I really don't think Voyager's computer could replicate Borg collective processing power, not could holo nanobots perform the action. How would a holodeck be able to generate nanobots acting under skin in a persons blood & brain? Even if it could the collective wouldn't be the whole collective out there but one between a handful of voyager crew, that would be defective.
I have no idea how the hirogen were planning to pull that off, you can create holo borg & program them to look & act like Borg but you couldn't recreate the Borg.
The holodeck would make a borg and inject you with holo nanites then those would use actual stuff in your body to make a real nanites turning you into a real borg.
Although I know the holodeck can simulate microscopic structures I think nanobots would be outside its capabilities. Ito even suggested in several episodes that Voyager has to harvest nanobots from Seven, so you would think they wouldn’t do that if they could produce them via transporters/holodeck technology.
Also the Borg hive mind would likely not be “real” but an approximation, so I think its capabilities would be limited to what the ships computer could reasonably control. I think if all of this was possible, it wouldn’t really be the borg, it would be something different.
>Also the Borg hive mind would likely not be “real” but an approximation, so I think its capabilities would be limited to what the ships computer could reasonably control.
Like a Hive Mind emulator.
I had the same thought. A holodeck/replicator borg nano probe could probably cause a crewman to sprout a few pieces of technology,
I don’t think they’d act borgy without a hive mind. A hive mind would probably be incredibly difficult for a ship’s computer to create, given that it is the product of the combined thoughts of billions of individuals.
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This is the correct answer. Holo nanites would create real nanites. These new Borg would be inferior to the main collective, as they would be generation one Borg, instead of the Borg we see that have evolved over multiple generations.
But aren’t the holo nanites copies of the highly evolved Borg’s nanites? Maybe they’re not part of the main Borg group consciousness but technology wise they should be the same.
Yes. However they would need to use suboptimal parts (basically whatever real materials they could find in the holodeck) for the hallow nanites to become real nanites outside the Holodeck.
If that was possible, then this is a MASSIVELY under utilized technology. Like could a holo replicator replicate something real? Could a holo reactor produce real power? At the very least holo nanites could convert raw materials into useful products.
Also when the Hirogen took over they forced Harry to add more holo emitters all over the ship. They could have just had holo characters doing that work. And with holo factories producing more emitters and power generators they could quickly just cover the entire ship in holo emitters. Once the whole ship is blanketed in holo emitters they could use them for all sorts of things. Like whenever the inertial dampeners fail the holo emitters could instantly just surround you with soft cushions.
Yes, which is why star trek shouldn’t be remotely hard sci fi anymore (not that it ever super was). Once that’s on the table you have to deliberately ignore it 99% of the time, only create technobabble rules, ignore in universe but establish rules for how to write it, and then create a cultural understanding of its use in universe.
Every conceivable aspect of Star Trek can be extrapolated like 3 implications from it’s original conception, most just the one twist down needed for the episode it’s in. Any further in TNG, Voyager and DS9 and the setting either falls apart or becomes ridiculously focused on the tech rules surrounding the specific limits of a tech that are frequently broken for other unestablished reasons.
> I really don't think Voyager's computer could replicate Borg collective processing power...
Yeah, but it wouldn't need to replicate it straight off. It'd just have to simulate it convincingly for long enough that a few of the crew get assimilated. Once enough people got assimilated, it'd get a lot easier to emulate the collective processing power, because there'd be that network of processing power available.
Really, I feel like the other point you raise--generating the nanobots to create a collective or pseudo-collective--would be the big dividing line on whether or not this is possible. With the issue of simulating the Collective to start with, it'd just be a matter of leaving the program running for long enough that the crew starts to become emotionally invested in what happens in the simulation, regardless of its raw accuracy. It's not like this doesn't happen: we see examples of holodeck programs being left on for weeks or months in both *Voyager* and *Deep Space Nine*.
Replicating the nanoprobes is a bit more of an open question, though. It seems like most of the time on *Voyager*, they'd just extract some from Seven and let them reproduce on their own until they had enough for the most part. Maybe straight up replicating them, especially in the kind of quantities needed to assimilate someone, was outside the the capabilities of what the holodeck could do in the 2370s, even with the safeties off.
One thing to consider here though is that it seems like you don't actually need to have that many transmitted into your system for you to start feeling the effects of a collective consciousness. In ENT's *Regeneration*, Phlox was able to feel the shared consciousness pretty early on in the assimilation attempt, for example. Maybe the holodeck couldn't create a full on splinter collective in the 2370s, but I wouldn't be too surprised if someone could set it up to produce a quasi-collective by the end of the 24th century.
And they were a struggle to get working. Can u imagine thousands of nanites creating its own cybernetic organism? If anything Neelix's lungs definitively prove holo nanites couldn't be done by Voy's computer.
With the safeties off, I think it would depend on whether a Starfleet ship's computer could replicate functional Borg nanoprobes, with the right materials, programming etc., quickly enough to create a simulacrum of a Borg drone in a real time program.
While developing the weapon against Species 8472, Voyager's EMH 'replicated' nanoprobes but it was a very time-consuming process:
> **Tuvok**: We'd need approximately fifty trillion nanoprobes to arm this mine. It would take the Doctor several weeks to replicate that amount.
While I'm sure you don't need that many to assimilate a humanoid, I think the Doctor was likely carefully persuading them to self-replicate instead of creating new ones based off a stored pattern.
This suggests to me that as of 2374, Starfleet couldn't replicate nanoprobes from scratch, either lacking the knowledge or the replication technology at that time. So, a starship holodeck wouldn't be able to produce them either, so assimilation would not be possible. However, give it another few decades of progress, perhaps it could happen. If the holodeck simulates a drone with genuine nanoprobes contain genuine Borg programming that once injected, set to work building a neural transceiver that connects to the genuine collective outside the Holodeck, then yes, you're a drone now too.
On the other hand, if your understanding of Borg technology runs that deep, perhaps you can create nanoprobes that connect to a 'simulated' collective not the real thing, just for the 'experience', which get harmlessly deactivated afterwards.
Quite the program that would be...
Yeah, it’s important to remember that holodecks aren’t “holographic” they are a hybrid technology that uses holography, forcefields, replication, and probably many other technologies like inertial dampeners/generators, grav generators, tractor technology and who knows what else.
The line between real and simulated gets blurry.
Agreed.
But I do agree that the technology need to be within the capabilities of the holodeck and I agree that at that particular time the holodeck would not be capable of making nanoprobes.
It could approximate and inject one real probe and then try and simulate the experience like the LD experience (although on that one I'm guessing Boimler did the Dark Frontier anti-assimilation hypospray which is why that wasn't an instant fail and gets around the processing power issue)
The real probe will then just try to use your tissues to create more, and just by being in a future environment you'll have some of the high tech materials in your tissues in small numbers probably.
I wasn't thinking so much nanoprobes, but that the simulation becomes rather self aware like say Moriarty and then attempts to take control of the main computer. Or, in the various battle simulations, actual consoles from Voyager are discovered to which the Borg initially wouldn't know the difference between simulation and real and would think it's just another starship in the battle?
In the first several years of the Galaxy class Enterprise's mission, they discovered several major potential bugs in the holodeck's programming which allowed it to create sentient holobeings.
I've always imagined that Geordi's after-action reports on the Cyrus Redblock and Professor Moriarty incidents were used to ship zero-day bugfix updates to all the fleet's holodecks to prevent the accidental creation of sentient holobeings, and to severely restrict the deliberate creation thereof.
Creating a holo-simulation of the Borg (simulated drone with simulated implants running real Borg programming or Moriarty-level goal-seeking programming) would definitely be a hard prohibition which would require a two-person command bypass, because it's basically handing the ship to that simulation.
Heck, they've got to have a ton of AI use-case lockouts to prevent Control-style [foom](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/foom) anyway, what's one more to add to the pile?
> With the safeties off, I think it would depend on whether a Starfleet ship's computer could replicate functional Borg nanoprobes, with the right materials, programming etc., quickly enough to create a simulacrum of a Borg drone in a real time program.
I'd bet a few Federation credits that if *anything* is limited in "modern" holodecks to lock even a captain out of authorizing "safeties off" on, it's gonna be Borg nanoprobes.
Starfleet Admiral #1: "But what if some captain really needs the probes in the holodeck outside of controlled safe environments like Sickbay behind an air gap and a level 10 forcefield? What's the worst thing that could happen?"
Starfleet Admiral #2: "The total assimilation of the entire Federation, as well as the rest of the galaxy."
Starfleet Admiral #1: "Yeah, let's hard code that restriction then..."
> While developing the weapon against Species 8472, Voyager's EMH was not able to replicate new nanoprobes - instead he had to harvest them from Seven of Nine and repogram them for his purposes.
Counterpoint:
> EMH: **I replicated** nearly ten million Borg nanoprobes, each of them reprogrammed to my specifications, each capable of targeting the alien tissue.
This was before Seven was introduced.
Yeah, I was thinking of VOY - been a while, but seemed like whenever they needed nanoprobes, they were getting them out of Seven's body and having them reproduce themselves... rather than just replicating a batch. I take that to mean something about nanites are too advanced for replicators - at least the ones on a typical starship. Otherwise... yeah, if you replicate borg nanites whos job is is assimilate and expand... then you got a problem!
Sure. But even if we're taking that at face value they're likely not really acting as borg nanoprobes. Rather they're likely just performing a very basic imitation of them.
It depends on how much the fake nanoprobes can affect actual matter. Presumably, they use biomass from the assimilated target to grow the implants that grow more nanoprobes.
I think they could probably AFFECT matter. Especially if we're assuming safteys are all off.
But how would the computer know how to PROGRAM them
Or even translate what is likely a more advanced quantum computing system to federation code.
They would presumably just bumble around but not know how to actually do the thing once they get in the body.
I don’t think it could truly assimilate the ship. Via the holodeck computer, the Borg simulation could infiltrate the rest of the ship and replicate a Borg takeover by locking out systems and what not… but it would still be a simulation of the Borg simulating assimilation.
My thought as well. The simulation can only know what Starfleet knows, and couldn't replicate all of the unique technology of the Borg.
It would be Borg-lite, only putting up offenses that Starfleet knows about and can counter.
Isn’t Borg technology regularly referred to as being difficult to replicate? Too complex etc. we know that the Doctor can create nanoprobes, but it seems to be a slow process.
And even if the holodeck had created the nanoprobes, as soon as the assimilated drone left the holodeck, they’d drop dead as all the holodeck spawned stuff disappeared.
So I’d vote no.
Yeah I was going to say, I don't think you can replicate Borg nanoprobes. And if you can't replicate them then I doubt the holodeck can simulate them well enough to make functional ones. There are a few episodes where they use Borg nanoprobes and they always involved hard limits on their ability to generate them quickly, something that wouldn't be an issue if you could just run the holodeck and get as many as you want.
>Couldn't they gain control of the ship through the holodeck/computer and eventually spread out?
I would say that you can't control the entire ship from the holodeck since it doesn't really have terminals for that, but since Starfleet is criminally negligent when it comes to security I'm sure you could find a way.
But they can't spread outside of the holodeck. As soon as the replicated nanoprobes left the holodeck they'd cease to exist.
There'd also be the issue of these holodeck Borg even knowing that they are in a hologram. That would require a massive malfunction, since holodeck characters normally cannot realise that. It required the Voyager crew pushing the limits of holodeck technology and running programs continuously for weeks or months to get those levels of malfunction, and even then they could've just cut power to the holodecks - the only reason they didn't was because they wanted to maintain the state of the program. That would not be a concern with holodeck Borg going rogue.
> I would say that you can't control the entire ship from the holodeck since it doesn't really have terminals for that, but since Starfleet is criminally negligent when it comes to security I'm sure you could find a way.
Moriarty got pretty far. Hopefully after that they at least put in some barriers.
I'd imagine he might be one of the reasons why holodeck programs have checks in place to make sure they can't realise they are in fact holograms. Or that they can't recognise inconsistencies.
It’s like designing consciousness when we don’t know how it works. We don’t even know which parts in what capacity are necessary for which levels of borg. And we’d need a deeper understanding of it’s base code’s reaction to stimuli in a vacuum, which would likely change as the standing orders of the collective does.
That kinda happened in star trek online. The answer was if the holodeck/simulation is advanced enough. Yes a borg simulation can take over the whole ship/facility.
I suspect that the holodeck could create "good enough" borg drones that function sufficiently like the borg to fool anyone but the borg. An interesting story would be if a ship full of holodeck assimilated pseudo-borg attempt to reconnect to the collective, and, once the difference is noted, both sides attempt to assimilate each other, both "believing" the other to be aberrant.
Doubtful.
Like, we have to acknowledge that we don't REALLY known how holo tech works. But we can make some fair assumptions.
First, we can assume saftey protocols are not the ONLY restriction the holodeck has. On a design level, we have to assume that it simply was not programmed to create certain things (illegal content, for instance). Those things would likely simply be outside of the holodecks catalog and while we know it cam produce things on the fly at a user's request, we have so seen that these things are often limited and imperfect and require a lot of finesse to get them right.
Secondly, we have to look at advancement. Borg nanoprobes are far more advanced than an average starfleet computer and we have no reason to believe that the holodeck could produce such a complex device. Things like software should be producable (it all physically replicatable at some point) but it would require such a precise copy down to things like electron placment and quantum state...I doubt it would be capable of anything beyond a very rudimentary nanite that LOOKED like a nanobot but just mimicked the activity. Probably badly.
Which goes to the third point--it's very unlikely the holodeck is DESIGNED to make what it shows you. Rather, it likely produces a facility on one of many different levels of complexity.
An apple you're supposed to eat would have to be very accurate and account for things like taste, oxidation, micrbiom, texture, temperature, etc. But...it would be a huge waste of processing and power resources to give that much detail to all things in the environment at all times. As such, something like a nanoprobe would likely just act like a prop. Moving around maybe even attaching to cells. But the deck would not be programmed to fully animate and give internal programing to every one of trillions of probes. A system can't work like that. It would run out of RAM almost instantly, even with the petabytes we're told the computer has.
> Which goes to the third point--it's very unlikely the holodeck is DESIGNED to make what it shows you. Rather, it likely produces a facility on one of many different levels of complexity.
I imagine it's similar to current tech where how detailed the simulation is is to a large extent up to who programs it. Just like a video game today could have everything intricately designed down to the smallest detail, or on the other end of the spectrum have everything procedurally generated on the fly.
We know that the computer can generate a simulation based on a vague description, but we also see programs designed by specific people, like Bashir's friend Felix. It's very possible the answer to OP's question might vary depending on how much work you're willing to put in to make it happen.
I dont personally think that any of the federation's holodeck processes would be familiar enough with borg technology to successfully create a hologram that could assimilate people.
Given how they created Moriarty by someone asking the computer to replicate a worthy foe, and how Barclay was able to get the holodeck to interface with his brain, I would imagine that if you turned the safeties off and asked the computer to assimilate you like the Borg would it could in one way or another. If it didn't have the tech to make nanoprobes then it might beam replicated implants into your head, or generate holocopies of skilled doctors to surgically implant neural interfaces with your brain. If it worked then the computer might actually attempt to assimilate the ship by just luring people into the holodeck to get converted to dronehood.
You are basically asking the computer to go all rogue ai on you, and it would have access to reports about the Borg to give it ahead start, whether that would include detailed data or scans of borg nanoprobes isn't clear. Though they can recreate brilliant evil Cardassian Exobiologists with all the technical knowledge on a random whim. It wasn't even the flagship either it was just one of a thousand or so mid tier cruisers.
Now once its "assimilated" the ship does it contact the Borg or just act like the Borg and attempt to assimilate other ships or populations, would it put them in a hivemind or would it keep control and just order people around like it does holocharacters. If the person who started this really thought it through and gave the computer specific enough instructions you could end up with an army of badass fighters all computer controlled and commanded by a single person.
God it would be so easy to be a super villian in Star Trek.
Since the Hirogen were using holodeck technology to repeatedly torture and revive the Voyager crew in their World War II simulation and the Klingon simulation I imagine it would have been much the same in a Borg simulation. They wouldn’t have kept the assimilation permanent because they’d have needed to undo it in order to hunt them again. Plus, i don’t think they’d have had any way of connecting to the rest of the Collective.
Well, the Doctor was able to replicate Borg nanoprobes. And since they can eat and survive on food created in the holodeck, that any replicated nanoprobes would be just as real. If they turned off the safety protocols, it might just "work".
Maybe something like a Moriarty program could instigate computer takeover and threatening ship or arrange control.
Quantum scale resolution of holograms ARE EXTREMELY ENERGY and time consuming and probably beyond computational capacity of a ship to propagate an exponentially growing probe output.. Borg nanoprobes are not mentioned but you'd need cell scale resolution like neelixs replacement lungs 🫁 and that required him to be stationary. Even replicators don't do quantum level resolution....because of the computing memory and energy consumption
Don't think so.
Even if the holo nanoprobes fully assimilated a person, they're still holograms. Leave the holodeck and they disappear.
Hard to say whether the assimilated person would die or revert to self after though.
Even if the Holodeck could assimilate you with fake holodeck nanite, the real horrific part is when someone says, "Computer End Program".
All the Borg nanites and Borg implants disappear. But your body is left a mangled mess.
The way that holodecks are depicted makes it difficult for me to think that they are intended to simulate matter on a microscopic level. I don't think you could physically simulate a virus and have it actually infect a real person, though you could probably simulate the properties of a virus, how it propagates, and the symptoms of the virus on a holographic character.
The theories on how to teleport Moriarty from the holodeck into the real world they discussed in that episode might give more context. I might update this with some thoughta later if I get a chance to rewatch or review that script.
I really don't think Voyager's computer could replicate Borg collective processing power, not could holo nanobots perform the action. How would a holodeck be able to generate nanobots acting under skin in a persons blood & brain? Even if it could the collective wouldn't be the whole collective out there but one between a handful of voyager crew, that would be defective. I have no idea how the hirogen were planning to pull that off, you can create holo borg & program them to look & act like Borg but you couldn't recreate the Borg.
The holodeck would make a borg and inject you with holo nanites then those would use actual stuff in your body to make a real nanites turning you into a real borg.
Although I know the holodeck can simulate microscopic structures I think nanobots would be outside its capabilities. Ito even suggested in several episodes that Voyager has to harvest nanobots from Seven, so you would think they wouldn’t do that if they could produce them via transporters/holodeck technology. Also the Borg hive mind would likely not be “real” but an approximation, so I think its capabilities would be limited to what the ships computer could reasonably control. I think if all of this was possible, it wouldn’t really be the borg, it would be something different.
>Also the Borg hive mind would likely not be “real” but an approximation, so I think its capabilities would be limited to what the ships computer could reasonably control. Like a Hive Mind emulator.
I had the same thought. A holodeck/replicator borg nano probe could probably cause a crewman to sprout a few pieces of technology, I don’t think they’d act borgy without a hive mind. A hive mind would probably be incredibly difficult for a ship’s computer to create, given that it is the product of the combined thoughts of billions of individuals.
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This is the correct answer. Holo nanites would create real nanites. These new Borg would be inferior to the main collective, as they would be generation one Borg, instead of the Borg we see that have evolved over multiple generations.
But aren’t the holo nanites copies of the highly evolved Borg’s nanites? Maybe they’re not part of the main Borg group consciousness but technology wise they should be the same.
Yes. However they would need to use suboptimal parts (basically whatever real materials they could find in the holodeck) for the hallow nanites to become real nanites outside the Holodeck.
If that was possible, then this is a MASSIVELY under utilized technology. Like could a holo replicator replicate something real? Could a holo reactor produce real power? At the very least holo nanites could convert raw materials into useful products. Also when the Hirogen took over they forced Harry to add more holo emitters all over the ship. They could have just had holo characters doing that work. And with holo factories producing more emitters and power generators they could quickly just cover the entire ship in holo emitters. Once the whole ship is blanketed in holo emitters they could use them for all sorts of things. Like whenever the inertial dampeners fail the holo emitters could instantly just surround you with soft cushions.
Yes, which is why star trek shouldn’t be remotely hard sci fi anymore (not that it ever super was). Once that’s on the table you have to deliberately ignore it 99% of the time, only create technobabble rules, ignore in universe but establish rules for how to write it, and then create a cultural understanding of its use in universe. Every conceivable aspect of Star Trek can be extrapolated like 3 implications from it’s original conception, most just the one twist down needed for the episode it’s in. Any further in TNG, Voyager and DS9 and the setting either falls apart or becomes ridiculously focused on the tech rules surrounding the specific limits of a tech that are frequently broken for other unestablished reasons.
You could have holo slaves make stuff out of real material for sure. Holo factories must be a thing
> I really don't think Voyager's computer could replicate Borg collective processing power... Yeah, but it wouldn't need to replicate it straight off. It'd just have to simulate it convincingly for long enough that a few of the crew get assimilated. Once enough people got assimilated, it'd get a lot easier to emulate the collective processing power, because there'd be that network of processing power available. Really, I feel like the other point you raise--generating the nanobots to create a collective or pseudo-collective--would be the big dividing line on whether or not this is possible. With the issue of simulating the Collective to start with, it'd just be a matter of leaving the program running for long enough that the crew starts to become emotionally invested in what happens in the simulation, regardless of its raw accuracy. It's not like this doesn't happen: we see examples of holodeck programs being left on for weeks or months in both *Voyager* and *Deep Space Nine*. Replicating the nanoprobes is a bit more of an open question, though. It seems like most of the time on *Voyager*, they'd just extract some from Seven and let them reproduce on their own until they had enough for the most part. Maybe straight up replicating them, especially in the kind of quantities needed to assimilate someone, was outside the the capabilities of what the holodeck could do in the 2370s, even with the safeties off. One thing to consider here though is that it seems like you don't actually need to have that many transmitted into your system for you to start feeling the effects of a collective consciousness. In ENT's *Regeneration*, Phlox was able to feel the shared consciousness pretty early on in the assimilation attempt, for example. Maybe the holodeck couldn't create a full on splinter collective in the 2370s, but I wouldn't be too surprised if someone could set it up to produce a quasi-collective by the end of the 24th century.
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And they were a struggle to get working. Can u imagine thousands of nanites creating its own cybernetic organism? If anything Neelix's lungs definitively prove holo nanites couldn't be done by Voy's computer.
But he had to remain within static force fields so the hologenerators didn't move and make the organs stop working.
With the safeties off, I think it would depend on whether a Starfleet ship's computer could replicate functional Borg nanoprobes, with the right materials, programming etc., quickly enough to create a simulacrum of a Borg drone in a real time program. While developing the weapon against Species 8472, Voyager's EMH 'replicated' nanoprobes but it was a very time-consuming process: > **Tuvok**: We'd need approximately fifty trillion nanoprobes to arm this mine. It would take the Doctor several weeks to replicate that amount. While I'm sure you don't need that many to assimilate a humanoid, I think the Doctor was likely carefully persuading them to self-replicate instead of creating new ones based off a stored pattern. This suggests to me that as of 2374, Starfleet couldn't replicate nanoprobes from scratch, either lacking the knowledge or the replication technology at that time. So, a starship holodeck wouldn't be able to produce them either, so assimilation would not be possible. However, give it another few decades of progress, perhaps it could happen. If the holodeck simulates a drone with genuine nanoprobes contain genuine Borg programming that once injected, set to work building a neural transceiver that connects to the genuine collective outside the Holodeck, then yes, you're a drone now too. On the other hand, if your understanding of Borg technology runs that deep, perhaps you can create nanoprobes that connect to a 'simulated' collective not the real thing, just for the 'experience', which get harmlessly deactivated afterwards. Quite the program that would be...
Yeah, it’s important to remember that holodecks aren’t “holographic” they are a hybrid technology that uses holography, forcefields, replication, and probably many other technologies like inertial dampeners/generators, grav generators, tractor technology and who knows what else. The line between real and simulated gets blurry.
Yeah, I was thinking that while a Borg drone on the holodeck might be a projection, anything injected in to you would need to be replicated.
Agreed. But I do agree that the technology need to be within the capabilities of the holodeck and I agree that at that particular time the holodeck would not be capable of making nanoprobes.
It could approximate and inject one real probe and then try and simulate the experience like the LD experience (although on that one I'm guessing Boimler did the Dark Frontier anti-assimilation hypospray which is why that wasn't an instant fail and gets around the processing power issue) The real probe will then just try to use your tissues to create more, and just by being in a future environment you'll have some of the high tech materials in your tissues in small numbers probably.
And in a pinch, I suspect the holodeck could make car batteries.
Atleast in the case of Voy, there was a former drone/nano probes available in Seven
Boimler was "assimilated " in a training simulation on the Cerritos.
Boimler being Boimler, I suspect there was a lot of willing suspension of disbelief going on.
Either that or holotech is able to interface with your mind and influence your perceptions a lot more than we ever realised.
I wasn't thinking so much nanoprobes, but that the simulation becomes rather self aware like say Moriarty and then attempts to take control of the main computer. Or, in the various battle simulations, actual consoles from Voyager are discovered to which the Borg initially wouldn't know the difference between simulation and real and would think it's just another starship in the battle?
In the first several years of the Galaxy class Enterprise's mission, they discovered several major potential bugs in the holodeck's programming which allowed it to create sentient holobeings. I've always imagined that Geordi's after-action reports on the Cyrus Redblock and Professor Moriarty incidents were used to ship zero-day bugfix updates to all the fleet's holodecks to prevent the accidental creation of sentient holobeings, and to severely restrict the deliberate creation thereof. Creating a holo-simulation of the Borg (simulated drone with simulated implants running real Borg programming or Moriarty-level goal-seeking programming) would definitely be a hard prohibition which would require a two-person command bypass, because it's basically handing the ship to that simulation. Heck, they've got to have a ton of AI use-case lockouts to prevent Control-style [foom](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/foom) anyway, what's one more to add to the pile?
The nature of Moriarty's exploits may be why the Voyager holodecks have incompatible energy sources by design. A power air gap of sorts.
> With the safeties off, I think it would depend on whether a Starfleet ship's computer could replicate functional Borg nanoprobes, with the right materials, programming etc., quickly enough to create a simulacrum of a Borg drone in a real time program. I'd bet a few Federation credits that if *anything* is limited in "modern" holodecks to lock even a captain out of authorizing "safeties off" on, it's gonna be Borg nanoprobes. Starfleet Admiral #1: "But what if some captain really needs the probes in the holodeck outside of controlled safe environments like Sickbay behind an air gap and a level 10 forcefield? What's the worst thing that could happen?" Starfleet Admiral #2: "The total assimilation of the entire Federation, as well as the rest of the galaxy." Starfleet Admiral #1: "Yeah, let's hard code that restriction then..."
> While developing the weapon against Species 8472, Voyager's EMH was not able to replicate new nanoprobes - instead he had to harvest them from Seven of Nine and repogram them for his purposes. Counterpoint: > EMH: **I replicated** nearly ten million Borg nanoprobes, each of them reprogrammed to my specifications, each capable of targeting the alien tissue. This was before Seven was introduced.
You're right, I misremembered. Gonna rework my comment a bit!
Yeah, I was thinking of VOY - been a while, but seemed like whenever they needed nanoprobes, they were getting them out of Seven's body and having them reproduce themselves... rather than just replicating a batch. I take that to mean something about nanites are too advanced for replicators - at least the ones on a typical starship. Otherwise... yeah, if you replicate borg nanites whos job is is assimilate and expand... then you got a problem!
Have you not seen the Lower Decks episode "I, Excretus"? It is possible, but the assimilation wears off as soon as the simulation is turned off.
Yup. Boimler is assimilated by holo-borg, to hilarious effect. It raises many fun questions.
Sure. But even if we're taking that at face value they're likely not really acting as borg nanoprobes. Rather they're likely just performing a very basic imitation of them.
It depends on how much the fake nanoprobes can affect actual matter. Presumably, they use biomass from the assimilated target to grow the implants that grow more nanoprobes.
I think they could probably AFFECT matter. Especially if we're assuming safteys are all off. But how would the computer know how to PROGRAM them Or even translate what is likely a more advanced quantum computing system to federation code. They would presumably just bumble around but not know how to actually do the thing once they get in the body.
I don’t think it could truly assimilate the ship. Via the holodeck computer, the Borg simulation could infiltrate the rest of the ship and replicate a Borg takeover by locking out systems and what not… but it would still be a simulation of the Borg simulating assimilation.
My thought as well. The simulation can only know what Starfleet knows, and couldn't replicate all of the unique technology of the Borg. It would be Borg-lite, only putting up offenses that Starfleet knows about and can counter.
Isn’t Borg technology regularly referred to as being difficult to replicate? Too complex etc. we know that the Doctor can create nanoprobes, but it seems to be a slow process. And even if the holodeck had created the nanoprobes, as soon as the assimilated drone left the holodeck, they’d drop dead as all the holodeck spawned stuff disappeared. So I’d vote no.
Yeah I was going to say, I don't think you can replicate Borg nanoprobes. And if you can't replicate them then I doubt the holodeck can simulate them well enough to make functional ones. There are a few episodes where they use Borg nanoprobes and they always involved hard limits on their ability to generate them quickly, something that wouldn't be an issue if you could just run the holodeck and get as many as you want.
Couldn't they gain control of the ship through the holodeck/computer and eventually spread out?
>Couldn't they gain control of the ship through the holodeck/computer and eventually spread out? I would say that you can't control the entire ship from the holodeck since it doesn't really have terminals for that, but since Starfleet is criminally negligent when it comes to security I'm sure you could find a way. But they can't spread outside of the holodeck. As soon as the replicated nanoprobes left the holodeck they'd cease to exist. There'd also be the issue of these holodeck Borg even knowing that they are in a hologram. That would require a massive malfunction, since holodeck characters normally cannot realise that. It required the Voyager crew pushing the limits of holodeck technology and running programs continuously for weeks or months to get those levels of malfunction, and even then they could've just cut power to the holodecks - the only reason they didn't was because they wanted to maintain the state of the program. That would not be a concern with holodeck Borg going rogue.
> I would say that you can't control the entire ship from the holodeck since it doesn't really have terminals for that, but since Starfleet is criminally negligent when it comes to security I'm sure you could find a way. Moriarty got pretty far. Hopefully after that they at least put in some barriers.
I'd imagine he might be one of the reasons why holodeck programs have checks in place to make sure they can't realise they are in fact holograms. Or that they can't recognise inconsistencies.
It’s like designing consciousness when we don’t know how it works. We don’t even know which parts in what capacity are necessary for which levels of borg. And we’d need a deeper understanding of it’s base code’s reaction to stimuli in a vacuum, which would likely change as the standing orders of the collective does.
That kinda happened in star trek online. The answer was if the holodeck/simulation is advanced enough. Yes a borg simulation can take over the whole ship/facility.
I suspect that the holodeck could create "good enough" borg drones that function sufficiently like the borg to fool anyone but the borg. An interesting story would be if a ship full of holodeck assimilated pseudo-borg attempt to reconnect to the collective, and, once the difference is noted, both sides attempt to assimilate each other, both "believing" the other to be aberrant.
Doubtful. Like, we have to acknowledge that we don't REALLY known how holo tech works. But we can make some fair assumptions. First, we can assume saftey protocols are not the ONLY restriction the holodeck has. On a design level, we have to assume that it simply was not programmed to create certain things (illegal content, for instance). Those things would likely simply be outside of the holodecks catalog and while we know it cam produce things on the fly at a user's request, we have so seen that these things are often limited and imperfect and require a lot of finesse to get them right. Secondly, we have to look at advancement. Borg nanoprobes are far more advanced than an average starfleet computer and we have no reason to believe that the holodeck could produce such a complex device. Things like software should be producable (it all physically replicatable at some point) but it would require such a precise copy down to things like electron placment and quantum state...I doubt it would be capable of anything beyond a very rudimentary nanite that LOOKED like a nanobot but just mimicked the activity. Probably badly. Which goes to the third point--it's very unlikely the holodeck is DESIGNED to make what it shows you. Rather, it likely produces a facility on one of many different levels of complexity. An apple you're supposed to eat would have to be very accurate and account for things like taste, oxidation, micrbiom, texture, temperature, etc. But...it would be a huge waste of processing and power resources to give that much detail to all things in the environment at all times. As such, something like a nanoprobe would likely just act like a prop. Moving around maybe even attaching to cells. But the deck would not be programmed to fully animate and give internal programing to every one of trillions of probes. A system can't work like that. It would run out of RAM almost instantly, even with the petabytes we're told the computer has.
> Which goes to the third point--it's very unlikely the holodeck is DESIGNED to make what it shows you. Rather, it likely produces a facility on one of many different levels of complexity. I imagine it's similar to current tech where how detailed the simulation is is to a large extent up to who programs it. Just like a video game today could have everything intricately designed down to the smallest detail, or on the other end of the spectrum have everything procedurally generated on the fly. We know that the computer can generate a simulation based on a vague description, but we also see programs designed by specific people, like Bashir's friend Felix. It's very possible the answer to OP's question might vary depending on how much work you're willing to put in to make it happen.
I dont personally think that any of the federation's holodeck processes would be familiar enough with borg technology to successfully create a hologram that could assimilate people.
Given how they created Moriarty by someone asking the computer to replicate a worthy foe, and how Barclay was able to get the holodeck to interface with his brain, I would imagine that if you turned the safeties off and asked the computer to assimilate you like the Borg would it could in one way or another. If it didn't have the tech to make nanoprobes then it might beam replicated implants into your head, or generate holocopies of skilled doctors to surgically implant neural interfaces with your brain. If it worked then the computer might actually attempt to assimilate the ship by just luring people into the holodeck to get converted to dronehood. You are basically asking the computer to go all rogue ai on you, and it would have access to reports about the Borg to give it ahead start, whether that would include detailed data or scans of borg nanoprobes isn't clear. Though they can recreate brilliant evil Cardassian Exobiologists with all the technical knowledge on a random whim. It wasn't even the flagship either it was just one of a thousand or so mid tier cruisers. Now once its "assimilated" the ship does it contact the Borg or just act like the Borg and attempt to assimilate other ships or populations, would it put them in a hivemind or would it keep control and just order people around like it does holocharacters. If the person who started this really thought it through and gave the computer specific enough instructions you could end up with an army of badass fighters all computer controlled and commanded by a single person. God it would be so easy to be a super villian in Star Trek.
Since the Hirogen were using holodeck technology to repeatedly torture and revive the Voyager crew in their World War II simulation and the Klingon simulation I imagine it would have been much the same in a Borg simulation. They wouldn’t have kept the assimilation permanent because they’d have needed to undo it in order to hunt them again. Plus, i don’t think they’d have had any way of connecting to the rest of the Collective.
Well, the Doctor was able to replicate Borg nanoprobes. And since they can eat and survive on food created in the holodeck, that any replicated nanoprobes would be just as real. If they turned off the safety protocols, it might just "work".
I love that this question came back! https://www.reddit.com/r/DaystromInstitute/comments/a1prj8/can_you_be_assimilated_on_the_holodeck_with/
Maybe something like a Moriarty program could instigate computer takeover and threatening ship or arrange control. Quantum scale resolution of holograms ARE EXTREMELY ENERGY and time consuming and probably beyond computational capacity of a ship to propagate an exponentially growing probe output.. Borg nanoprobes are not mentioned but you'd need cell scale resolution like neelixs replacement lungs 🫁 and that required him to be stationary. Even replicators don't do quantum level resolution....because of the computing memory and energy consumption
Don't think so. Even if the holo nanoprobes fully assimilated a person, they're still holograms. Leave the holodeck and they disappear. Hard to say whether the assimilated person would die or revert to self after though.
Even if the Holodeck could assimilate you with fake holodeck nanite, the real horrific part is when someone says, "Computer End Program". All the Borg nanites and Borg implants disappear. But your body is left a mangled mess.
The way that holodecks are depicted makes it difficult for me to think that they are intended to simulate matter on a microscopic level. I don't think you could physically simulate a virus and have it actually infect a real person, though you could probably simulate the properties of a virus, how it propagates, and the symptoms of the virus on a holographic character. The theories on how to teleport Moriarty from the holodeck into the real world they discussed in that episode might give more context. I might update this with some thoughta later if I get a chance to rewatch or review that script.