@elvesdoitbetter - Ha. Very impressive! I agree mostly with your ordering. 

I generally rank ascended beings as a level of development above all technological developments. Really when you strip away all the mumbo jumbo all it is, is just another level of development beyond what can be done through technology.

Also it’s interesting that the Ori were able to give their people a lot of technology. Those massive warships for example. The question is whether that technology was technology they gifted to their followers from a time BEFORE they ascended or whether being ascended gives them even greater knowledge of advanced technology that they are able to share with their people.

In any case I tend to rank the Ori’s technological development separately from them as ascended beings. Likewise I rank the ancients at their max technological advancement level before they ascended and a separate spot for their post ascended level of development.

You’re right that ranking ascended beings relative to one another is difficult because of our frame of reference. So I just put them all at the end. Except Anubis is beneath them because he’s only half ascended.

But when you think about energy creatures, many of them are sort of earlier states of ascension, lesser steps along sort of a different evolutionary pathway.  So… really what is needed is a two part ordering system that converges with ascension being the maximal point above both technological evolution and energy evolution. But of course relative energy development is hard to measure again because of our different frame of reference.  At best you can sort of give a measure of relative energy POWER which is very different.

Even technological development can be funny. I mean goa’uld don’t really “develop” very much. They steal technology. Nevertheless as we’ve seen from the cooperation with Ba’al they can still develop pretty detailed understanding of technology because of their exposure to lots of different technology. If we were to disqualify them because they stole their technology we’d likewise have to disqualify the Ori who were given their technology from their Ori ascended and the Tau’ri b the end of the series who likewise got much of their technology from examining the ancients and through cooperation with the Asgard.

The replicators are similar too, even in bug form they were able to absorb the technology that they ate up and develop into more and more advanced forms eventually achieving human form and beyond. So really we can only examine these societies at their current level of access to technology regardless of where the technology came from exactly and assume that they are generally able to understand it or absorb it into their development somehow or another.

The only real major issue I’d have with your ranking is toward the top end. It could easily be argued that the Milky Way replicators are by the end of sg-1 more advanced than the Asgard. After all they had a hand in the destruction of the Asgard and were able to escape a prison in a Black Hole if I recall correctly. That’s pretty badass.  Then again their ability to defeat the Asgard might be a matter of power not advancement again. Just like the wraith were able to defeat the ancients by sheer numbers, the replicators are similarly able to overwhelm the asgard not by development but by strength. The counterargument though is that replicators absorbed A LOT of asgard technology plus that of many other cultures. As a result they could be ranked higher.

So altogether I’d rank the high end like this:
tollans
furlings approx= nox
asgard
replicators (milky way as of end of series)
replicators (pegasus)
ancients (just before ascension)
ori (society)
giants (maybe?)
anubis (other partially ascended like that black mist thing in an ep of Atlantis)
ori (ascended) == ancients (ascended)

I’d also probably rank the tin man androids lower. They seem pretty inferior to the Reese-type androids. And that place Harlan lived in was pretty backward.

But you’re right it’s tough to order and a lot of it is mostly just guessing. But I agree with pretty much all of the rest of your ordering.

@AnonymousXGrl - @elvesdoitbetter - @rianahntr -  Wow. I’m outnumbered 3 to 1 on the anti-Replicators front. Should I try to defend my love for them? Sure why not. I’ll give it a shot.

First I don’t see human form replicators and bug replicators as being different villains. To me they are all part of a continuum of development. The replicators are effectively a rapidly evolving species of which human form is just another stage. They could have taken any other complex forms too, not sure why they chose humans but whatever.

But that rapid evolution is why to me they were the only villain that struck me as a real serious threat to all of human existence. The goa’uld might enslave humanity but only if the vastly more powerful Asgard and Ancients, the substantively more powerful tollans or Nox, or the near equally powerful Jaffa, Tau’ri and Tokra don’t stop them. Come on. That’s not a threat! Even if they were somehow to win against these villains, the Goa’uld would only enslave humanity and eventually humanity would rebel. They did long ago in Earth’s history, they would again in every society that they held sway over. The goa’uld’s hold over people seemed extremely tenuous to me. It’s largely because they are at an inherent disadvantage in that there are so few of them, there’s so much infighting between them, and their base form is a snake. Their core advantage is genetic memory and stolen technology but new technology can overcome that.

The Wraith have a built in incentive not to kill humanity too.  They need them for food. So the only way they could maintain their empire is by constantly going planet to planet and wiping out their level of technology. That’s a crazy system. People will slip through and they did. And technological development of the wraith is not THAT high. They are sort of complacent and they are limited by their need to hibernate. A human or other alien civilization given enough time was bound to eventually surpass them.

The Ori were a credible threat but only because the Ancients are sooo damned annoying. Their non-interference is taken to an insane extreme to the point that they don’t help at all. That whole plot line leaves me really uncomfortable. Stargate has clearly made a strong stand against the Star Trek Prime Directive. While I always thought the Prime Directive was dumb and I think TNG makes a good case against it in its own series, but I think Stargate at times goes too far against it. At times they are making it seem so silly as if they are mocking it. I’m not that far against the idea. I mean there ARE cases where non-interference does make sense. But Stargate only draws the line at “playing God” with a people.  Anything up to but beneath that level of interference is morally fine. I’m not sure that makes sense.

Maybe I’m just too much of a techy but in comparison I feel the mostly organic evolution of a new non-organic life form is a powerful story driver. And it makes perfect sense to me that the evolve so rapidly and are so difficult to kill. In effect they are a big advanced virus. But then so are we really. We, as a people, destroy our environment with the same single minded obsession that the replicators have only we are a bit more introspective about it. In effect because the replicators evolved so quickly and under constrained circumstances they weren’t able to develop the kind of conscience that humans developed over our long historical development.  As a result, when they reach the human form, they come off as being more “young” than the tau’ri. They’re like children. You can even see the points where a bit of self awareness and a conscience is starting to develop in them, but it’s stomped out by their predatory enemy, organic life which is determined to wipe them out.

The main characters mistake the replicators childishness as soullessness because they have to in order to justify their brutal actions against the replicators. Thinking of them as an emerging species would require them to question whether they have a right to survive at that other species expense. It’s the same dilemma that they are faced with the wraith only the mental blocks in the core characters that keep them from realizing it run deeper because of their prejudice against non-organics.

But we the viewer need I think that separation and that threat level in order to be able to cope with the events we witness. It’s because we can very clearly understand that there won’t be any second chances with the replicators. If humanity doesn’t stop them, they really will wipe out organic life rapidly and efficiently and as they go they’ll keep getting stronger and more dangerous endlessly without end.  In effect you’re given the sort of a battlefield scenario that Stargate uses so often. Like when the Goa’uld ships are right there over your planet about to wipe out all or most life on your planet, you can’t really stop and worry about the many lives on those ships when you blow them up. Likewise the characters and the audience are given enough information to see the threat and understand it.

At the same time, you are left a bit unsettled because it’s like so many real wars between societies where each side reacts to their fear of the “other” that often appears to be a pursuit of revenge. Each side sees the other as an imminent threat to the others survival. Also you see the main characters treat the replicators in ways that they would never treat any organic life form with utter disregard for their will. But part of that made sense especially with the Jack character in whom bias against alien things and machines runs deepest, as we saw in the episode “Tin Man” and from his reaction to the kidnapping of Scarra.  Also SG-1′s experiences with replicating nanites on several occasions prior as well as their experiences with Reese made them perceive nanites as an intractable threat and human form replicators as fundamentally unstable to the point that they couldn’t take risks with them. But I think the Reese character herself demonstrates pretty conclusively that the replicators were capable of eventually becoming more than simple soulless automata and the main characters were wrong to start to see them that way.

That being said I felt that they could have made the replicators an even better villain by providing more evidence of their emerging development and showing their side more clearly and making it possible to bridge the gap in understanding between the heroes and the replicators. They had certain opportunities to do that, both when Weir was taken over by the replicators or when Sam was turned into one or with the two defectors from the replicators side that helped them.  But the authors took the easy way out.

That’s what they do with all the villains of course. That’s why I said Stargate is not a show you really watch for the villains. Many of the very best episodes don’t even feature any of the recurring villains. It’s probably not a bad thing overall. Though the villains aren’t horribly constructed, you watch the show much more for the heroes. You see how they react to various unique and clever circumstances and how those challenges draw them together.

Well that’s pretty much the best case I can make for the replicators. I can understand why you don’t buy it. To me the replicators are what the Borg in TNG SHOULD have been. But I’ll acknowledge they aren’t a very original concept and they aren’t particularly well fleshed out. But I still like them.

I’ll offer one last argument and hopefully it’ll be the clincher that convinces you all. My very BEST argument. Be ready for it. It’s going to BLOW your mind. After this argument, there’s no way you won’t agree with me.  Here goes….
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BUGS RULE!!!

Q.E.D.

@AnonymousXGrl - Trust me I’m the last one to worry about on spelling. My spelling sucks. Worse, nobody has ever managed to convince my stubborn self that it matters in the slightest. I happily mispell everything and I’m often too lazy to click on the red squiggly lines to correct myself. I mean as long as people get the gist who care right?

I just thought it was funny that there was a quote from SG-1 that fit so perfectly with your spelling mistake. lol. ^_^

Yeah Farscape is a little disgusting sometimes. I hated that aspect of it. But it did have some good eps.

RDA is amazing and Sam was Awesome! Teal’c was extroardinary. Hammond, Janet, Jackson, Weir, Sheppard. Ronin. Tayla. Really almost ALL the good characters in Stargate are really well done. But my favorite character of all, by far, is Rodney McKay from Atlantis.

But then I’ve heard many SG-1 fans hate him too. So I might be on the opposite side of that debate like I am on the replicator question.