Otter's Rock

As you said yourself, just because most people from Pegasus don't already have the background to understand the ancient technology doesn't mean they can't learn. At the time SGA starts, the Tau'ri (humans from Earth—this term was more from SG1 than Atlantis and you said you haven't watched much of that, but it's the best term to cover both the SGC and the Atlantis expedition) have recently undergone a massive technological jump powered mostly by them stealing anything that isn't nailed down from the Goa'uld. In 1997 they had exactly the same level of technology as real 1997, but by 2005 they were operating Earth-built FTL-capable capital ships in space, all with very little guidance from any other species or formalized teaching. People are just as smart everywhere and while yes, it might take a little time to train someone from a Pegasus agrarian society to match the Phds of the expedition scientists, there's no reason it can't be done, and no reason to imagine there aren't people in Pegasus who can learn just as fast as the Tau'ri did.

There's also no reason to assume someone must fully understand tech to operate it effectively—I certainly don't understand fully how a computer works, but I use one at a high level every day.

The show actually gives us a perfect case study of this in the form of Teyla. The Athosians are quasi-agricultural nomadic forages, but within the first year of being on Atlantis she has a full working grasp of both Earth and Ancient technology. Even more than that, she proves in the very first episode that while most Pegasus societies are operating barely above subsistence levels, they near-universally understand what technology is. Her introduction involves her wowing Sheppard with the use of a lighter more advanced than Earth's (which directly echoes O'Neill having given Skaara his earth lighter in Stargate the movie) and in the process she subverts the "ignorant natives are wowed by superior western technology" trope.

The Athosians know about cities and technology. They choose to be a small community of quasi-agricultural foragers. There's every indication this is common in Pegasus. (This also happens in real life on earth by the way. There are plenty of reasons for people to maintain traditional ways of life instead of changing to match imported western cultural and technological norms.)

On a similar note, the episode "the game" even shows an entire society moving from medieval lifestyles to renaissance/early modern ones in the space of two and a half years just because they were receiving scientific and engineering information from McKay—information which they then implemented on their own, integrating and understanding the principles extremely rapidly.

There are also plenty of Pegasus societies that are already technologically capable, at least to within a couple decades of 1997 earth, our baseline. The Genii and the Hoffans are both comparable to the US in the first half of the 20th century. The Olesians seem about equal to 21st century earth, and the Taranians had a full working understanding of how to operate the ancient outpost on their planet. There's every indication that the Satedans were actually ahead of the Tau'ri pre-technological-leap. (Earth still can't mass produce energy weapons like Sateda evidently could) And even if we dismiss that, the Travelers are definitely well beyond Earth, at least on the metrics of long-term experience with space travel. They have teenagers who can match Earth's best and brightest on familiarity and comfort with hyperdrive systems.

Now yes, Atlantis had rocky relationships with most of these groups, and I wouldn't advocate for the expedition inviting the Genii or the people who were feeding all their criminals to the Wraith to have free reign in the city, but it truly wouldn't have been hard to vet a few people (Especially the Travellers, the Taranians, or the Satedan survivors) and invite them to collaborate in the city. Atlantis was perpetually on the verge of crisis due to understaffing, and Traveller or Satedan engineers would have been invaluable.

That's just the practical side of the equation, the things that would actively benefit the expedition and by extension Earth. There is also a moral side to this discussion. Yes, the city is a target and full of dangerous stuff, but it's also the most well-defended place in Pegasus. A galaxy where every other location is also a target because the expedition woke the Wraith. I think it's not unreasonable to say the expedition can afford to and should take the time to clear a few apartment blocks for displaced people, even if they're only going to live there temporarily before moving to either A) Lantea's mainland (where the Athosians were in the early seasons) B) Their own planet or C) some other planetary outpost defended actively by the Tau'ri as an alpha site. Atlantis has a shield and weapons and training to protect themselves. They should share those boons when they can.

As for your point about independence/reliance on the expedition you brought up in your first reply, I think the point is perfectly valid but could easily have been handled differently. Reading between the lines, we know Atlantis is already reliant on Pegasus agriculture to keep itself operational. They were doing so in Season 1 trading for food and having the Athosians raise crops on the mainland, and even after reconnecting with Earth they were definitely not shipping all their food in on the Daedalus. That would just be ridiculously impractical and also fragile as a system, since the trip is long and the ship could be damaged and forced to delay at any time. This doesn't come up much after season 1, but Sam's arrival in season 4 includes a bit about a fruit basket with a mix of things from their trading partners, so I feel comfortable taking it as canon.

Essentially, the expedition is already reliant on the population of Pegasus for food. Anyone coming to the city could therefore find ways to become integrated in a reciprocal system. Whether that's straight up commuting through the gate, staying on Atlantis seasonally while fields are fallow, or splitting a population between Atlantis and elsewhere, the relationship between the city and the rest of Pegasus doesn't have to be one-way. even use of Lantea's mainland and the being-cut-off-from-the-gate which didn't work for the Athosians can be mitigated in any number of ways—the city floats, it could be moved closer to the coast where it's reachable by watercraft etc—and that's on top of the alternate solution of sticking with what the show does but changing it a little so that when they move to another planet Atlantis sends along a permanent garrison of expedition military, which is just plain tactically sound and wouldn't have infringed on the Athosians' independence unduly.

I hope that covers all the in-universe bases to your satisfaction, because now I'm gonna move in to the colonialism thing.

[supportive mutuals, please go ahead and resume your reading here. you guys are the best and most coolest people in the galaxy.]

Colonialism is not a topic of the series so much as it is an uncomfortable bedrock that the whole (extremely enjoyable, don't get me wrong, I love it a lot!) franchise rests on. From the very start in the 1994 movie, Stargate invoked "ancient aliens" and pseudoarchaeology to build its world. While in a fictional vacuum it is perfectly fine to enjoy stories of cool ancient precursors and secret alien technology, these things do not exist in a vacuum. Real world pseudoarchaeology is at its core a vehicle for justifying racism. The idea that ancient peoples received technology from advanced aliens who they worshipped as gods (the premise of the movie and SG1) comes from Erich von Däniken's book Chariots of the Gods, and the idea that Atlantis was real and populated by super technologically advanced ancient people (the premise of SGA) was in part popularized by Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods. Both have a distinctly white-supremacist bent ("if it looks like brown people built something impressive—like the pyramids—no they didn't, it must be aliens") and, to quote archaeologist John Hoopes, "Pseudoarchaeology actively promotes myths that are routinely used in the service of white supremacy, racialized nationalism, colonialism, and the dispossession and oppression of indigenous peoples." (I did not find this quote myself. The wikipedia page for pseudoarchaeology uses it, and I went and verified the source which is here—the end of the introduction on page 9—before using it.)

Again, this doesn't mean Stargate isn't a fun and worthwhile show. I knew all of this going in and still chose to watch it, and I've shared it with multiple archaeologists in my life (hell, my favorite anthropology professor in college had an SG1 poster on her door) but it does mean that we are better off engaging with it critically, with our eyes open to the potentially damaging narratives in its premise.

Next, the US military thing.

It's basically a meme that the leads in both SG1 and SGA commit truly staggering numbers of war crimes. The narrative is generally pretty sympathetic to these, though it does call them out occasionally.

SG1 rather famously has Teal'c stand trial for war crimes in an episode which features both the hilarious exchange:

Hammond: The United States military is not in the business of interfering in other people's affairs.

O'Neill: ...........since when, sir?

and a more serious comment from O'Neill that the things he did whole in USAF black ops were not all that different from the things Teal'c did as Apophis's first prime.

In the episode, Teal'c is released after conviction on the grounds that he has changed and is doing enough good now that letting him continue is prioritized over retribution.

SGA, likewise, has characters in season 1 openly discuss that they're not adhering to the Geneva Convention, and in Season 5 they also stand trial for their war crimes. It's less well handled than Teal's case, and ends with a sort of uncomfortable shrug. The characters weren't really able to get acquitted on the merits of their arguments (they really did do everything they were accused of) but it was a political sham trial anyway so...yeah.

Now of course instances of specific individual war crimes do not equal a system of state imperialism but...well, that is also there. SG1 has an arc of Earth rolling up to other planets and interfering in their affairs, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse, and only rarely with invitation. The Tau'ri climbing the technological ladder 1:1 corresponds with Earth becoming more and more capable of projecting power throughout the galaxy, and Atlantis continues that with Earth beginning to project power into the next galaxy over. (Weir calls Atlantis a colony and herself governor of that colony in season 1) All of which is explicitly only secondarily altruistic. "Defend Earth" is the highest goal of both shows. SG1 sacrifices entire planets of allies more than once to shield Earth, and SGA ends with the Tau'ri taking Pegasus's best hope of defense away from Pegasus to defend Earth. That is an imperialist action.

This is already pretty dubious behavior in a fictional vacuum, and gets worse when taken in real world context. The show outright invites us to compare O'Neill's black ops past in the employ of the USAF to Teal'c's villain past, but even if it didn't we would be well within bounds to tie the fictional SGC's actions to the real US military's actions, because one is a fictionalized version of the other. The SGC is imperialist because the US military is an imperial arm of an imperial state.

Now, I'm nowhere near the best qualified to explain the symbolic and explicit ties between the shows and the Cold War and Iraq and Afghanistan. Luckily, other people have already done that in posts like this one.

So, essentially when we discuss the show we have to be careful about falling into colonialist traps, simply because colonialism is present in the fabric of the story. Yes, we can arrive at those colonialist conclusions in-universe without ever having followed colonialist logic ourselves, but that's because the writers who built the world came from our world and in some cases took incorrect real-world colonialist assumptions and baked them into the worldbuilding as true and factually correct. Taking a watsonian approach ("well, it's true in-universe") does not absolve the conclusion of being imperialist.

So when I say "the show brought up the idea of Atlantis welcoming refugees and then dropped it, and that's bad" the response "well, it would have been dangerous, and no one in Pegasus could really have helped" does not successfully refute nor meaningfully engage with my point. Because the writers chose to make it dangerous and chose to make it rare to find people with technical expertise, both of which play into a narrative of American imperial paranoia and exceptionalism imported from the real world.