When should the Borg assimilate a species?

[Mojochi]

I think the problem with some theories here is that it assumes the Borg are capable of long game assimilation tactics, & while that is possibly true, it's also just as likely that they are a pretty unique development by design, and in order to keep it functioning, they might not have the luxury of holding off. When they come upon someone within the proper parameters, they really have to consume them ASAP to not only continue to establish their stronghold, but also to keep the thing operational

Basically, they probably don't think in terms of "Desirability" as @Spot261 was suggesting, but more probably have to view things in terms of viability. If they're viable, they get taken, & the ones that aren't viable, are likely deemed so because not only do they not possess any enriching qualities, but they also present a potential for retrogression.

"We will add your distinctiveness to our own" That might work both ways, & therein it becomes pretty important to walk a fine line of keeping the ranks growing, as much as possible, but not to a detriment

 

[James89901]

I think the problem with some theories here is that it assumes the Borg are capable of long game assimilation tactics, & while that is possibly true, it's also just as likely that they are a pretty unique development by design, and in order to keep it functioning, they might not have the luxury of holding off. When they come upon someone within the proper parameters, they really have to consume them ASAP to not only continue to establish their stronghold, but also to keep the thing operational

Basically, they probably don't think in terms of "Desirability" as @Spot261 was suggesting, but more probably have to view things in terms of viability. If they're viable, they get taken, & the ones that aren't viable, are likely deemed so because not only do they not possess any enriching qualities, but they also present a potential for retrogression.

"We will add your distinctiveness to our own" That might work both ways, & therein it becomes pretty important to walk a fine line of keeping the ranks growing, as much as possible, but not to a detriment

I lean towards the idea that that was actually once the way they operated. I think it would of been a necessity of their culture to adopt a strategy like that in order to survive. This is because a group that is as hostile as the Borg would of began to upset many cultures very quickly.

I'd say that the most likely origins of the Borg were that their nano-probe technology was developed by a highly advanced species and that technology eventually turned on them and lead to their downfall, and they were the first race that was "assimilated" by their own technology and the Borg then started on the front foot because of such a tech advantage. Yet that wouldn't of been enough to secure a dominant position in the galaxy. Conquering and rapid expansion would of been essential and any long-term goals of perfection be put aside until they became "comfortable" in their superiority.

They clearly reached a point in TNG and Voyager where they considered themselves above others and it would seem they believed they reached this goal of becoming a galactic superpower.

From this point onwards, I don't see any reason that they shouldn't have long term thinking strategies in place. Although the Borg cannot be innovative with new technologies. They do seem to be able to adopt the thinking patterns of advanced warfare strategies and tactics that they've assimilated. So I'd say that long term survival and their goal of ultimate perfection would be susceptible to such forward thinking as well. P.S. I find it strange the Borg seem to adopt everything about a species except for their abilities to invent new things haha. But it's just a TV show and required for the plot I guess.

Could you maybe elaborate on a possible scenario where the Borg would need to consume species quickly in order to keep the collective operational?

 

[Spot261]

I think the problem with some theories here is that it assumes the Borg are capable of long game assimilation tactics, & while that is possibly true, it's also just as likely that they are a pretty unique development by design, and in order to keep it functioning, they might not have the luxury of holding off. When they come upon someone within the proper parameters, they really have to consume them ASAP to not only continue to establish their stronghold, but also to keep the thing operational

Basically, they probably don't think in terms of "Desirability" as @Spot261 was suggesting, but more probably have to view things in terms of viability. If they're viable, they get taken, & the ones that aren't viable, are likely deemed so because not only do they not possess any enriching qualities, but they also present a potential for retrogression.

"We will add your distinctiveness to our own" That might work both ways, & therein it becomes pretty important to walk a fine line of keeping the ranks growing, as much as possible, but not to a detriment

What makes you think they struggle to keep things operational?

 

[at Quark's]

In Year of Hell Seven mentions a 'resistance quotient', which establishes that there is at least a kind of evaluation about how easy said species was/would be to assimilate. That would suggest it's not purely an "instinctual" process.

The Borg Queen telling Seven about the more surreptitious strategy they created for Earth would indicate there is at least some conscious thought /strategy going into this, as well.

Of course that still leaves room for not being able to postpone it for too long. Perhaps it can be compared to humans getting hungry. They'll have to eat rather sooner than later, but how they get their food can be a matter of strategy.

 

[Mojochi]

What makes you think they struggle to keep things operational?

I don't necessarily think it's a complete struggle, & I'd certainly agree they have strategy at play with it, but survival in general is struggle, & it's surely labor/cost intensive, & then there's the fact that even in Star Trek's strange & unlikely universe, which is positively littered with humanoid inhabitable worlds & intelligent species, it still must be a limited consumption pool.

Humanoid species that are at just the right level of development to be viable for assimilation have to be a limited prospect to some degree. There certainly can't be an endless glut of them out there. Plus, these are corporeal bodies we're talking about, & humanoid bodies die off, even under the most optimal circumstances. I don't necessarily know the life expectancy of a drone. There's nothing I know to suggest they are immortal, so I have to maybe think they live about as long as the species themselves might under the best conditions the nanoprobes can create

If their drones have a life expectancy, & their consumption pool is limited, then it isn't a feast, & you'd think at some level they'd operate on famine protocol, meaning you take what you can get, when you can get it, so long as it doesn't pose a detriment. That's just survival, though I'm just hypothesizing here.

 

[Spot261]

I don't necessarily think it's a complete struggle, & I'd certainly agree they have strategy at play with it, but survival in general is struggle, & it's surely labor/cost intensive, & then there's the fact that even in Star Trek's strange & unlikely universe, which is positively littered with humanoid inhabitable worlds & intelligent species, it still must be a limited consumption pool.

Humanoid species that are at just the right level of development to be viable for assimilation have to be a limited prospect to some degree. There certainly can't be an endless glut of them out there. Plus, these are corporeal bodies we're talking about, & humanoid bodies die off, even under the most optimal circumstances. I don't necessarily know the life expectancy of a drone. There's nothing I know to suggest they are immortal, so I have to maybe think they live about as long as the species themselves might under the best conditions the nanoprobes can create

If their drones have a life expectancy, & their consumption pool is limited, then it isn't a feast, & you'd think at some level they'd operate on famine protocol, meaning you take what you can get, when you can get it, so long as it doesn't pose a detriment. That's just survival, though I'm just hypothesizing here.

Portrayals of the Borg are in many ways inconsistent, but we do know they act with intelligence rather than being purely instinctive,

We also know that the Borg do reproduce in some manner, after all our first encounter with a cube showed us baby Borg being "incubated" for want of a better word. Likewise machinery can doubtless be manufactured from raw materials just as easily, if not more so, as from starships and alien cities. Assimilating living beings and technology seems to be as much about diversifying their pool of technological and genetic material ("Your technological and biological distinctiveness will be added...") as it is about gaining resources per se.

 

[James89901]

In Year of Hell Seven mentions a 'resistance quotient', which establishes that there is at least a kind of evaluation about how easy said species was/would be to assimilate. That would suggest it's not purely an "instinctual" process.

The Borg Queen telling Seven about the more surreptitious strategy they created for Earth would indicate there is at least some conscious thought /strategy going into this, as well.

Of course that still leaves room for not being able to postpone it for too long. Perhaps it can be compared to humans getting hungry. They'll have to eat rather sooner than later, but how they get their food can be a matter of strategy.

I don't necessarily think it's a complete struggle, & I'd certainly agree they have strategy at play with it, but survival in general is struggle, & it's surely labor/cost intensive, & then there's the fact that even in Star Trek's strange & unlikely universe, which is positively littered with humanoid inhabitable worlds & intelligent species, it still must be a limited consumption pool.

Humanoid species that are at just the right level of development to be viable for assimilation have to be a limited prospect to some degree. There certainly can't be an endless glut of them out there. Plus, these are corporeal bodies we're talking about, & humanoid bodies die off, even under the most optimal circumstances. I don't necessarily know the life expectancy of a drone. There's been nothing to suggest they are immortal, so I have to maybe think they live about as long as the species themselves might under the best conditions the nanoprobes can create

If their drones have a life expectancy, & their consumption pool is limited, then it isn't a feast, & you'd think at some level they'd operate on famine protocol, meaning you take what you can get, when you can get it, so long as it doesn't pose a detriment. That's just survival, though I'm just hypothesizing here.

Yes I have wondered at times about drone life expectancy. Because if they only live for 200 years or so, then it would certainly make the process of assimilation a survival act for the most part, and all other goals are secondary.

Yet we are talking about nano-probes here

I don't necessarily think it's a complete struggle, & I'd certainly agree they have strategy at play with it, but survival in general is struggle, & it's surely labor/cost intensive, & then there's the fact that even in Star Trek's strange & unlikely universe, which is positively littered with humanoid inhabitable worlds & intelligent species, it still must be a limited consumption pool.

Humanoid species that are at just the right level of development to be viable for assimilation have to be a limited prospect to some degree. There certainly can't be an endless glut of them out there. Plus, these are corporeal bodies we're talking about, & humanoid bodies die off, even under the most optimal circumstances. I don't necessarily know the life expectancy of a drone. There's nothing I know to suggest they are immortal, so I have to maybe think they live about as long as the species themselves might under the best conditions the nanoprobes can create

If their drones have a life expectancy, & their consumption pool is limited, then it isn't a feast, & you'd think at some level they'd operate on famine protocol, meaning you take what you can get, when you can get it, so long as it doesn't pose a detriment. That's just survival, though I'm just hypothesizing here.

I have considered Borg life expectancy before. In the episode "mortal coil", Neelix dies and Seven uses Borg tech to bring him back to life after he has been dead for 19 hours. So they have the ability to bring species back to life. Therefore we can quite safely assume they have the ability to prolong life indefinitely, or at the very least to a significantly greater span that what the assimilated race would normally live to.

Granted, I'm not a human biologist in any part of the field, but if I had to put money on it, I'd say that prolonging a life is many times more difficult that bringing back a 19 hour old corpse haha. So Borg nano-probes are probably capable of quite a bit in terms of extending life.

Also in the scorpion episode where Voyager teams with the cube, a drone repairs a huge cut on Janeway's forehead in about 1 second. It doesn't prove anything about life expectancy per say. But it's another instance that does show that they have quite an understanding of human biological anatomy.

If Borg only did live for a few hundred years, then yes I'd say assimilation would become a necessity of pure survival. Seeing as how they don't procreate. All other objectives would fall secondary to survival.

However, because of the above points of complete restoration from death, and regenerative abilities, it's my opinion that it's quite likely that drones live extremely long lifetimes. Possibly even, barring some act of violence or accident, they might even be immortal.

 

[James89901]

Portrayals of the Borg are in many ways inconsistent, but we do know they act with intelligence rather than being purely instinctive,

We also know that the Borg do reproduce in some manner, after all our first encounter with a cube showed us baby Borg being "incubated" for want of a better word. Likewise machinery can doubtless be manufactured from raw materials just as easily, if not more so, as from starships and alien cities. Assimilating living beings and technology seems to be as much about diversifying their pool of technological and genetic material ("Your technological and biological distinctiveness will be added...") as it is about gaining resources per se.

I think the Borg incubation age accelerators were used for assimilated infants. Not actually a means of reproduction for the Borg themselves.

 

[at Quark's]

Portrayals of the Borg are in many ways inconsistent, but we do know they act with intelligence rather than being purely instinctive,
We also know that the Borg do reproduce in some manner, after all our first encounter with a cube showed us baby Borg being "incubated" for want of a better word.

Not necessarily. Riker observes the infant and says:

From the look of it the Borg are born as biological life form. It seems that almost immediately after birth they begin artificial implants. <....>

However, this was before the introduction of the "assimilation" concept. (Out of universe).
In-universe, we could explain this because at that point, Riker couldn't have known of the fact that Borg assimilate other species. So he sees a baby, and speculates that it is a "native Borg" (where in fact it could just be a baby in the early stages of assimilation.

Riker is even so prudent to include "from the look of it", so he is merely reporting what it looks like to him.

 

[Spot261]

Not necessarily. Riker observes the infant and says:



However, this was before the introduction of the "assimilation" concept. (Out of universe).
In-universe, we could explain this because at that point, Riker couldn't have known of the fact that Borg assimilate other species. So he sees a baby, and speculates that it is a "native Borg" (where in fact it could just be a baby in the early stages of assimilation.

Riker is even so prudent to include "from the look of it", so he is merely reporting what it looks like to him.

Correct, the point being we really don't know for sure.

But, it seems as though the Borg would be foolish not to have redundancy built into this aspect of their operation when it is the guiding principle in every other respect.

 

[James89901]

Correct, the point being we really don't know for sure.

But, it seems as though the Borg would be foolish not to have redundancy built into this aspect of their operation when it is the guiding principle in every other respect.

It would be strange for them to not reproduce I think. Even though there is no evidence of it. I mean "drone" Voyager is possibly evidence of it. Although that is 29th century Borg tech, so perhaps it's not possible for modern day Borg.

I've only ever heard Seven talk of incubation chambers used on the children she knew who were assimilated and not born as Borg.

The main problem with if the Borg can reproduce is that why would they then assimilate species? It'd make no sense. Their only goal is perfection in terms of a being the perfect being of both biological and technology prowess. It's not military dominance and aggressive violence for the sake of some emotional need they have to fulfill. They just want to be perfect, in their version of the word.

Military conflict would only hinder that advance if they had the ability to replenish their species and grow by themselves. They could acquire/assimilate knowledge a different way to actually taking over an entire species. Their nano-probes can do almost anything. So they could be repurposed to gather all knowledge of a species (even covertly), be it biological or technological, and then relay the information back to the hive mind.

Reproduction would probably put the star trek in a bit of a logical conundrum with their primary antagonist. So perhaps that's why it's not written into anywhere to say that they reproduce.

 

[at Quark's]

^ Yeah, it's one of those things we simply don't know for sure.

Just like the question as to whether they can do technological research of their own (which would be useful to them, and there are indications for that, such as in the story 7 tells how they once stabilised an omega molecule for a very short time before it exploded, which allowed them to 'refine their theories'), or not, as in other episodes is is claimed the Borg can only understand what they assimilate (in Scorpion, for example).

 

[James89901]

^ Yeah, it's one of those things we simply don't know for sure.

Just like the question as to whether they can do technological research of their own (which would be useful to them, and there are indications for that, such as in the story 7 tells how they once stabilised an omega molecule for a very short time before it exploded, which allowed them to 'refine their theories'), or not, as in other episodes is is claimed the Borg can only understand what they assimilate (in Scorpion, for example).

I wonder if by "research", they are still just using already assimilated techniques to conduct it. As in they still lack the ability to achieve theoretical breakthroughs, but rather they are limited to only experimental research.

It's a fine line that star trek treads with the Borg and any kind of innovation or invention traits. Because I'm not totally sure that even any breakthroughs in experimental physics or engineering could be achieved without the use of imagination. It does leave room for pure luck in finding the answer. Like with the infinite typewriter monkeys and how they would eventually write the works of Shakespeare if they were typewriting for an infinite amount of time. The exact same thing is feasible in any of the sciences or mathematics.

If the monkeys had calculators and a vast knowledge of very early 1900s physics, then I'd say their chance of "stumbling" upon General relativity is way way way higher than if they just had a typewriter and their aim was to randomly write out Shakespeare's works haha.

So what I mean by that is that the Borg probably have quite a high probability of actually having random breakthroughs in science even if they lack imagination. Which could account for at least some of the work we've heard of them doing I guess.

 

[Lord Garth]

The Borg should assimilate a species when they have something to add that they didn't have before.

 

[James89901]

The Borg should assimilate a species when they have something to add that they didn't have before.

Yes, that should be the way almost always. However if they assimilate pre-maturely, and the target species only has a few things to add, then they might potentially be missing out on many new future inventions from that species.

The rate of technological innovation should be a key factor in deciding a species addition to the collective as long as that species is no real threat or they are not needed for drone harvesting in times of emergency, such as a war with the Undine for example.

 

[at Quark's]

The rate of technological innovation should be a key factor in deciding a species addition to the collective as long as that species is no real threat or they are not needed for drone harvesting in times of emergency, such as a war with the Undine for example.

In that case the Blink of an eye aliens would probably be on the top of their list provided the Borg got wind of them But probably they'd invent even faster than the Borg can adapt ...

 

[James89901]

In that case the Blink of an eye aliens would probably be on the top of their list provided the Borg got wind of them But probably they'd invent even faster than the Borg can adapt ...

Haha Yeah unless the Borg found them within a few days of Voyager discovering them, I think the Borg would be screwed haha.

I would of liked to of seen a follow up on that species. Presumably, they would of been rulers of the universe in a very short amount of Earth time.

 

[at Quark's]

Presumably, they would of been rulers of the universe in a very short amount of Earth time.

Or then, they go extinct for whatever reason within a very short amount of time too (but still be around for hundreds of thousands of their years). After all, there have been more extremely advanced species that eventually died out (Iconians, T'Kon empire), some probably even without enemies (the ancient aliens of "the Chase" that seeded the alpha and Beta quadrant).

Or "transcend" and take no further notice of mundane matters of the universe. Or ....

 

[James89901]

Or then, they go extinct for whatever reason within a very short amount of time too (but still be around for hundreds of thousands of their years). Or "transcend" and take no further notice of mundane matters of the universe. Or ....

Yeah I was thinking how if the resources on their planet cannot sustain them, then the option to explore space for more resources is not available to them unless they can somehow phase their ships to keep them at the same time as their planet and move throughout the galaxy at the same rate of the federation ships.

I seem to remember them saying something about how they were able to eventually control their "time" when they came up to help voyager, so that might not be a problem. I could be wrong though.

 

[at Quark's]

GOTANA-RETZ: <...>. A temporal compensator. It allows me to exist in your time frame without actually leaving my own, but only for a few minutes. I'm afraid it'll be a while before my people actually join the rest of the galaxy.

Sounds to me like such technology is in development, but not yet mature, however with the expectation that at some point in the future it will be.