A machine planet doesn't look like Borg at all, the Borg are not Machines.
V'Ger thought of Carbon based life as vermin, the Borg are carbon based life with synthetic enhancements, they aren't machines at all. Data is a machine, the Borg wanted to change that.
The Borg are not Machines, the Borg consider Machines, like Data, to be inferior. V'Ger was a Machine, V'Ger landed on a planet of Machines and was "repaired", V'Ger had no concept of sentient organic life, and wouldn't accept at first that it was created originally by Organic life.
The Borg is a Collective, V'Ger was an individual. At the time V'Ger was launched from Earth the Borg were already identifiable as the Borg we know, though with a smaller domain and as a less powerful species, meaning the V'Ger/Decker merger postdates the Borg and can't be responsible for their creation, unless you want to believe that Merger fell backwards in time, lost all its memories and technology, got really tiny, and somehow started making more.
V'ger's primary mission was to explore, the Borg think exploration is irrelevant.
V'Ger sought to merge with the maker, who V'Ger though was a machine (Aren't we all made in God's image afterall? =P ) because V'Ger had already explored this entire Universe and was seeking to find new things to explore (parallel dimensions). This is obviously massively beyond the capability of the Borg.
I don't know how anyone can draw any parallels at all between the Borg and V'Ger's adopted machine race. It seems to me there is a good chance that race doesn't even exist in our Galaxy since we don't know anything about the phenomenon that Voyager fell into that brought it to them, and they are clearly capable of long range extra-galactic travel in short amounts of time.
Well said. This is exactly why the direct connections don't make sense. TPM is so underrated, but the story is actually one of the best for several reasons, not the least of which is that the antagonist is trying to understand the meaning of it's existence and place in the universe.
Yeah, I like the Borg just being the Borg.....I like to think of them as Fire.....fire is going to do what it's going to do its not evil, the borg are not evil.
...the fun may be to investigate what that machine planet really was and if it has any connection to the Borg at all.
That doesn't need to explain where the Borg came from, but it might be intriguing to know if there is "another" machine race similar or different to the Borg.
Thank you for responding, Dstahl. In this regard, I'd be fine with that...if perhaps it's certain technology the Borg acquired from the machine race and used for their own. It's just enough room to maneuver in a reasonable way that doesn't step on any previous aspects of the shows and movies.
Well what if there where actually multiple different "borg" cybernetic beings which eventually assimilated smaller groups and eachother. We did have that one episode of voyager "Unity" where a small collective was created against janeway's better judgement. Infighting amongst borg collectives would be enough to fragment their memories of the past.
I imagine the borg didn't always have a queen she's supposed to provide order to the chaos of all those borg minds, by acting as some form of central control the one that gives the orders and sets the borg agenda. So, the reason they assimilate and search for "Perfection" is because the borg queen decided that was the goal. they could just as easily have been a peaceful cybernetic group with goals similar to the federation's goals if the queen wanted to.
Remeber the nanite replicators of Stargate all it takes is one of those deciding to assimilate an organic and boom borg!
It's possible, and could settle the debate on the age of the Borg. Perhaps the Machine Race was around 200,000 years ago, but the early Borg didn't come into existance until a 1,000 years ago.
Maybe this Machine Race was pivotal in the defeat of the Iconians? That they were too destructive and had to be stopped.
In revenge, the Iconian survivors found about the Pre-Borg and corrupted the cybernetics and turned them into the Borg. They unleased the Borg into the Universe, which destroyed the Machine race, and then when the Borg assimilated most or all of the Galaxy, the planned on unleashed a virus that disabled the Borg.
(Which explains the nastiness of the Iconian Virus Probes, they were made to stop the machine race and the Borg).
So with the Borg gone, they rule the Galaxy once more!
Why move on? Why demystify? Why are we even trying to link V'ger the Borg and the Iconians into one story? What is with this need to have a quick easy explanation for everything? It is a big damn galaxy in an even bigger universe and there is plenty of room for these entities to exist in circumstances completely unrelated to each other. It is poor story telling creating a scenario where all of these mysteries lead to a simple unifying source and sometimes it feels like the efforts of a bad cop following the path of least resistance trying to link all of his unsolved cases to the one suspect he has in custody.
Well, I still believe the Borg and V'ger have a common ancestry, somewhere further up the family tree perhaps, as has been hinted at before. But I don't think they'd be tied in with the Iconians too much. I personally feel, though, if at least V'ger was tramping across the known universe, it's potentially likely it would have assimilated (for lack of a better term, honest) some data relating to Iconians. Maybe. At least it'd justify a little tie-in role with STO's current events.
It did take an awfully long time to get home with some of the most advanced technology beyond human comprehension at its disposal, and that's only if we assume it didn't get flung through time as well, which I feel is a safe bet. I imagine V'ger literally stopped at every item of interest on the way home, probably involved a lot of detours, being the intergalactic tourist it is.
The machine race still strikes me as some sort of enigmatic faction that'd rather keep to itself, maybe out of fear of organics. But I'd still love to see what they're about someday, but would take a lot to do them justice, considering the state of their reconstruction of V'ger. While I don't think we'd see them in STO, I'm not opposed to hints or remnants of their leftovers to tease us with.
On another note, I do recall hearing that Decker's actor would be happy to come back as the merged being for a Star Trek appearance, think it was off of the Director's Cut commentary or some behind-the-scenes bit. Maybe...we could get a voiced cameo someday...? =P
That doesn't need to explain where the Borg came from, but it might be intriguing to know if there is "another" machine race similar or different to the Borg.
Like maybe Borg from the Mirror Universe? There's an interesting twist...
I seem to recall one of the books had Q responsible for Gary Mitchell. It's like, god-like beings are only acceptable if they have 90s hair?
the book where Q has to fight this being called 0 who was responsible for the destruction of the T'Kon(he used his powers to cause the T'Kon primary to nova early)? I didn't like it. It gave the galactic barrier a purpose, but.... a kinda silly one.
No, it doesnt ... Trelane is a child, one with very powerful toys but still a child.
Very different from the Q that thematic are more akin to the Organians.
A child with Q-like powers. And parents who were far more powerful. His PARENTS were responsible citizens, but Trelane? Trelane was about as responsible as the John de Lancie Q.
But I digress.... The idea of a connection between the Borg and Iconians is an interesting one. What races destroyed the Iconians? Picard alluded to historical accounts of their destruction but never discussed the origin of those accounts.
Personally i do not want a direct connection between borg and vger, for many reasons. But having the machine race or its creator race connected to both would not be too bad.
New home of the Romulan Republic.
I have an idea for what Season 11 should be; Season 11: The Big Bug Fix.
I have not been able to read my bug tickets in over a year, not even the tickets about not being able to see my tickets.
I find the drama of your signature proof of your immaturity, this means you, DR whiners.
Okay here's my idea of the origin of the Borg. The borg started out as small cybernetic cult that linked thier minds, kind of like the mini collective those former borg created for mutual protection.
They weren't harmful or cruel and only assimulated people volunteerily, people seduced by the idea of immortality, of harmony, of perfection. Maybe they worshipped the machine people who created V'yger, wishing to be more like them.
But that nice collective assimulated a strange woman, whose mind did not assimulate right.
Instead of merging smoothly into collective, she forged a dissendant note in the collective, in effect her mind acted like a virus, corrupting the collective with her drive and ambition.
Overtime she found others that could be shaped the same way she was, creating new Borg Queens, which only made the collective stronger.
Its these Borg Queens who manipulate and edit the collective, so that the hatred of those who were forcibly assimulated do not drive the collective to suicide.
This is just my idea, that way it it fits both hundreds of years and millenia. The original collective could be thousands of years old, but the aggressive form could be only 900 or so hundred years old.
"Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them." -Thomas Marrone
No, it's not, and no, it doesn't. Consider how the "whale probe" is a plain black cylinder with a light ball hanging out at one end, and the Borg command ship looks, oh...I dunno, pretty much EXACTLY like a borgified V'Ger:
No. The Borg Command ship is fashioned after V'Gert. Wat we saw initially in the TPM was V'Ger's defensive shields. The Whale Probe was only a plain cylinder.
But another point needs to emphasized a LOT. The "body" V'Ger was constructed by the machine planet to allow Voyager 6 to fulfill it's programming. Let me repeat that, the incredibly power body of V'Ger that has more power than a 1,000 starships, have a 3-D storage system that is measured in cubic kilometers, has probes which will memorize you to death, which has a defensive shield that was (depending on cut) 82 AU or 2 AUs across. One AU/astronomical Unit is 149 597 870 700 miles/149 597 871 km (the average distance from the orbit of the Earth to the Sun). Along the way back home V'Ger became sentient.
And as I typing the above, it occurs to be that the Borg may have encountered V'Ger before it became sentient. A "primordial" Borg encountered a vastly power machine probe which was a level of technology they could not come close to acquiring nor fully understanding. The probe may have memorized some of them to death with it's probes. And them moved on. The Borg may have experience a fundamental change of for their nascent society.
Perhaps has a civil war between the forces that strove perfection as the pure machine individuals (emulating V'Ger) and the force that strove for perfection as a cybernetic hive mind. The forces of the Hive Mind Collective win as a huge cost. The collective memory is fragmented, and yet they retain some knowledge of the probe they encounter long ago. And only now have assimilated enough know-how to enable the Collective to build copies of that probe that pale in comparison to the original
Dan Stahl is a fan of V'Ger so its not surprising that a Borg ship that looks like it was introduced. It is easier to introduce a ship that looks like a borgified version of V'Ger than creating a story arc involving V'Ger. Assuming that the machine race that modified V'Ger and the Borg have some history, then it is not surprising that V'Ger looks like a Borg ship. For all we know, the Unimatrix ships are ships the Borg assimilated from the machine race and the machine race made V'Ger to look like them and that is the only connection between the Borg and V'Ger.
Yeah the biggest issue with exploring the origin of V'Ger is that it's STUPIDLY powerful. It did what it felt like then went on it's way.... it didn't ever even get damaged...
In my opinion it is less about trying to connect V'Ger to the Borg as much as it is trying to answer the question of who made V'Ger and do "they" in some way have a relationship or connection to Borg.
The "machine planet" that Spock sees in the holo storage of V'Ger is what has led to all the speculation of "Borg" because we see machine planet and say - hey that looks like Borg!
But the fun may be to investigate what that machine planet really was and if it has any connection to the Borg at all.
That doesn't need to explain where the Borg came from, but it might be intriguing to know if there is "another" machine race similar or different to the Borg.
I'm a big fan of the Borg, and so not a fan of the V'ger theories, but reading this is a relief to me. The Borg work so much better as a mystery, something that emerged from thousands of years in the past whose origins have been lost, with all kinds of legends and stories arising about them that might be true. To have any one answer be "the" origin of the Borg would ruin their mystique, and personally, having V'ger create them like Legacy said has always seemed convoluted (any origin story that requires time travel just to make itself work is, by Occam's Razor alone, a seriously improbable origin). Guinan and the Queen suggest a more gradual, sociological process, a race of people that evolved into what we see now, and that always seemed so much more powerful as a metaphor for the information age taken to its extreme, with everyone plugged into each other all the time. Making the Borg the victims of something else, a nanite plague or V'ger swooping along, takes away the social allegory, which is really what sets Trek apart from other sci-fi stories.
On the other hand, V'Ger being a Borg creation gone awry could make sense given their histories, and the command ships do a good job of looking like both V'ger and like plausible Borg vessels. It's still odd that V'ger's so godly compared to the Borg (and just about everything that's not Q), but maybe the Borg just got the V'ger snowball rolling somehow, and it picked up a whole bunch more technology along the way.
Ideally, though, I'd like to see the origins of the Borg kept as a mystery, and the V'ger connection as one more legend, one more thread to follow up on in the search for answers, but something that still leaves room for players to have their own ideas about what the Borg are and where they came from.
In my opinion it is less about trying to connect V'Ger to the Borg as much as it is trying to answer the question of who made V'Ger and do "they" in some way have a relationship or connection to Borg.
The "machine planet" that Spock sees in the holo storage of V'Ger is what has led to all the speculation of "Borg" because we see machine planet and say - hey that looks like Borg!
But the fun may be to investigate what that machine planet really was and if it has any connection to the Borg at all.
That doesn't need to explain where the Borg came from, but it might be intriguing to know if there is "another" machine race similar or different to the Borg.
Actually in Voyager they proved what was said in TNG that the Borg only controlled a few systems in 1484, which makes them over 900 years old (which justified the millenium comment in TNG).
This used to bother me until I remembered one thing. The Vaadwaur are over 10,000 light years away from the heart of Borg space, thanks to Kes going omnipotent and flinging Voyager across the quadrant. So what that really tells us is that in the 15th century the Borg reached the edge of Vaadwaur space, which is far enough away for Guinan and the Queen saying they're thousands of years of old to still make sense.
(Sorry to practically necro the thread, but it was too interesting to resist. )
Edit: A thought came to me of one way to connect V'ger and the Borg without stepping on either one's origin. An event unfolds that sends the player on a mission to find the machine planet, perhaps another probe that's laying a swath of destruction across the quadrant. The first lead is the Borg due to their V'ger-like command ships and, after infiltrating a Borg ship and hacking into their database, we learn that the machine planet is a legend even to them, and long ago they found and assimilated a derelict ship whose design became a template for the command vessels. We follow that clue to the sector where the machine ship was found adrift, and, once there, wind up unlocking a wormhole that leads to the machine planet itself. The Borg become an important clue in the search for the machine planet, but they're not the answer themselves.
The V'Ger connection is stupid... besides that would suggest Commander Decker was a bigger doofus then he was before.
I think the Borg began with a humanoid species (note the Borg Human Designation is not 001) which would imply the "Creator" that made a cybernetic system to better their life in both everyday and defense and enhances them to a higher state of being which brings in "perfection" peverted by the computer AI and like every major computer/technological advancement in Scifi it goes horribly wrong and goes Hal 3000 and Skynet on its own creators. Instead of killing the computer Hive (brain) fuses with the populous and all of the information they possess/uniqueness is stores and used in the coming war, then the world undergoes a nuclear war. The Queen comes in due to the native hierarchy of the creator species, during the conflict the proto-Borg assimilate the Head of Gov which is female to speak for the Borg and gives the classic Queen we all know and love. Then after the world is decimated and populous destoryed and the primary mission was foiled the Borg began to assemble all the technology they can find
on the planet and start building a Armada since the target species (their own) is gone, the Collective wishes to give the Galaxy "perfection" and grow in technological power and then starts targeting neighboring species.
The rest is history and up to speculation
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC] "This planet smells, it must be the Klingons"
Comments
:cool:
Thank you for responding, Dstahl. In this regard, I'd be fine with that...if perhaps it's certain technology the Borg acquired from the machine race and used for their own. It's just enough room to maneuver in a reasonable way that doesn't step on any previous aspects of the shows and movies.
I imagine the borg didn't always have a queen she's supposed to provide order to the chaos of all those borg minds, by acting as some form of central control the one that gives the orders and sets the borg agenda. So, the reason they assimilate and search for "Perfection" is because the borg queen decided that was the goal. they could just as easily have been a peaceful cybernetic group with goals similar to the federation's goals if the queen wanted to.
Remeber the nanite replicators of Stargate all it takes is one of those deciding to assimilate an organic and boom borg!
Well, I still believe the Borg and V'ger have a common ancestry, somewhere further up the family tree perhaps, as has been hinted at before. But I don't think they'd be tied in with the Iconians too much. I personally feel, though, if at least V'ger was tramping across the known universe, it's potentially likely it would have assimilated (for lack of a better term, honest) some data relating to Iconians. Maybe. At least it'd justify a little tie-in role with STO's current events.
It did take an awfully long time to get home with some of the most advanced technology beyond human comprehension at its disposal, and that's only if we assume it didn't get flung through time as well, which I feel is a safe bet. I imagine V'ger literally stopped at every item of interest on the way home, probably involved a lot of detours, being the intergalactic tourist it is.
The machine race still strikes me as some sort of enigmatic faction that'd rather keep to itself, maybe out of fear of organics. But I'd still love to see what they're about someday, but would take a lot to do them justice, considering the state of their reconstruction of V'ger. While I don't think we'd see them in STO, I'm not opposed to hints or remnants of their leftovers to tease us with.
On another note, I do recall hearing that Decker's actor would be happy to come back as the merged being for a Star Trek appearance, think it was off of the Director's Cut commentary or some behind-the-scenes bit. Maybe...we could get a voiced cameo someday...? =P
Like maybe Borg from the Mirror Universe? There's an interesting twist...
Captain Ariel Trueheart Department of Temporal Investigations
U.S.S. Valkyrie - NCC 991701
=/\= ================================= =/\=
But I digress.... The idea of a connection between the Borg and Iconians is an interesting one. What races destroyed the Iconians? Picard alluded to historical accounts of their destruction but never discussed the origin of those accounts.
My character Tsin'xing
http://www.startrek.com/database_article/probe-the
What does this mean?
Assimiliated Lock Box?
Delta Quadrant Duty Officer Pack?
Borg Origin FE?
When "the boss" posts to the thread you kind of have to wonder what it all means.
I've been wanting to arm a Fleet K't'inga Retrofit with Beam Overload and High-Yield Omega plasma torpedoes and name it the IKS Blaster Beam.
Then go into Borg Red Alerts blaring this. Have a little taste of your own medicine!
Damn, I would pay all the money for the K't'inga bridge we saw in TMP with those cool swiveling gunnery stations.
But it has NOTHING in common with unimatrix ships....
My character Tsin'xing
I have an idea for what Season 11 should be; Season 11: The Big Bug Fix.
I have not been able to read my bug tickets in over a year, not even the tickets about not being able to see my tickets.
I find the drama of your signature proof of your immaturity, this means you, DR whiners.
http://www.stowiki.org/File:Borg_Command_Ship.png
http://www.startrek.com/database_article/probe-the
They weren't harmful or cruel and only assimulated people volunteerily, people seduced by the idea of immortality, of harmony, of perfection. Maybe they worshipped the machine people who created V'yger, wishing to be more like them.
But that nice collective assimulated a strange woman, whose mind did not assimulate right.
Instead of merging smoothly into collective, she forged a dissendant note in the collective, in effect her mind acted like a virus, corrupting the collective with her drive and ambition.
Overtime she found others that could be shaped the same way she was, creating new Borg Queens, which only made the collective stronger.
Its these Borg Queens who manipulate and edit the collective, so that the hatred of those who were forcibly assimulated do not drive the collective to suicide.
This is just my idea, that way it it fits both hundreds of years and millenia. The original collective could be thousands of years old, but the aggressive form could be only 900 or so hundred years old.
Not as similar as these.
http://www.stowiki.org/images/e/e9/Borg_Command_Ship.png
http://images.wikia.com/memoryalpha/en/images/4/4c/Vger_ship.jpg
"Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them."
-Thomas Marrone
http://www.stowiki.org/images/d/db/Borg_Command_Ship_1.jpg
V'Ger from TMP:
http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/V%27Ger?file=Vger_ship.jpg
http://www.scifi-meshes.com/forums/downloads/v%27ger%20encounter%2010_DDn.jpg
http://www.startrekdb.se/skepp/bilder/vger_side.jpg
I really don't see how you got the whale probe from that...
No. The Borg Command ship is fashioned after V'Gert. Wat we saw initially in the TPM was V'Ger's defensive shields. The Whale Probe was only a plain cylinder.
But another point needs to emphasized a LOT. The "body" V'Ger was constructed by the machine planet to allow Voyager 6 to fulfill it's programming. Let me repeat that, the incredibly power body of V'Ger that has more power than a 1,000 starships, have a 3-D storage system that is measured in cubic kilometers, has probes which will memorize you to death, which has a defensive shield that was (depending on cut) 82 AU or 2 AUs across. One AU/astronomical Unit is 149 597 870 700 miles/149 597 871 km (the average distance from the orbit of the Earth to the Sun). Along the way back home V'Ger became sentient.
And as I typing the above, it occurs to be that the Borg may have encountered V'Ger before it became sentient. A "primordial" Borg encountered a vastly power machine probe which was a level of technology they could not come close to acquiring nor fully understanding. The probe may have memorized some of them to death with it's probes. And them moved on. The Borg may have experience a fundamental change of for their nascent society.
Perhaps has a civil war between the forces that strove perfection as the pure machine individuals (emulating V'Ger) and the force that strove for perfection as a cybernetic hive mind. The forces of the Hive Mind Collective win as a huge cost. The collective memory is fragmented, and yet they retain some knowledge of the probe they encounter long ago. And only now have assimilated enough know-how to enable the Collective to build copies of that probe that pale in comparison to the original
My character Tsin'xing
I'm a big fan of the Borg, and so not a fan of the V'ger theories, but reading this is a relief to me. The Borg work so much better as a mystery, something that emerged from thousands of years in the past whose origins have been lost, with all kinds of legends and stories arising about them that might be true. To have any one answer be "the" origin of the Borg would ruin their mystique, and personally, having V'ger create them like Legacy said has always seemed convoluted (any origin story that requires time travel just to make itself work is, by Occam's Razor alone, a seriously improbable origin). Guinan and the Queen suggest a more gradual, sociological process, a race of people that evolved into what we see now, and that always seemed so much more powerful as a metaphor for the information age taken to its extreme, with everyone plugged into each other all the time. Making the Borg the victims of something else, a nanite plague or V'ger swooping along, takes away the social allegory, which is really what sets Trek apart from other sci-fi stories.
On the other hand, V'Ger being a Borg creation gone awry could make sense given their histories, and the command ships do a good job of looking like both V'ger and like plausible Borg vessels. It's still odd that V'ger's so godly compared to the Borg (and just about everything that's not Q), but maybe the Borg just got the V'ger snowball rolling somehow, and it picked up a whole bunch more technology along the way.
Ideally, though, I'd like to see the origins of the Borg kept as a mystery, and the V'ger connection as one more legend, one more thread to follow up on in the search for answers, but something that still leaves room for players to have their own ideas about what the Borg are and where they came from.
In short, exploring something like this...
Would be all kinds of awesome.
This used to bother me until I remembered one thing. The Vaadwaur are over 10,000 light years away from the heart of Borg space, thanks to Kes going omnipotent and flinging Voyager across the quadrant. So what that really tells us is that in the 15th century the Borg reached the edge of Vaadwaur space, which is far enough away for Guinan and the Queen saying they're thousands of years of old to still make sense.
(Sorry to practically necro the thread, but it was too interesting to resist.
Edit: A thought came to me of one way to connect V'ger and the Borg without stepping on either one's origin. An event unfolds that sends the player on a mission to find the machine planet, perhaps another probe that's laying a swath of destruction across the quadrant. The first lead is the Borg due to their V'ger-like command ships and, after infiltrating a Borg ship and hacking into their database, we learn that the machine planet is a legend even to them, and long ago they found and assimilated a derelict ship whose design became a template for the command vessels. We follow that clue to the sector where the machine ship was found adrift, and, once there, wind up unlocking a wormhole that leads to the machine planet itself. The Borg become an important clue in the search for the machine planet, but they're not the answer themselves.
I think the Borg began with a humanoid species (note the Borg Human Designation is not 001) which would imply the "Creator" that made a cybernetic system to better their life in both everyday and defense and enhances them to a higher state of being which brings in "perfection" peverted by the computer AI and like every major computer/technological advancement in Scifi it goes horribly wrong and goes Hal 3000 and Skynet on its own creators. Instead of killing the computer Hive (brain) fuses with the populous and all of the information they possess/uniqueness is stores and used in the coming war, then the world undergoes a nuclear war. The Queen comes in due to the native hierarchy of the creator species, during the conflict the proto-Borg assimilate the Head of Gov which is female to speak for the Borg and gives the classic Queen we all know and love. Then after the world is decimated and populous destoryed and the primary mission was foiled the Borg began to assemble all the technology they can find
on the planet and start building a Armada since the target species (their own) is gone, the Collective wishes to give the Galaxy "perfection" and grow in technological power and then starts targeting neighboring species.
The rest is history and up to speculation