This painted such an incredible picture that ive always had half composed in my head, but this finished it! I absolutely love the idea the founders are the galaxy seeding race (and also somewhat explains why the same actress was used, although obviously not the real intention... Or was it?)

I always had this theory in my head too, but with one major difference. The link isn't a result of conflict but of loneliness. The founder's race travelled the galaxy, but found it empty and devoid of life. So they seeded a ton of planets all over the galaxy roughly at the same time, which is why most "current" 24th century civs out there all have roughly the same technological development. In cosmological and evolutional terms, 1000 years, 100 000 years or even 65 000 000 is a small difference, so this even explains ancient civs like the iconians, the voth, etc. No need for the whole "clockwise" exploration story, as the technological difference between alpha quadrant and delta really isn't big at all, especially considering cosmic time scales. Some species are just as advanced, or more advanced, and older than the federation (voth, Borg, hirogen, vaadwar, etc) so it's not even true that the delta quadrant is "younger". Heck the krenim imperium on its own was, in certain time lines and in certain areas, far more advanced than the federation considering it's time controlling, chronoton based weaponry. But anyway, lonely founders seeding the galaxy, developing complex biotech and genetic engeneering techniques. They started genetically modifying themselves to be able to have closer intimate contact, and eventually changed themselves into changelings so they could experience life in all its facets (even "learn how to be a rock" or everything else). But even after thousands of years of this this got boring, so they retreated into the great link where time became irrelevant and they became locked in unified pure thought for billions of years, waiting and waiting untill the planets and races they seeded developed. Then after billions of years the woke up and went into the galaxy they created, but quickly found it hostile to their dismay. The young races they seeded were distrustful, and often even outright hostile towards them. So they set out to re-establish control over their creations by posing as gods and creating the dominion. And in the 24th century they had just about managed to establish that control over 1/4 of the galaxy, the gamma quadrant, when the federation encountered them. It's often mentioned in ds9 that the founders and the dominion think long term, and move meticulously and slowly, so it makes sense they would expand their control over the younger races slowly and methodically over thousands of years, genetically modifying these races to make them less hostile, more subservient, and unthreatening to them as they expand. This also explains why the founders are so "arrogant", and look at the "solids" as lesser races, limited and like children that need to be controlled. They're their creations that got out of control... So yeah I love the idea that the founders are the ancient seeding aliens. But the link in my headcanon is a result of their isolation for billions of years where they waited for all that time for the races they seeded to develop and grow and mature... But hey, in this many things/explanations/histories are possible! Anyone can think what they want as this was never explained in canon. And it never will be the way "modern trek" is being written...

Who are "they"?

How much of the gamma quadrant the Founders control is something never addressed. They could have a lot of hostile neighbors. At the very least we know there is a Borg transwarp hub. Doubt on the whole they are much bigger than the Federation and most of that seems to be just keeping people inline with the carrot (vorta) and the stick (jem hadar).

Or the Gamma Quadrant founders could be evolved from Liquid Terminators.

Going above or below is going around. After all there's no up or down in space lol..

@@Markus117d yes there is up and down, relative to the plane of the galaxy.

Except that they went into the Mutara Nebula *intentionally* . As Spock said "the odds will be even" because the disadvantage of the Enterprise's shields not working would be negated because Reliant's would be inoperable too. Presumably Kirk was counting on either the Enterprise having superior sensors or his crew being better than Khan's. And then Khan pursued them. We also don't actually know canonically just how big the Mutara Nebula is.

@@Markus117d up and down are always relative. Given an agreed upon fixed point of reference, for example a flat plane directly through the center of the Milky Way, one can *always* use "up" and "down".

Also.... the producers talks about this. They mentioned this was for the benefit of the audience.

I always assumed that the Borg simply weren't interested in the limited technology of the races north of the Expanse and that they could cross it anytime they wanted as Seven mentioned that the Borg came across a Kazon colony but opted to leave them alone as assimilating them would deviate from their goal of perfection. Of course, they could've gone around the Expanse just to see what races lurked north of it and whether or not they were a threat or could be assimilated by them.

Also worth noting that these barriers are only encountered from the perspective of Voyager's linear path back towards the Federation. It could be that other paths might be more open, but leading them off-course.

​@@girlgardeI remember that comment by Seven of Nine, oooof when the Borg consider you a detriment, it's pretty bad 😂.

By any reasonable map, most of the alpha and beta quadrants are still unexplored. The fed, klingons, romulans, and cardassians are just in one little area straddling the two quadrants.

Well drafted

This is a better analogy than my "slice" one!

I'm actually studying dendrochronology in grad school now, specifically in bur oak research, and I like the analogy, the nekrit expanse is like a section of rings that are all very small (the 1840's and 1930's come to mind) and hard to distinguish, making charting past them very hard or even impossible.

7 also mentions that the Borg had met them and found them not worth assimilating.

@@dupersuper1938 *task failed successfully*

Wasn’t that later on?

Seven also told Neelix that the Borg had found a transport ship of his people and that their musculature made them excellent drones. Neelix's response was a very creeped out "good for you."

Yeah, that was in the late season 3 episode Blood Fever (the one where Torres catches Pon Farr). By then Voyager had been making its way through the Nekrit Expanse.

They basically had transporters as a sidearm.

@@gatedude07 but not for boarding ships.

@@DavidKnowles0 this could be explained by the fact that their bodies were so weakened by the fage they couldn't handle molecular disassembly and reassembly in a transporter. Or maybe it's because transporters require the ships shields to be down, which requires you to fire heavy weapons at it risking damage to the crew and the bodies they wanted to harvest in the first place, or even risked destroying the entire ship they were trying to harvest. So they stopped using transporters and started using actual grabbing and boarding and using their hyper advanced medical scanners/transporters/weapons, since this risked less damage to the bodies they were trying to harvest. The vidiians were quite advanced technologically compared to many other races, even on a similar level as the federation in many fields, so it seems logical they'd start using that technological edge to overpower less developed races to harvest them safely, instead of using conventional weapons. But I admit, it is strange they never seemed to use transporters for boarding.

Indeed. However, the Voth are extremely self-centered, and believe themselves to be absolutely superior to every other species in the galaxy, and so won't do didley squat against the Borg unless the Borg attack them first, or in case the Voth stand to gain something sgnificant from it. The Borg, on their part, seem to have decided that the Voth might be to big of a mouthful to go after... for now. Add to that that the Voth are also supremely slow, as a culture, and straight up might not have noticed that The Borg have moved on from being a minor strange cybernetic species, to a galactic level threat.

Do the Voth have any territory at all? If 2 of them hadn't been chasing voyager, the entire species would never have been discovered by voyager. With their sophisticated cloaking device, they could simply ignore any hostile species.

I read that story too and it explained a lot of things such as what really happened involving the race that was hiding from the Borg.

Be the series end not even the Borg could touch it so not exactly correct

The Borg have been shown to be sending scout ships far outside their borders. With Cubes appearing thousands or even tens of thousands of lightyears away from Borg territory. They probably scouted the area in the past and found nothing there worth assimilating on the short term and then proceeded to expand in another direction. Even if a single Cube failed to get through, I doubt the Borg as a whole have failed to go through, especially since they could just pass around easily.

Once the Borg assimilate Sicarian technology-well, I don’t think they would just use it for the Queen cell…

The Borg having scarian technology makes no sense given the info on how their technology work given in the episode.

@@DavidKnowles0 “Makes no sense” seems like a pretty good evaluation of that, and many other, scenarios on the show.

​@@DavidKnowles0 in the episode they needed the planet to focus and amplify it for the trajector to work. Given what we were shown the borg must have found a way around this problem for usage on a cube. the fact that this device was reserved for only the queen, might give us a hint on what restriction this might result in. Likely it is the borg cube still not being powerful enough to amplify the trajector, so that it might only be a good use for emergencies.

I think the best theory ive heard is the Borg are a cyclical occurrence. Basically when tech takes over a civilization and expands, becomes a massive threat, then gets knocked down a peg (such as the janway virus) become more of a background issue like they were in Vaadwaur time, before rising again.

I think the Borg existed as pacifists for hundreds of thousands of years. But were eventually exposed to a terrible disaster or attack that then forced them to adapt their whole way of life. Maybe the Borg began to believe that the only way for them to ensure their own survival was to simply assimilate all useful forms of life in order to become the perfect organism which is impossible to destroy. The Borg may just be seekers of immortality, driven to become extremists by an an extreme threat in their distant past.

Potentially related memory: Professor Michio Kaku, in his book Hyperspace, postulated that a craft could potentially travel against the movement of the galaxy, effectively moving slower, and experience a greater passage of time than at the point of origin if they circled all the way back around.

Noone knows details. That is the order of things.

He did a video about this 2 years ago. Look it up 😉

You know he has a video on that where he talks about it. Id check it out if you want to see what he has to say about the topic.

@@yodaslovetoy didn’t know that. Thanks.

@@CorvoFG The short version: It would have taken longer and the most important part is simply THE DOMINION. They don't like intruders and even in the best scenario, they simply would've escorted them straight to the wormhole.

Nope, nearly equidistant from the maps from various sources. So, it would take many decades to get to as well. You can see one on Memory Alpha that shows it.

I seem to remember an episode stating that it was hundreds of thousands of years old and the hirogen had found it abandoned and had been using it for only several tens of thousands. "Still spacefaring long before humans but not one of the oldest compared to the voth.

We dont know for sure. The only source of whom built the relay network was the hirogen themselves, and who knows if they where being honest.

Wetherspoons probably would..

@@CorvoFG and call it The Targ and Sehlat

Hmm… maybe they knocked them back without them knowing it enough times that the Borg still haven’t taken over the galaxy.

That's against the quite isolationistic culture of the Voth. When they don't see you as a thread to their dogma, they don't encounter you. And as they are most likely much more advanced as the borg, a cube cannot even come near one of our old dinosaur friends without being annihilated, if the cubes would even be able to find the city ships.

The Voth are isolationists who aren't interested in the affairs of other races and leave them alone provided they do the same. They may regard other races especially Mammalian races as lower forms of life but they don't bother them unless there's extreme circumstances. As a result, they didn't care about the Borg's rise provided the Borg didn't attack them. I imagine the Borg DID try a few times to go after the Voth but got crushed each time.

Both possibilities was stated in Voyager but they never clarified.

Or: Do the Borg maybe have assimilated the Vaadvuar technology? Could also be possible, but as the Borg will most likely only have assimilated parts of it, they had to find an own way to make it work - which in Borg fashion always means big and cubicle stuff.

I've always suspected that the tunnel network found by the Vaaduar was created by some long forgotten advanced race, which would fit with the pattern pointed out in this vid.

I believe it was said they were using solar sails to explore space while earth was just sailing the seas, it’s in the episode of DS9 called Explorers

They weren't using warp tech, they occasionally lucked out and caught some sci-fi stuff that made them go at warp somehow without a subspace field or anything... And judging by the technology inside the solar sail ship, I don't know how the fuck they were getting into orbit. No computers, no engines.

@@bipolarminddroppings It was mentioned in the episode that what Sisko took to be decorations on the old traditional star charts he navigated by were actually the tachyon eddies that launch the light sail into FTL. Apparently enough travelers exploring the Bajoran system hit them to map them not to mention make it back to record them. As I recall something about it only working because of how much surface area such a small/light craft had in the mile wide sail. So it wouldn't weigh much more than an Apollo command midule. It's possible they used rockets or just used rockets to set up a space elevator which is a lot closer to reality IRL than warp speed or even manned solar sails.

@@bipolarminddroppings they’re definitely not the launch vehicles, they’d transfer into them once they’re already in orbit in a more typical fashion. Like a regular old rocket. The solar sail crafts would’ve had to have been built in orbit or on a moon etc - Sisko just had the benefit of cargo bay doors and tractor beams.

Bajor does have inhabitable moons, so it is likely they had more of an incentive early on to develop even basic rocketry and other space technologies.

The Krowtonan Guard unfortunatly we only get that reference to them and know nothing else. Even expanded lore like Star Trek online has avoided using them.

@@smof1 That's them! I thought ST:O would've expanded on them, given that they expanded and interlinked plot threads from basically all Trek series across decades. That's... pretty strange?

@@KimPossibleShockwave yeah its one of the things even ST:O hasnt touched. maybe in a future update?

@@smof1 I mean, ST:O has been out for like over ten years now. I find it very odd. Maybe they don't have the rights to use the name or something, but even then there are ways around that...

It was never clarified if the Hirogen built the network or simply used the net for their own purposes.

That struck me as odd too. If Voyager only takes a month to go "several thousand" light years, they could get back to the other end of the Milky Way (which after all is only 100,000 ly across) in 6 years at most, right?

Not an official one, but I had to draw up a rough estimate based on putting together fan speculation and official works for my Video on "Why did Voyager not use the Wormhole?"

Consider their way of life. They intentionally oppose progressionism and silence those within their civilization who seek truth and change. That is the opposite of evolution - it's stagnation. Science in our world has been held back for a very long time due to the restrictive assumptions of people who refused to believe certain things could be possible. The more open-minded we've become in recent years (often people inspired by science fiction and other creative expressions) the more quickly our understanding of the universe has leap-frogged. 'This is the way it is' is always going to fall behind 'What if...?' in the eternal scale of advancement.

@@heartoffire5902 I would say the opposite has happened today. People haven't been as close-minded as they are today since the dark ages. Technology has also regressed by the way.. Look up how engineering and rocket science has regressed and some of the technologies actually lost. For example, the rockets for the Apollo program cannot be built anymore, no one is smart enough or educated enough to build them. Nasa admitted to this.

Since that’s 1000 LY thick, that’s at least an extra year of travel if not an extra two years. Sure some diversions within the plane added that much time but they would’ve also missed every shortcut they found. The main limit to their travel time was engine speed, after all, not space geography.

Not anymore, as in the end there will be no time ship. The last scenes you saw of Annorax with his wife were 200 years BEFORE the happenings of Voyager. Don't forget, that he travelled with his ship from 2170 till 2370 around to delete stuff out of the history. And in the end it seems as if he never finished his timeship before he died after a happy life with his wife and family. The Krenim Voyager therefore encountered after they destroyed the time ship could be the great great grandson of Annorax ;)

Interesting thought, but with the use of inertial dampers, the tech may not be viable. The same inertia that allows such guidance to work would result in several kilograms of greasy smears on each bulkhead behind each crewman. Even given that, inertial guidance systems have uncertainties that compound with distance travelled. I agree though, great idea to consider, and definitely worth a line or two of dialogue to discuss and dismiss (if plot requires lack of navigational clarity).

@@christophermillett7386 the technical manuals from the Original Series and from The Next Generation both included semi detailed explanations of the SINS.

@@AlexandarHullRichter fair enough. Point conceded.

The Hur'q came from the Gamma Quadrant

True, the borg wouldn't stand a chance, but the Voth probably know that an assimilated ship would be their end.

Why woulnt they stand a chance? the Voth, if pressed to by the Borg would out numbered and surrounded, why wouldnt they be crushed? We dont know how long ago Voth technology peaked or the rate ar which they continue to advance. 20 million years is a long time to have equivalent technology, but advancement is a curve and in that time the Voth could have conquered the galaxy several times over., but they didnt, they have more advanced tech than the Federation but it is still contemporaneous to it. The Borg would have caught up in that time no doubt.

@@Elessar2417 The borg have nothing that even remotely compares to the technology of the Voth.