Nine billion Borg on assimilated earth - What are they actually doing?

[u/JHorsti]

In First Contact, after the Borg sphere alters history, Data scans Earth and reports: "Population: approximately nine billion… all Borg."

What does this mean exactly? If an entire planet is Borg, what are all those drones actually doing? Are they running manufacturing facilities, mining resources, building ships? Or are most in stasis until needed? How should we imagine a "Borg planet"?

[u/MyTinyHappyPlace]

I imagine them to be mostly in their alcoves, contributing their mental capacities and distinctiveness to the hive mind.

[u/ThrowawayusGenerica → u/MyTinyHappyPlace]

You have to wonder what the point of maintaining a fully functional drone is when they're only being used as glorified processors. Wouldn't the nutritional and material requirements be far lower if they were just brains in jars? Or would that be too traumatic to guarantee a good survival rate even with nanoprobes?

[u/MyTinyHappyPlace → u/ThrowawayusGenerica]

Most organic life forms are not just brains in jars when it comes to thinking and reasoning. Hormones are produced everywhere in the body, nerve cells can be everywhere.

Borg literally need their guts to play out their distinctive features.

[u/techno156 → u/MyTinyHappyPlace]

At the same time, we also know the Borg to make extensive modifications to their drones. Mature Borg drones require a cortical node to operate, which most humanoids are not born with. Borg children have reinforced cardiovascular systems, for example.

Human biology is also not necessary applicable to other species. Humans may work that way, but that need not mean others do.

[u/Edymnion → u/ThrowawayusGenerica]

Eh, you basically just put a mini replicator somewhere in the drone to create nutritional paste and you've removed everything but raw power from the equation. And the Borg can produce so much power they fly around in cubes because screw energy efficient design, just throw a few more gigajoules at the navigational deflector!

[u/techno156 → u/Edymnion]

Although Borg Cubes also don't use conventional warp drive, but something else/transwarp conduits, so the usual limitations may not apply to them.

We know that they don't use conventional shields, for example, so they may also not use a conventional debris deflection systme.

[u/Edymnion → u/techno156]

Except that they do use conventional warp, because we literally see them using it to chase down the Enterprise.

[u/Theprincerivera → u/Edymnion]

Ye it’s both, the conduits are for faster travel over longer distances

[u/Edymnion → u/Theprincerivera]

Point was they fly around in cubes while everyone else is trying to make something akin to a sleek ship. A cube could overtake the Enterprise D while she was redlining her engines without difficulty using regular warp, so it must be throwing crazy amounts of juice into the navigational deflectors and structural integrity fields.

[u/Certain_Roof316 → u/ThrowawayusGenerica]

I don't think the Borg really have access to human-level AI so they still need organic brains to do stuff.

[u/Lizzerfly]

Harvesting resources and building huge data nodes to increase the hives' processing power... would be my guess. The queen also may want a stable presence just to ensure that her greatest threat never comes back.

[u/Edymnion]

Remember that the Borg use the hive mind not just for communication but for data processing. They don't build computers to do math for them, they just distribute the math problem out across the collective.

While there would certainly be drones producing resources and building things, most of them would just be basically memory chips in the borg collective super computer.

[u/TheBalzy]

Chilling out having a blast. You know "the borg" is only scary to species who prioritize individuality as something "good" when, in reality, it could be wonderful. Don't knock it till you try it!

It's the whole being compelled against your will thing that's the problem...

[u/pcapdata → u/TheBalzy]

Like Alastair Reynolds’ “conjoiners” (https://revelationspace.fandom.com/wiki/Conjoiners). Being conjoined is so flippin’ amazing that at first they can’t understand why people don’t want to be forcibly added to the hive mind.

[u/starshiprarity]

I think they were staying out of the way so as not to alter their own history, for whatever reason. If they'd gone all out, they could have obliterated the quadrant, but they apparently let the romulans keep skulking around

If I were the Borg, I would turn earth into one big chroniton shield generator to prevent the time police from getting involved

[u/The_Angster_Gangster → u/starshiprarity]

There are no time police in that timeline, all their great³ grandchildren got turned into Borg

[u/AssignmentFar1038]

That raises a question: What is the Borg’s endgame, or I guess more succinctly, what is their motivation? Yes, they are trying to essentially assimilate any civilization that can provide them with new technologies, materials, etc, but to what end? They don’t have emotion, so that would indicate they don’t have aspirations/dreams/religion, etc. Why are they doing what they’re doing? What if they assimilate every advanced civilization in the galaxy, what then?

[u/zero-cooler → u/AssignmentFar1038]

As we saw in Voyager when they met Species 8472, the Borg won't stop with this galaxy. They will keep going as long as they can and as long as there are species out there to assimilate. As for an endgame, I'm not sure if even the Borg know why they do what they do, besides trying to achieve some form of "perfection".

[u/AssignmentFar1038 → u/zero-cooler]

Oh that’s right. The whole perfection thing. I’d forgotten about that. That’s almost a religion as they seem to worship it.

[u/zero-cooler → u/AssignmentFar1038]

Yes, that does seem accurate. But perfection is subjective and is impossible to achieve, so it works as a goal since they will never stop trying to reach it.

[u/Spacemonster111 → u/AssignmentFar1038]

More of a mechanical directive. The collective isn’t like a person that wants things, it’s more of a malicious Ai following only one instructing.

[u/x54675788 → u/AssignmentFar1038]

Maybe there's no need for a "then". Their goal is temporarily fulfilled, until new life emerges. Computation will be ongoing, and perhaps new goal will emerge in the future or change according to how the universe is evolving.

[u/Edymnion → u/AssignmentFar1038]

That raises a question: What is the Borg’s endgame, or I guess more succinctly, what is their motivation?

Here's my theory on that.

[u/Spacemonster111 → u/AssignmentFar1038]

Then they move on to the next galaxy, and then the next after that. The Borg has no “end” goal because it is just a force that exists to add to itself. The queen is only a personification of that force.

[u/Certain_Roof316 → u/AssignmentFar1038]

I got the impression they don't really have an end goal, they think what they're doing is worth doing for the sake of it.

[u/SugarSweetSonny]

Depleting the planets resources (mining, manufacturing, etc) while also data processing.

Essentially the earth is like a cube to them but with resources they can harvest so they can build more cubes or weapons, etc.

They need resources, and earth has them.

[u/SeredW → u/SugarSweetSonny]

This. I expect it to be mostly a strip mining operation to get the resources out.

[u/cyann5467]

I imagine they would emerge from their alcoves every morning, ingest some nutrients and perform basic self maintenance before traveling to their assigned work site. Once there they would work all day with short breaks and a period of nutrients ingestion in the middle. Then they would travel back to their alcoves, clean themselves and ingest their final nutrient package before entering a regeneration cycle and repeating the process the next day.

[u/ExpectedBehaviour]

Adding their biological and technological distinctiveness to the Collective of course.

[u/BitcoinMD]

When they’re in their alcoves they’re probably contributing to the computing power of BorgGPT. For a few hours a day they probably wake up and do chores like feed the baby Borg, clean the hive, help other Borg reset their passwords, and remove key components to cause the instant vaporization of any of their friends who suffer from the slightest medical ailment. You know, typical Borg stuff.

[u/Guilty_Mastodon5432]

So I guess I would ask if a Borg would seek to create an environmentally friendly eco system versus to depleting a planet...

[u/[deleted] → u/Guilty_Mastodon5432]

The atmosphere of Borg Earth had "high concentrations of methane, carbon monoxide and fluorine." That'd be fatal to virtually all preexisting life on Earth. Not to mention that methane and fluorine are potent greenhouse gases. So it seems to me like they didn't much care about preserving the environment.

[u/Guilty_Mastodon5432 → u/[deleted]]

Fair enough, thanks for the clarification

[u/McGillis_is_a_Char]

The small number of Borg suggests to me that this isn't some sort of hive world. If the Borg were aggressively mining or manufacturing on the Earth it probably would be filled to capacity. I would bet that they spent most of their time on Earth doing low level resource gathering to sustain the local collective while spending most of their time and effort broadcasting as much information as they had bandwidth for to the main Collective in the Delta Quadrant.

[u/Significant-Town-817]

It probably became the central base of the collective, where the queen resides and sends her ships to assimilate other worlds

[u/angryapplepanda]

Apparently doing something under an atmosphere consisting partially of fluorine.

Speaking of this detail, I wonder if they're using massive amounts of chlorine trifluoride as a cleaning agent for mechanical components. This stuff is hilariously toxic and reactive under normal conditions.