In Stargate Universe why didn't the ancients use the wormhole drive(Used in SGA last episodes to get Atlantis to Earth) to get to the source of the strange signal that the main ship in SGU is heading to?
They made all this infrastructure to get there building gates and everything, why not just use the wormhole drive?
Sure, its dangerous, but they could have tried to send a probe first.
From the Stargate Wiki:
"This ship was launched to solve a mystery, not by arriving at some ultimate destination where all the questions are answered at one time, but by accumulating knowledge bit by bit."
— Nicholas Rush (Gauntlet, episode 20, season 2)
In other words, simply sending a probe to the far end of the Universe wouldn't have helped. The ship had to collect information from every point along the way.
This could be considered roughly analogous to very-long-baseline interferometry.
Presumably, the requirement to make continuous observations is also why Destiny didn't use the more conventional hyperspace drive, but a previously unknown technology that allows the ship to travel faster than light while remaining in real space.
(It would probably have been sensible to send out two ships, heading in opposite directions. But we don't know enough about the nature of the signal to be sure whether that would help, and of course we don't know for sure that there wasn't a second ship!)
For the same reason the Ancients never visited Destiny themselves: they ascended.
At the end of the war with the Wraith, the Ancients sank Atlantis and escaped through the Stargate to the Milky Way where they either died or ascended. Ascension might be a more direct route to learning about the superstructure or the very nature of the universe, and if not they seem to be engaged in other pursuits. It might not have even been possible for them to return to Atlantis to use the drive if they thought they could and decided they wanted to, given that the Wraith had effectively won. However, it might not even have been a reasonable idea.
McKay and Zalenka say that work on the Wormhole Drive was abandoned because of its instability, tremendous power requirements, and the difficulty of the calculations. With Atlantis at their disposal, McKay was only able to calculate the relatively miniscule jump from the edge of the Milky Way to Earth. Odds are that a jump to the edge of the universe would require nigh impossible amounts of energy, even for the Ancients, and some of the most complex calculations imaginable, if they were even solvable at all given that the destination, the superstructure, is a relatively unknown destination.
The Destiny was launched from Earth, some 50 million years ago.
Ancient wormhole drive technology was being developed on Atlantis, in their post-Earth civilization in the Pegasus Galaxy.
Gabriele writes: “3. Destiny is older than Atlantis. In “The Lost City” we come to know that Atlantis is about 30 million years old. The gate aboard Destiny is older than the ones in the Milky Way. In “Frozen” we come to know that the gates in the Mily Way are about 50 million years old. Is the Destiny about 60 million years old?”
Answer: Damn that’s old. If Destiny is older than the Milky Way gates then yes.
-Joseph Mallozi, Producer of Stargate Universe (and SGA & SG1), on his blog
So, we could be looking at a time difference between the technologies of 20-30 million years. As others have mentioned, the technology hadn't even been finished or used by the time the Ancients left Atlantis, but was finished by McKay for a relatively short hope from one galaxy to another. Keep in mind that Stargates could already be used to jump between galaxies with relative ease, using ZPMs, so it's a testament to the difficulty of the wormhole drive technology that it hadn't been used for in-galaxy or intergalactic jumps.
As to why they didn't later try to finish the technology anyway, one could argue it wasn't only because they achieved Ascension in the end, but prior to Ascension they were struggling with other issues, such as the war against the Wraith in the Pegasus galaxy.
There is no "source". The signal is part of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which permeates every point in space. Every point. Including where you're sitting right now.
There is no "place to go": there is a long journey across the universe to accumulate knowledge and data, in order to discover as much as possible about the nature of the universe given the suggestion that there is "something out there" that, at one time, caused the "signal" in the CMBR.
Also, the wormhole drive was experimental and unfinished when the Ancients abandoned Atlantis and moved back to relatively primitive Earth. Many of those folks subsequently ascended anyway.
Because there was no wormhole drive yet. Destiny used a primitive FLT drive that kept them at near-relativistic speeds. They were basically just going a little faster than light speed
