The Borg: Resistance is futile, but why resist?

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that this subject has been covered before, but it is something I'd like to put into writing as it did play a big part in who I am today. My writing skills aren't too much to sing about so bare with me if my grammar sometimes wavers.

Looking back on my life, some of my fondest memories were of watching Star Trek. I was about 11 or 12 when Star Trek: Voyager was released, and I remember clearly how I stayed up until the late hours to watch the premier. Being from the United Kingdom meant I had to stay up until long past midnight on a school night to catch the first episode of the new series being broadcast from the States. It was a momentous occasion for a young sci-fi loving lad and I'm sure I wasn't the only one. A moment I will always cherish.

After discovering guitar playing, partying, the infinite joys the opposite sex could provide and having to work for a living, Star Trek took a back seat as my life moved off into other directions. Until recently that was, when I was compelled to purchase all the old episodes on DVD and watch them. Oh, how the nostalgia did flow. Naturally, as a young boy, a lot of what happened in Star Trek went over my prepubescent head. I had missed a lot of the commentaries on modern life and the many layers the episodes had to offer for those willing to look for them and enjoyed seeing them again with an older head on my shoulders.

And so it came to seeing the Borg all over again, and I couldn't help but almost sympathize with them the second time around. Perhaps I was looking a little too far into the episodes, but I couldn't help but think to myself "These guys have got the right idea!"

Of course, their methods of "assimilation" and "adapting cultures to service us" were terrifying. Their all-conquering, heartless and calculating nature ("Resistance Is Futile..." It really smegging was), their ability to adapt to weaponry and regenerate, they were the perfect enemy for the Star Trek universe. But inside their cold and barbaric acts, there seemed, to me at least, to be an almost Transhuman ethic.

Putting the cruelty and such aside, are the Borg not just a race striving for the kind of perfection that Transhumanists aspire to? The Borg are a collective consciousness, a whole race made up of thousands of cultures and species, all working towards the same goal with no hint of racism or prejudice (aside from that whole galactic domination thing, but we'll waver that for now.)

As their race progresses and grows to engulf other races and areas of the galaxy, they adapt to their newfound surroundings and update themselves, using what they have assimilated. They rebuild themselves and augment their bodies, becoming more powerful than before. Smarter, stronger, faster. They operate as one entity, working towards a single goal; Perfection.

Now, I'm not suggesting that Transhumanism will turn the human race into an army of murderous cyborgs, far from it. But are the two so different, when you strip back the layers to their foundations?

I'm very much into the sharing of knowledge. I think it is one of the most powerful things in our universe and something that everyone should have access to. I think our whole race should be united as one, all working towards a goal of inner perfection and exploration. Why should we be stuck with the same body we were born with? Why can we not upgrade, like we do our phones, our computers, our cars?
While we should still retain our individuality, I think our race would benefit from a kind of collective consciousness as well. Perhaps not to the extremes of The Borg, but something more malleable. Something like a collective subconciousness, to be aware of others and be able to share our combined knowledge, but still retain that which makes us us.

Perhaps our race as a whole needs such a kick in the brain. If the whole world suddenly thought as one, we would know the suffering and pain of others to a deep, personal level, while also understanding, as a whole, why we need to unite and move forward as a single species, not wasting our time killing each other and taking each others stuff.  We would see the ridiculousness of our actions, how our hate for each other just holds us back and prevents us from becoming more than human. Just as The Borg work to better themselves as a whole, so should we. It could be a marvellous thing.

Assuming we don't end up assimilating the first alien species we meet and injecting them with cyborg creating nanobots, I think we'll do just fine.