It may have taken hours for Carter to dig out the DHD, but she played with it for at least twelve hours. Doing what isn’t clear to me; dialling Earth repeatedly? She’d made numerous attempts, each of which was noted as a tremor-like vibration at the Cheyenne gate.
Unfortunately, that’s making up additional information to try to explain away a flaw. It simply wasn’t a well thought-out episode, but admittedly if the stargates had been used logically, we wouldn’t have all these “we’ve got exactly three minutes to get back safely to Earth before the tidal wave wipes us out!! I hope they open the iris in time!!” episodes.
Similarly, if a squad of 21st-century marines were given phaser rifles, I bet they’d soon start experimenting with shooting down aircraft and satellites, because it’s cool. It ends up being left to the novel and fanfic writers to explore all the possibilities raised but then forgotten in the episodes.
From what I recall, the iris is just a millimeter or two beyond the event horizon. That allows for reconstitution of matter. Unfortunately, if the matter involved (like, oh, I don’t know, a Tok’Ra) is wider/deeper than a few millimeters, it will reconstitute within that space in slices. These slices still have the momentum that the whole object/Tok’Ra had when it entered the gate. Which causes the thumping noise.
RE: Ancients = Humans?
I don’t think this has ever been stated either way. All we know is the Ancients look like humans, and had a base on Earth (Antarctica). My personal theory is that when the Ancients were getting wiped out by their plauge, they set up a planet similar to the one they evolved on so their species would not die out completely. They put two stargates on the planet, one for us to find, and one for them to use to survail humanity without getting caught. The Gao’uld showed up after the Ancients went extinct and the rest is history. This isn’t canon however.
RE: Alpha Site.
IIRC the Alpha site came about very early in the series before the 2nd gate was found. In the episode the antarctic gate wouldn’t dial period. Sam figured something was wrong with the system and didn’t bother trying to dial out. Bad, bad scientist.
RE: Going Backwards
I believe going backward into a wormhole will just kill you. I can’t remember an instance where this happened, but the splash from an incoming gate disintegrates things, so I would think the wormhole behaves the same way. Still, this has never been shown. It could have been the Ancient solution to garbage dumps.
RE: Arm through gate.
Jack can mess around like that because he hasn’t reached the part of the wormhole that turns him into an energy signal. There seems to be a buffer just in case travellers have second thoughts. How far in does it go? Probably as long as you are capable of pulling yourself back out (one foot outside the wormhole) you should be ok. However, once you’re in the wormhole theres nothing to walk on, and no way to get any way but forward. So what if you’re tied to a rope and people outside try pulling you out? No dice. In one episode Daniel is looking at a tape of the first Stargate test. The traveller (Ernest) is in a scuba suit and tied to a rope. When he enter the wormhole, they try to pull him out and end up with a cut rope, no Ernest.
Now, if Jack kept his arm in the wormhole and they shut it off, he’d lose the arm. Right before (or maybe as) the Stargate is shut off everything in the buffer is sent off. In the second episode of the series Jack kills a Gao’uld by sticking its head into the gate as command turns it off. The piece of the Gao’ulds head touching the gate is sent through the gate and the Gao’uld is left with a cranial skylight.
Well, it has been stated that we are ‘the second evolution of the form’, which of course means the third evolution will look something like neanderthals. Also, the Gao’uld have moved gates around before, and I was under the assumption that the second gate was the ‘original’, and the one that was first found was the one moved in by the Gao’uld to do whatever it is they do.
Well, she did try to dial what she assumed was ‘out’…
In the SG:A episode ‘38 minutes’, they go a bit more into how the gates work, but the transcript doesn’t appear to be available…
