was working without payment
Would be nice to know if the Stargate universe would evolve like the Star Trek universe

Hehe - I knew this argument would come. But in that special case - new planet - less people - it doesn't hold. And of course you have to define what dumb or smart really is. I would consider me a completely dumb when it comes to cooking but smart when it comes to building/inventing. So who would survive - the guy who knows how to cook but doesn't know how to build a shelter or the guy who knows how to build a house but doesn't know which fruit/meat to eat or how to prepare it?
Of course it's not that black and white - but still - our values don't necessarily apply in those situations.

What I meant was recordings of our previous knowledge. So unless someone went around the Destiny with the Kino and recorded everything that was in its database (or ever stuff that pertained to humans), they had no recordings of the previous knowledge that people before me were claiming gave them a head start.

Sure, they could record anything new and Eli wrote books. That is perfectly fine. My argument is that they could record only what they knew (as in knowledge already present in their minds) and that that knowledge is minuscule when compared to all the knowledge needed to create and operate a society as advanced as ours. And not only don't each of them possess enough information to re-create society (at even a much more basic level), their knowledge is very specialized to a particular sub-field of our knowledge - in the case of scientists almost absurdly specialized - and wouldn't be of much use at the beginning when the problem isn't theoretical mathematics but how to best build a shovel.

All I was saying is that yes, because they are smart and they have generic previous knowledge of how stuff works, they can re-invent many things much easier and faster than our ancestors could, which is why they covered basically 6000 years of our evolution in 2000 years, but they can't just create them exactly as we know them, because nobody knows everything that is needed. Plus you have take into account that even if they had the perfect knowledge of everything they needed to build and how it's supposed to be maintained, they had to adopt it for local phenomena, i.e. it's nice that you think you know how to find and mine ore, but what if the ore on Novus is completely different from the ore we know, has a higher melting point or is guarded by dragons?

And I am very glad you know how to do those things, but a) if that's true you are not most people, and b) I'd argue that anything you would do is leaves much to be desired when it comes to industrial scale, i.e. your system would feed you and a few people, but once it would be adapted to feed a whole city it would probably fail miserably. That's what I am talking about - there is so much specialized knowledge we currently have that it is impossible to know all of it and as any university graduate tells you, no matter which field you go into, you realize you've been taught mostly very simplified models of how the real world works.

How do you know they didn't invent TV? You need relaxation after a hard day's work. I am sure they had professional sports, etc. And the same goes for money.

But there are two more interesting things to consider: One is the length of their year. Our year is the length of time it takes Earth to rotate around the sun. Keeping that time correct anywhere but on Earth is very difficult. Spaceships returning to Earth have to do it and often get it wrong, but why would people so far away from Earth and with no way to properly judge time keep to the same time system? I think it's safe to assume that their day, month, and year were much different from ours, because they were based on Novus' rotation and it's orbit around its star. That means that their 2000 years could be much longer or shorter than our 2000 years.

Second I think the fact that they didn't have wars slowed down their scientific development. It is a widely known fact that wars allow major shift / jumps forward in scientific research - the space race of the 1960s was a direct result of the rocket research done in World War II and ever since the big wars we didn't have any major scientific shifts or breakthroughs, we only had incremental improvements. So it could be argued that they might've discovered FTL if they had waged war for some of the last centuries they were on Novus ...

"We're on the side of the demons, Chief. We're evil men in the gardens of paradise, sent by the forces of death to spread devastation and destruction wherever we go."
-- Colonel Tigh

If their sun is larger than ours, the planet would orbit at a greater distance and therefore longer years...

What's the chance of it being the same size as our sun?

I'm more bothered by the whole gravity thing... every planet or moon they have ever visited seams to have the exact same mass as earth.... what's the probability of that?

Well it's just a matter of special effects. And they just have this kind of vegetation near Vancouver

Or take the language thingy. All speak the same language (English/American whatever - don't start it again!). Just imagine you travel 2000 years back in time and tried to talk to some people of you own village/town/country. You might understand them but it would be really hard (and no - they didn't speak British English in ancient Rome!). Now you have some people trapped on a planet for 2000 years and they speak exactly the same - impossible, but easy to film and easy for the viewers

Well, they mention a lot of gates being "locked out" : ie, Destiny tells them that they can't go there because of bad gravity/atmosphere/whatever...

Not sure to whom you're comment is pointed at, but it made me think and I'll answer anyway.

I don't know if it's mention throughout the series, but I imagine the crew believes that all gates where originally put on habitable planets by the ancients. Since millions of years have past, some planets may have lost that habitability (is that a word? ), hence the gates being locked out.

But I also think that they put stargates on planets that weren't habitable yet.

Who knows how many gates have been made and put on planets. But I imagine a whole bunch are gone because of worlds being destroyed by natural forces.

Not just the Spanish maine my love. The entire ocean. The entire world!