Re: Wouldn't this have actually stopped the borg...
Another reminder that there are
Destiny spoilers ahead (could someone please edit the thread title?):
Wouldn't the events at the begining of Star Trek First contact actually have prevented the creation of the Borg (when we seen brefly that earh was assimalted). Since the Borg were created out of a couple 22nd century humans and Caeliar, assimalting Earth in the late 21st century would have prevented the Borg from exisiting.
That's an interesting point. In the timeline we glimpsed early in FC, where Earth was assimilated as a result of the Borg's time travel to 2067, presumably First Contact would never have occurred, we wouldn't have had Earth Starfleet, and there would've been no
Columbia crew to encounter the Caeliar. So by trying to create a timeline where the Federation didn't exist, the Borg should've really created one where they didn't exist either.
Ahh, but there is a way out. Time travellers themselves remain insulated from the changes in their own futures. In "Past Tense," Sisko, Bashir, and Dax continued to live in the 2020s even after their actions had changed the future so that the Federation never rose. In "Yesteryear," Spock continued to exist in the past even after the change that erased him from history, and thus could return to the altered future. And at least according to
Crucible, McCoy lived on for decades in the 20th century after saving Edith Keeler and preventing the Federation from ever rising.
So by the same token, even though the Borg sphere's actions in that briefly glimpsed timeline (existing "after" they went back and shot up Cochrane's base but "before" the E-E went back to fix things) would've prevented the creation of the Borg in that timeline, the out-of-time Borg from that sphere would still have been around, insulated from the change, refugees from another history. So they could've restarted the Collective all over again in that timeline, with Earth as the first world they assimilated. Thus, we still get the result that the E-E crew glimpsed, the 24th-century Earth that's populated entirely by Borg.
Then, once the Borg in the past were defeated and Cochrane's flight went off as scheduled, history was restored to the path we know, and ironically defeating the Borg brought the whole Collective back into existence. Oopsie! (Not that anyone involved could've known, of course.)