How far ahead are the Borg technology compare to Starfleet and most species in the Alpha Quadrant? Decades? Centuries? And are Borg drones immortal? Meaning they don't grow old and only die if injured badly?
shareUnknown, and no, Borg drones are not immortal; they'll grow old and die eventually.
Technological progress is not something one can predict. It's not as though you could say in a hundred years we'll have colonies on Mars, because we don't know what the next century will bring. 40 years ago, nobody could conceive of the Internet. 30 years ago, nobody could seriously conceive of smartphones and the myriad of apps available for it. 200 years ago, nobody could predict flight, or cars, or people going to the moon, or cures for polio, or heart transplants, etc.
This is all because the conceit of technological progress is silly. Engineering and invention doesn't work in predictable ways. Dilbert makes fun of this conceit all the time, where the corporate masters over Dilbert demand he make something like anti-gravity or time-travel. Dilbert and his friends have to keep all trade journals and Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines away from the likes of their Pointy-Haired Boss or anyone in Marketing lest they get ideas. Somethings can be predicted, so long as the science behind it is sound enough. And sometimes, technologies come to us purely on accident. Teflon, for instance, was a pure accident. Roy Plunkett at the DuPont labs was trying to make a new kind of refrigerant, and came up with Polytetrafloroethylene, and found this stuff to be incredibly slippery. Now we use it on our cookware and nuclear weapons.
There are many ancient cultures, such as the Inca, the Aztecs, and the Maya, who never developed the Wheel. And yet, they were able to create magnificent cities and structures. They were great biochemists and farmers (even if they didn't quite know entirely what they were dealing with chemically), and superb mathematicians.
And there are some technologies that many cultures have but really don't take too much advantage of because they don't know how. Gunpowder was one such implement, as was flight; in order to fly, you have to have a means of thrust and lift. We sort of had the lift down for centuries, the problem was the thrust. How do you make a source of thrust light enough for the aircraft to lift off the ground?
So you can't say that the Federation, in so many years, will be at the level of the Borg.
Dilbert and his friends have to keep all trade journals and Popular Science and Popular Mechanics magazines away from the likes of their Pointy-Haired Boss or anyone in Marketing lest they get ideas.
This was well illustrated in the TNG episode 'Ensigns of Command' (which was on today) where Picard tells Geordi he wants the transporter modified to work through some sort of radiation and doesn't want to be told it's impossible. Later they are shown having no success and Picard visits. He asks how it's going and Geordi responds, "About like you'd expect". The Captain smiles and exits with a bounce in his step. At the end, Geordi comes to the bridge and announces it is possible, he merely needs 15 years and a team of 100 people. I really thought he was going to turn and run away after saying that - his body language was showing it, maybe Burton was thinking that's what he'd do - but Captain Picard takes it in good humor since he no longer needs it done.
Didn't the Borg already had warp drive during the 16th century? Or even further back?
I remember Guinan said that they have been assimilating species for thousands of centuries.
One of my friends is an engineer who works at the JPL, and one time as they were working on the Spitzer space telescope, they were talking about the fact that the light we see, whatever it is, often is millions of years old, and it takes time to predict the present location and status of various stellar bodies like stars, nebula, and galaxies. Well, one suit ordered them to make a telescope show them the universe in real-time. The room burst out laughing. What he effectively said was make some sort of time-machine.
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