An "official" Borg Homeworld?

[Edit_XYZ]

As I recall, in addition to various trek lit works, in 'Q, who', Q says directly that the borg are millions of years old

Not that I remember. It's Guinan that says it, and what she says is that they've "been developing for millennia."

"Millennia" is thousands of years, not millions of years.

And even if that weren't the case, Q is just as capable of lying as Guinan is of just getting it wrong.

Actually, according to Guinan, the borg are 'thousands of centuries' (AKA hundreds of thousands) of years old - FAR older than destiny's origin story.

About Q lying - read my previous post. In short, it's a lousy explanation.
And, of course, there's Guinan. When did the character get wrong something she stated so definitively? It was the scenarists' intent for her affirmation to be accurate.

 

[Hartzilla2007]

^ Let me guess: Does this toy happen to belong to an overly litigious old dwarf whom we shall nickname "Grouchy"?

Different set of toys. The Larry Niven toys.

"The Slaver Weapon" tells us nothing about the Slaver Wars, only that they happened billions of years ago. In Known Space, we know that the Tnuctip only defeated the Slavers because they created the "Scream," an immensely powerful weapon that caused every sentient creature in the galaxy to commit suicide. We don't know how the Slaver Wars ended in the Star Trek universe, though. What if there were no Tnuctip in the Star Trek universe? What if the rebellion against the Slavers took a different route...?

Consider what assimilation does. It takes a biological machine and slaves it to a silicon machine, overriding the biological nervous system with a mechanical nervous system.

In a war against the Slavers, who were immensely powerful telepaths, something like the Borg would be the ultimate weapon. The assimilation process would override the nervous system that the Slavers tap into, and it would turn a soldier for the Slaver armies into a soldier fighting against the Slavers.

The Borg make perfect sense as a weapon against the Slavers. Unfortunately, once you've turned a weapon like that on, it's impossible to turn off, and thus the Borg continued to exist. And this lead into other things, like why the tech state of the galaxy seems to be uniform (the Borg will go through and assimilate the galaxy, basically sterilizing it, and with nothing left to assimilate they retreat into hibernation, the life process starts again, and this could repeat itself every few million years or so).

That was my theory, anyway.

Except that explanation relies on TAS which opens a whole can of worms.

 

[TerraUnam]

Why go for good storytelling and a Borg origin revealed in a trilogy when you can have a perfectly good half-baked continuity conspiracy theory instead?

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Except that explanation relies on TAS which opens a whole can of worms.

The animated series as a whole isn't a "can of worms" anymore, really, and it hasn't been for a number of years. "The Slaver Weapon," though, is, and it's considered off-limits out of respect for Niven and to keep anyone from stepping on his toes.

Why go for good storytelling and a Borg origin revealed in a trilogy when you can have a perfectly good half-baked continuity conspiracy theory instead?

Because when Paul hired me to write about the Borg, my brief was to write an article that tied everything together, from the video games to the novels that Christopher points out aren't considered by the editors at Pocket to be part of the "novel continuity" anymore. The only things I was told not to touch were The Return and Strange New Worlds. But that meant I had to reconcile Destiny with Vendetta and their widely divergent ages for the Borg. Since that was the article that Paul wanted, that was the article that I wrote.

I still consider the crash of Mantilis a decisive event in the Borg's development, even though I think the Borg predated the Caeliar by aeons. Assuming the Borg found the wreckage of Mantilis and assimilated the humans and natives that had been possessed by the deranged Sedin, her "hunger" gave the Borg a new drive, but it was also an infection that consumed the Borg. I would even go so far as to say that the reason why the Caeliar had never dealt with the Borg prior to the 2370s is that there was never any reason for them to; any Borg they might have encountered in one of the Borg's previous expansionist phases wouldn't have had Sedin's hunger in its heart.

 

[David Mack]

^ Or, for all we know, the Borg were created as seen in Destiny, then a time-travel event shifted some of their subsequent drones into the deep past, and those time-displaced drones and queen eventually merged with their forebears hundreds of thousands of years later, as part of a self-consistent causal loop. Or something.

 

[Sci]

I find that theory interesting on an intellectual level, Allyn, but emotionally uncompelling. And it undermines the thematic unity of Destiny if that's not the definitive origin of the Borg.

And I don't really care if Guinan had a random line in an episode that aired 20 years ago that no one but hard core trivia buffs remember.

Give me Destiny's origin any day of the week, which has the Borg being born in pain, desolation, and starvation on the world of Arehaz, homeworld of the Kindir, in 4527 BCE.

 

[F. King Daniel]

You guys do realize how small Trek's continuity gets if we disregard everything that's contradicted by a throwaway line or two? We're talking a mishmash of a few half- and quarter- episodes.

 

[TerraUnam]

Okay, having the Borg "hibernate" and start over periodically is one way to reconcile the idea of their being billions of years old with their relatively limited territory (since it would only take millions of years to colonize the entire galaxy even without warp drive). But it seems difficult to reconcile with their level of technology. The design of the Borg -- big clunky metal and plastic parts stuck onto actors' bodies -- always struck me as an implausibly primitive approach to cyborg technology. Even by 1980s standards it looked cruder than it should've been. I'd think something that had been at it for billions of years would be much more streamlined, with nanotechnology so integrated with biology that the distinction would be virtually undetectable and effectively meaningless. So I've never bought the idea of the Borg as some kind of incredibly advanced ancient superrace. They're just too dang kludgey. The idea in Destiny that the Borg arose as sort of an accidental hodgepodge just a few thousand years ago, a set of makeshift, jury-rigged adaptations that have only been marginally improved on since due to the Borg's limited ability to innovate, seems much more credible to me.

And anyway, my point was simply that this thread hasn't included much discussion of Trek literature at all, which is surprising considering where it was posted. It's mostly been more conjectural.

So you're arguing that Trek's cyborgs should have been more like Erika Hernandez post Change? I can go along with that.

Second, as I recall in the first Borg episode in TNG the power conduits on the set of the Borg cube were clearly aluminum heating ducts, the portable kind that looks like an accordion. The budget was showing.

 

[Christopher]

Well, Guinan's actual line from "Q Who" is, "They're made up of organic and artificial life which has been developing for thousands of centuries." Which is... wow. Kind of incoherent. It's hard to see a clear, definitive way to parse that. And given that Guinan is a refugee from the Delta Quadrant who wasn't even present when the Borg destroyed her world but only learned about them secondhand, I don't think she qualifies as an expert whose statements must be stipulated as fact. That rather confusing sentence of hers could've simply been wrong.

There's also VGR's "Dragon's Teeth," in which the Vaadwaur Gedrin asserts that 900 years earlier -- as recently as 1484 CE -- the Borg had "only assimilated a handful of systems." Assuming Gedrin is speaking truthfully, he had "many encounters" with the Borg, which would make him a primary source while Guinan's accounts are only secondary at best. And his testimony suggests a very recent origin for the Borg, or at least a recent beginning for their current era of expansion.

Of course, it's possible that once the Borg originated on Arehaz, it took nearly 6000 years before they managed to get into space. After all, with no capacity for innovation, just the assimilation of what other races created, they might not have been able to get into space until someone with starflight capability landed on their world and got assimilated. Another possibility is that Gedrin was unaware of the true expanse of Borg territory, but I'd consider that unlikely since the Vaadwaur's subspace corridors let them span a huge swath of the galaxy. While if the Borg had expanded sometime within the preceding 6000 years and then been pushed back nearly to the point of eradication before expanding again, then by the same token the Vaadwaur should've been aware of historical records or archaeological evidence of their former presence.

It is, of course, possible that Gedrin was lying -- exaggerating the number of encounters he'd had and downplaying their size and strength relative to the Vaadwaur in order to make himself and his people sound more impressive. As with Guinan, we just can't assume he's a reliable source.

 

[Mr Silver]

"The Slaver Weapon" tells us nothing about the Slaver Wars, only that they happened billions of years ago. In Known Space, we know that the Tnuctip only defeated the Slavers because they created the "Scream," an immensely powerful weapon that caused every sentient creature in the galaxy to commit suicide. We don't know how the Slaver Wars ended in the Star Trek universe, though. What if there were no Tnuctip in the Star Trek universe? What if the rebellion against the Slavers took a different route...?

Consider what assimilation does. It takes a biological machine and slaves it to a silicon machine, overriding the biological nervous system with a mechanical nervous system.

In a war against the Slavers, who were immensely powerful telepaths, something like the Borg would be the ultimate weapon. The assimilation process would override the nervous system that the Slavers tap into, and it would turn a soldier for the Slaver armies into a soldier fighting against the Slavers.

The Borg make perfect sense as a weapon against the Slavers. Unfortunately, once you've turned a weapon like that on, it's impossible to turn off, and thus the Borg continued to exist. And this lead into other things, like why the tech state of the galaxy seems to be uniform (the Borg will go through and assimilate the galaxy, basically sterilizing it, and with nothing left to assimilate they retreat into hibernation, the life process starts again, and this could repeat itself every few million years or so).

That was my theory, anyway.

I like this theory, but I'm not keen on it involving TAS. I like the idea of the Borg being a weapon of some kind - maybe an artificial intelligence that was activated as a last resort to some other threat and then didn't deactivate itself when the threat was over.

I've envisioned the Borg as being an experiment in combining the biological and the technological that didn't go to plan. Say a species decides that a hive mind would be a major advantage for their world and gives their scientists the go ahead to develop it. It's starts of small, with participants being fitted with cybernetic devices that are vital to the process and with an artificial intelligence filtering the thoughts of the group and bringing "order to chaos". Eventually the AI misinterprets the thoughts of the collective and asserts itself upon one of the participants - a female.

The hive mind decides that the benefits from a planet-wide collective are needed and the entire race is assimilated. They name themselves "Borg" (because it's short for "Cyborg" which doesn't make a lot of sense, except in Destiny) and decide that perfection is their ultimate goal and this can only be achieved through a balance of the biological and technological.

 

[Edit_XYZ]

Well, Guinan's actual line from "Q Who" is, "They're made up of organic and artificial life which has been developing for thousands of centuries." Which is... wow. Kind of incoherent. It's hard to see a clear, definitive way to parse that. And given that Guinan is a refugee from the Delta Quadrant who wasn't even present when the Borg destroyed her world but only learned about them secondhand, I don't think she qualifies as an expert whose statements must be stipulated as fact. That rather confusing sentence of hers could've simply been wrong.

First - "incoherent"? What exactly is incoherent about the statement, Christopher?
It's actually pretty straightforward.

Second - yes, Guinan was not present when her homeworld was destroyed by the borg. She knew only 'bits and pieces' from her people.
But she, the listener, was certain these 'bits and pieces' were accurate - and expressed herself consequently.
If anyone can judge correctly the veracity of such information, Guinan can.

Also, as already said, as per the scenarists' intent, her statements are to be taken as 'fact': her character has ALWAYS been a reliable source of information.

There's also VGR's "Dragon's Teeth," in which the Vaadwaur Gedrin asserts that 900 years earlier -- as recently as 1484 CE -- the Borg had "only assimilated a handful of systems." Assuming Gedrin is speaking truthfully, he had "many encounters" with the Borg, which would make him a primary source while Guinan's accounts are only secondary at best. And his testimony suggests a very recent origin for the Borg, or at least a recent beginning for their current era of expansion.

The Vaadwaur's exploration/sphere of influence extended only in the relatively small region of the delta quadrant where their subspace channels network existed.

7 of 9's affirmation about the borg's memories of that era being fragmentary actually suports the theory that, in the recent past, the borg suffered something akin to a cerebral stroke - as a consequence of assimilating the Sedin-descended collective and fundamentally changing the hive mind?
Other than a stroke extending through the entirety of the collective, there's no way to explain loss of memories by the borg - between its famed redundancy and the fact that a single ship retains all its memories (look how much 7 of 9, a mere drone, retained of this racial memory).

I find that theory interesting on an intellectual level, Allyn, but emotionally uncompelling. And it undermines the thematic unity of Destiny if that's not the definitive origin of the Borg.

And I don't really care if Guinan had a random line in an episode that aired 20 years ago that no one but hard core trivia buffs remember.

Give me Destiny's origin any day of the week, which has the Borg being born in pain, desolation, and starvation on the world of Arehaz, homeworld of the Kindir, in 4527 BCE.

Fair enough, Sci.

What I like about your position is that you're not trying to hide behind some needless fanwank to pretend this or that piece of canon never aired/was written/etc.

You acknowledge that it exists; it's just that you choose to ignore it - which is, of course, a valid position.

Aprops destiny's themes/messages:
http://trekbbs.com/showpost.php?p=5376904&postcount=19

 

[Christopher]

They name themselves "Borg" (because it's short for "Cyborg" which doesn't make a lot of sense, except in Destiny)

Yeah... I always used to figure that when Guinan said in "Q Who" that they were called Borg, she was giving the English-speaking crew an Anglicized equivalent of her people's term for them. The idea that an alien race of cyborgs just happened to give them a name that sounded like a corruption of the English word cyborg was always kinda ridiculous. (Though sadly far from unprecedented in Trek.) So I appreciate that Destiny gives us an explanation for that.

 

[JD]

Well, Guinan's actual line from "Q Who" is, "They're made up of organic and artificial life which has been developing for thousands of centuries." Which is... wow. Kind of incoherent. It's hard to see a clear, definitive way to parse that. And given that Guinan is a refugee from the Delta Quadrant who wasn't even present when the Borg destroyed her world but only learned about them secondhand, I don't think she qualifies as an expert whose statements must be stipulated as fact. That rather confusing sentence of hers could've simply been wrong.

First - "incoherent"? What exactly is incoherent about the statement, Christopher?
It's actually pretty straightforward.

Second - yes, Guinan was not present when her homeworld was destroyed by the borg. She knew only 'bits and pieces' from her people.
But she, the listener, was certain these 'bits and pieces' were accurate - and expressed herself consequently.
If anyone can judge correctly the veracity of such information, Guinan can.

Also, as already said, as per the scenarists' intent, her statements are to be taken as 'fact': her character has ALWAYS been a reliable source of information.

There's also VGR's "Dragon's Teeth," in which the Vaadwaur Gedrin asserts that 900 years earlier -- as recently as 1484 CE -- the Borg had "only assimilated a handful of systems." Assuming Gedrin is speaking truthfully, he had "many encounters" with the Borg, which would make him a primary source while Guinan's accounts are only secondary at best. And his testimony suggests a very recent origin for the Borg, or at least a recent beginning for their current era of expansion.

The Vaadwaur's exploration/sphere of influence extended only in the relatively small region of the delta quadrant where their subspace channels network existed.

7 of 9's affirmation about the borg's memories of that era being fragmentary actually suports the theory that, in the recent past, the borg suffered something akin to a cerebral stroke - as a consequence of assimilating the Sedin-descended collective and fundamentally changing the hive mind?
Other than a stroke extending through the entirety of the collective, there's no way to explain loss of memories by the borg - between its famed redundancy and the fact that a single ship retains all its memories (look how much 7 of 9, a mere drone, retained of this racial memory).

Another thing to keep in mind is that this is the Borg we're talking about here, so I wouldn't be surprised if there's been alot of exageration about them over the centuries. They strike me as the kind of thing that would really build up a much bigger reputation among their victims than they really deserve. As for what Seven say, perhaps they've simply assimilated so many other races that have been around that long that over time they can no longer differentiate their history from those of the races they've assimilated.

 

[Christopher]

Well, Guinan's actual line from "Q Who" is, "They're made up of organic and artificial life which has been developing for thousands of centuries." Which is... wow. Kind of incoherent. It's hard to see a clear, definitive way to parse that. And given that Guinan is a refugee from the Delta Quadrant who wasn't even present when the Borg destroyed her world but only learned about them secondhand, I don't think she qualifies as an expert whose statements must be stipulated as fact. That rather confusing sentence of hers could've simply been wrong.

First - "incoherent"? What exactly is incoherent about the statement, Christopher?
It's actually pretty straightforward.

Well, for one thing, it isn't grammatically consistent. There are evidently two subjects, "organic [life] and artificial life," but it has a singular verb, "has been." So which is she referring to? If she's referring to them both collectively, that isn't very informative given that organic life has, obviously, been developing for billions of years. If she intended to say that two different forms of life have been developing together for thousands of centuries, or merged together that long ago, she could've chosen a clearer way of saying it.

And "made up of organic and artificial life" can be interpreted any number of ways. First off, how do you define "artificial life?" Taken literally, that phrase would refer to biological organisms that were created by intelligent beings. "Artificial" doesn't mean "not organic," it means "made by craft," manufactured by people. We can excuse a little inaccuracy and grant that in vernacular, "artificial life" probably refers to inorganic technology which is self-replicating and mimics the behavior of living things. Or, in the case of Data (a so-called "artificial life form"), technology which possesses consciousness and thus tends to be characterized as "alive" by a sloppy definition of the term. (I always hated that drink-mix commercial from my childhood where the kids exclaim, "The flowers are alive!" when the flowers turn out to have faces and fangs and try to eat them. All flowers are alive, you idiot children!!)

So yeah, in retrospect, clearly it was meant to say that the Borg are a hybrid of organic life and self-replicating technology, and was probably meant to say that the hybridization originated in at least its most primitive stage thousands of centuries ago. But it's a very poorly phrased way of putting that across, so that grants us some ambiguity even if it wasn't intended to.

Second - yes, Guinan was not present when her homeworld was destroyed by the borg. She knew only 'bits and pieces' from her people.
But she, the listener, was certain these 'bits and pieces' were accurate - and expressed herself consequently.
If anyone can judge correctly the veracity of such information, Guinan can.

At most, she could determine whether her sources believed that what they said was true. She would have no way of knowing whether those sources' beliefs corresponded to objective fact. For thousands of years, most educated humans sincerely believed that the Sun revolved around the Earth. If someone with infallible lie-detection ability asked a bunch of pre-Copernican scholars whether the Earth circled the Sun, they would all say "no" and the listener would be convinced they were being as honest as possible. But they would still have been completely wrong, because belief is one thing and objective fact is a completely different thing.

After all, it's not like the people Guinan spoke to would've been immortals who'd actually witnessed the creation of the Borg firsthand. Anything they told her, no matter how sincerely they believed it, would've been hearsay countless generations removed. Or maybe even guesswork. After all, it's unlikely that many witnesses to the early days of the Borg would've survived to tell anyone what had happened. It's just not realistic to expect that anyone short of Q's level of perception would have direct, reliable information about the Borg's origins. And Q didn't say anything about how or when they came into being; only Guinan did.

Also, as already said, as per the scenarists' intent, her statements are to be taken as 'fact': her character has ALWAYS been a reliable source of information.

But the scenarists' intent in "Dragon's Teeth" is blatantly contradictory. So since we only have those two references, they cancel out where intent is concerned. Star Trek is full of cases where one writer has intended one thing to be true and a later writer has grossly contradicted it. Hell, most of the stuff that was intended to be true about the Borg in "Q Who" -- that they're incubated from infancy rather than assimilated, that they're only interested in technology rather than people, that their ships are totally decentralized without any distinct engines or computer cores or weapons nodes, that you can't get life-form readings from drones, etc. -- ended up being blatantly contradicted by later Borg episodes (and movie). Essentially everything "Q Who" told us about the Borg was later decided to be "wrong" or at least incomplete. The producers of later Borg stories never hesitated to contradict what "Q Who" asserted or intended, so why should this factoid -- which was also later contradicted -- be any different?

The Vaadwaur's exploration/sphere of influence extended only in the relatively small region of the delta quadrant where their subspace channels network existed.

"Dragon's Teeth" happened in the early 6th season. By that point, Voyager had made the following jumps through space: 9500 light-years courtesy of Kes, 2500 ly through the Malon vortex, 10,000 ly by quantum slipstream, 20,000 ly by Borg transwarp coil, and another 200 ly through the Vaadwaur corridors (Star Charts mistakenly puts the Vaadwaur homeworld before the corridor instead of after). And that's in addition to the over 2000 ly they'd covered through normal space according to Star Charts's estimates. So the Vaadwaur homeworld was something like 45,000 light-years from the Talaxian homeworld -- and yet the Vaadwaur were familiar with the Talaxians and had visited their homeworld. So we know that the Vaadwaur corridors spanned a distance equal to nearly half the diameter of the Milky Way Galaxy, or nearly the entire radius of the Delta Quadrant. That's not "relatively small," that's mind-bogglingly immense.

7 of 9's affirmation about the borg's memories of that era being fragmentary actually suports the theory that, in the recent past, the borg suffered something akin to a cerebral stroke - as a consequence of assimilating the Sedin-descended collective and fundamentally changing the hive mind?

Other than a stroke extending through the entirety of the collective, there's no way to explain loss of memories by the borg - between its famed redundancy and the fact that a single ship retains all its memories (look how much 7 of 9, a mere drone, retained of this racial memory).

There are certainly other ways. For instance, there could've been some powerful enemy that developed a computer virus or energy weapon that disrupted the Borg's memories. That could be what knocked them back to the small number of systems they occupied in the 15th century. Or it could be quite simply that the Borg were still a new, developing civilization at that point and hadn't yet evolved into their modern form, and information was lost in the transition.

And really, 900 years is a long time. Information has a way of degrading, even in computers. The very atoms of the storage medium can undergo spontaneous quantum state changes or be damaged by cosmic rays, introducing errors and corruptions into the data. The older the memory, the more it deteriorates. The Borg don't have historians, don't consult their knowledge base unless they have an immediate need for it, so a lot of old data would just sit on a virtual shelf slowly falling apart. Maybe 900 years is a little quick for that deterioration to happen, but the Borg aren't innovators, so they don't necessarily have the ability to improve on what they have.

 

[Mr Silver]

They name themselves "Borg" (because it's short for "Cyborg" which doesn't make a lot of sense, except in Destiny)

Yeah... I always used to figure that when Guinan said in "Q Who" that they were called Borg, she was giving the English-speaking crew an Anglicized equivalent of her people's term for them. The idea that an alien race of cyborgs just happened to give them a name that sounded like a corruption of the English word cyborg was always kinda ridiculous. (Though sadly far from unprecedented in Trek.) So I appreciate that Destiny gives us an explanation for that.

I've often thought that perhaps the Borg have no particular name for themselves (other than "collective) and simply announce themselves as whatever word a particular race knows them as. They could have found out the "Borg" name when the drones boarded the Enterprise in "Q-Who" - after all, what Guinan had told Picard would surely have been logged in the ship's records.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Different set of toys. The Larry Niven toys.

You mean, ye olde watermelon gun?


Kzin, M'Ress and Arex by Therin of Andor, on Flickr

 

[F. King Daniel]

The most advanced hair dryer in the galaxy, that thing.

 

[Christopher]

I've often thought that perhaps the Borg have no particular name for themselves (other than "collective) and simply announce themselves as whatever word a particular race knows them as. They could have found out the "Borg" name when the drones boarded the Enterprise in "Q-Who" - after all, what Guinan had told Picard would surely have been logged in the ship's records.

But why would they have cared enough about other civilizations to bother accommodating them by learning and using their nomenclature? They couldn't care less what Species 867-5309-23Skidoo calls them, because they intend to make that species not exist anymore real soon.

 

[Mr Silver]

But why would they have cared enough about other civilizations to bother accommodating them by learning and using their nomenclature? They couldn't care less what Species 867-5309-23Skidoo calls them, because they intend to make that species not exist anymore real soon.

A formality perhaps?

One that is based on the Borg's idea of superiority that gives them a need to announce their presence to every species that they assimilate. If they couldn't care less, they wouldn't bother with any kind of communications with their targets for assimilation.

 

[Christopher]

Announcing their presence is one thing. Actually learning the language and making up a name in it? No way. That's far more accommodating and imaginative to make any sense for the Borg to do. They don't give a damn about anyone's language. Everyone uses translators anyway, so why bother?