SGU 107: "Earth" (Spoilers)

[Zac Naloen]

Agreed, at the moment there is no real sense of jeapody. However, I don't really see that lasting, again they've only been there like a week or two if that. If the writers understand what they are doing things need to get steadily worse for at least two seasons if they get that. In a third season perhaps they can start having real breakthroughs with regarsd to getting home and cheering people up.

The big deal here is that they have a succesful Science Fiction author actually consulting on the show to give them a fresh perspective. The hope is that will keep them in line with regards to the realism of the situation here whilst allowing them to maintain the softer aspects of the universe.


Btw, I liked the comment that Eli is on a sort of crash diet. It won't be showing just yet but if they are realising that, then I can see a few characters losing weight by the end of the season.

[Andrew_Fireborn]

I would have thought that were this the case, genius inventor Janos may have said something about it to Weir when she time jumped back to Atlantis and told him her team was going to die due to ZPM depletion. He had to come up with that rotating module trick to save the power. If there was a ZPM plant in the city, surely he would have simply pointed it out to her so she could turn it on and bang out a few spares, and leave them in the power room for Rodney to find back in the present.

Given how much power they're supposed to contain, I'm not terribly surprised that Atlantis isn't able to make more.

I wouldn't be too surprised if that one facility that spit out all those exotic particles wasn't an early attempt to make them without doing something crazy. Say something like what Destiny does, but on a much larger scale.

Though, again, you would think any facility for making them would have been their first search into that ancient database...

[NecronLord]

Project Arcturus was a planned replacement for ZPMs, according to its records.

[Starglider]

Here's a crazy idea for getting the Destiny crew back - the Stargate can scan a person and rebuild them at the other end of the trip. If they could find a way to visually examine the actual data that gets imprinted on a Stargate when a person passes through it, then have someone stare at the data until they have visually glanced at it all (yeah it'll be a lot, but how long would it take - a week, two, tops?)

Try many times longer than the projected lifespan of the universe. This is an utterly idiotic idea; do you seriously think that a total description of a human being fits into a few hardback books?

I suppose that with the stones there might be a way to transfer the persons actual original consciousness into the copy body you made, maybe with Machello's body swap machine or with the Asgard mind transfer tech they were always using to move into new clone bodies.

Highly dubious even if you cloned bodies for them from previously taken DNA samples.

As for ZPMs, the Asurans clearly had factories for them on their planet. My guess is that they're large facilities and putting one on Atlantis would be equivalent to putting a uranium enrichment or reprocessing plant on a contemporary aircraft carrier. Since the things last for centuries if not millenia of use, they have plenty of time to stop and set up a manufacturing plant if needed.

I am glad that the Destiny's weapons are shown to be relatively primitive. It is supposed to be a very old ship. The Goa'uld probably make knock-offs of the most basic ancient tech they could find.

The episode itself, well, I can see the necessity of that sort of character development, but if I was rewatching this series on DVD I would be sorely tempted to skip that episode. It establishes the dynamic of the strained relationship with earth, but did I have to sit through a solid 45 minute block of friends, relatives and whining for that? It would be acceptable if this was the first episode in which they got in touch with Earth, but it isn't, we've already had to sit through plenty of backstory (and encounters with drama-ex and symapthy-mom) in previous episodes. 2/5.

[Revy]

Try many times longer than the projected lifespan of the universe. This is an utterly idiotic idea; do you seriously think that a total description of a human being fits into a few hardback books?

No, but it fits onto the data crystals imbedded in the Stargates. I just figured that the data gets compressed like a Jpeg or something so that the Gates don't have such a massive amount of data to transfer from one Gate to another. If they do transfer the raw information of a variable number of people as fast as we see them do in the show, then that is one hell of a transfer rate. I wish my net connection could be that fast.

Yeah, okay so it's a dumb idea. But this;

Highly dubious even if you cloned bodies for them from previously taken DNA samples.

Umm, why? Their minds are clearly inhabiting the bodies they swap into. And we know that as they have the entire Asgard tech base they have cloning and mind transfer tech that was developed to the Nth degree by the Asgard, who ultimately went extinct from too much cloning. I don't see why they can't whip up some clone bodies and transfer the stone-users minds into the cloned bodies. Heck, they even found some of the cloning facilities that Baal used to do his Agent Smith thing.

I don't think making fresh bodies would be a problem. The only problem is if either the Asgard mind transfer tech or Machello's machine would work on a stone user. But since nothing like that has ever been tried, we can hardly rule it out. It'd at least be worth a shot on the show, even if they invented a reason for it not to work.

[Starglider]

do you seriously think that a total description of a human being fits into a few hardback books?

No, but it fits onto the data crystals imbedded in the Stargates. I just figured that the data gets compressed like a Jpeg or something

I'm sure it does, but a human contains about 10^27 atoms, so an excellent compression scheme would be required just to cram the data into plausible molecular storage. It isn't going to fit onto any human-made storage device, much less the pathetically slow memorisation rate of somebody reading off a screen.

Umm, why? Their minds are clearly inhabiting the bodies they swap into.

That is highly dubious. If it was a direct swap (which is incidentally extremely implausible in neuroanatomical terms), why would there still be a connection between the 'posessed' and original bodies, such that killing one would cause the other to die (e.g. when Daniel and Vala's hosts were executed)? Telepresence with the potential for unfortunate feedback is much more plausible.

I don't see why they can't whip up some clone bodies

'Whip up'? It isn't a question of 'whipping up', you're proposing a serious R&D effort (actually two - the cloning effort and the mind-transfer effort) to develop a novel capability (for earth) with massive ethical implications (what if the tech gets stolen, what about all the failed cloning attempts) just to save one SG expedition team. Research in those areas is probably ongoing anyway, but reasonably it would take decades - even in Stargate's hyper-accelerated R&D timescales, years.

[Oskuro]

Just a minor comment, didn't some independent Earth company manage to clone an Asgard? I suspect the ability to make clones is not beyond the reach of Earth's technology, although that says nothing of the ethical implications, as well as the mind transfer problem.

[NecronLord]

'Whip up'? It isn't a question of 'whipping up', you're proposing a serious R&D effort (actually two - the cloning effort and the mind-transfer effort) to develop a novel capability (for earth) with massive ethical implications (what if the tech gets stolen, what about all the failed cloning attempts) just to save one SG expedition team. Research in those areas is probably ongoing anyway, but reasonably it would take decades - even in Stargate's hyper-accelerated R&D timescales, years.

In fairness, an Entrepeneur, I forget his name, managed to get a mostly-mentally inactive asgard clone made. And the Asgard have the means to rapidly clone humans. It should be a matter of looking it up in the Asgard database.