The Ancient gene?

[Hartzilla2007]

well it was confirmed in the latest episode that the Destiny was built before the "Ancient Gene Only" technology was created.

 

[David cgc]

If they came back through the gate, why was it buried in Antarctica and another one established on Earth? Did the Goa'uld arrive later, find Earth without an accessible gate, and put another one down? Why didn't they just move the Antarctic gate? How did they make the 'new' gate the primary gate?

As I figured it, the Ancients came back to Earth through the Antarctic Gate (which was, at that time, either within or safely nearby the Antarctic outpost/City-Ship Parking Crater). I figure they deactivated the Antarctic DHD, the same way Janus locked out the Atlantis gate in "Before I Sleep" so it would reject any incoming wormholes that didn't come from Earth. That's why, even when the Antarctic DHD was connected to the Antarctic gate, either before it was found by the SGC or when the NID was using it, they needed to always overcharge the off-world gate to connect to it and not the SGC, while the Giza DHD always superseded the SGC as soon as it was connected.

So, anyway, the Ancients turned off the Earth gate so no one would follow them. They locked the doors, turned out the lights, and went to live out their lives. Not long after, Ra arrived on Earth, and ascertained that it, apparently, didn't have a stargate, so he brought his own. At some point, either during the Goa'uld occupation of Earth, the in-between period, or after SG-1 pissed of Apophis, an unfortunate Serpent Guard went though an overcharged stargate to Earth and ended up in Antarctica and froze to death. I like to imagine it was right after the gate was buried in Giza, and Apophis assumed Earth was suddenly inaccessible because of some trick of Ra's to keep him off the planet, so his technicians overcharged the stargate in an attempt to get past whatever hypothetical security measure had been set up.

I assume the goa'uld never found the antarctic gate, and only learned of it second-hand from us after we found it. The post-Giza civilizations were taken off Earth by ship, and not by the antarctic stargate.

What about the 'point of origin is Earth!' plotpoint from Air? Was the point of origin the Lamda symbol we know as Earth or was it the O symbol of the Antarctic gate, which would have been 'Earth' at the time Destiny was launched?

That threw me too, but I figured out how it would work. Remember, despite the limitations of their props, each stargate is supposed to have it's own unique point of origin symbol. The Icarus gate wouldn't have had the Lambda symbol at all and, God bless 'em, they didn't show it on the gate in the show, because that would've broken the PoO mythology worse than everything else they've done to break it.

Anyway, each glyph on the stargate obviously represents some cartographical value, almost certainly different depending on which chevron is being locked. So thats a possible seven values associated with each glyph, or something like 266 distinct coordinate markers on a 38 (ignoring the origin symbol) glyph stargate. My point is, there's more to the origin symbol than just triangle-with-a-circle-over-it, or lock-this-to-turn-on-stargate. It's a shorthand for the entire spatial address of wherever the gate is at that moment (because it can recalculate on the fly after it's been moved, so long as it's relatively still in astronomical terms).

So when the lambda symbol showed up on the Icarus dialing computer, the actual stargate wasn't dialing that symbol, because it didn't have it (hell, the gate was still spinning when the last chevron actually locked). The dialing computer was doing an end-run around the gate's dial, and directly feeding it the coordinate information that the point of origin gives the gate when dialed from Earth, pretty much spoofing the gate's own inner ring (which, I suppose, is the same way the DHD works, directly feeding the gate the coordinate of a given glyph so it doesn't have to mechanically lock it in). That probably shouldn't have worked at all, or at best, should've caused a wormhole to inexplicably open from Earth to the Destiny, but my guess is that the distance involved was so great, and the energy involved so massive that the coordinates for Earth and Icarus were close enough for the wormhole to still connect to Icarus even if it was being charted for a completely different planet. And we know "close enough" can work with stargate coordinates, though such miscalibration causes all that nasty freezing and being thrown out of the recieving gate and such. That trick probably wouldn't work on a smaller scale, though. You probably couldn't spoof Earth's origin from Icarus to dial, say, Abydos and get a good connection. Probably not even if you were trying to dial, say, Atlantis.

And, due to an apparent lack of ancestral pride, Earth still uses the lambda "slave name" point of origin to represent earth instead of the Ancients' sun-over-the-ocean symbol, which is why that came up on the computer. If an actual Ancient had been standing there, he probably would've asked why they were representing Earth's coordinates with the symbol for Planet X.

Or, not, since they started using lambda as the default point of origin for stargate addresses in season 9 or 10 on Ancient computers. I suppose I could fanwank it away with Ra having stolen the stargate from someplace more important to the Ancients than Earth, which I have an idea about, but I've already given the functioning of the stargate way more thought and way more words than I should've tonight, so I'll just close off.

 

[cultcross]

That's an excellent idea, I like that quite a lot (the glyph-is-actually-a-full-set-of-coordinates one, not the fanwank )

Thanks for posting that.