The Borg vs The Voth
- Thread starter Mr. 5618
- Start date
TNG Borg > Voth > Voyager Borg
"We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness ..."
<Voth commander flips a switch. All energy in Borg cube dies. The end.>
Joking aside, I think the Voth are more advanced than the Borg. Against the Borg, resistance was futile. All shots becoming ineffective after a few tries. Against the Voth, you couldn't put up a resistance in the first place- you couldn't even fire a shot. Also, the Voth apparently don't require a transwarp network for transwarp. That said, the Borg probably need to overpower only one of their smaller and weaker vessels to learn a lot of their technology, so the Voth are probably all but invincible to the Borg.
Of course, they should have been massively more advanced even beyond what we saw, they had an incredible 65 million year head start on humans. But their society seems stagnated almost beyond belief.
<Voth commander flips a switch. All energy in Borg cube dies. The end.>
Joking aside, I think the Voth are more advanced than the Borg. Against the Borg, resistance was futile. All shots becoming ineffective after a few tries. Against the Voth, you couldn't put up a resistance in the first place- you couldn't even fire a shot. Also, the Voth apparently don't require a transwarp network for transwarp. That said, the Borg probably need to overpower only one of their smaller and weaker vessels to learn a lot of their technology, so the Voth are probably all but invincible to the Borg.
Of course, they should have been massively more advanced even beyond what we saw, they had an incredible 65 million year head start on humans. But their society seems stagnated almost beyond belief.
Last edited:
And the laseraptors are now a real thing.
They did seems stagnated for a race as old as they are. They should've been more advanced. I'm guessing there was more to them and we just didn't see it. Too bad we couldn't have seen more of them.
yeah, their governing bodies were obviously made up of dinosaurs. They were basically thinking in Jurassic terms.
I always had the feeling that the Voth scientists being detected was mainly because they underestimated the inventiveness of Our Heroes, due to their prejudices against mammalians, which caused them to become too careless. But yeah, I agree that the Borg need only overpower one of their weaker vessels / colonies (if they have any besides that city-ship) to close a lot of the technology gap (I said as much in an earlier post).
The Voth might be the extreme Bajoran case. Bajorans apparently were advanced before humans were 'standing erect', as Picard said. That's a LONG time.
I wonder if the stagnation of both societies has a commonality. Bajorans are extremely religious with their belief in the Prophets. The Voth essentially have their own with the Doctrine.
Our own history has shown that religion and doctrines can be detrimental to progress.
So I see this as realistic.
As for the Voth winning against the Borg...no. Despite seeing only their one city-ship and having no evidence they don't have many, many more like it, the Borg have thousands of ships and millions of drones. Simple numbers will do the Voth in. Death by a thousand cuts.
I wonder if the stagnation of both societies has a commonality. Bajorans are extremely religious with their belief in the Prophets. The Voth essentially have their own with the Doctrine.
Our own history has shown that religion and doctrines can be detrimental to progress.
So I see this as realistic.
As for the Voth winning against the Borg...no. Despite seeing only their one city-ship and having no evidence they don't have many, many more like it, the Borg have thousands of ships and millions of drones. Simple numbers will do the Voth in. Death by a thousand cuts.
I might, too. But I simply don't buy 65 million years of cultural stagnation. (Given how fast humans are advancing, the Voth seem to be no more than about a 1000 years ahead in technology, perhaps 10.000 if we're being very generous, but certainly no more than that).
I'd even sooner believe they migrated to the DQ starting 65 million years ago, then lost all their technology for unimaginable stretches of time, and only relatively recently achieved the technological level they have today (where relatively recently could still mean 'hundreds of millennia ').
The Voth were fine, IMO; they shouldn't have ABANDONED them right away. Their culture, history and established protagonist and antagonist sides would have been nice to explore more. I'd have liked to see them as an antagonistic race not unlike the Dominion whose presence and technology would have put the balance of power of the first half of the show into question. To say nothing of the history of Earth back home.
Mark
Mark
All I can come up with is, maybe not stagnation, but a series of ups and downs.
They progress to a certain point, then some type of infighting, or something happens, and they go back to the stone age, so a Rise and Fall of Empires over the years, Maybe the Voth were very antagonistic, and old grudges would flair up occasionally.
Maybe they got to the penical of there society, then decided to say, screw it, and regress to an agrarian society on some worlds, content with farming. If we look at a civilization, you rise up, go to the stars, explore the stars, catalogue and research, etc. .. but for how long? 1000 years? 10,000 years? After 10,000 years, you would have catalogued and explored your home galaxy, more than likely other galaxies, technology beyond belief.. then what? You stay at that high? Not usually. After so much time, you civilization becomes stagnant, one becomes bored.
Some may evolve into energy beings and go explore other demintions, others will continue with the status quo, others, like said, will regress to just being happy on 1 world with a modicum of technology.
You may have wars where your civilization may barely survive, and then you have to start over.
After 65 million years there civilization may have rised and fallen countless time, and the City Ship maybe there latest rise, which may have happened 1000, 10,000 years ago, so there technology is at that level.
With this iteration, they maybe trying with "the doctrine" and see how far they get.
It would be amazing that after that long a time that any civilization remains at all, and not have passed on, like other species.
They progress to a certain point, then some type of infighting, or something happens, and they go back to the stone age, so a Rise and Fall of Empires over the years, Maybe the Voth were very antagonistic, and old grudges would flair up occasionally.
Maybe they got to the penical of there society, then decided to say, screw it, and regress to an agrarian society on some worlds, content with farming. If we look at a civilization, you rise up, go to the stars, explore the stars, catalogue and research, etc. .. but for how long? 1000 years? 10,000 years? After 10,000 years, you would have catalogued and explored your home galaxy, more than likely other galaxies, technology beyond belief.. then what? You stay at that high? Not usually. After so much time, you civilization becomes stagnant, one becomes bored.
Some may evolve into energy beings and go explore other demintions, others will continue with the status quo, others, like said, will regress to just being happy on 1 world with a modicum of technology.
You may have wars where your civilization may barely survive, and then you have to start over.
After 65 million years there civilization may have rised and fallen countless time, and the City Ship maybe there latest rise, which may have happened 1000, 10,000 years ago, so there technology is at that level.
With this iteration, they maybe trying with "the doctrine" and see how far they get.
It would be amazing that after that long a time that any civilization remains at all, and not have passed on, like other species.
This all assumes that there isn’t an upper ceiling to technological development and knowledge.
the Voth are not the only super advanced civilization.
But all of them seem to have disappeared or eventually stagnated.
most have developed one or two pieces of extraordinary technology that is distinct from your run of the mill starship tech.
But that’s it.
laws of physics will eventually prevent one from becoming more and more “powerful”.
I don’t buy the simple extrapolation of infinite development curves.
the Voth are not the only super advanced civilization.
But all of them seem to have disappeared or eventually stagnated.
most have developed one or two pieces of extraordinary technology that is distinct from your run of the mill starship tech.
But that’s it.
laws of physics will eventually prevent one from becoming more and more “powerful”.
I don’t buy the simple extrapolation of infinite development curves.
Perhaps their society evolves very slowly, like turtledove’s reptilian race.
Oh, I believe in a ceiling, all right. But it's not at the Voth level, as we've seen aliens more advanced than them (for example the Organians, the Dowd, and perhaps the Dyson sphere builders, possibly the Iconians -- can't really say). It's got to be at the Q continuum level, at the very least.
That. or you'd have to believe they were essentially born that way and their power is unobtainable by others species, which would make them kind of a supernatural species (which I don't think really meshes well with the Star Trek universe).
I wonder how much the Voth would know about their actual history (regardless of their forgotten origins) and such previous iterations, should they exist. They do make sweeping claims about '20 million years of history' and 'for millions of years we believed that <x> ', but even those statements could simply be based on Doctrine rather than on historical fact.
Last edited:
I think that the Voth were superior to the Borg.
In "Unity",when the crew discovered a dead Borg cube, they discussed what could have caused it.
JANEWAY: The question is, why have the Borg left one of their ships and all it's technology adrift in space for anyone to find?
TUVOK: It is possible that the deactivation of the ship and it's systems severed the link with the rest of the Collective.
KIM: But what caused the shut-down in the first place?
TORRES: It could have been some kind of natural disaster, or
KIM: Or what?
TORRES: Maybe the Borg were defeated by an enemy even more powerful than they are.
My guess was then and still is that the Voth caused it. That was my immediate thought when Voyager encountered the Voth ship. I expected then that we would see more of the Voth. Unfortunately it didn't happen.
However, I must admit that the "Distant origin" thing, that the Voth actually originated from Earth was one of the worst over-the-top things that showed up on Voyager. If there had been such a civilisation on Earth, there would at least have been some trace of it.
In "Unity",when the crew discovered a dead Borg cube, they discussed what could have caused it.
JANEWAY: The question is, why have the Borg left one of their ships and all it's technology adrift in space for anyone to find?
TUVOK: It is possible that the deactivation of the ship and it's systems severed the link with the rest of the Collective.
KIM: But what caused the shut-down in the first place?
TORRES: It could have been some kind of natural disaster, or
KIM: Or what?
TORRES: Maybe the Borg were defeated by an enemy even more powerful than they are.
My guess was then and still is that the Voth caused it. That was my immediate thought when Voyager encountered the Voth ship. I expected then that we would see more of the Voth. Unfortunately it didn't happen.
However, I must admit that the "Distant origin" thing, that the Voth actually originated from Earth was one of the worst over-the-top things that showed up on Voyager. If there had been such a civilisation on Earth, there would at least have been some trace of it.
Not necessarily. We stil don't have traces of Atlantis.
I don't know. Unless the Voth have a way to avoid assimilation by nanoprobes, all the borg need to do is get close enough to some of the Voth to inject them. Or they could even use an airborne virus as the queen planned to do with Earth... Plus when you can defeat 8472 (thanks to Voyager btw) you can defeat anything.
Similar threads
