What happened to Deep Spaces 1-8?

Why assume that? They're part of the same grouping within the organization, but that doesn't mean they have to spend every moment together, or else what's the point of having nine of them? They made up Unimatrix 01, but each one had its own distinct role to play in that sub-unit, and they might have often had to separate and perform different physical tasks in different parts of a cube, say. And their interconnection was mental, not physical. No matter how widely separated the components of a Borg unimatrix are in space, they're still thinking as one entity so long as their subspace link is active.

 

Then why assume that seven and the other three were part of the same group in that episode? You're not being very consistent. They either need to stay together or they don't. You seem to be arguing for both.

 

"Assume?" No. They explicitly said so in dialogue.

What are you even talking about? Being part of the same group does not require being physically together at every single moment. The police officers who belong to the same precinct patrol in separate parts of the city. The soldiers who belong to the same unit may be assigned to fan out and search different parts of a region, or maybe some would be sent to scout ahead while others stay behind to make camp. Like I said, what's the point of even having multiple members in a group if they aren't able to split up and do different tasks?

And you're misunderstanding the entire nature of the Borg Collective. All Borg drones are part of the same group mind, no matter how far apart they are physically from one another. A drone in the Alpha Quadrant is part of the same single consciousness as a drone in the Delta Quadrant. They're cells in a single body, being controlled by a single will. Their physical separation is, as the Borg would say, irrelevant.

 

Ok, I didn't remember that part of the dialogue.

Anyway, Police officers and Soldiers are human beings. Not mindless automatons without any personal needs as are the borg drones. You can't compare one with the other.

 

That's not how analogies work. They're never meant to be exact in every particular. What matters is the specific element you're comparing. And I was not comparing the intelligence or autonomy of the individual members. I was merely making a point that being part of the same organizational grouping does not in any sense require being physically adjacent at every single moment, as you seemed to be bizarrely and incomprehensibly assuming. I could've just as easily used a colony of ants or bees as my analogy -- they spread out over a fair distance physically while still pursuing a collective behavior pattern.

And yes, as you seem to have overlooked, I already explicitly pointed out -- twice -- how the Borg's difference from humanity makes it even less necessary for them to be physically together.

 

You can't have it both ways. Either they need to be together and there are five missing in that episode or they don't and four of them being together is incomprehensible.

Come on! There are trillions of borg. What are the chances that four members of a group of nine would be together at any time instead of being separated by a see of drones unless they needed to be?!!!!

 

They're actually all named for a very popular 22nd century boy band, "Deep Space", whose music helped unite the Federation.

 

What happened to American Histories I-IX? Maybe we should ask Avery Brooks.

 

Nothing unites like a common nuisance.

 

The "missing" part is trivial, of course: nine went down, four came back. We see a corpse. Somewhere outside the view, there were four more.

Moreover, how could a simplistic designation scheme indicating "nine" in "unimatrix 01" even begin to cope with the complexity of a Collective trillions strong? There must be lots of information left unsaid (like, say, 99.99999999% of it) - but conversely, what is being said must be relevant to the situation at hand. And it would not be if these four were just loosely associated at some abstract hierarchy level. It only becomes relevant if "unimatrix 01" is either the team flying that particular ship, or then a subsection of that team, and loses its relevancy if "unimatrix 01" is to extend beyond the walls of the ship.

That the Drone Formerly Known As Annika Hansen would keep on calling herself Seven of Nine beyond the factual passing of the Nine is then more a sign of teen rebellion than of adherence to Collective rules...

...Although of course no Drone ever completely dies ("Infinite Regress").

Timo Saloniemi

 

I am not convinced by that storage of memory thing. When I am dead, if some of my personal memory is stored somewhere (assuming we find a way to do that before I die) I'll still be just as dead.

 

The decisive point would be whether it's actually 100% of your memory being stored, and whether it's dynamic storage that allows you to go on living in every practical respect (rather than, say, just looping the same memories over and over again).

"Infinite Regress" doesn't quite tell. But the memories in the episode are at least partially interactive - is that Seven's input or something inherent in the memories?

Timo Saloniemi

 

I seem to recall that several other Deep Space bases can be visited in the adventure video game 'Star Trek: The Next Generation: A Final Unity', although most of them are not plot relevant (but there's a certain "open world" aspect to the galaxy map in the game, so you can set course for them anyway.)

 

100% or 50%, dynamic or static, doesn't make a difference, it would still only be a simulation and the real me would still be dead.

 

And also regardless of the fact that one episode proves that at the most it must be between about 120 and 480 light years from Earth.

 

What Picard said in First Contact was that the Federation has over 150 members "spread across 8000 light years" -- which doesn't really make any sense, because he's using a linear measure to refer to a three-dimensional volume. Does he mean a sphere 8000 ly in diameter? Does he mean 8000 cubic light years, which would mean a sphere less than 25 ly in diameter? The latter is clearly nonsensical. But the former is highly unlikely too, because "Encounter at Farpoint" said that Deneb was at the most distant edge of Starfleet exploration and it's only 2600 ly away, give or take a couple hundred. And of course Starfleet exploration must extend far beyond the actual political borders of the Federation -- that's implicit in the whole "explore strange new worlds" thing.

So Picard's line is gibberish and deserves to be ignored. Realistically, we're probably talking a radius for the UFP of no more than 1000 or so light-years (diameter of 2000), possibly much less -- and of course it's not a uniform sphere, what with the vagaries of exploration and other political territories getting in the way. Now, originally, DS9's creators meant for it to be pretty remote, on the fringes of UFP territory. But later on, they started getting sloppy with interstellar distances and we had the Defiant and Quark's shuttle commuting from DS9 to Earth in a matter of days, or Cardassian fleets getting to the Klingon Empire in a similar amount of time, and that storytelling decision to compress travel times implied a much smaller Federation than TOS and TNG had assumed.

 

Well, it was cut to seem that way, but there were hints that more time had passed -- McCoy had changed uniforms and Kirk had slept off his sedative. Although there's a similarly quick trip from the Klingon border to Earth in STID, and that's cut in a way that makes it much harder to fit in any extra time.

Aw, dang. Now I'm thinking about how that sequence in ST'09 was Anton Yelchin's first scene as Chekov, and now I'm sad.