Which still leaves an intriguing mystery. Why had they been developing like that for 'thousands of centuries', as Guinan tells us in the original Borg episode, Q Who, to only go for an aggressive course of expansion not much earlier (and possibly even later) than our 15th century? Or did they suffer some catastrophic setback sometime before the Vaadwaur went into stasis? Or could perhaps either Guinan or the Vaadwaur simply have been misinformed?
The Doomsday Machine builders, Slavers..Vegan Tyranny were active then.
When is "then"?
Didn't Guinan say the Borg were around for thousands of centuries, and thus for hundreds of thosuands ofyears?
Didn't the Vaadwaur or however they were spelled say the Borg only ruled a few systems a thousand years before Voyager?
There is a big rime difference berween those statements, hundreds of thousands of years. So I have to wonder exactly when was your "then" supposed to be.
We can suppose that maybe the Borg existed from hundreds of thousands of years, and then suffered some terrible disaster comparitively recently, and as they recovered began their carrer of assimilating people and technology..
There are only the vaguest hints about when the Doomsday Machine was built, and where it might have been built.
The Thrint or Slavers come from Larry Niven's Known Space series, where they ruled a large part of the galaxy at least a billion years ago. The only canonical mention of the Slavers in
Star Trek is in the animated series episode "The Slaver Weapon".
SPOCK: These stasis boxes are the most remarkable thing the Slavers ever produced. Time stands still inside a stasis box. A billion years means nothing in there. What is it, Lieutenant?
UHURA: I've studied the history of the Slaver Empire, but it's sketchy. We know they were masters of all the intelligent beings in this galaxy a billion years ago, until one race revolted. Are the stasis boxes the only source of information we have?
SPOCK: The Slavers and all their subjects were exterminated in the war that followed. Intelligent life had to evolve all over again. The stasis boxes are the only remnant of those lost civilisations.
And:
SPOCK [OC]: Stasis boxes and their contents are the only remnant of a species which ruled most of this galaxy a billion years ago. Their effect on science has been incalculable. In one was found a flying belt which was the key to the artificial gravity field used by starships. Another box contained a disrupter bomb with the pin pulled. As a result, all stasis boxes are now under the jurisdiction of Starfleet, and only certain key specialists handle them. The boxes are rare, potentially dangerous, and we seem to have found a second one.
http://www.chakoteya.net/StarTrek/TAS011.htm
So in the Slavers lived "one billion" years ago, which was 1,000,000,000 years using the short scale or 1,000,000,000,000 years using the long scale.
A
billion is a number with two distinct definitions:
- 1,000,000,000, i.e. one thousand million, or 109 (ten to the ninth power), as defined on the short scale. This is now the meaning in all English dialects.[1][2]
- 1,000,000,000,000, i.e. one million million, or 1012 (ten to the twelfth power), as defined on the long scale. This is one thousand times larger than the short scale billion, and this number is now normally referred to as one trillion. This is the historical meaning in English (with the exception of the United States), and was still in official use in British English until some time after World War II. It is still in use in many non-English-speaking countries where billion and trillion 1018 (ten to the eighteenth power) or equivalent words maintain their long scale definitions.
.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion
The Vegan Tyranny is also from written science fiction, from James Blish's "Okie" stories, also known as
Cities in Flight. James Blish mentioned the Vegans in one of his adaptations of TOS episodes. So the Vegans are not exactly, totally, or 100 percent, canon in
Star Trek. There is no totally canon information about them in
Star Trek.
What is know about the Vegan Confederation or Vegan Tyranny in
Cities in Flight is that it was a large space empire ruling much of the galaxy and lastng for about 10,000 years before being overthrown by Earth humans. Earth Humans didn't consider the Vegans (from Vega II, a planet of the star Vega) to be human, but the non human civilzations did. And an unusual looking man could pass himself off as a Vegan.
Anway, there is an incredibly vast amount of time between the Slavers 1,000,000,000 years ago and the Vegan space realm founded about 8000 BC.
So it seems a little odd to me to read the Slavers and the Vegan Tyranny lumped together as existing together "then".
