An "official" Borg Homeworld?

[WarsTrek1993]

This is another Shatnerverse related post, but I wanted to hear others' opinions on this: is there really such thing as a main "homeworld" for the Borg? (Like the one in "The Return.")
I already know of Gene Roddenberry's joke about the machine planet in V'ger being just that.

But they don't seem like the kind of species who have a specific home planet.

 

[Tiberius]

They probably had a home planet that they originally evolved on, but I doubt it has any importance in the 24th century. There was certainly nothing established on screen about it.

The V'Ger connection doesn't work. For example, V'Ger is ignorant of carbon units, and yet the Borg use assimialted carbon units as drones. And why woulkd the Borg decide to help out a primitive space probe like the machine planet helped out Voyager 6?

 

[Christopher]

Destiny establishes the world the Borg originated on (within the Trek Lit continuity, at least), but it can hardly be considered their homeworld. A collective consciousness whose awareness resides equally and simultaneously in every single drone and computer system in every single Borg vessel and installation throughout the galaxy would have no concept of a discrete home. At most, the Queen's location could be considered a "home base" of sorts, but as the Queen herself put it, that might be thinking too three-dimensionally. The Queen is the Borg, and thus can potentially exist physically anywhere within the Collective that a suitable Queen-type drone body exists, while existing mentally throughout the entire Collective at once.

Voyager established the Unicomplex (aka the Primary Unicomplex), a vast space-based facility comprising thousands of interconnected structures, as the Queen's usual "home base." But it doesn't qualify as a "world," not in the planetary sense at least. (The script to "Dark Frontier," where it was introduced, actually did describe it as "a purely technological world.")

 

[xortex]

Could the Borg be an alternate reality V'ger created by Will Decker?

 

[WarsTrek1993]

They probably had a home planet that they originally evolved on, but I doubt it has any importance in the 24th century. There was certainly nothing established on screen about it.

The V'Ger connection doesn't work. For example, V'Ger is ignorant of carbon units, and yet the Borg use assimialted carbon units as drones. And why woulkd the Borg decide to help out a primitive space probe like the machine planet helped out Voyager 6?

As fun as the V'Ger-Borg thing was, I agree with what you said. To the Borg, space probes are "Irrelevant".

 

[TerraUnam]

Destiny at least had the poetic symmetry of the Borg being born in terror and then propagating terror. They were nasty from the beginning.

Things like the V'ger explanation? Not so much and they are the lesser for it.

 

[Mr Silver]

IIRC, Species 8472 destroyed a Borg planet in "Scorpion" - well one that had been assimilated and populated by Borg at least.

The characterisation of the Borg suggests that they reside in space onboard their vessels or the unimatrix bases that they have scattered around the galaxy. Asides from what has been established in the Treklit continunity, we have to assume that the Borg came from somewhere and that their species 0 (or 1) were a planet dwelling race that started the collective.

It's not out of the realm of possibilities to theorise that the Borg came from outside the Milky Way galaxy. They have a method of propulsion that allows them to exceed speeds far greater than warp drive after all. But this is only conjecture on my part because it's pretty much given that the Borg are native to the Milky Way, given their large presenc - particulary in the Delta Quadrant which is called their "home" throughout the franchise.

Asides from that, Star Charts suggests that the Borg homeworld is known as "Borg Prime" and is home to several trillion drones - again, if I recall correctly.

I don't think V'Ger has anything to do with the Borg, this is merely something that GR jokingly suggested when someone noted the similarities between the Borg and V'Ger around the time that "Q-Who" aired. The "Shatnerverse" does indeed make the connection, as does Star Trek: Legacy, but if there was any real connection planned, then it would have at least been hinted at during the Borg's onscreen appearances. I do like the use of the blaster beam for the Borg though!

 

[F. King Daniel]

This is another Shatnerverse related post, but I wanted to hear others' opinions on this: is there really such thing as a main "homeworld" for the Borg? (Like the one in "The Return.")
I already know of Gene Roddenberry's joke about the machine planet in V'ger being just that.

But they don't seem like the kind of species who have a specific home planet.

Although there are many incompatibilities, when I last read "The Return", I wondered if maybe some of the ancient structures described were remnants of the Caeliar city crashed at the end of "Destiny"

 

[Mr Silver]

There's also the possibility that the Borg stripped their origin planet for it's resources and then abandoned it, much like they did in some of their earlier appearances in TNG. If this is the case, then the Borg are certainly space dwellers and have no permanent fixed location because it's inefficient.

The reason it's inefficient is much the same reason that any major force in Star Trek spreads itself out - so if one of it's locations is compromised/destroyed/conquered, the entire force doesn't fall.

 

[Robert D. Robot]

Perhaps the Borg did not originate from a single species, but evolved/developed from within a coalition or association of spacefaring species? A Federation "gone bad"?

 

[DS9Continuing]

I never thought it made any sense for the Borg to have any kind of stable central location or homebase. If their driving force is to devour and assimilate everything that exists, then in order to do that you need to be constantly on the move. They would just be a perpetually expanding wave of cubes spreading outwards from wherever they originally started.

Once their original homeworld (whatever that may have been in the various continuities) was used up of resources, what possible reason could they have to stay there? Likewise any other world they attacked and assimilated. Once they've taken everything they want - the technology, the bodies - what's the point of hanging around? That's why to me any kind of Borg "world" (as seen in First Contact and "Scorpion") doesn't make sense.

Likewise, I don't really see the need for the Unicomplex either. What can they do there that they can't do on the move? Keeping a central locus that is highly fortified and easily defended is the act of an individualistic species, where one location is automatically more important and more vital to the functioning of a society than any other. That's clearly not the case with the Borg - they are decentralized by definition. Even if only one drone survives, the entire Borg collective survives.

Do they need it for a research base or something? It's been canonically stated that the Borg don't do research - hence losing to Species 8472. And even if they did, any random cube must have the facilities to do everything the entire collective is capable of, so there's still no need for a central location.

.

 

[Saul]

Maybe there is no Borg Homeworld. They evolved on a spaceship or another planet and destroyed their world for resources. I remember there been a episode proposed for Enterprise's 5th season that would show the origin of the Borg Queen. That would have been interesting. Maybe the creation of the Borg is also a Paradox caused by their time travel into the past. I liked the idea of the connection to V'ger and the Home planet in "The Return".

 

[Christopher]

It's odd that this thread was started in the Trek Lit forum yet there's been so little acknowledgement that the question has already been definitively answered within the novel continuity. It would seem this topic, with the broader focus it's ended up having, would be more a General Trek Discussion thing.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

It's odd that this thread was started in the Trek Lit forum yet there's been so little acknowledgement that the question has already been definitively answered within the novel continuity. It would seem this topic, with the broader focus it's ended up having, would be more a General Trek Discussion thing.

Christopher, I disagree completely with the idea that this has been "definitively answered within the novel continuity."

Yes, Destiny posits a defining moment within Borg history, but it happens too recently in the past to be the definitive Borg origin, since other works refer to the existence of Borg hundreds of thousands (Probe) and billions of years (Vendetta) in the past. And since this springboarded off a Shatnerverse question, even the Borg homeworld in The Return is far more ancient than the Caeliar city.

I don't think Destiny is wrong, exactly. I just think it's incomplete. I tend to think that the Borg assimilated whatever Sedin became, and Sedin's personality then became the Borg Queen personality. For what it's worth, Dave Mack told me he was perfectly fine with the approach I took on that question for Star Trek Magazine, so I don't feel like I'm disrespecting Dave's work on Destiny by saying that it's incomplete.

I have a theory on the Borg origins, and when Paul Simpson and I were discussing the article on Borg history he wanted for Star Trek Magazine a few years ago, I told him the theory. It explained everything. But it involved a toy in the Star Trek toybox that isn't allowed to be touched, and so I couldn't offer it.

 

[David Mack]

^ Let me guess: Does this toy happen to belong to an overly litigious old dwarf whom we shall nickname "Grouchy"?

 

[Christopher]

Yes, Destiny posits a defining moment within Borg history, but it happens too recently in the past to be the definitive Borg origin, since other works refer to the existence of Borg hundreds of thousands (Probe) and billions of years (Vendetta) in the past.

But those were both written long before the establishment of the primary novel continuity that I'm referring to. Obviously there are various different Borg origins in various works of Trek Lit, but the word "continuity" should've been the giveaway that I'm referring specifically to the primary "novelverse" to which Destiny and most Trek Lit of the past decade belongs.

(And yes, I know that Before Dishonor refers back to elements of Vendetta, but it's not unprecedented for new works to reference some aspects of older works while retconning or disregarding others. And a Borg origin billions of years on the past is a premise with many obvious problems to it.)

 

[Allyn Gibson]

^ Let me guess: Does this toy happen to belong to an overly litigious old dwarf whom we shall nickname "Grouchy"?

Different set of toys. The Larry Niven toys.

"The Slaver Weapon" tells us nothing about the Slaver Wars, only that they happened billions of years ago. In Known Space, we know that the Tnuctip only defeated the Slavers because they created the "Scream," an immensely powerful weapon that caused every sentient creature in the galaxy to commit suicide. We don't know how the Slaver Wars ended in the Star Trek universe, though. What if there were no Tnuctip in the Star Trek universe? What if the rebellion against the Slavers took a different route...?

Consider what assimilation does. It takes a biological machine and slaves it to a silicon machine, overriding the biological nervous system with a mechanical nervous system.

In a war against the Slavers, who were immensely powerful telepaths, something like the Borg would be the ultimate weapon. The assimilation process would override the nervous system that the Slavers tap into, and it would turn a soldier for the Slaver armies into a soldier fighting against the Slavers.

The Borg make perfect sense as a weapon against the Slavers. Unfortunately, once you've turned a weapon like that on, it's impossible to turn off, and thus the Borg continued to exist. And this lead into other things, like why the tech state of the galaxy seems to be uniform (the Borg will go through and assimilate the galaxy, basically sterilizing it, and with nothing left to assimilate they retreat into hibernation, the life process starts again, and this could repeat itself every few million years or so).

That was my theory, anyway.

 

[Christopher]

Okay, having the Borg "hibernate" and start over periodically is one way to reconcile the idea of their being billions of years old with their relatively limited territory (since it would only take millions of years to colonize the entire galaxy even without warp drive). But it seems difficult to reconcile with their level of technology. The design of the Borg -- big clunky metal and plastic parts stuck onto actors' bodies -- always struck me as an implausibly primitive approach to cyborg technology. Even by 1980s standards it looked cruder than it should've been. I'd think something that had been at it for billions of years would be much more streamlined, with nanotechnology so integrated with biology that the distinction would be virtually undetectable and effectively meaningless. So I've never bought the idea of the Borg as some kind of incredibly advanced ancient superrace. They're just too dang kludgey. The idea in Destiny that the Borg arose as sort of an accidental hodgepodge just a few thousand years ago, a set of makeshift, jury-rigged adaptations that have only been marginally improved on since due to the Borg's limited ability to innovate, seems much more credible to me.

And anyway, my point was simply that this thread hasn't included much discussion of Trek literature at all, which is surprising considering where it was posted. It's mostly been more conjectural.

 

[Edit_XYZ]

As I recall, in addition to various trek lit works, in 'Q, who', Q says directly that the borg are millions of years old - making Allyn Gibson's idea about the borg origin that much more plausible.

The only alternative explanation is that Q lied - the problem with this explanation being that Q had no reason to lie: the borg did not need hyperbole to be menacing and everything else Q said about the borg proved true.


About the clunky looking borg tech - the limited creativity of the borg could very well explain it even after millions of years. The borg don't have the creativity - not even the desire - to seamlessly integrate what they assimilate.

Indeed, the borg appearance would be a powerful statement about the borg as being an evolutionary dead end, unable to evolve beyond what they steal.

As opposed to one of the statements implicit in 'destiny' (if we are to assume that the borg only existed for thousands of years):
As per game theory, the borg mindset - mowing everyone down to mindless workers/unrelenting conquest - is superior to individuality and cooperation.
Why so?
Because the borg was a very small force a few thousand years ago, while the galaxy was filled with spacefaring federation/romulan/etc like species (which was established multiple times). In a few thousand years, the borg are the dominant force in the galaxy. This is only possible if they won the vast majority of confrontations, of 'games', played against the civilisations they met and conquered.

 

[DS9Continuing]

As I recall, in addition to various trek lit works, in 'Q, who', Q says directly that the borg are millions of years old

Not that I remember. It's Guinan that says it, and what she says is that they've "been developing for millennia."

"Millennia" is thousands of years, not millions of years.

And even if that weren't the case, Q is just as capable of lying as Guinan is of just getting it wrong.

.