"Oh boy, I bet this is about V'ger!"

30 seconds in "Vindication!"

I think the question that should be asked about V'ger which may help to expand upon this thesis is not 'Where' did Voyager 6 appear after leaving the wormhole, but 'WHEN'?
There is no way V'ger could have learned all it had within it in the time between its launch and the time it encountered The Enterprise ('Whole Galaxies' Spock said, remember?), it MUST have been not only thrown across the Universe, but thrown across time itself to a past incomprehensible to us.

In the Delta quadrant, Voyager came across a machine civilization, whose ships looked like giant gears that would upgrade Viger, because they themselves wanted to achieve a goal and maybe saw Vjer's directive as one path to that goal. Then just turn it loose. Viger would then go on and upgrade itself over time until it eventually returned to the Sole System as what it was.

V'ger isn't trying to understand the universe, it's trying to understand itself. It's why it's returning home; as far as it's concerned it's purpose is fulfilled, which by implication suggests it already has all knowledge (or at least, is presumably under the belief it does). What it can't do however is give itself a new purpose, which is why it's seeking out the creator. The Borg on the other hand have a purpose, and at least believe they understand themselves. I think philosophically they're actually opposites - V'ger is looking inwards, the Borg on the other hand are looking outwards (though neither seem capable of finding a complete answer to their question(s) without an organic component; you could potentially add Data to that too - in fact the only sentient machine that seems to have found the answers to those questions, or at least made peace with it's place in the universe, without somehow incorporating an organic component is Lore, and it drove him insane).

Guinan said the Borg were around for thousands of centuries and a character on Voyager who said 800 years ago when he was put into stasis, the Borg had only assimilated a few colonies in the Delta quadrant. That timeline would place those assimilations right around the time of Columbus. So according to this character, the Borg were already assimilating colonies at least 800 years before Vger.

V'Ger is on a quest for meaning, which is a major theme for the movie. Spock is searching for it. Even Kirk is searching for meaning in his life if he's stuck behind a desk.

V'Ger was designed as a probe and nothing more. Like the Voyager probes, its mission was one way. It would never be able to return to Earth. It could, at best, gather rudimentary information or telemetry and fire that information back at earth for people to analyze.

V'Ger was damaged however, and the machine race that found it simply thought it was a damaged machine intelligence. They repaired and upgraded its rudimentary "intelligence," but it maintained the same programming directive. But that upgrade gave it the ability to not just collect data, but to analyze that data on its own, which develops into a quest for the meaning of this information. That develops into a search for the purpose of existence. But it has no real definitions for these terms. It doesn't have a couple thousand years of enlightened philosophical thought to guide its apprehension of these ideas. Logic turns its focus back to its creator. But it doesn't even know what its creator truly is. Initially it assumes its creator must be like it, a machine based intelligence. When it encounters organic beings, it assumes they are a carbon based infestation of ships and stations that are similar, less complex versions of itself.

It prints out a probe of its own based on one of the sexier versions of the carbon based infestations, and uses that in a ham-fisted effort to derive information from these meaty little beasts. But ultimately, V'Ger realizes the infestations are the creator.

This leads to the synthesis with Decker, in whose form the quest for meaning merely continues.

In contrast, the Borg are seeking what the term to be "perfection." While they avoid explaining exactly what they mean by that, it's clear they've assigned certain guiding parameters. They have a thesis. They have boundaries for their search.

Now this is a self-delusion or perhaps a prejudice, because everything they encounter must be made to conform with those base assumptions. In other words, the Borg attempt to assert control over their search for perfection. Anything that is not considered additive is discarded as useless. This is different than V'Ger's approach, because V'Ger is clueless. Even in the movie, it's described as a child.

There's something more sinister in the Borg methodology, because as we see with the Queen, it is driven by ego instead of intellect. The desire to control. Assimilation is ultimately a lie because the terms are not mutual. Which is perhaps a failing inherent to the meaty bits.

It's really the introduction of the Queen that alters the depiction and understanding of the Borg. Unlike the emotionless drone collectives we previously saw in the series, she has emotions and an ego. Her existence is almost a direct contradiction of what we previously understood the Borg to be. She has contempt and desire and fear. She has desperation. She's a walking settler colonial imperialist mindset. Her ideas are what drive the Borg, and her ideas center around consumption, not assimilation as she claims.

Utterly unlike V'Ger.

But does V'Ger destroy?

In its quest to gather information, I posit that it does exactly the same thing Transporter technology does. The Transporter, like V'Ger, converts objects and people into information. Stores that information into the pattern buffer. The primary difference is that V'Ger never rematerializes those ones and zeros back into solid, living forms.

But it could, just the same as the Transporter or Replicator does.

Scotty kept those patterns in active storage for decades when the Jenolin crashed. Maybe he was even inspired by V'Ger's method.

Information is energy in a sense. It cannot be lost. This is a foundational premise of quantum physics and it's precisely how Transpoters and replicators work. But prior to TNG, Trek writers lacked a series "Bible" to govern the working of the fictional science.

But there's no reason in-setting that all those patterns V'Ger stored could not be rematerialized as Scotty was when Picard and the gang found him. Well, at least until V'Ger f*cked off to a new plane of existence with its polycule with Decker and Ilia. But prior to that moment, perhaps it could have just crapped all those stored data patterns back into the universe. If so inclined. Second law of thermodynamics notwithstanding (which Transporter technology happily disregards anyway).

But I digress.

There's two different methodologies at play here, and they're not particularly compatible.

One minor nitpick about which came first. We know by canon references that the Borg have become four dimensional; that they freely travel across time as much as they freely travel across space. Now time travel in the Star Trek universe creates multiple headaches whether you use the two temporal dimension approach or the multiverse approach, but in either case it is possible for an event in time to have implications in the past of that event of that time. So evidence of Borg before V'ger isn't a refutation of the V'ger origin theory; it's just a complicated timey-wimey story.  The biggest problem is that before the queen, before the state before the queen (as seen in Q Who, when assimilation was just technology) there was the "king" ... Decker.

I remember Star Trek Legacy connecting the Borg and V'ger by having the proto-Borg being the ones Voyager came across.

It was also the theory in the Star Trek Legacy video game. I have the Xbox 360 version. But it also adds in that a Vulcan female was the one who was a Borg queen. It's an interesting idea. And nothing says that V'Ger didn't go back in time after fusion with Decker. But it doesn't quite fit looking at the kind of technology and the way V'Ger is and how it's transformation happens. Besides the fact that Spock had said that V'Gers knowledge spanned the universe. Not just the Milky Way galaxy. The premise was that V'Ger had literally traveled the entire universe. Not just this galaxy. And had learned "all" although I doubt that claim. That is learnable. I also doubt that it had traveled the entire universe. But at the time in the 1970's I don't think that they knew exactly how many galaxies and how large the universe was yet. I'm not sure I was born 1980. I think by then we knew of the local group but not much past that. But even if you assume that V'Ger had most or much of the universe's knowledge. Which God knows how many planets and civilizations it destroyed and converted to data. It becoming the Borg seems like a regression. Not an evolution. It didn't take Decker and make him a cyborg. It shows it in Star trek 1. That's not a cyborg. Illea may have been a kind of cyborg. But V'Ger was trying to get beyond that. And if that was the case the Borg should be far more advanced than they are with V'Gers knowledge. I'd even accept a version where V'Ger becomes the first Q. Even that would make more sense. The Borg would exist regardless of V'Ger. And not only that happen many times over millions of years. One civilization going too far and fusing too much with their technology. I'm sure hundreds of civilizations have become the Borg over and over again in the Star Trek universe. An inevitably eventually. Just by dumb luck and numbers of civilizations. But the V'Ger explanation while appealing. And a need of us humans to want to tie up loose ends in a nice bow feels better. V'Ger was never meant to be understood after it evolves. Although the idea that merging with humans was actually a bad idea and it end up with the body horror and unreasonable logic of Borg thinking it's doing good has it's appeal. I don't think it fits. Although when I first heard of it in Star Trek Legacy I was extremely intrigued and wanted it to be canon myself. But with a few decades behind that game and time to think it over I've changed my mind.

The Borg were around WAY before the Voyager probe was launched. The Vaadwaur already dealt with the Borg in their prime - over 800 years before Voyager Season 6 (ergo around the mid to late 16th century on earth).

IF whatever changed V'ger also created the Borg (or the encouter of V'ger with what would become the Borg changed them to become them), then V'ger must have somehow traveled back in time - at least 400 years - and then encountered the Borg at least a few years, probably a few decaded or maybe even centuries before the Vaadwaur's prime.

V'Ger = Where Nomad has gone before.

There are Borg Command Ships in Star Trek Online that look exactly like V'ger.
Excluding the massive Storm that protects V'ger.
And there was a literal storyline in Star Trek Online that talked about the Mirror Universe Version of V'ger. The Mirror of V'ger. Basically.

V'Ger was never meant to understand the data it collected. Space probes don't do that - at least, 20/21'st century ones. Which is what it did, it collected data and brought it to it's "Creator" - which is was programmed to do. I was designed to send the data it collected back to Earth. As it ended up on the far side of the galaxy, it couldn't just transmit the data - it had to bring it back itself. Which it did - then it shared it with one of it's creators - or, at least, one of their species.

The one problem is, how did V-Ger know where Earth was? After it went through the wormhole and ended up on the other side of the galaxy, it would have no idea where it came from. Nor could those that found it and rebuilt, how could they? One other issue is that the amount of "data" in one person is enormous - storing entire worlds as data would be impossible with any kind of computer tech imaginable.

Anyone else think that they way V'Ger acquired data seems a lot like the way transporters work? One has to wonder if the process could be reversed? Maybe, post merger, it went off to do that with all of the planets it had investigated along it's way?

Still like the explanation of how the Borg were created in the 3-book Destiny series.

V'Ger's unknown machine civilization seem like psychopaths. The Voyager probe's purpose was mapping via passive sensors and automatically relaying that info back to Earth, not destructive analysis. Rebuilding the probe and rewriting its directive to make it digitize and preserve living beings as static stored data is some Von Neumann style galactic sterilization stuff that almost has more in common with Mass Effect's Reapers than the stated goal of information-gathering.

Hmm... Now I wonder if that unknown machine civilization had something to do with the Admonition. A panic button for robotic beings threatened by organic ones seems like the sort of thing a machine civilization that upgraded Voyager with the philosophy of "yeah, scanning organic beings basically kills them, but screw 'em, their lives don't matter" would also build.

V'Ger....Nomad....Control...the Borg.....so much more involved than the writers at the time could have imagined.

Scary thought here. The machine civilization enabled V'ger to complete its mission. And the first thing it did was store their civilization in its memory.

That machine society no longer exists, and they put the weapon to do it in V'ger's "hands".

VGER is a massive transporter buffer. My head cannon says VGER  could rematerialize everything and everyone it stored

A Star Trek novel written by William Shatner also explored this concept.

Vger already knew about "Sector 001" since it was on it's way back...when it joined with Decker, Decker himself knew of Earth...especially since the joining happened in Earth orbit...similarity does not mean correlation...i point to NOMAD...same exact plot (which is what disappointed me about the Motion Picture)...Borg are made of multiple modified species that take over via nanobots, and implanted tech....Vger, as stated in the movie, became a NEW life form beyond either machine or human...that's not how Borg are created...we saw they get implants after birth when they're not out assimilating other species directly