Daystrom Institute
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Serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek from both in-universe and real world perspectives.
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Episode Guides
The /r/DaystromInstitute wiki held a number of popular Star Trek watch guides. We have rehosted them here:
- Kraetos’ guide to Star Trek (the original series)
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Animated Series
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- Darth_Rasputin32898’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- OpticalData’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
- petrus4’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
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I don't think I would agree with the claim that "natural, biological systems are actually often perfect models for ... efficiency." Natural, biological systems tend to get the job done (natural selection at work), but often do so in bizare, highly inefficient ways.
For example, most of us have eyes. Our eyes generally do an extraordinarily good job absorbing reflected light and allow us to perceive an enormous amount of visual information regarding our surroundings. So far, so good.
Look a little deeper, though, and the structure of our eyeballs quickly shows the vestiges of it's bogosort design process: vertibrate eyes all have a blind spot where the optic nerve blocks some incoming light from reaching our photoreceptor cells. We generally don't notice this because we have two eyes, and our brains are pretty good at merging the images we get from each one to cover for whatever the other missed (including constructing some outright fabrications where needed). Essentially, the human eye is a camera with the power cord routed across the lens: an obviously idiotic design decision that persists because it wasn't quite bad enough to be completely debilitating and could be mostly compensated for. Cephalopod eyeballs, which evolved independently of ours, do not have this particular weakness (although they do have their own suboptimal quirks).
It's not hard to look at the bevy of ingenious yet plainly stupid constructs that evolution has created and decide that they fall well short of any idealized standard of "perfection." Why should the Borg accept a visual sensor with such a glaring flaw, when they know they can do it better?
You might still disagree with this, but I guess the main thing I mean by efficiency in the case of biology is that natural systems seem to take the shortest route in response to stimuli. So perhaps there is a difference between optimization and efficiency in the case of the Borg, and I would say that an unintended consequence of their advanced tech is that it would start to behave like an organic system as they adapt to new circumstances.
I think there is a problem the Borg maybe haven't acknowledged which is that they want an organized and optimized system, but progress or evolution means having a system which is good at responding to favorably to current conditions which may or may not exist in the future. Obviously the Borg are trying to also control their environment to be as predictable as possible, but they still encounter the unexpected (species 8472, for example) and have had some HUGE weak spots/ liabilities (Data can put a whole cube to sleep, their ships are subject to easily being infiltrated, etc). The Borg may believe in perfection, but I think they are on a fools errand.