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Is there any indicator as to how many planets have Stargates?


I'm trying to figure out how many planets have stargates in the Stargate universe, preferably separated by galaxy. I've recently thought about just how many stars there are in the galaxy, and roughly what fraction of them would have a stargate, just to run through some numbers.



Bonus points if you compare the number of stargates to the number of stars in the galaxy, distance between stargates, etc.



Answer



To my knowledge, there was never a number given for the number of Stargates in the Milky Way or Pegasus galaxies. An out of universe explanation for this is that giving such a number would limit the number of planets they could visit and thus the number of episodes they could have on different planets. Such a limit would also prevent the writers from easily doing things like pulling 17 gates from each galaxy to build an intergalactic bridge, which would further reduce the number of gates in the galaxy.


This is a pretty comprehensive list of the known gates and addresses.


On the other hand, for Stargate Universe, we know that the trail of gates left behind the seed ships have been going for 60 million years, and their FTL is pretty quick. If one ship is able to seed a gate on one planet each week, then that means there are roughly 3.13064742 × 10^9 gates spread across the universe, per seed ship.


After reading a few of the Stargate wiki pages, I rewatched a couple of episodes that I thought might provide clues. In Avenger 2.0, a season 7 episode, Felcher's assistant Chloe provides a hint to the number of gates in the Milky Way. They deploy a virus that scrambles the glyphs on a DHD so they no longer correspond to the correct coordinates. This makes it so the DHD for that gate doesn't work. This virus then spreads to other gates, and Chloe says:



If each gate only dials 2 others before adapting to the new system, the entire network will be affected in less than 2 hours.



This was several hours after they'd deployed the virus. What follows is speculation, inferring from what is in the episode. The above quote was from later in the day they deployed the virus to one gate. If we assume they deployed the virus first thing in the day, and learned of the ramifications at midday, then there are ~5 hours of the virus spreading prior to that quote. Add 2 more hours, we get 7 total. We don't know how long it takes for one gate to dial another gate and send the update, so for an upper bound on the number of gates, let's assume that it's instantaneous once the two gates connect.



One gate dials one other gate (1 infected DHD), sends the update (2 total), then both gates dial another (4 total). Then the first infected gate is done, and the 3 others dial out (7 total). Then the second infected gate is done, so 5 of the gates dial out (12 total). Next 8 of them will dial out. The number of gates dialing each time is going to follow the Fibonacci sequence.


So, now we know how long it will take to spread, and how quickly it spreads to new gates. If we assume that the dialing process takes 1 minute, it will run for 420 iterations. But that yields a number larger than the number of stars in the galaxy. By like 10^78th power. If it takes 2 minutes to dial, that comes down to 10^35th.


I hate it when writers don't do research.


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