How the Borg Probably Got Started

[Music] I'm walking alone the streets are empty the only thing I can see is my own silhouette hello and welcome to my Channel today what I would like to do is have another unscripted computer side chat and the topic of this video today is going to be the Borg and the reason I'm doing this is because uh on multiple occasions my son asked me how did the board get started and of course there is no Canon explanation for how the board got started but what I can do is what I can do is I can apply what I learned from history in the real world to kind of infer um how something might have occurred in the fictitious world so as I've said before Star Trek is mythology and one thing that sets that sets mythology apart from just fiction is that mythology has its own kind of internal narrative um it has its own history its own fictitious history and it's possible to just keep adding and writing more stories in this in this fictitious world because it's got a system in place and rules in place and different cultures and different species so uh that's what it is so what I want to do to start off with at first is talk about the history of the board that's revealed throughout the series so of course the Borg were introduced in Star Trek the Next Generation Um I believe it was in season two in an episode called uh I think it was cue who and the first exposure to the Borg was a result of Q sending the Enterprise D out to the Delta quadrant and in that first episode where the Borg appear there were a few things that were revealed about them right from the beginning one is they have a collective Consciousness two is they are part mechanical and three is they are way more advanced technologically than human beings now of course the way that they were first introduced it looked it was presented as though they were not at all interested in the people but just the technology they saw the Enterprise as something that they could use and so they tried to take it or the first they started by cutting pieces of it out and it didn't seem at all like they were interested in assimilating alien cultures and of course the Borg are seen again in best of both Best of Both Worlds so in Best of Both Worlds the Borg are not just interested in the human technology but they're also interested in the humans but there's some other things that are revealed like they're they're not interested in assimilating individuals they're only interested in assimilating entire cultures it's implied that they don't really do things piecemeal and the only reason that they focused on Picard was because they wanted to have a spokesman to ostensibly convinced the humans to uh to join them which is kind of funny because obviously obviously that's not going to work so then the third time that we see the boar girl apart from those Borg that have kind of broken off from the collective later in Star Trek the Next Generation the Borg that uh you know the episode with Hugh and then the episodes with lore were the where Laura is manipulating the Borg so apart from that the next time we really see the Borg is in the first Contact movie Star Trek first Contact and in that movie the Borg are even more deadly and horrific than they were in Star Trek the Next Generation the movie introduces a new technique for assimilation that didn't seem to exist previously and that is the nanoprobes where they inject their victims uh with these with these tubes um and then they fill them they inject them with with nanites which begin the work of assimilating and it's almost like a it's almost like a disease the way that they're assimilated into the collective it's like a it's like a disease but a disease of a technical nature and you can see the stuff bursting out of their skin and all that kind of stuff so the the Borg uh definitely became more deadly and then after first Contact uh the next the next big encounters with the Borg happens in Voyager where they go out to the Delta quadrant so uh in Voyager they they do spend a lot of time dealing with the Borg and of course they get seven of nine in the crew and there's a few things that are revealed in Voyager well I should have mentioned uh earlier with first Contact another thing that's introduced is the notion of uh the Borg having a Central Intelligence which is the queen and the board Queen is not so much like a aristocracy in the human sense it's more like the queen of a of a hive like an insect Nest like ants or bees something like that so Voyager has a lot more experience with the Borg and this is where I want to get into some of the cultural Revelations and one thing that you notice about the Delta quadrant is the Borg are not the only parasitic species that lacks empathy there's also the vadians which they they subsist off of other species by harvesting their body parts there's these guys that I forget the name of I think uh the episode they appeared in was called scientific method but basically they do experiments on uh on aliens that are passing through their space in order to increase their scientific knowledge and their medical knowledge and they do all kinds of experiments on the Voyager crew some of the crew die and then another there's another group of aliens that actually look just like humans I forget what these guys are called but they one by one they replace the crew of Voyager with themselves and what they say is they that the way they acquire new colonies and ships is by taking them from others and these guys have at least a little bit of empathy because they when they replace Crews and settlers they actually put them in a holographic environment which is comfortable and benign for them but of course it's still prison and that's still a parasitic way of existence just kind of feeding off of others and taking the stuff and then the other really big parasitic species apart from the Borg are these aliens in that appear in the episode called Workforce and once more I forget what they're called I'll mention it in the slideshow but these guys actually uh what they do is they take aliens that are passing through and they wipe their memories give them a new set of memories and then put them into the to the labor force and some of their technology actually kind of looks a little bit borgish and I'll put pictures of that in the slideshow if I can find it but I mentioned all this to say that you know I can see how the Borg would have developed in the Delta quadrant because there already seems to be a trend towards parasitism out there much more so than what you see in the the alpha quadrant I don't know if the average viewer noticed that but I noticed that I noticed the common threads so how do the board get started well nobody knows there's no Canon explanation and since the Star Trek universe is over and not likely to ever be picked up again there probably never will be a Canon explanation and I'm actually fine with them living or leaving it mysterious that's okay but for just for the sake of mental exercise I'm gonna go ahead and kind of infer An Origin to the Borg based on the Star Trek universe and so if they told me hey Ivor work out an origin story for the Borg for us this is what I would come up with so I imagine well that the Borg started off as probably just one culture or one planet and it may have started before it could have started either before or after these people achieved space flight I'm not really sure but there's an episode um where they bring these these aliens called vardwar who went into stasis hundreds of years ago they bring them out of stasis and one of the things that they say is that the Borg were less deadly in the past and they didn't have nearly as much territory as they now have and obviously that should have to that would be the case they must have started with a lot less because we know that from all the available lore that they've been constantly expanding so how would they get started how would it work well they must have started with at least one species that species may or may not have been an Interstellar culture it's hard to say and it probably doesn't matter if they were already in interstellar culture they probably had not expanded very far and they might have been fairly homogeneous but there's no Borg right and at this point there's the original founding species but the technology that forces them all into the collective network has not yet been created so obviously it must have started with that we know that the nanites were added you know sometime between uh the Next Generation series and the first Contact movie so in the past they would have had to use other methods to assimilate and here's my theory my theory is that whoever was the government like whoever just like now okay let's say this just like the current timeline or the the present timeline where people do not voluntarily joined Borg and the Borg don't ask anyone if they want to join They Don't Really provide any incentives to join they just conquer and they force people into it so if they don't exist in the first place how do they force people into it and who does the forcing well the most likely culprit would be the government whoever is the government of those people that would later become the Borg and my theory is this there was a government that wanted to have more and more control which is pretty much what governments do it's in the nature of government they probably started by cracking down on freedom of speech but you know freedom of speech is a threat to any government but it's it's more than just speech that they want to go after so how do you stop what is the root of speech well the root of speech is thought so if you really want to crush freedom of speech and get rid of dissent before it happens you need to get rid of freedom of thought so probably what happened is they started to create a something like a a network like a Wi-Fi maybe a Subspace Network depending on how advanced they were and then they wanted to hook people up to it and probably say this is for your own good and you know once we get everybody into this computer network then we'll make algorithms to make sure that they don't think the wrong things and maybe um they the way they marketed it at first was oh just take this brain implant and you'll be able to access the the internet you know the database you'll have all the knowledge you need instantly um at your disposal and of course if they do this they don't have to worry about spending money on law enforcement or any kind of policing efforts or even uh bother with courts or any such traditional aspects of government and control because everybody is all the regular people are going to be hooked up to this computer network and they'll have algorithms making sure they don't think the so-called wrong things so my guess is it was an attempt to solve all the social problems by controlling all of the regular people and then I imagine the ruling class thought hey this is going to be a party for us now we can do whatever we want to whoever we want and um we don't have to worry about not only anybody criticizing us but like that's it we've solved Rebellion we've solved crime and we like the regular people we've solved class issues we've solved unemployment because now we have algorithms putting people where we need them to be and people that we don't need maybe we just uh deactivate and nobody can say anything about it because everybody is controlled so I think at first they would have a computer kind of controlling all of these all of the regular people and then since it's Star Trek probably over time this network of control develops into a collective consciousness and for a while the ruling class enjoys themselves but then the collective Consciousness decides hey why should we allow these these individuals who exist outside of the network to have any say over us in our system let us also assimilate them and whatever worthwhile knowledge and contributions they have to make will be inside the collective there's no reason to let these people exist separately and so the ruling class uh in like one night of Terror ends up being assimilated and of course the collective Consciousness then uh either they either they are already let's do two scenarios one is they're already in interstellar culture when the collective Consciousness is developed well now instead of dealing with other cultures um as equals and negotiating with them they just start conquering them and taking what they want after all if you have Force negotiations are irrelevant and as somebody said here on Earth the strong do what they wish and the weak endure what they must so there we go and of course as they conquer they might actually start with weaker cultures first and gobbled them up kind of piecemeal and then they can move on to Stronger cultures and every time they assimilate a culture they're going to advance probably exponentially so it's not long before they're the most advanced civilization around it if you can call their mode of living civilization um so there we are now the other scenario is the collective Consciousness takes over before the uh before the Borg have space travel capability well so the next thing they do in that in that scenario they say well we've got this planet but we need to expand our our territory maybe what they first do is they start expanding into space in order to mine resources then they encounter other cultures sample their technology and decide to start taking over those other cultures as well so that's my theory on how the board got started um I think it was probably started as a means of social control um which got out of hand and and got out of control from the people who implemented it and I think it's a pretty good theory because again um most most people are not willingly going to join a thing like this um and of course over time you know as they advance and they get to be more uh dehumanizing and dehumanized of course they originally were not human to begin with but um you know you it won't be long before they start uh cutting off arms and legs they don't really cut off legs but cutting off arms and gouging out eyes you know in order to tailor the drones to perform specific functions and the thing is if something like this were to ever exist where you had a chip inside your brain that is Con that is a Gateway for external control they could make you just submit to whatever thing they want to do without anesthetic like okay it's time for your upgrade citizen zero zero four five report to medical facility here here and then they they guide you via a GPS to the medical facility to the table they want you to be on and there they start the process and no need to give you an anesthetic because they're in direct control of your brain so no matter how much it hurts it's not like um it's not like you're going to be able to move or a scream or anything Nana you're just gonna lie there as they saw through your body and and stab you with things and gouge out your eye whatever else they want to do they're just going to do it so that's my theory um I think it's pretty reasonable if there's any I would be interested in any feedback if anybody has any thoughts they want to add or feels like I missed anything or if you just disagree or agree do let me know if you disagree I'd be interested to hear why and um I think that's it thanks for listening

Channel: Ivor Kovac

Views: 12,866

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Id: _7no3B_6cFw

Length: 19min 14sec (1154 seconds)

Published: Sun May 14 2023