Location of earth/Stargate address

[vafhudr]

I was watching first episode of farscape today and i wanted to know: "If i was lost on the other side of the universe how could i show earths location" than stargate came on and i thought that the gate address (with out the point of origin)[Earths address is "Auriga, Cetus, Centaurus, Cancer, Scutum, Eridanus"] would work. So does the stargate address used in the show Point to earths location if not can earth be identified by the same way? Also if that fails how do i identify were earth is on a starmap??

[Pangloss]

They don't. They have entry points in each galaxy. You can't go to a specific stargate in a different galaxy, even with a ZPM. Earth (and Lantea) just happen to be galactic entry points (not a coincidence; they designed it that way).

 

Once you're within a galactic gate system you can only address other gates in the same galaxy -- that's all you have addressing symbols for. That's why the intergalactic bridge had a midway station.

 

(This isn't an astronomy question, but I guess it's an interesting thought problem. I'm going to move it over to the General forum, though.)

[vafhudr]

I wasnt asking about the gate address in stargate i know how it works (you can gate from an other galxy with enough power and an 8th chevron) i wanted to know if the 6point address for earth in the show does point to earth in real llife

[Pangloss]

Well the way I always figured it that's a fundamental impossibility. The Stargate addressing system is based on how constellations appear from Earth, so it ignores the fact that the sky looks different as you travel around the galaxy. None of the symbols have any meaning anywhere except for on Earth.

 

In the show they have an excuse for that -- the Lanteans imposed that symbology, because Earth was at the center of their Milky Way civilization. But of course that would not apply in "real life".

 

That's not to say that you couldn't come up with some sort of addressing system for the galaxy and even outside of it. But if you wanted it to be intuitively obvious to unenlightened and disconnected inhabitants and accurate over time, I don't know what it would be based on. Perhaps the positions of pulsars or something -- I believe I've seen that done in some SF books.

 

Outside of the galaxy would be a real stretch of the imagination. The only common frame of reference I can think of there might be a spectral analysis of individual galaxies, comprised into some sort of map.

[insane_alien]

there are several ways of 'addressing' the location of earth in real life. you could use cartesian coordinates based on the center of the galaxy or you could use polar coordinates with the same origin.

 

at any one point in time you would only need three numbers to define the position of earth, not 6.

 

in cartesian coordinates it would be something like (25000,100,20) i have made up the values here just call them light years or something.

 

in polar they could be 28* right 0.5* up and 25000light years out.

 

but this is ultimately useless as the positions would change with time. it is much better to have a model of the galaxy and predict where it will be when you get there.

[Sisyphus]

That still wouldn't help you unless you already knew where you were in the same coordinate system. If I understand the problem correctly, it's how how to find Earth if you're teleported somewhere unfamiliar. (I've never seen the show.)

[Pangloss]

That's actually more or less what happens in the show, especially at the beginning when they're pondering the ramifications of the device. Stargate is like Star Trek in the sense that the producers want it to inspire young minds towards science. They're not always successful in that regard, but it's nice that they make the effort.

 

To my mind, the most interesting subset of the problem is the concept of seeding thousands of star systems with some sort of visual aid, like a cosmic PowerPoint slide show, that you could drop onto planets with "potential" (primordial soup, advanced plant life, primates, whatever). It could be along the lines of Arthur Clarke's 2001 monument, or the Stargate device's addressing system, but really it doesn't have to be so sophisticated -- it really just needs to tell these potentially intelligent species that (a) they're not alone, (b) where they are in the accepted galactic coordinate system, and © perhaps how to go about contacting and/or joining galactic civilization. It would be like an invitation, but sent perhaps billions of years in advance. It would have to be incredibly durable and brilliantly intuitive at the same time.

 

(Windows Aeterna?) (grin)

[SkepticLance]

To look at the science of this, we need to ignore the fiction. After all, in fiction, you can 'invent' any technology you like.

 

It might be interesting to rephrase the question. Imagine you are part of a future society with interstellar travel. Since we are being scientifically realistic, that travel is at sub-light speeds, and takes thousands of years to go any great distance.

 

Imagine also, that a technology that exists is cryosuspension. You are put to sleep, and your body is frozen according to the advanced medical techniques so that you are not killed by the freezing process. This is theoretically possible, since there are a number of species of animals on Earth that have adaptations permitting them to be frozen solid, and come 'back to life' when thawed.

 

You have a problem. Your starship has malfunctioned, and you have travelled enormously further than programmed. You wake from cryosuspension half way across the galaxy. You decide to send your starship back to Earth, putting yourself back into cryosuspension for the multi-thousand year journey.

 

First, you have to determine where you are, and a course back home.

 

The question now becomes - how will you identify your position, and navigate home? What 'landmarks' will you use?

[insane_alien]

well, we would have models of the way the stars are moving as a map, and the ship probably has a clock or two aboard so, you could predict where the sol system had moved to in the galaxy, as for finding your own location, i'm pretty sure any automated ship would record its course especially if there were a malfunction.

 

if for some reason the ship doesn't know where it is, a few other galaxies and the galactic center should provide a reasonable approximation until better data can be gathered.

[Pangloss]

A long time ago, I forget where, I read a concept for a galactic society without FTL travel or communication, sleep-travel or generation ships (I think it might have been an essay by Asimov). The interesting thing was that it could still be a galactic society, complete with a rich history, shared technologies and a deep sense of galactic culture and perspective. Sure, it could take hundreds or thousands of years just to answer a phone call, but that doesn't mean you couldn't share a great deal of information -- just over a VERY long time frame.

 

I loved the idea -- it's very romantic. Island civilizations shouting to one another across the background noise of cosmic radiation and the eons of time. It would certainly emphasize the need for ecological responsibility! But it could still be a very interesting thing to join -- such a society could easily construct an "Encyclopedia Galactica", for example. Trade could take place in the form of information, or possibly physical goods via robot ships on very long timelines. And it would be a SAFE society, since war would be next to impossible (though I suppose those robot ships could do some damage, if you made someone angry enough to want to kill your grandchildren!).

 

Not a bad possibility, really.

[Sayonara]

Well the way I always figured it that's a fundamental impossibility. The Stargate addressing system is based on how constellations appear from Earth, so it ignores the fact that the sky looks different as you travel around the galaxy. None of the symbols have any meaning anywhere except for on Earth.

 

In the show they have an excuse for that -- the Lanteans imposed that symbology, because Earth was at the center of their Milky Way civilization. But of course that would not apply in "real life".

They only use one or two props on the show for the gate itself, so the chevron symbols on the rings are going to be the same on every "planet". But you'd imagine that if the system were real, the constellation symbols used to plot destinations from any given planet would be from the point of view of that planet itself. Otherwise the number of combinations needed to address all the gates on the network would rapidly exceed the sensible combinations provided for by the Tau'ri gate.

 

I say "sensible combinations", because although the stargate addresses are 7 symbols long, really there are only three data points which define the destination, as insane_alien already pointed out. In other words, the number of possible addresses is not simply a matter of all the combinations which the symbol ring allows. Also you have the added problem that if you identify all of the in-galaxy intersection points between those constellations depicted on the ring, most of them will point out a patch of empty space, so they are not useful as gate addresses.

 

The seventh symbol, the point of origin, is redundant anyway as gates ought to broadcast this information to the receiving gate as a matter of course (this would also help with verifying where an incoming wormhole is coming from, which you'd imagine the Lanteans would have thought of).

 

Points of origin are a sticky wicket also for the fact that there should be hundreds of thousands of them. Possibly there is a "reserved space" on the dialing ring which is used for the origin symbol specific to any particular system. But if this is so then gates removed from their own systems should not be able to dial out, and they do. So as before, why even bother to dial in the origin symbol?

 

Having said all that, I did enjoy the modest mystery of the symbols in the original film. And of course it allowed Daniel Jackson to keep everyone on Abydos long enough for the plot to unfold while he searched for the seventh symbol (even though he eventually basically made it up).

[Pangloss]

They only use one or two props on the show for the gate itself, so the chevron symbols on the rings are going to be the same on every "planet". But you'd imagine that if the system were real, the constellation symbols used to plot destinations from any given planet would be from the point of view of that planet itself.

 

Well they could do that, but that would certainly pose a serious problem to any first-time traveler once they arrived at their destination! That sort of approach makes sense if your goal is uplifting pre-sentient species in the distant future. But if your goal is short-term travel for your own people, a universal system is probably better. I suppose you could carry around some sort of address translation device, but if you lost that you'd be stuck on the destination world until you could figure out all the symbols and their relationship with known landmarks around the galaxy.

[Sayonara]

We've seen several races with wearable technology that can dial addresses for them. At some point during the height of the Ancients' civilisation there might have been a "published database" of addresses.