I was thinking about the various advanced races in the Stargate universe and how they go about problem solving. They really don't seem to be all that good at it or go about it very intelligently. Other than the Nox, who I don't remember ever needing to deal with a serious problem, they don't have much mental flexibility.
When the advanced race or cultures like the Asgard, Tollan or Ancients have a problem, they throw tehnology at it. Their advanced technology seems to be their one and only approach. If it doesn't work, they just try more and more technology. If that doesn't work, they are out of luck. If their techonolgy can't solve the problem at hand, they don't or can't think to try anything else. They are stuck.
Thier solving problems seem to really be quite poor even when they are presumably very intelligent or even super intelligent. They have one-track minds and little ability to adapt if their usual solution doesn't work or is actively counter-productive as with the Asgard and their battle with the Replicators.
When the advanced race or cultures like the Asgard, Tollan or Ancients have a problem, they throw tehnology at it. Their advanced technology seems to be their one and only approach. If it doesn't work, they just try more and more technology. If that doesn't work, they are out of luck. If their techonolgy can't solve the problem at hand, they don't or can't think to try anything else. They are stuck.
Thier solving problems seem to really be quite poor even when they are presumably very intelligent or even super intelligent. They have one-track minds and little ability to adapt if their usual solution doesn't work or is actively counter-productive as with the Asgard and their battle with the Replicators.
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Re: Advanced races and problem solving
Tue, September 26, 2006 - 9:44 AMAnd they tend to use the same kind of technology when fighting an enemy even after that technology has failed. The Ancients' shields and weapons eventually failed to fend of the Wraith probably because they didn't go beyond those forms of technology. But I'm of the mind that the Ancients would've improved their chances of defeating the Wraith if they, for example, did a computer scan of the Wraith genome and created an anti-Wraith virus from the informnation provided from that scan. Of course some might say they probalby did that, but the Wraith adpated to the virus. Maybe so. But I still say it would've been more likely to succeed than fail.
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Re: Advanced races and problem solving
Tue, September 26, 2006 - 7:16 PMThey tried to win with yet more of the same thing that was already not working for them. It seems to have been there one option and it didn't work. They tried to take their existing ZPM technology one step further to make a bigger and better zero-point energy source. It didn't work and they lost.
Maybe the Ancients are a special case since the situation starts with them already defeated long earlier.
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Re: Advanced races and problem solving
Wed, September 27, 2006 - 4:16 PMbut, again to remind ppl, the ancient's did not fail against the wraith due to any technological related reason. they failed for one reason and one reason only: numbers. the wraith simply were able to breed and expande at a rate MUCH greater than the ancients could or did anticipate, and THAT is why they failed.
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Re: Advanced races and problem solving
Tue, September 26, 2006 - 10:46 AMNecessity is the mother of invention. -
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Re: Advanced races and problem solving
Tue, September 26, 2006 - 7:19 PMThe Ancients, Tollan and Asgard all had plenty of neccessity. The Ancients faced total defeat in the Pegasus Galaxy and extinction in this galaxy. The Asgard were on the verge of complete collapse under Replicator attack. The Tollan faced either enslavement to Anubis or total destruction. There didn't seem to any shortage of neccessity in these situations. -
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Re: Advanced races and problem solving
Wed, September 27, 2006 - 11:49 AM< The Ancients, Tollan and Asgard all had plenty of neccessity. >
Right, but they weren't all that inventive during the crisis. The observation was made that they kept using the same old tricks, perhaps because they'd been pampered by their own technology for too long, leading to complacency and lack of inclination to innovate. -
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Re: Advanced races and problem solving
Thu, September 28, 2006 - 1:16 AMThat is just what I am saying. Even when they need to come up with some other solution to avoid imminent destruction, they can't seem to do it. They keep trying the same thing over and over and seemingly expecting a different outcome. This has been advanced as a definition of insanity.
I can't remember the source of the original quote but it's an old saw.
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Re: Advanced races and problem solving
Tue, September 26, 2006 - 7:02 PMAlbert Einstein could build a nuclear bomb and come up with theories of relativity ... but couldn't match his socks or remember his social security number. I guess that when a person (or in the case of aliens, people for lack of a better term) get sooo intelligent, they forget all the simple stuff (when dealing with the replicators, Thor needed Sam to come up with a "stupid" idea because he couldn't do it). When she came up with the idea of blowing the O'Neill up, he agreed that it was stupid but just might work. -
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Re: Advanced races and problem solving
Tue, September 26, 2006 - 7:28 PMExcept that Carter's solution wasn't stupid. It played on the predictable behavior patterns of the Replicators which is one of their few real weaknesses.
Building another and yet more technologically advanced ship to send against the Replicators was the stupid idea. The most likely outcome would be that they take that ship and it's technology over and become even more dangerous. That is what had happened every other time the Asgard had tried to deal with the problem by upping the tech ante. It happened after that too. The Asgard tried yet another tech solution (the time dilation machine), The Replicators took it over again. The whole back-fired by allowing the Replicators to greatly speed their evolution.
The Asgard always try to solve the problem by upping the tech ante. It always backfires on them. Still, they keep on doing it. It isn't just with the Replicators either. Their pursuit of yet more bio-tech and cloning tech to solve the problems created by their bio-tech and cloning tech almost lead them to extinction even if they had never happened on the Replicators at all. -
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Re: Advanced races and problem solving
Wed, September 27, 2006 - 11:52 AM<The Asgard always try to solve the problem by upping the tech ante. It always backfires on them.>
Presumably it has worked in the past. It does seem to be the default mode of problem solving for them. It's either cultural arrogance, cultural atrophy, or some innate thought pattern.
I think they're trying to highlight the advantage our flexible monkey brains have. What are the Asgard, amphibians? -
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Re: Advanced races and problem solving
Thu, September 28, 2006 - 1:13 AMApparently, they were originally beings that did not look all that different from us. They showed an earlier Asgard in one episode and it looked like a cross between the current Asgard an a humen. I think it definitely implied that they were much more human like at some point in their past. That was a very long time ago though. Millions of years or something like that. -
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Re: Advanced races and problem solving
Thu, September 28, 2006 - 9:05 AMAnything that primitive 21st century humans know the Asgard, the Ancients and the Tollan would also know. If the Atlantis team could figure out how to turn Wraith into humans, then the Ancient must also be capable of doing the same. And with their much more advanced technology, the Ancients could've come up with a better, stronger, faster system of turning Wraith into humans. Also, it looks like the Ancients did a very lousy job of programming their replicators with their version of the Laws of Robotics. I mean, the Laws of Robots would be useless if the mechines they were programmed into wouldn't obey them.
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