If "classic" Trek had introduced the Borg...

[Destructor]

Herbert wrote:

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The idea of a connection between the Borg and Vejur originated with a joke made by Gene Roddenberry during an interview shortly after "Q Who?." He joked that the planet of living machines might be the Borg's homeworld.
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Vejur

I think that joke gives the theory a bit more creedence than the normal fan-theories we make here, but I have to admit, even before the internet (and so before I'd ever heard that GR had said such a thing), when I was watching TMP for the first time and the probe 'assimilated' Ilia so that she could speak for the machine intelligence, and then it mentioned a distant machine world, I totally said: "That could definitely be the Borg." so it's not a difficult connection to make.

[Maurice]

V'ger stored Ilia as a memory pattern and made a machine facsimile with her thought patterns. Not at all the same thing.

[jgalley]

Destructor wrote:

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I think that joke gives the theory a bit more creedence than the normal fan-theories we make here, but I have to admit, even before the internet (and so before I'd ever heard that GR had said such a thing), when I was watching TMP for the first time and the probe 'assimilated' Ilia so that she could speak for the machine intelligence, and then it mentioned a distant machine world, I totally said: "That could definitely be the Borg." so it's not a difficult connection to make.

but still not an intelligent one, no offense.

as already stated (just above) she wasn't "assimilated" it was an entirely new being that just had her look and memories...the borg are half-organic, half-machine...

again any intelligent thought shows that there's no way they can be related.

it's like saying the holodeck is borg because it can re-create "real" people. it's not even close.

[Mytran]

William Shatner used the notion in one of his Trek novels (I forget which one, the second or third I think). Spock connects with the Borg and realises its not the first time (the first time being V'ger). The differences are explained by there being different sects of Borg, each doing the assimilation thing in slightly different ways. In the case of V'ger's sect, they assimilate via information and energy patterns.

So; an explanation, but I agree that it's a stretch.

[Anwar]

It does make sense there would be different Borg groups with different methods. One thing that was overlooked with the assimilation idea was that, if the Borg Hive Mind is really made of the minds of everyone in the Hive including the Assimilated people, then shouldn't the assimilation of new individuals with new personalities eventually have some effect on the Hive Mind?

I mean, if a Borg Cube assimilated a bunch of Klingons to the point there were more assimilated Klingons than anyone else on that ship, wouldn't their combined personalities have more of an influence on the Collective will than any other?

[Christopher]

^But it doesn't make sense, since the Borg Collective is, well, a collective. Every drone throughout the galaxy is controlled by a single collective consciousness. There are no separate "nations" within it, just a single homogenized whole. Yes, assimilating a new species would theoretically add some new elements into the mix, but with so many thousands of species in there already, it would be diluted to a homeopathic degree (well, not quite homeopathic, since at least there'd be some actual trace of it present). It wouldn't significantly change the whole in any noticeable way, and any subtle change that did occur would be uniform throughout the entire Collective.

Especially given that the Borg are complete hypocrites. They claim to welcome new distinctiveness, but they're the ultimate conformists, ruthlessly suppressing and expunging anything that doesn't fit their preconceived notions of "perfection." So they probably discard all the really novel and distinctive traits of their assimilated species and just keep the stuff that's pretty much the same as what they already have.

[Anwar]

Exactly, the Collective really isn't a Collective as it is really a malevolent viral being that infects and contaminates life.

[Nerys Myk]

A connection between V'Ger and the androids of Exo III or Mudd's World would make more sense than the Borg.

[Uxi]

Anwar wrote:

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Exactly, the Collective really isn't a Collective as it is really a malevolent viral being that infects and contaminates life.

Well, it was only supposed to be interested in technology originally. Only later did it get interested in life. For reasons unspecified. Maybe they absorbed some tech from a militant species and that was the reason?

In any case, the V'ger planet could have been an offshoot or predecessor to the Borg as seen by TNG.

[Anwar]

Originally, the idea was that the Borg were just one species that willingly turned itself into an organic/technology hybrid unified as one mind and that they went around searching for new technologies they could use for themselves (destroying the origin of said technology in the process, making it more unique?).

This got retconned by TNG itself so that they went around assimilating entire species as well as their technology, so it's a case of changed premise.

Frankly, both were a bit too nebulous and the whole Borg concept could've used some pre-planning if they intended them to be anything more than a one-shot foe.

[Christopher]

If one wants an in-story explanation for the discrepancies between what "Q Who" asserted and how the Borg were later portrayed, it could simply be that the main source of information about the Borg in "Q Who" was Q himself, a notorious liar.

[Uxi]

The drone behavior in "Q Who" also showed a distinct lack of interest in anything except the tech, too, though.

[Christopher]

^Which could, I suppose, be reconciled given that the Borg had already assimilated humans -- the Hansen family -- and thus weren't particularly curious about them. But the Enterprise's technology was more advanced than the Raven's.

[Timo]

And this continues to be true of later Drones, despite our heroes learning that the Collective does interest itself in lifeforms and cultures.

It's simply a rare case of realism: when encountering a radically alien species, our heroes initially got most of the facts about them wrong. Humans could have been much older news to the Collective than the Hanson debacle, really, considering their low species number... Klingons, likewise.

Regarding assimilation and dilution of ideas: the Borg may originally have been quite serious about welcoming the distinctiveness of newly assimilated individuals and cultures. It's simply that this doctrine is doomed to fail when the Collective grows in size, and the Borg may not have taken that into account. Or then they simply saw that there was no way to take that into account, shrugged (it's one of the most impressive sights in this galaxy, really, sixteen trillion humanoids lifting their shoulders in unison!) and continued along the path set by their forefathers.

Timo Saloniemi

[Timewalker]

Christopher wrote:

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The Borg knew about the Feeration even earlier than that, when they assimilated Magnus, Irene, and Annika Hansen in 2356..

You're thinking of Erin Hansen. Irene Hansen was Seven's aunt, and she was never assimilated.


I recall the Borg wanting to add a species' biological and technological distinctiveness to their own, but nothing about their culture.

It's like a real-world country welcoming immigrants (biology) and their intellectual know-how and "stuff" (technology), but saying "Forget about your former culture, you'll have to adapt to ours."