Yeah, because the books are considered canon and never disagree at all.
Some manners would be nice, okay?
The Borg - "Origins, Theories, Etc"
- Thread starter Mr Silver
- Start date
Yeah, because the books are considered canon and never disagree at all.
Some manners would be nice, okay?
Didn't it start as a Ferengi mind-control experiment, simply intended get people's money but somehow ended up passing on the relentless Ferengi greed and expand-or-die philosophy to test subjects who became the first Borg? The Ferengi also have a very low species number (180?), and Ferenginar has never been assimulated.
This x1000!!
I have another idea, been watching a bit of Smallville recently, mainly Season 5 which features "Brainiac", now for those of you who aren't familiar, Braniac (or Brain Interactive Construct) was an Artificial Intelligence designed by the Kryptonians, in many incarnations of "Superman", Brainiac was corrupted and reprogrammed by a bad guy, in Smallville it was General Zod, who programmed Brainiac to find him a Host to inhabit, now...
What if the Borg were originally an Artificial Intelligence, created by an Ancient Race? The sytem was created as an advanced probe, designed to study and assimilate information from other cultures harmlessly, however, drop in a deluded group of Scientists who decide to merge with the AI and you get a corrupted force made of Biological and Technological elements, with a goal of attaining "Perfection" by Assimilating entire Cultures and Technology
The AI regulates the eventual "Collective", creating a seperate program to help order the trillions of thoughts throughout the "Hive Mind" this program is adapted to a chosen "Drone" when required, this Drone then becomes the "Borg Queen", since the Borg Queens basic Personality and Abilities are a Computer Program, the Borg Queen can virtually survive indefinitely, when a new Queen is chosen, the program merges with the chosen Drone, becoming the dominant personality
I dunno, maybe a bit too "Matrix" like, but quite an interesting idea, all the same
I could easily see the Collective and the Queen as separate lifeforms: the latter is a parasite living out of the former. Perhaps the Queen was accidentally created by the Collective, and immediately or gradually took over. Or perhaps she came from the outside somehow and co-opted the multitude of bodies like a more conventional parasite would a single body.
OTOH, it wouldn't be difficult to see the Queen as the lowest slave created by the Collective, the slave tasked with managerial duties and interfacing with lesser species, and sometimes even with the loathsome job of having the occasional individual thought.
As we have seen in many episodes, the Collective is a robust and sort of flexible construct: if you hack it into pieces, the pieces will form new mini-Collectives. The Borg might well be the winners of a protracted competition between various types of collectivization, some more benign from our POV, some less so; there might have been millennia of evolution of various Collective types, until the current oppressive version won out. All sorts of well-intentioned experiments would have contributed to and merged into this overall winner en route.
Timo Saloniemi
OTOH, it wouldn't be difficult to see the Queen as the lowest slave created by the Collective, the slave tasked with managerial duties and interfacing with lesser species, and sometimes even with the loathsome job of having the occasional individual thought.
As we have seen in many episodes, the Collective is a robust and sort of flexible construct: if you hack it into pieces, the pieces will form new mini-Collectives. The Borg might well be the winners of a protracted competition between various types of collectivization, some more benign from our POV, some less so; there might have been millennia of evolution of various Collective types, until the current oppressive version won out. All sorts of well-intentioned experiments would have contributed to and merged into this overall winner en route.
Timo Saloniemi
Sorry, this is the internet, expect criticism.
You have a point, generally everyones polite around here and you weren't rude in any of your posts in this thread
But this is also the Internet and you are going to encounter some very opinionated people, especially where Star Trek is concerned, Sojourner has a right to his opinion, its not how I would have worded it, but still he's not breaking any rule by saying what he said
I like to think that the Borg "adapted" having a Queen later in their evolution. That they didn't necessarily start out having one but assimilated a being into their Collective and the concept of a hive hierarchy was developed from that. There have been dozens of Borg Queen's used to as the Queen stated in "First Contact" "Bring order to chaos".
Does everything have to have human centric origins...
Anyway Guinan said they've been around for 1000s of centuries.
Anyway Guinan said they've been around for 1000s of centuries.
With respect, Guinan tends to exaggerate things, If we go on what the Vaardwaur stated in "Dragons Teeth" that the Borg only controlled a handful of systems in the 14th Century, then we can work out that they'd more or less been around for a few decades back then (thats if we restrict the Borg's origin to just the Milky Way Galaxy)
And I agree, I think its totally narrow minded for people to think that everything needs to be related to Humans, especially in the "World Of Trek", where its been clearly established that Human's are nothing more than a Teardrop in an Ocean
Just take this constantly recurring gag...
Random Starfleet Goon: "We're from a Planet called Earth"
Alien Who Has Been About: "Earth? Never heard of it!"
I’ve long thought that something like what you describe would have been a great origin story for the Borg, and it works great if your source material is limited to Q Who and BOBW. Unfortunately, later TNG and VOY episodes and FC make it harder and harder to reconcile such a story with canon. The origin described in the Destiny trilogy (disclaimer: I have only read summaries, not the novels) lacks intelligence and is completely against the spirit of the concept of the Borg as originally depicted.
See also my comments on SPOF DEM as applied to the Borg.
I got the Destiny trilogy last Christmas. Only Trek lit I've read in years. I don't remember anything other than that it was complicated and tried to explain the Borg.
I will second someone earlier who liked the Borg in their less-personal phase, early on. Much cooler.
I will second someone earlier who liked the Borg in their less-personal phase, early on. Much cooler.
The Borg as portrayed in "Q Who?" and BOBW were only good for those two stories. If they were supposed to stay that way, then they shouldn't have reappeared after BOBW because they're too dead-end to do further stories. They tried to expand on the idea of the Borg with "Scorpion" and all they got for it was endless complaints of "The Borg aren't invincible anymore, they're RUINED!!! WAAAHH!!"
I'd always thought the Borg was a collective-mind-type entity (as seen on BOBW) until it assimilated a female who was able to overcome and conquor the collective mind from within--turning it into a Queen-led hive mind....like attempting to assimilate a Metron or a Sith....
I’m OK with the Borg not always being invincible, but I always want the Borg to be Borg. They should retain the essential characteristics described in QW? and BOBW: They are powerful compared to the Ent-D and its contemporary AQ powers, they have a collective consciousness that harnesses the power of a lot of brains, it is an intelligent consciousness, they have the ability to analyze and adapt to new situations, their technology is based on massive redundancy and is designed to avoid SPOFs.
I don’t think they should have been abandoned after BOBW. I Borg is a good episode, even though Picard’s ultimate decision is hard to defend and Hugh’s quick adoption of “human” values is implausible (a flaw that plagues a lot of episodes going all the way back to TOS). Descent is kind of dumb. FC has a lot going for it, but its resolution is a major cheat.
I remember not liking the way the Borg were handled in VOY when I watched it in first run. I am now watching the series again for the first time since it was in first run; I’m older and wiser and my tastes have changed. So far I have seen two Borg episodes in my rewatch: Unity and Scorpion (Part I). I like them both and feel they both respect the essence of Borg. I’m looking forward to Scorpion2 and the rest. I may be disappointed, but Unity and Scorpion1 have convinced me to continue to watch with an open mind.
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I'm just getting back into Star Trek after a lengthy absence, and I've not read a Trek novel in years. However, I do remember those Gold Key comics and never really appreciated them for nitpicking all the inconsistencies. But it was the Borg that drew me back into Trek. All that being said, the idea presented in the original post is intriguing. And of all the ideas presented so far, I think it's my favorite "what if" scenario for the Borg's origins.
I agree- the novels are fantasy and non canon. So it's a license to truly let loose your ideas. I think it's stupid having to keep track of every novel to find out what's happening in the newest novel.
They deliberately avoided this continuing arc in TNG and Voyager because it puts off viewers who switch on for the first time and no frakkin idea whats going on.
I liked the origin of the Borg in Destiny. However I found it predictable form the style in writing, and guessed the origins in the 2nd novel -which spoiled it for me
I found something a while back that's supposedly an unused Voyager script that details the origin of the borg.
"Origin of the Species"
"Origin of the Species"
Gotta love Voyager science.
The mobile holo-emitter can pass through walls?
OK, I can accept this coming from a 1966-67 episode like Space Seed, but how can somebody write something like this just a few years before the turn of the century?
Sub-atomic bacteria cells?
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If we're going to have an "origin" for the Borg, I'd like it to be something relatively simple. I like the idea that they intentionally became the Borg, rather than having it be the result of some accident or meddling or whatever. It seems a little more alien that this is what they strove for, and a little extra alienness here and there wouldn't hurt Star Trek a bit.
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