Reconciling Enterprise's "Regeneration" with the known Borg timeline?

[Enterprise1701]

The way I figure it (I think maybe @Christopher might have said something similar in his annotations for one of his novels) is that it's plausibly true that the Borg did receive the message from "Regeneration" prior to "The Raven", "The Neutral Zone", and "Q Who", but it made no significant change to their exploration of Federation space because A. the message took so long to reach and B. they had a bunch of other things to explore elsewhere.

 

[Nyotarules]

I thought Borg territory was in the Delta quadrant and does it not take 70 years in the 24th century to get from there to the edges of the Alpha quadrant? How far did Q send the Enterprise in Q Who?

 

[Stevil2001]

I think the more prosaic information seeking issue is the simplest - even the crew (on the E-D) or their AI running the search don't look for or locate the right files - why does it need to be come complex than that?

Yeah, I agree with this. The NX-01 made first contact with dozens of species that we saw in four years, and probably many more that we didn't, and tons of them were probably one-offs. Multiply that by all the ships in the Federation Starfleet over the subsequent two centuries, and you're talking about an insane amount of data. We know from "The Raven" and "Dark Frontier" that the Federation was pretty sure there was something called "the Borg" out there, but I see no reason that the crew of the NCC-1701-D would be familiar with it. When they made their report to Starfleet, Commander Shelby probably collated the data and realized it could be the same species.

 

[Idran]

I thought Borg territory was in the Delta quadrant and does it not take 70 years in the 24th century to get from there to the edges of the Alpha quadrant? How far did Q send the Enterprise in Q Who?

DATA: According to these coordinates, we have travelled seven thousand light years
DATA [OC]: And are located near the system J two five.
RIKER: Travel time to the nearest starbase?
DATA [OC]: At maximum warp, in two years, seven months, three days, eighteen hours we would reach Starbase one eight five.

Core Borg territory seems to be in the Delta Quadrant, but the outermost reaches of their territory by the mid-2360s seem to have extended all the way into the deep Beta Quadrant, with scouting efforts extending all the way to Romulan territory as well as some of the further reaches of the RNZ.

 

[Nyotarules]

Thanks, I suppose how long it takes to get from A to B depends on the plot - Earth to Vulcan in one day according to ST09, and that is what 14 light years? lol

 

[Idran]

Oh no, this isn't just a "warp moves at the speed of plot" thing. This time around, the distance doesn't match up either; 7000 light years just isn't anywhere close to the Delta Quadrant, that's still within Beta. Between "The Neutral Zone", "Q Who?", the El-Aurian backstory, and "The Raven", all the evidence points to the Borg simply having an absolutely immense territory that spanned on the order of tens of thousands of lightyears and was starting to stretch towards Romulan territory by the mid-24th century. It was just a lot sparser that far from their core territory.

 

[Nyotarules]

I recall the slipstream technology the Borg had or something like it that Voyager used to get home. Would explain them popping up thousand of lights years away.

 

[Stevil2001]

Do the Borg have to have "territory" in the Beta Quadrant for "Q Who" to work? One can imagine a bunch of lone cubes scooting around the galaxy, just assimilating what looks neat and adding it to the Collective: sort of an anti-Enterprise. (Which is sort of the ideological point of them.) That the NCC-1701-D ended up right in the path of one is because that's where Q dropped them.

 

[Idran]

Transwarp corridors? That could be part of it, yeah; it could be that rather than a relatively contiguous extent (as contiguous as any interstellar territory can be, at least), it's a series of expanding regions centered around transwarp apertures.

Do the Borg have to have "territory" in the Beta Quadrant for "Q Who" to work? One can imagine a bunch of lone cubes scooting around the galaxy, just assimilating what looks neat and adding it to the Collective: sort of an anti-Enterprise. (Which is sort of the ideological point of them.) That the NCC-1701-D ended up right in the path of one is because that's where Q dropped them.

Not from "Q Who?" alone, no, but it's just one of numerous pieces of evidence that suggest that the Borg were a lot closer to home than purely the depths of the Delta Quadrant even before they encountered the Enterprise. Like I mentioned earlier, "Neutral Zone", "Q Who?", "The Raven", and the el-Aurian backstory all suggest that the Borg had at least some level of significant presence relatively near to the Federation (in the sense of being years away at high warp rather than decades) in the mid-24th century. They just hadn't gotten this particular way yet until the J-25 encounter. Not to say that your perspective's wrong, just that I think both your reading and this one are equally supported by what was presented onscreen overall.

 

[JD]

Didn't Q even say something about how the Federation was already headed towards an encounter with the Borg, and he just pushed them into it a few years faster?
As for Regeneration, it's worth keeping in mind that there is 200 years between ENT and TNG. A lot of stuff can get lost or buried in that time.

 

[Jedi Ben]

That was Guinan.

 

[Leto_II]

Why can't it just be rumors drifting out from the area where the Borg actually are known to have been active contemporaneously, though? System J-25 was only 2 or 3 years away at Warp 9-ish, that's like a decade or two at civilian speeds; that might be a slow spread of rumors, but not an insurmountable one. I mean, the El-Aurian homeworld was in Borg territory, and dozens of El-Aurian refugees made it to the Federation core worlds.

The Federation might just not put any stock into the rumors as an organization because they sound so ridiculous and because verifying them would require cutting through Romulan territory to reach the deep Beta Quadrant on what, at the time, would probably have to be a devoted decade-long mission there and back to investigate stories of cyborgs of mass destruction.

Judging by "Q Who", the outer fringes of Borg territory were not nearly as far away as people tend to think.

Also, the Lost Era novel Well of Souls (dealing with the Enteprise-C under Rachel Garrett) establishes that Starfleet conducted a debriefing of the El-Aurian survivors rescued by the Enterprise-B from the Nexus, and that virtually all of them gave vivid statements describing the Borg devastation of their homeworld and their resulting flight towards the Federation.

Combining these with whatever intelligence Starfleet gained from the incident in Jonathan Archer's time, it's clear that they were definitely aware of the scope of the Borg threat by 2365 and Q's return, if not necessarily aware of how to counteract that threat.

Do the Borg have to have "territory" in the Beta Quadrant for "Q Who" to work? One can imagine a bunch of lone cubes scooting around the galaxy, just assimilating what looks neat and adding it to the Collective: sort of an anti-Enterprise. (Which is sort of the ideological point of them.) That the NCC-1701-D ended up right in the path of one is because that's where Q dropped them.

It's mentioned in the episode that Q deposited the Enterprise-D close to where Guinan's people originated, or at least in space they were familiar with:

Picard: "Guinan, your people have been in this part of the galaxy..."
Guinan: "Yes."
Picard: "What can you tell us?"
Guinan: "Only that if I were you, I'd start back now."

Which suggests that they were indeed within Borg space in that region of the Beta Quadrant, if we assume that this territory familiar to the El-Aurians was assimilated at some point in the past century or thereabouts.

 

[Stevil2001]

Oh, I forgot about that. Thanks!

 

[Nyotarules]

Novels are not part of canon so the original premise of Section 31 keeping Starfleet in ignorance for 200 years to explain the lack of knowledge about the Borg is feasible.
However after Guinan and her people were rescued in ST Generations, I don't see it possible they kept quiet about their experiences with the Borg. When it comes to long standing series that cover 50 years leave consistency and logic at the door and just enjoy the show lol

 

[Idran]

When it comes to long standing series that cover 50 years leave consistency and logic at the door and just enjoy the show lol

But it's more fun to not do that.

 

[Tuskin38]

Novels are not part of canon so the original premise of Section 31 keeping Starfleet in ignorance for 200 years to explain the lack of knowledge about the Borg is feasible.

But the original point of this thread was to talk about a Trek-Lit answer to the OP's question.

 

[Nyotarules]

But the original point of this thread was to talk about a Trek-Lit answer to the OP's question.

I get that,Trek Lit may provide a good answer but since most of the books are written after an episode is on the TV it does not always link to what canon shows. If Guinan had a line in 'Q Who' 'we warned the Federation of the threat but they did not believe us/take us seriously etc' or someone found something in the computer database about cybernetic beings then yes that would be a good tie between ST TNG and Trek Lit.

 

[Idran]

Right, but the question wasn't "how do we reconcile this based solely on what we saw on screen". And even if the OP didn't ask about Treklit, they asked it in the Treklit subforum, this would be a silly place to dismiss it as not canon and so not relevant.

 

[The Wormhole]

However after Guinan and her people were rescued in ST Generations, I don't see it possible they kept quiet about their experiences with the Borg.

A few years ago this issue was discussed in another thread. In it, I made this post containing my thoughts on the matter. I'll re-post the relevant portion of the post here:

When the El Aurians were rescued they may very well have told Starfleet everything they knew about the Borg, but when Starfleet reviewed the facts they likely felt that the Borg are on the opposite end of the galaxy and won't pose a threat any earlier than several decades later, it's not an immediate problem. We got other things to worry about, like maintaining this fragile new peace with the Klingons. Not to mention the Romulans seem up to something.

Or, alternatively, maybe reports of the Borg did stir something among the Starfleet brass who put forward several initiatives to counter them as soon as word first came from the El Aurians in the 2290s. But then years go by and then decades with no contact from the Borg and no evidence that they are sizing up the Federation or even that they exist. Eventually someone's going to realize that there's better things to be devoting resources to. Like cleaning up after the Tomed Incident, dealing with Tholians attacking starbases, war with the Cardassians, peace with the Klingons deteriorating, some mysterious race called the Ferengi who are rumoured to eat people and have destroyed a Federation starship commanded by one of Starfleet's top captains. In light of all this, one can understand why Starfleet and the Federation would downgrade the priority assigned to what is starting to look like a space myth.

 

[Stevil2001]

Honestly, Starfleet doesn't even have to dismiss or downplay what the El-Aurians said about the Borg to justify not focusing on them. Star Trek shows us that space is positively brimming with crazy things that destroy planets: the doomsday machine, the cloud that ate Alondra, the space amoeba. The Borg would just be another one of these (which Starfleet always manages to destroy) until the NCC-1701-D encounters the Borg at J-25.