The Borg vs. The Culture

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Game, set, match.

[Yukaphile]

Oh wow, very true. Jesus, how could I forget that...?

They'd have to be damn careful to succeed on the first try, otherwise the Culture would become aware of their presence and go all purging on them.

[Yukaphile]

Then again... here's something I read. The greatest intelligence that guide the Culture are not humanoids, but robotic "Minds." So... they'd have to first assimilate them in order to gain a clear and concise idea on when the Culture was founded. Suddenly it seems a lot more difficult, huh? Given how OP those minds are presented as.

[Madner Kami]

remember we see various Borg who were assimilated at Wolf 359 later during the years

Um, what? When did that happen?

[TGLS]

I think it happened during Unity (Voyager 859).

[Yukaphile]

And "Unimatrix Zero."

[Jonathan101]

Then again... here's something I read. The greatest intelligence that guide the Culture are not humanoids, but robotic "Minds." So... they'd have to first assimilate them in order to gain a clear and concise idea on when the Culture was founded. Suddenly it seems a lot more difficult, huh? Given how OP those minds are presented as.

I fail to see why you would need to assimilate the leaders of a civilisation to find out when that civilisation was founded. Unless the Minds are keeping the origins of the Culture a secret from its' citizens- which is possible but goes against the philosophy of the Culture- I'm sure any reasonably educated Culture schmuck would do.

If neither has any knowledge of the other, then the Culture would take a fierce early advantage, but the Borg will resort to time-travel sooner or later even if it's just to preserve their own existence, which could lead to a very, very complex game of temporal chess between the two factions as this time-dumped Borg can carry knowledge of the Culture to their own past selves, giving them a bit of an edge next time the Borg and the Culture achieve "first" contact.

The question for me isn't whether the Culture can beat the Borg, but whether they can do so before the Borg go back in time and bring knowledge of the Culture to themselves, and in turn realise that further time-travel is probably a good option for them. They have the weapon they need to win this fight; it's just a question of how they use it.

[Eishtmo]

Time travel doesn't exist in the Culture universe. And the amount of time travel the Borg would have to do to have any affect is very BROAD. And depending on circumstances, the Culture would have "friends" that are basically ascended beings to help look out for them, or they would just blow them away even at the earliest point (the Culture was formed from multiple advanced civilizations deciding to work together, all of which make the Borg look very young indeed).

Territory doesn't mean much. The Culture is Involved in galactic affairs, yes, but they don't have "territory" in the strictest sense. Their ships (the General Service Vehicles, usually classed with names like Mountain and Ocean) just kind of tour around being examples of what the Culture is (think Ent-D) but really are just big flying chunks of territory. That can mass produce other, smaller, more lethal ships.

The reason assimilating a Culture citizen is kind of a waste is because the Culture is on the order of 10,000 years old. The Borg are a few hundred years old, at best. Most Culture citizens don't really know their history, or much of their tech. A Drone would be the best choice to try, but considering most of them are armed with antimatter weapons, I doubt it would have gone very well.

As for trying to assimilate a Mind, hahahahahahaha. In Look to Windward, an equal level tech civilization tried to assassinate a Mind by teleporting micro missiles into it. It failed (of course the Mind still died, but that was for other reasons, mostly suicide). Then the Culture got it's revenge with E-dust, a swarm of nanomachines that make the Borg look like they're playing with Duplo blocks.

[Yukaphile]

@Jonathan101 In any reasonable first contact scenario, where both have no prior knowledge of the other, the Culture would wipe them out in nanoseconds - which is literally overkill for them given their ships and their Minds can react in terms of picoseconds. Combat that takes eleven microseconds is considered long. I read that once. Then the Culture becomes aware of them, boom. Borg are gone. The only chance the Borg would have of winning would be if they had prior knowledge of them, but given how they were presented post-First Contact, that's not how the Borg operate, instead just ruthlessly sending waves of drones at an enemy they know nothing about hoping to assimilate it. Refer to Species 8472 to get a clear view of this mindset. And hey, the Borg didn't resort to time travel there, so... it's doubtful they would here, at least not in time to save themselves. Remember that the only time the Borg assimilate individuals is if it gives them an advantage, and with humanity, they were an unknown, so they wanted to hedge their bets, but they had already downloaded information from the Enterprise's computer. Assimilating some random joe might or might not help. I'll have to read more from the series before I can come to any conclusions. But getting information from a computer is a lot more reliable than a random humanoid.

In summation, the only way to help the Borg win would be to massively stack the deck in their favor with prep time, full knowledge of their enemy, while denying that to the other, which is possible if Q came along deciding to amuse himself. But that hardly makes it a fair fight. And I don't think the Borg would want to time travel anyway, given their more advanced technology such as Gridfire and Effectors would tempt the Borg to want to conquer them even more to add to their own. It's what the Borg do. No, I'd give the collective only a 2% chance of victory in the best-case scenario.

[TheLibrarian]

Well, the Borg did in fact strategically assimilate Picard (and that was pre-FC, so it applies to both), so it is certainly an option, but they would probably pick up anyone they could.

I don't think they regard a single person as representative of an entire culture, but it gives them an insight regarding who and how many of that culture they need to take next.

But TBOBW implies that individual assimilation is still an involved surgical process requiring at least a few hours and the resources of their ship to accomplish. I'd wager the Borg only bother with this route if a civilization is being particularly stubborn in resisting assimilation.

Related: is the near-instantaneous "vampire bite" assimilation seen in FC a newer development? Or a technology the Borg cube in the TBOBW didn't possess but the ones in FC do? Did the creation of Locutus give them the information to speed up human assimilation in the intervening years?