drazen wrote:I believe The Ancients actually fled (or was it returned?) to Earth from the Pegasus Galaxy. They were the basis of the legend of the Knights of the Round Table. It's also how some humans had the ATA gene that let them activate Ancient technology via touch.
That's all true, but…
So when they seeded the Milky Way Galaxy gate system, they probably just did everything from their own reference point -- constellations as seen from Earth.
…the Milky Way gate system existed long before that happened. The Ancients settled the Milky Way first, then mostly died or ascended when the plague wiped them out, except for Atlantis which fled to Pegasus and started over again (which is why Pegasis tech is newer and cooler than Milky Way tech). When the Wraith overran Pegasus, the last survivors at Atlantis gated back to Earth, because Earth evolution had in the interim been guided into a "second evolution" of the Ancients' form (which is to say, humans), so there were people there to live with, primitive though they were.
The Beta Gate on Earth (the one recovered from the former site of Atlantis in Antarctica) was at the time of its discovery the oldest gate known, so I think the writers had some idea in their minds at some point that Earth was the origin of the gate network somehow, except that later episodes then established that the planet Dakara was where the Ancients first settled after their original arrival in the Milky Way, so Earth was probably just an early planet in the gate network, not the first. It's still unclear why they guided evolution on Earth rather than anywhere else; maybe it was just the last Ancient world to fall to the plague, since Atlantis was apparently the last city standing, so maybe the only Ancients around to instigate that guided evolution plan were the ones living on Earth, so they just did it there when they left. It's weird though because Atlantis is also said to be the newest Ancient city, the last one built before their fall. So it's weird: Earth is not the first Ancient world in this galaxy and so probably not the first gate in the gate network, but it does have the oldest gate that we've heard of on screen, but it also was home to the newest city the Ancients ever built, and was probably the last Ancient world to fall, and it was the world where they set up their successors to evolve, and the one to which the last of them later returned to live out the rest of their lives.
But anyway, from the movie we know that not all gates have Earth constellations on them, since that was a major plot point: Daniel Jackson needed to figure out how to dial Earth from Abydos, and couldn't do that without learning some info from the locals. Mostly the problem was he needed to know the point-of-origin symbol, which isn't a constellation, but apparently he had to do something to figure out the rest of it first, even if that was comparatively easy for him.
I do remember that the Gou'ald originally used the rocky-looking Unas alien race as a host, but eventually came to prefer humans, who apparently must have made better Jaffa as well (weren't Jaffa altered humans? I think in one episode, a Gou'ald takes over SGC with some sort of sex pheromone and tries to make Col. O'Neill into a Jaffa).
That's correct. The Goa'uld evolved on the same world as the Unas (P3X-888) and initially used them as hosts, however they apparently don't heal as well, either from the Goa'uld's own innate healing abilities or especially with the sarcophagus technology, as humans do; likely because the sarcophagus was designed by Ancients for Ancients and so works better on re-evolved Ancients a.k.a. humans than some random alien lizard-men. So when Ra discovered Earth, and found humans made better hosts, he began exporting them throughout the galaxy, and pretty soon the Unas were pretty much discarded as any use to the Goa'uld. And the modern Jaffa are all modified humans, yes; it's unclear whether there were ever Unas Jaffa, or just Unas hosts and slaves.
Thinking about Ra arriving on Earth and the movie's subtle suggestion that he was a "grey alien" reminds me of another thing that bothers me about the series, as much as I love it: the Asgard. That they are named that, specifically. Asgard is a place. The only mention it in the first episode where those aliens are encountered was when Thor called himself "high commander of the Asgard fleet", which anyone with any familiarity with the Norse mythology that underlies them, or Norse languages in general, should know is something akin to "high commander of the Earth fleet". Imagine if a human introduced himself as high commander of the Earth fleet, and those aliens thereafter referred to our species, not our planet, as "the Earth"; like, four of us show up and they're like "four Earth are here to visit us". That's how stupid calling those aliens "the Asgard" are. They should be the goddamn Aesir goddamnit, and their planet or galaxy or somewhere should be called Asgard. But no, some stupid writer read Thor's lines from that first episode and thought "Asgard" was the name of their species and now we're stuck with it.