Star Trek: Questions you always wanted answers to

Since most Star Trek aliens are humanoid bipeds, that's what the Borg are. There have been Borg of other races within that framework depicted on the various shows.
 
It always bugged me that all of the races in the galaxy all seemed to be around the same age, galactically speaking.
The Vulcans and Klingons got to space a few hundred years before Humans, but now everyone seems to have the same kinds of technology more or less. Even the Borg aren't that much older and more advanced.
Where are all of the races that are millions of years ahead? Or even a few thousand years ahead with tech more in line with what you see from the 26th and 29th century Federation?

I think the Mass Effect universe does a good job or explaining this trope and uses it as an interesting plot element, but I can't think of a good explanation for Star Trek.

I'm no ST expert, but what about that ship in The Voyage Home that was trying to talk to the whales? Maybe some like that are older?

I think Babylon 5 showed this best when they had the Shadow war. When Ivanova was trying to contact the First Ones, someone Lorien maybe, says something like the way the First Ones think is like the younger races wondering what ants are concerned about. They are so far ahead they barely notice them.
 
I'm no ST expert, but what about that ship in The Voyage Home that was trying to talk to the whales? Maybe some like that are older?
Thats true, but you dont see as many of them running around as you do with races around the same level of tech.
You have dozens of races all setting out around the same time who have been around for less than a thousand years or weird god like beings that have been around forever. Anything in between seems either rare or wiped out.

Theres only one good explanation for that:
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Two points raised, here...

First, the Borg. Originally, in "Q Who?", they were a humanoid race that had been developing their technological interconnectedness for "thousands of centuries". They were speciesist. Guinan and Q both discussed it: "They're not interested in you. You're nothing to them. They're only interested in your ship, in its technology. They've identified it as something they can consume." "That's not hoe the Borg work. They don't assimilate individuals -- only civilizations. When they come, they'll come in force. They don't do anything piecemeal." And so on like that. The gist was that they descended en masse on a technological race's world(s), stripped every city and artifact, disposed of the extraneous biomass (people), and incorporated whatever new technological tricks that race had into their repertoire.

But then in their very next appearance, "Best of Both Worlds", suddenly they sent a single ship to assimilate a single person to "facilitate" the assimilation of Humanity (and then presumably the rest of the Federation, and so on from there), and were suddenly interested in the biological as well as technological distinctiveness of other species. In further appearances, they continued the decline from relentless toward brainless. They scared the hell out of me in that first episode, were still intimidating in BoBW, and by the time First Contact came out they had become vaguely slimy, somewhat sexual (nanoprobe injectors, the Queen, hints from VOY "Unity"), and ignoring us because we posed no threat had devolved to bumbling around obeying their programming like like living zombies.

We did not originally see other species represented because there were none. The Borg bioform was, in Star Wars terms, a near-Human species. It wasn't until the entire concept had transmogrified a few times (First Contact and the Borg arc of Voyager) that we saw other species -- Cardassians, Klingons, Romulans, Bolians, and other races thus far unknown...

* * *

As for "older races", we saw the Progenitor species in TNG's "The Chase" who seeded the primordial oceans on many Alpha Quadrant planets around 4 billion years ago. But in general... For as long as this galaxy's been around, for the number of supernova explosions needed to fuse the heavier elements needed for organic life, for the time needed for those atoms and molecules to drift through the galactic arms and accumulate... Our sun is, by reasoned conjecture, probably a third-generation star. It and its planetary system have a decent amound of stuff heavier than Hydrogen and Helium (comparatively speaking). Given all that, I've often speculated on whether we might be the first sapient species to evolve to this point in this galaxy. And I've seen a few s/f authors follow the same thought.

Even if we're not first, other races may be up to a few thousand to a few million years older than us. There may or may not be technological plateaus. The idea of intelligent, spacefaring civilizations on the order of a billion or more years older than us I start to consider unlikely, from the sheer lack of available stuff to make them. And, to keep the Babylon 5 comparison going, those seriously old races might have so vastly out-evolved us and how we think and experience the universe that G'Kar's comparison of the Younger Races to the First Ones -- an ant asking another ant what the humanoid who just picked him up was -- is probably pretty apt. If they're aware of our existence at all, we are at least as far beneath their concerns and they have nothing to say to us nor time to spare for us.

There are hints of that Trek, too -- the hyper-evolved races who are beyond our concepts of territory and scientific pursuit and such: The Melkot, the "Golden Youth" from "Arena", the Organians, The Greek gods (of whom Apollo was the only one who still felt the need for lesser beings to worship them), and so on. Many instances of "oh, this was our home when we were like you... we visit from time to time" or "you beings are noisy -- we'll be going away now" or "come look for us again in a few centuries/millennia when you've grown up some" and like that.

--Jonah
 
There are hints of that Trek, too -- the hyper-evolved races who are beyond our concepts of territory and scientific pursuit and such: The Melkot, the "Golden Youth" from "Arena", the Organians, The Greek gods (of whom Apollo was the only one who still felt the need for lesser beings to worship them), and so on. Many instances of "oh, this was our home when we were like you... we visit from time to time" or "you beings are noisy -- we'll be going away now" or "come look for us again in a few centuries/millennia when you've grown up some" and like that.

Don't forget the Q while you're at it, they're definitely far more evolved than the rest of the Galaxy and with the exception of Q they're not very interested the lesser/younger races. There's also Trelane, the self styled Squire of Gothos but he may have been a Q but there's nothing in canon (yet) to say whether he was or was not a Q. Also, don't forget that Guinan's race is supposed to be pretty advanced/evolved even if they don't seem to have any tech to show for it and are definitely interested in the younger/lesser races, or at least Guinan herself is.
 
There are hints of that Trek, too -- the hyper-evolved races who are beyond our concepts of territory and scientific pursuit and such: The Melkot, the "Golden Youth" from "Arena", the Organians, The Greek gods (of whom Apollo was the only one who still felt the need for lesser beings to worship them), and so on. Many instances of "oh, this was our home when we were like you... we visit from time to time" or "you beings are noisy -- we'll be going away now" or "come look for us again in a few centuries/millennia when you've grown up some" and like that.

--Jonah
My point is that there doesn't seem to be much in between Federation level and God/magic level.
We see that the Federation advances a lot up to the 29th century, but they aren't clicking their fingers and doing whatever they like. They still use clear technology, but they are doing time travel and travelling between galaxies.
The galaxy should be filled with races who are doing all of that stuff and building things like the Dyson sphere.

One thought could be that the Federation is actually quite close to getting Q level abilities, and that races do it relatively quickly. It might be that it's an exponential thing and that the more advanced you get, the quicker you advance. Perhaps it only takes a couple thousand or so years for your advancement to reach the level of magic and that most races leave the galaxy behind really quickly.
 
are the borg human from origins?
Do

why the question? in Star Trek Voyager "distant origin" the crew meets the Voth wich origins came from earth. so if dinosaur DNA can get to the delta quadrant that long ago why not humans?

I know plus,
Have not seen a 6 armed 12 foot tall sloth like alien creature in there ranks .

Which really most star trek is humanoid it seems .
Borg are humiodist lol
All other forms of life are inferior !
 
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I know plus,
Have not seen a 6 armed 12 foot tall sloth like alien creature in there ranks .

Which really most star trek is humanoid it seems .
Borg are humiodist lol
All other forms of life are inferior !

In the Animated Series there was a 3 armed/legged alien who served on the bridge along with a felinoid alien too. The Starfleet Battles board game, while non-canon, also had one or two felinoid races as playable factions and there was a felinoid or canid alien seen in the background in Star Trek IV or VI. It's just in the main TV series that we've not seen many non-humanoid aliens.
 
There is an admittedly chauvinistic theory that bipedal (ish) locomotion, thus raising the head/sensory cluster up over the tall grass for further viewing (and earlier awareness of approaching danger), and upper limbs thus freed up for grasping and tool development are more conducive to the development of sapience than other taxonomical configurations. Thus, while we have some non-humanoid intelligent species in Trek (Horta, the sand computer from "Home Soil", Excalbians, Melkot, Tholians, etc.), evolutionary advantage favors the humanoid shape.

Some of this is conjectural, based on the one biosphere we can readily access, and som eof this is rationalization for budgetary considerations. ;)

--Jonah
 
In the Animated Series there was a 3 armed/legged alien who served on the bridge along with a felinoid alien too. The Starfleet Battles board game, while non-canon, also had one or two felinoid races as playable factions and there was a felinoid or canid alien seen in the background in Star Trek IV or VI. It's just in the main TV series that we've not seen many non-humanoid aliens.

Going by Star Fleet Battles, there were the Hydrans, who had three arms and three legs, the Kzinti, which were kind of dog-like sorta and the Lyrans, which were feline. And, or course, the Tholians, who were crystaline. And the Andromedans who nobody has any clue what they look like, at least last time I knew. It's pretty easy to understand why you don't see a lot of non-humanoids in Star Trek, because we'd mostly be interested in dealing with species that have things we need and vice versa. What's the point of meeting with sentient pond slime? What do you have in common? Of course in TOS, they did run into several non-humanoid aliens, like the Horta, but that's pretty rare.
 
In the Animated Series there was a 3 armed/legged alien who
served on the bridge along with a felinoid alien too. The Starfleet Battles board game, while non-canon, also had one or two felinoid races as playable factions and there was a felinoid or canid alien seen in the background in Star Trek IV or VI. It's just in the main TV series that we've not seen many non-humanoid aliens.

Man I've got to watch the animated series I've had it on DVD for at least 3 years but every time I start on it I get busy .
Only seen the first few episodes .
Lol
Imagine those little creatures from the beginning of beyond as Borg .
That would suck !
 
Was watching TNG the other day. When the Enterprise does all these flyovers you can see that there are all these "windows" in the bottom of the saucer section. Why have we never seen any of these rooms with these big glass floors?
 
That's a good question and probably has no in show answer other than they looked cool or else gravity was switched on those decks.
 
Well to be fair we never saw more than maybe a quarter of the Enterprise's internal layout during the entire run and the films. The closest we have to showing what those windows may look like are in the later Ten-Forward sets with the windows slanted upwards from floor to ceiling.
 
True... Though the closest we got (that I can recall) to a lower hull window view in TNG, was in the 1st season episode: Haven, during the pre-wedding dinner. I'm pretty sure it's from the upper forward section of the neck.

The screen grab is from Trek Core. It's the best one they had.
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haven108.jpg
 
Well to be fair we never saw more than maybe a quarter of the Enterprise's internal layout during the entire run and the films. The closest we have to showing what those windows may look like are in the later Ten-Forward sets with the windows slanted upwards from floor to ceiling.

This always bugged me too... cause in Ten Forward those windows were floor to ceiling... but you can see them on the outside of the ship on the edge of the saucer, and they are maybe a third of the height of those underside windows.

THAT said, the top saucer had long ones too, and if you look at the personal quarters, the windows were rounded on top, but went flat to the floor (okay, usually hidden behind furniture)... but, maybe the windows cover 2-3 decks?
 
Was watching TNG the other day. When the Enterprise does all these flyovers you can see that there are all these "windows" in the bottom of the saucer section. Why have we never seen any of these rooms with these big glass floors?

Looking at pics of the Enterprise D I'd say that none of the windows on the bottom of the saucers would be on the floor. The upper most sets of windows on the saucer bottom look like they'd be on the wall but at an extreme angle. The windows on the bottom most part of the saucer appear to be inset so that they're standing either vertically or at slight angle. So I'd say that none of the windows on the lower saucer are actually on the floor.

On the other hand, the ones on the top of the saucer are a different matter, most, if not all, of those look like, at the least, run from floor to ceiling if not being entirely on the celiing like a giant moonroof.

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