After the advent of writing, the internal voices that commanded bicameral humans eventually fell silent, and humanity was forever changed. But what about the Borg? Are they destined to remain nothing more than unconscious automatons for all Star Trek eternity?
So maybe what we really fear is not the behavior of a fictional enemy, but a dark remnant of our historical selves. If Jaynes is correct, the transformation from internally commanded, unconscious beings to thinking, reflecting people would have to be considered the most significant and far-reaching adaptation in the history of our species. It was a change that gave us that which we are most loath to lose: our individuality.
Jacob Lopata is an entrepreneur, aerospace engineer, and commercial pilot based in Chicago. This article originally appeared on our blog, Facts So Romantic , in November Nautilus uses cookies to manage your digital subscription and show you your reading progress.
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It was clear from their introduction they had the tactical and technical advantage over the Borg. They also proved to be innovative by creating that training center whereby they copied San Francisco, Starfleet Academy, Starfleet HQ and took human form to learn more about the 'human experience' in order to infiltrate Earth. The Borg would never have wasted time or resources on something so elaborate. Even with their Transwarp Conduits, the Galaxy is unbelievably vast and they could go hundreds of years without finding suitable species to absorb.
At least ants know to cultivate 'herds' of livestock aphids or crops fungi to sustain their colonies. The Borg seem much too simple and opportunistic to be so advanced a species capable of long-term viability. Even if the Borg were actually interested in being purely expansionistic and also learned to employ the advantages of individuality which the Queen seemed to be toying with and were able to grow beyond their brute-force approach to conquest, there's still no quantitative data available to judge whether their rate of expansion is realistic or not.
Because that is not their goal. The Borg, at least in the main canon, have never shown any interest is turning everyone into Borg, and in fact have demonstrated the opposite. Not only could assimilating the wrong species take away from the Borg's perfection but it certainly does not add to it. And the Borg are well aware that assimilating an entire species prevents it from further advancing and developing things that the Borg might value latter.
I have a theory based on something Q said in "Q-Who," I think that maybe there's something that could be holding the Borg back, prehaps an even greater threat that's never been revealed and the only reason Voyager never encoutered it was pure luck, I mean Q isn't exactly evil is he, he wanted to give the Enterprise a real scare and wouldn't have put them up against something that could destroy them in seconds.
Note this is only a theory, but wouldn't it be a good basis for a film or something? Imagine Q pops up tell Picard and Janeway that the Borg have been utterly wiped out and totally exterminated and whatever, whoever did it, is heading straight for Earth? Don't the Borg only assimilate life forms which are actually useful for them to assimilate. If a culture does not have anything worth looting they are not worth bothering with and just get ignored unless they pose a threat.
The Borg have always sought to advance themselves to a state of perfection as they see it. BORG: Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours. From Voyager, we learn that there are cultures the Borg would not assimilate and that they see the Omega Particle as almost divine. Interestingly, some cultures were assimilated for specific purposes.
For example, the Hazari in the Voyager episode Think Tank were said to make excellent tactical drones due to being technologically advanced and violent. Essentially, it seems that a species had to have something to offer to be assimilated. Generally, this meant technology that The Collective did not possess already. That may be why the Kazon were unworthy of assimilation. They were fairly primitive and only had the technology they did because they took it from the Trabe relatively recently.
While the Kazon were an extreme example, the general idea on Voyager was that the Delta Quadrant was untamed and its people were unsophisticated. Voyager rarely encountered true equals and was generally vastly superior or inferior to the other species with whom they interacted, particularly early on. As the ship got closer to Borg controlled space they encountered races that had been wiped out by the Borg such as species and others who hid their technology to escape assimilation like the Brunali.
Other races may simply have been too powerful for the Borg to contend with openly in their current form Species and the Voth. Based on every encounter with the Collective ever shown on screen, the Borg approach is to assume a position of superiority and dictate the situation to the betterment of the Collective. In situations where this was not possible, and failing an immediate solution, the Collective might back off until it was. TL;DR Some races were unworthy of Borg attention, some were assimilated, some adapted to life near the collective, some posed too much of a threat for the collective to attack.
You don't know what it's like in our universe. The Federation's gone, the Borg is everywhere! We're one of the last ships left. Please, you've got to help us! DATA: Sensors indicate no evidence of conventional attack. WORF: The outpost was not just destroyed, it's as though some great force just scooped it off the face of the planet.
In "Q who? DATA: There is a system of roads on this planet, which indicates a highly industrialised civilisation. But where there should be cities there are only great rips in the surface. WORF: It is as though some great force just scooped all the machine elements off the face of the planet.
Then the Borg attack and they eventually have to ask Q to save them and send them back to where they were. The Enterprise has arrived at Jouret Four in response to a distress signal from one of the Federation's outermost colonies. WORF: No sir. There have been no communications from the colony for over twelve hours. WORF: None. The centre of town is at the edge of a massive crater. Captain's log, Stardate No sign remains of the nine hundred inhabitants. We've known they were coming for over a year.
The initial descriptions of these surface conditions are almost identical to your reports from system J two five.
He agrees with you. Your encounter with the Borg was over seven thousand light years away. There's no doubt any more. It is the Borg. Captain's log, stardate With confirmation of the Borg's presence in Federation space, Admiral Hanson has returned to Starbase three two four to discuss strategy with Starfleet Command.
Lieutenant Commander Shelby remains on board to continue tactical preparations. There are Borg at system J25 7, light years from Federation space, Borg at the Federation-Romulan Neutral Zone thousands of light years closer to earth, and now Borg in another section of Federation space. These three sets of Borg may belong to one, two, or three different Borg planetary colonies, ships, or fleets. A Borg ship in the area near New Providence attacks the Enterprise , kidnaps Captain Picard, and leaves at warp speed:.
WORF: Sir, the coordinates they have set, they're on a direct course to sector zero zero one. The Terran system. All during "The Best of Both Worlds Part 2" The Enterprise follows the Borg ship to Earth, and despite being delayed for eight to twelve hours to repair, eventually catch up with it.
The Borg ship must travel no faster than The Enterprise and so should not have come from the area near system J25 7, light years from Earth but from a closer group of Borg. As fans remember a federation fleet fights the Borg ship heading straight for Earth at the star system Wolf Wolf is one of the closest stars to earth, being 7. Wolf 's coordinates in The equitorial system are right ascension 10 hours 56 minutes Earth is about 25, light years from the center of the galaxy and thus from the line separated the Alpha and Beta quadrants from the Gamma and Delta Quadrants.
A line from Earth at 45 degress from the galactic center would intercept the quadrant dividing line 25, light years from the galactic center and get farther and farther away from the galactic center as it got farther and farther into the Delta or Gamma Quadrant until it finally left the galactic disc, probably passing outside of Borg space even if it went through the Delta Quadrant and not the Gamma Quadrant.
And a line at The galactic latitude of At such a steep angle the Borg ship would have crossed the galactic edge and the galactic barrier only about three to five thousand light years back on it's path - many fans would guess only about a thousand light years back. With the crew of a vessel assimilated or otherwise subdued, the Borg stripped the ship down for parts to incorporate into their own technology. If possible the assimilated ship was towed into a hangar aboard the attacking Borg ship.
VOY : " Dark Frontier ", " Collective " It was rare for the Borg to keep an assimilated vessel intact, except in instances where a Borg crew was forced to abandon their own ship and commandeer their victims' ship. Faced with an entire fleet, as in the Battle of Wolf , the Borg were willing to destroy individual ships outright, although some might have been spared for assimilation. The Collective typically did not seek out individuals or starships, assimilating them only as encountered.
It was only known to actively target worlds and civilizations, ranging from small colonies to the entire realm of fluidic space. An entire fleet was dispatched to assimilate Species , but on two occasions, a single ship was assigned to conquer the entire Federation. If the Borg did not choose to hold an assimilated planet, they removed its populace and any artificial structures from the surface. Alternately, they could maintain a presence on the planet, terraforming its environment to meet their needs.
The Borg had a standard set of hails which were sent to those targeted for assimilation. The actual wording varied, but the hails almost always included the following information:. Little is known about the Borg assimilation technique prior to Observations since that time demonstrated that the Borg assimilated an individual by projecting a pair of assimilation tubules into the victim's neck, injecting nanoprobes into the bloodstream that began connecting the new drone to the hive mind.
This was accomplished the moment a Borg drone was within arm's reach of the target. During initial stages of assimilation, Borg nanoprobes began attaching themselves to the victim's red blood cells, allowing them to circulate throughout the body.
VOY : " Scorpion " Within minutes, the nanoprobes spread visibly through the capillaries of the victim's skin. The victim, at this point, still retained his or her individuality and had virtually none of the Borg's standard array of defenses.
Left unchecked, the nanoprobes soon begin self-replicating and producing larger constructs that form the necessary Borg implants. Among the first major structures assembled was the neural transceiver , allowing the Collective to tap into the victim's mind and usurp control of his or her body.
A vocal subprocessor was also installed. By this time, the new drone's skin coloration had changed to a pale gray and mottled as some small implants began to emerge inside and outside the body.
In some cases, the skin and face became at least slightly deformed due to the implants growing in and on the body. VOY : " Unimatrix Zero ". In a daydream of The Doctor 's, the Borg were able to conduct assimilation by penetrating the defenses of a vessel with an " assimilation virus ," the effects of which were nearly instantaneous.
Methods for preventing or overcoming Borg assimilation are of paramount importance to cultures that refuse to abandon members of their society captured by the Collective.
In , Phlox determined that exposing himself to omicron particles could disable the nanoprobes injected into his body by drones using technology originating in This method was uniquely applicable to Phlox due to his Denobulan physiology and his immune system , which made him unusually resistant to assimilation.
ENT : " Regeneration ". The most basic, and arguably most practical remedy was to euthanize the intended victim either prior to or in the early minutes of assimilation, before the nanoprobes could install standard Borg defenses.
During the Borg's raid of the USS Enterprise -E , Captain Picard saw this approach to be the lesser of two evils, believing his assimilated crewmen were irrecoverable under the circumstances and better off dying as individuals than living as drones.
Star Trek: First Contact. When rescuing Picard himself in , the crew of the USS Enterprise -D were not under direct attack by the Borg and therefore had the luxury of considering other options.
Upon connecting his neural net to Picard's Borg implants, Lt. Commander Data was able to isolate Picard's individual mind from the Collective. Disconnecting Picard from his implants was considered a risky procedure, but upon the destruction of the cube that assimilated him the Collective lost its hold on him. Physical recovery was swift, although the psychological trauma was more severe.
In a Borg cube was disabled in an electrokinetic storm in the Nekrit Expanse , causing approximately 80, drones to be disconnected from the hive mind. These former drones settled on a nearby planet, where their limited medical resources allowed them to remove most, but not all, of their cybernetic implants. After the population descended into war, they elected to form a new hive mind as the Cooperative.
VOY : " Unity ". The crew of the USS Voyager was forced to sever Seven of Nine 's link to the Collective when, through her, the Borg reneged on its alliance with the starship. Using a neural transceiver installed in him by the Borg Cooperative and a Borg alcove installed aboard Voyager by the Collective, Chakotay tapped into Seven's consciousness in order to distract her while B'Elanna Torres shorted out the console she was attempting to assimilate.
The Brunali genetically engineered Icheb with a pathogen that would infect the Collective after they sent him to be assimilated.
After this pathogen killed all of the adult Borg aboard the cube which assimilated Icheb, the ship's maturation chambers prematurely released the juvenile drones who were not yet fully connected to the Collective, giving Voyager an opportunity to liberate them in VOY : " Collective ".
A neural suppressant developed by Voyager 's EMH in made it possible for Kathryn Janeway , Tuvok , and B'Elanna Torres to be physically assimilated without being connected to the hive mind and losing their individuality.
This allowed them to surreptitiously operate within a Borg cube and sabotage its central plexus. Following their mission the three officers were returned to Voyager where their implants were safely removed without medical complications. Use of the neural suppressant apparently correlated to the lack of psychological trauma suffered in comparison to Picard's experience.
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