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Sep. 13th, 2006 05:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ivyficThis is the sort of epiphany I have at 4:55 while staring at a manuscript on the USS Exploring Expedition.
From canon we know that the Stargate has 37 chevrons on it and one of these is a wild-card chevron specific to the world of origin. This leaves 36 constant symbols on a Milky Way galaxy stargate.
It suddenly occured to me that that is exactly the number of characters that make up an alpha-numeric alphabet: 26 letter, 10 numerals. Suddenly I understand why the writers put 37 symbols on the gate. That makes the six digit planet designations translations of the gate address for that planet, literally like a phone number. Each letter and number represents a gate symbol, so to dial P3R-268, you dial P3R-268 and then the symbol for earth.
I'd have to go back and watch "The Enemy Within," where Carter and O'Neill have a conversation about planet designation, but I was always under the impression that the designation had to do with stellar cartography, specifying their location in space, much as astronomers name stars. Maybe I'm just being dense, but I don't think the show ever says that the planet designations correspond directly to the gate address. In fact, in "Lost City" when Daniel realizes that in Ancient each gate symbol was a syllable so that the gate addresses became six syllable words - the name of the planet - it's a big epiphany, which would imply that it's different from how the SGC designates planets. (Nevermind that one of the two examples O'Neill gives, "sh", is a phoneme and not a syllable.)
But it just makes sense that the planet names be the gate address. That way if you knew the name of a planet, you'd know how to dial there (like Daniel remembering the designation for the beta site from "There But for the Grace of God" and using it in "Within the Serpent's Grasp" - it would be implausible to expect that he'd remembered what was dialed, but he could easily have remembered the name).
Then I was thinking about how most planet designations start with "P" or "M". With 36 possible characters in 6 positions, there are about 2e9 possible permutations. If we restrict the first digit to one of two possibilities, that only restricts the number of permutations to about 1e8, still more than enough.
In fact, it would make sense for the first few digits of the designation to be restricted, since we know there are far more permutations than gates. It would be like how all publishing houses have a certain string of numbers that all their ISBNs start with (for WH Freeman, it was 07167). Or, more aptly, how all radio stations start with K or W, and the letter specifies which coast the station is broadcasting from. So, P planets could be roughly on one side of the galaxy and M on the other.
This doesn't explain, though, why most planets have more numerals than letters in their designations and the letters are usually P, M, R or X, unless there really aren't any planets dialled with the other twenty-two symbols on the gate. Or just that the writers think those letters sound cooler, but that's no fun as an answer.
Now let's look at what the canon of the movie and show has told us about how gate addresses work. The show and movie both specify that the final chevron of any address is the planet of origin - which would make the symbol everyone refers to as the symbol for Earth (the one in the logo) actually the symbol for Abydos, since that is the symbol Jackson finds in the movie is the seventh symbol.
(The only way I can make that make sense is if dialing Earth is fundamentally different than dialing anywhere else since it is the origin planet of the whole system, but that doesn't make sense either.)
In the film, Jackson says that each of the gate symbols are constellations - that is, constellations as viewed from Earth. This makes sense since Earth is the sort of mystical progenitor planet, so would have been the point of reference for all Ancient stellar cartography. That would mean, though, since the Goa'uld used the gates for millenia without knowledge of where Earth was that they could not have fully understood the cartogrophy of the gates. Anyway. Jackson says that the first six symbols designate a unique point in space by defining three intersecting lines in a cube.
This I find problematic. A - you don't need six points to designate a unique point in space and B - constellations only look clustered from one vantage point. The stars (and galaxies) that make them up are spread out over such vast distances that they would be shit at designating specific points in space. (You could theoretically designate a center of the constellation by doing a sort of center of mass calculation and come up with a unique point in space, but why the hell would you want to do that?) Also, Jackson's diagram indicates that the six constellations form the center points of the six sides of a cube, and I don't even want to talk about how astonishingly unlikely it would be to find 36 common points in a galaxy that could be combined into cubes around each of the destination planets. It only really makes sense if the gate addresses are somewhat arbitrarily assigned, as phone numbers are, but that would negate Carter's ability to "correct for stellar drift" in the gate addresses.
That bit of technobabble always bothered me too - with only 36 possible inputs, how can you make minor adjustments? At what point has a planet drifted enough that you should change this symbol to that one? Unless it's not the gate addresses that have shifted, but what the computer is telling the stargate that those symbols correspond too... That could work... It even works with the technobabble about self-updating with the DHDs, since Earth doesn't have one.
What's my point with all of this? I don't know. Possibly that if I ever bothered to catalogue the addresses we actually see people on the show dial they wouldn't make sense with any explanation of how the gate dialing works, and definitely would not correspond closely enough with the stated planet designations to work out some sort of alphabet.
Possibly that the explanation for how the stargate works was clearly intended to work only for going from Earth to Abydos (though why they wouldn't just have had an on-button for that, I don't know, except that there needed to be some reason to bring Jackson along) and doesn't make sense once they expanded what the gates did for the show.
Possibly that I have way too much time on my hands and need to not have epiphanies right at the end of the workday.
ETA: I realized as I was falling asleep last night that I was wrong on the math. That's been corrected now.
From canon we know that the Stargate has 37 chevrons on it and one of these is a wild-card chevron specific to the world of origin. This leaves 36 constant symbols on a Milky Way galaxy stargate.
It suddenly occured to me that that is exactly the number of characters that make up an alpha-numeric alphabet: 26 letter, 10 numerals. Suddenly I understand why the writers put 37 symbols on the gate. That makes the six digit planet designations translations of the gate address for that planet, literally like a phone number. Each letter and number represents a gate symbol, so to dial P3R-268, you dial P3R-268 and then the symbol for earth.
I'd have to go back and watch "The Enemy Within," where Carter and O'Neill have a conversation about planet designation, but I was always under the impression that the designation had to do with stellar cartography, specifying their location in space, much as astronomers name stars. Maybe I'm just being dense, but I don't think the show ever says that the planet designations correspond directly to the gate address. In fact, in "Lost City" when Daniel realizes that in Ancient each gate symbol was a syllable so that the gate addresses became six syllable words - the name of the planet - it's a big epiphany, which would imply that it's different from how the SGC designates planets. (Nevermind that one of the two examples O'Neill gives, "sh", is a phoneme and not a syllable.)
But it just makes sense that the planet names be the gate address. That way if you knew the name of a planet, you'd know how to dial there (like Daniel remembering the designation for the beta site from "There But for the Grace of God" and using it in "Within the Serpent's Grasp" - it would be implausible to expect that he'd remembered what was dialed, but he could easily have remembered the name).
Then I was thinking about how most planet designations start with "P" or "M". With 36 possible characters in 6 positions, there are about 2e9 possible permutations. If we restrict the first digit to one of two possibilities, that only restricts the number of permutations to about 1e8, still more than enough.
In fact, it would make sense for the first few digits of the designation to be restricted, since we know there are far more permutations than gates. It would be like how all publishing houses have a certain string of numbers that all their ISBNs start with (for WH Freeman, it was 07167). Or, more aptly, how all radio stations start with K or W, and the letter specifies which coast the station is broadcasting from. So, P planets could be roughly on one side of the galaxy and M on the other.
This doesn't explain, though, why most planets have more numerals than letters in their designations and the letters are usually P, M, R or X, unless there really aren't any planets dialled with the other twenty-two symbols on the gate. Or just that the writers think those letters sound cooler, but that's no fun as an answer.
Now let's look at what the canon of the movie and show has told us about how gate addresses work. The show and movie both specify that the final chevron of any address is the planet of origin - which would make the symbol everyone refers to as the symbol for Earth (the one in the logo) actually the symbol for Abydos, since that is the symbol Jackson finds in the movie is the seventh symbol.
(The only way I can make that make sense is if dialing Earth is fundamentally different than dialing anywhere else since it is the origin planet of the whole system, but that doesn't make sense either.)
In the film, Jackson says that each of the gate symbols are constellations - that is, constellations as viewed from Earth. This makes sense since Earth is the sort of mystical progenitor planet, so would have been the point of reference for all Ancient stellar cartography. That would mean, though, since the Goa'uld used the gates for millenia without knowledge of where Earth was that they could not have fully understood the cartogrophy of the gates. Anyway. Jackson says that the first six symbols designate a unique point in space by defining three intersecting lines in a cube.
This I find problematic. A - you don't need six points to designate a unique point in space and B - constellations only look clustered from one vantage point. The stars (and galaxies) that make them up are spread out over such vast distances that they would be shit at designating specific points in space. (You could theoretically designate a center of the constellation by doing a sort of center of mass calculation and come up with a unique point in space, but why the hell would you want to do that?) Also, Jackson's diagram indicates that the six constellations form the center points of the six sides of a cube, and I don't even want to talk about how astonishingly unlikely it would be to find 36 common points in a galaxy that could be combined into cubes around each of the destination planets. It only really makes sense if the gate addresses are somewhat arbitrarily assigned, as phone numbers are, but that would negate Carter's ability to "correct for stellar drift" in the gate addresses.
That bit of technobabble always bothered me too - with only 36 possible inputs, how can you make minor adjustments? At what point has a planet drifted enough that you should change this symbol to that one? Unless it's not the gate addresses that have shifted, but what the computer is telling the stargate that those symbols correspond too... That could work... It even works with the technobabble about self-updating with the DHDs, since Earth doesn't have one.
What's my point with all of this? I don't know. Possibly that if I ever bothered to catalogue the addresses we actually see people on the show dial they wouldn't make sense with any explanation of how the gate dialing works, and definitely would not correspond closely enough with the stated planet designations to work out some sort of alphabet.
Possibly that the explanation for how the stargate works was clearly intended to work only for going from Earth to Abydos (though why they wouldn't just have had an on-button for that, I don't know, except that there needed to be some reason to bring Jackson along) and doesn't make sense once they expanded what the gates did for the show.
Possibly that I have way too much time on my hands and need to not have epiphanies right at the end of the workday.
ETA: I realized as I was falling asleep last night that I was wrong on the math. That's been corrected now.
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-13 09:52 pm (UTC)2: I don't watch either show anymore, but I'm pretty sure someone, at some point, refers to the chevrons being encodable to phoenemes and v/v. I think it had something to do with O'Neil getting head-zapped again for some reason.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-13 09:56 pm (UTC)Re: 2 - that's "Lost City," which I referred to. Daniel says that each symbol is a syllable (you may have read this before I corrected it), hence the planet "Proklaroosh Teonas." Unfortunately, the two symbol examples Jack gives are "at" and "sh," and "sh" is a phoneme, not a syllable. It would be almost impossible to construct an alphabet of 36 phonemes that could be infinitely permutated and still pronouncable, especially if one of them is "sh", which has no vowel sound. It would also make the planet Daniel mentions into seven symbols, unless "roosh" and "sh" are different symbols.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-24 12:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-13 10:29 pm (UTC)I might be wrong about this, probably am, but....
Didn't at some point Sam say that P was used to deisgnate planets, and M was for moon? It's the one with all the little glowy bugs and the Mini Sam....
no subject
Date: 2006-09-13 10:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-13 10:59 pm (UTC)And, I might observe that A - you don't need six points to designate a unique point in space might work for three dimensions. But perhaps not for eleven?
Also, correcting for stellar drift doesn't mean the symbolic, arbitrary constellations on the gate symbols have drifted. One's a phone number, and the other's a zip code. It means the *planets* are not in the same place as they were thousands of years ago. The DHDs automatically correct for this, and Earth's dialing computer has to be updated to bend the wormhole slightly to hit the destination stargate.
Think of an established wormhole as a shoelace dropping down to a paper cup. If the paper cup has moved slightly, over a few years, then the gromit will still land in the paper cup. But if thousands of years have passed, and the paper cup moves far enough, the gromit will hit the edge or miss the cup altogether. Abydos is close enough to Earth that they've stayed relatively in range, but until Carter corrected the dialing computer, the ride was extremely rough.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-14 03:19 am (UTC)It's been awhile since I took geometry, but I still don't see how that could work.
A lot of this post was me thinking out loud, so I see the point about stellar drift, though it's always been a bit too handwavy of an explanation for me. (They do what exactly to correct? How?). Yes, I know. Technobabble. Time to disengage the scientific brain.
The planetary designations have nothing to do with the stargates.
Oh, I'm not saying they do in canon, just that it would make so much sense if they did. I mean, why memorize both the designation and the address for each planet when they can both be the same? That's what the Ancients did.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-13 11:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-14 03:14 am (UTC)Also, TV shows are notoriously bad about any sort of continuity on these kinds of things (wait - how do the communicators work on TNG?) that there's canon evidence to refute any general theory of how this works. I'm just choosing to ignore certain bits.