On Secrecy and Stargates

I’ve been watching old episodes of Stargate via Netflix and I started thinking about the whole “keeping the Stargate a secret” thing. At first, this made sense for the show and reality. An unknown device that no one really understands, but can take you to other worlds. Yeah, that would probably be kept secret. Their mission is to acquire advanced technology, which is a very special forces/covert ops type thing.

This logic starts to fall apart as the series goes on. It starts to bump the edge of reason even in season one. Earth is about to be attacked and the ships are destroyed at the last seconds. The shuttle is used to rescue SG-1 (not that the shuttle could do that, sadly) and half the world could see the ships blow up in orbit. But okay, you could explain that one away without letting the secret slip out to far.

The next couple seasons still remain reasonable for keeping the secret. There’s some conspiracy stuff, a few alien ships crash in Earth’s ocean, secret starfighters flying out of Area-51. All small scale enough to be kept under wraps. But around season 6, things really become ridiculous.

For starters, there’s the Prometheus. The cost of building her must have been enormous. NASA can’t even get funding to launch a half built satellite without intense scrutiny. An entire interstellar spaceship is kept under wraps? The only person who seemed to notice is one intrepid, sneaky, amoral reporter.

Then there’s the technologies. Even before some of the better Asgard upgrades of later seasons,  the ship can launch itself, has artificial gravity and inertial dampeners. The F-302’s make any other fighter in the world hopelessly obsolete. Yet, we still have the space shuttle and traditional rockets.

But okay, pulling off building the Prometheus in secret, maybe they can do it. At the end of season 7, Anubis attacks Earth with a massive fleet. For some reason, they attack and destroy an entire aircraft carrier group. We’re talking close to ten thousand sailors and maybe a dozen ships sunk. You don’t just cover that up with a fake story.

From that point forward, it really is ridiculous that they stuck with the secrecy plotline. They’ve got the whole IOA thing which made some logical sense. But now fleets of starships are being built. Humans are regularly traveling all over the galaxy on them, and even between galaxies. They’ve got transporter technology which would be incredibly useful. The number of people involved in whole program, between crews, manufacturing, etc must be in the thousands to tens of thousands. No way that remains quiet.

If something like this were to be real, I don’t think it could remain a secret. Nor should it. That just makes things needlessly complicated. All that BS about people aren’t ready for the truth is just BS. Not once on the show did anyone who learned the truth display any level of “not-ready-ness”.

But that’s my geek-rant for the week. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is a Stargate program in existence right now and it’s been kept secret. That’s why they canceled the shuttle program and didn’t start a replacement. It’s hopelessly obsolete. We’ll all be told about the Daedalus class ships that out there exploring the galaxy soon.