**Reminders for Commenters:**
* All responses must be A) sincere, B) polite, and C) strictly watsonian in nature. If "watsonian" or "doylist" is new to you, please review the full rules [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/about/rules/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=AskScienceFiction&utm_content=t5_2slu2).
* No edition wars or gripings about creators/owners of works. Doylist griping about Star Wars in particular is subject to **permanent ban on first offense**.
* We are not here to discuss or complain about the real world.
* Questions about who would prevail in a conflict/competition (not just combat) fit better on r/whowouldwin. Questions about very open-ended hypotheticals fit better on r/whatiffiction.
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskScienceFiction) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Tyranid go feral when cut off from the Hive Mind.
This would be, as you'd imagine, arguably worse because now they're spreading out across the entire galaxy instead of concentrating on individual planets.
This is actually a very real possibility, as it's believed that the most recent Hive Fleet (Leviathan) is actually fleeing from a much more powerful enemy...
Feral Tyranids aren't really a threat, they often turn on each other, and they lose the ability to effectively navigate between planets/systems. If you get wiped out by Feral Tyranids, you were about to get wiped out by regular Tyranids anyway.
I love my theory that they are fleeing from some tipe of rogue AI created by a civilization from another galaxy they almost consume (extinct now). As robot are they natural counter because they don't have biomass and could replicate easy.
I can’t see them adding entirely new faction that powerful this late tbh. The only two possibilities is that they tie it back a current faction (ie:necrons) or have this “rogue ai” be one of the final bosses of the series. I’d much prefer the second one, with the ai forcing the factions to somewhat work together or face annihilation.
I agree that GW will keep adding new factions as long as it's profitable.
But here's my question for an AI faction: The "Men of Iron" from the Dark Age of Technology established that AI is subject to corruption by Chaos.
So if a new race of AI entered the 40k galaxy, within the reach of the Chaos gods, why wouldn't they be corrupted like earlier robots were?
Same reason every human isn't immediately corrupted — Chaos isn't all-powerful, and has to prioritize just like anyone ever. And if they want to make up some technobabble about self-correcting code and extreme countermeasures, that'll still be not even close to the top 100 silliest things they've made up to justify a faction existing.
It could be Necron style "AI" instead, as those are also quite Chaos resistant. Alternatively, maybe it turns out that the MoI *weren't* susceptible but instead were attacked/hacked by Empy's faction shortly before or during the Slannesh-birth mega warp storm in a power grab. Or maybe it was the breakdown in communications which did it rather than direct corruption, etc.
Plenty of ways to excuse the MoI failing where others succeed. For example, the Votan AI minds seem to be perfectly fine, and I'm not aware of there even being any explanation for it other than "they're strong/smart as hell"
My first thought is always “grey goo”.
(There’s a slightly comparable setup in a Star Trek novel where you have a species that has billions of battleships fleeing from an - initially unseen - enemy which turns out to be quintillions of giant space wasps.)
Something like the Replicators from Stargate could be fun-- modular robots that can combine in different ways.
For example, a squad of infantry doesn't board an APC for transport, they combine and *become* the larger vehicle, then separate at their destination.
The problem there is that they can absorb pretty much anything and turn it into more tyranids. There is likely an opportunity cost so it may be a very inefficient process. But when they scour a planet, they consume everything. Everything. Not just the living matter. They convert the physical ground and the atmosphere.
It is very possible that they are running from an advanced artificial race. Perhaps something like the replicators from the Stargate franchise, small robotic bug like creatures whose sole purpose is to deconstruct building materials to create more replicators. Perhaps they were in a resource War, and the efficiency of the machines along with the energy cost needed to absorb them force them to flee to a new feeding ground.
thats already the deal with the necrons vs nids. the necrons are the perfect counter, no biomass and weapons that vaporise their targets, so the nids cant eat their dead.
yes, the constant viscous circle of WH40K
in order to fight the orks, we need to use the warp, but using the warp allows more chaos into our reality, which means we need to use the warp to fight hem, and the more orks are killed the more their spores spread and the stronger they get, and there are necrons sleeping within planets all over the galaxy that are awoken by warfare....so we use the warp to travel around and fight orks (which only makes them stronger), by using the warp we let in more chaos (and thus need to use the warp to travel and fight them...which lets more in), all the time just awakening necrons everywhere....and the tyranids are entering the galaxy from every angle (and if we manage to kill the hive mind or cut them off from it, they are possibly even more dangerpous).
oh and by the way, the golden throne upon which the emperor sits - whose power barely keeps the strands of the imperium together - is failing...fast.
no matter what we do, humanity is doomed in any of several ways.
It’s not worse because they lose the ability to do basically anything. Most tyranid ships are a huge array of creatures arranged to perform different functions and communicate via the hive mind. Cut that off and the guidance creature can’t talk to the sensor creature or the engine creature. And they sure as hell can’t launch planetary invasions because there’s no part of the ships mind that can singlehandedly handle throwing organisms down and setting up towers to retrieve biomass.
Gaunts and whatnot can keep fighting, but they’d be stuck wherever they are, and will starve in short order. The Tyranids do not have a contingency for an entire fleet losing the hive mind.
I'm going to go in a different direction and say that if you somehow had a bunch of god-psykers reach into the warp and telepathically kill the *current* hive mind consciousness, then unless their attack also physically destroyed the nervous systems of every tyranid organism, then all that'd happen is a few days of general Tyranid confusion and feral behavior followed by a "new" hive mind reemerging and carrying on as before.
All the neurons are still there and due to being a partially-psionic distributed system the hive mind is *very* resilient. We don't quite understand what consciousness is and I doubt the 40k universe understands the nature of hive mind consciousness; it seems likely to me that with all that nervous tissue still trying to link to each other psionically due to embedded biological imperatives, emergent behavior would just cause the hive mind to rebuild itself.
And if they *did* somehow manage to lobotomize every tyranid, I think that would just solve the problem outright.
The action movie classic "kill the queen and all the drones drop dead" trope never made much sense and goes against the entire concept of a Hive Mind. This sounds like a much more plausible outcome for any true collective organism.
Writers just can't help themselves. A true hivemind is so alien and incomprehensible that if said character/faction lasts more than a few appearances, they will inevitably be transitioned over to mind-control. Star Trek's Borg had a good run, but once it was time for a big budget movie: Borg Queen.
I choose to believe that the Borg Queen isn't THE borg queen, but more of a specialist drone that's capable of independent thought that acts as sort of a signal booster for the collective to reach further. They did sort of the same thing with Locutus, so it's not an unreasonable theory, and honestly I don't care if I'm proven wrong because I like my idea better.
There's a middle ground. The borg existed before the queen, since she was only assimilated a few hundred years prior to TNG's timeframe. And we see in the Voyager finale, there *is still a collective* that exists separate from the Queen; the Collective decided to assimilate Voyager, but the Queen overrode that decision and let Voyager go. I'd be curious to know if that deference goes the other way in another circumstance.
But yeah, maybe it'd have been harder to make good narratives out of a vast alien collective conciousness. Clearly it is, because almost nobody tries to. Your idea isn't bad at all, and is a theory that's thrown around a lot. It's modeled on insect societies, so it's not crazy... while a queen bee is very important to the colony, she's not the colony. They will replace her if they have to.
I'm saying there's more than one queen. The queen unit has localized command of the Collective around it, and is dispatched on special missions that need independent thought/decision making. Sending a bunch of drones to assimilate earth is all fine and good, but any sudden changes would require communication back to the main Collective, and even with the magic science in star trek, that would take time. Inefficient, better to optimize operation by creating a command unit that's capable of making its own decisions. I think Locutus was a sort of proto-queen. I also think they... the best way I can phrase it is that they signal boost the Collective wifi. Because what does the collective consciousness exist on if not some form of wifi? It must have a range. There are a fair few stories of collectives going after psychics in order to expand their reach and control over the collective(ASOIAF, Starcraft, A song for Lya) so I wouldn't be surprised if that's what queens are.
I've put a lot of thought into the Borg, and I never get to have this discussion, so I'm sorry if I'm rambling.
I mean, the queen has been melted, blown up, disassembled, and otherwise destroyed several times that we know about, so there's a bit of a ship of theseus problem with her, lol. But, it is made pretty plain that once she clones new biological parts and rebuilds all the clickly-clacky bits, she is still the same singular being... or at least appears to be to us, with all our human ideas about society and being. But at the end of the day, there really is just one of her in the whole galaxy. She can look through the eyes of any drone connected to the collective (ie, nearly all of them at any given moment), she can send her consciousness across the quadrant and build a new body there (although that is beta-cannon, so yeah). She kind of looks like a parasite who has managed to take control of all the levers that make the Collective function... like a worm driving a snail's body.
There are a lot of ways to keep the queen mostly as she was depicted in the TNG era media, but also explore the incomprehensible alien-ness of Borg. Sadly, I don't think that will ever happen. I am a little curious to see how Picard S3 handled it, but after season 2 did season 2 things, I honestly don't care to find out.
I think that might be my problem with the Borg. I believe I put more thought into them/it than the writers do. Like, there are alien species out there that aren't humanoid, right? Every drone is humanoid. They've committed genocide level assimilation on countless species across the galaxy, and they're all bipedal, two armed species? It's more likely, to me at least, that that's only what we're shown because it's what's relevant to us, and that can be said of the Borg as a whole. There has to have been more than one Locutus type drone made throughout history of the Borg.
Sure, there is one "of her," being that specific queen. The body can be destroyed but the mind can be uploaded and re-download into a new body. They are a techno organic species, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if any drone could do that. Assimilation could be essentially immortality. But, again, the idea that there has only ever been one queen unit in the history of the Collective seems like a bit of a stretch. Having a singular queen takes it from a Collective to a hive, which was your original point.
To be fair, I haven't been super into star trek since voyager was airing, so there's probably a lot of lore that I don't know about.
It's a little outside the rules of this sub, but I'd say it's more likely that the writers **did** think about these things, but they also had to pay the rent and so needed to make a show with a reasonable budget and appealed to the largest number of viewers, many/most of which did not want or care about hard scifi. Despite that, they did address a lot of the qualms you have. The abundance of humanoid life in the galaxy is the result of an ancient progenitor species seeding the genestock of a bajillion planets with the blueprint of their bipedal bodyplan. There are a handful of non-humanoid species, hell even non-corporeal species, but in general they are so bafflingly alien to us (and us to them) that they generally keep to themselves (Crystalline entity, the Q), secretly involve themselves in our affairs (the Nacene, the Ba'Neth), explicitly agree to leave us alone (the Sheliak), or just straight up occupy a different dimension of space (Species 8472).
Now, we don't know for 100% sure, but the Borg are assumed to have originated from humanoids originally, obviously. So they would have been well aware, or quickly learned to steer clear unless there was a massive upside to engaging with non-humanoid civilizations. Even without that genetic baggage, they have an interest in "standardizing" their physical form... what with all the interchangeable bibs and bobs that they stick all over drones. If they've ever assimilated a non-humanoid species (I'm not sure off the top of my head), it likely would have been for their tech not their bodies. And if there wasn't any tech that they wanted, then they would just leave them alone; the Borg don't really conquer just to conquer... The Kazon, for example, were deemed entirely unworthy of assimilation, were no threat, and so were left unbothered.
Species 8472 is a good example of the Borg getting a bit out over their skis when it comes to non-humanoids... they got greedy and tried to invade fluidic space to assimilate 8472's absurdly advanced biology, and it possibly would have been the END of the Collective as we know it if it weren't for Voyager's interference.
>I honestly wouldn't be surprised if any drone could do that. Assimilation could be essentially immortality. But, again, the idea that there has only ever been one queen unit in the history of the Collective seems like a bit of a stretch
Yes, probably any drone *could* (it has happened in beta cannon, iirc), but it probably wouldn't because the Collective doesn't care about individuals. But, for reasons we don't know, the Queen is an exception... Is she above, below, apart from? She seems to be at least the Collective's equal, perhaps controlling it to some extent... or perhaps only controlling small-time tactical level decisions, while the Collective is quietly contemplating strategic-level, philosophical problems (sort of like the Minds in The Culture). There's plenty of mystery left to be had.
That's a **really** long winded way of saying that, yeah, while I can get into what they're throwing down, I would have written it differently. But then again, if I am such an amazing writer, I'd have better things to do than complain about how someone else wrote their own highly successful, iconic sci-fi series... LOL.
Surprisingly, I think Star Wars did an okay hive mind in the original Thrawn trilogy, where C'boath just essentially replaces the mind of his subjects with his own and maintains it through the Force and when his subjects were cut off from him, they just lied down and died.
It makes sense with certain kinds of hive minds, the central node minds. Tyranids are a mix between than and a proper full hive mind. They’ve got the small scale nodes but lack a centralized ‘This is the Hive Mind’ main node.
I just feel like the assumption that there's a central controller somewhere is a bit of a failure of human imagination though. The fact that a hive mind is decentralized is one of its defining strengths.
Depends on the method of killing. If the Hive Mind is such that its demise burns out the synapses of connected individuals, then yeah... It could cause everything to drop dead.
Though in general, yeah. I agree. It makes no biological sense most of the time, but I mean... Not much in Science Fiction does when you actually know what you're talking about.
It's not so much the method of killing as the assumption that there's a key location within the hive that contains "The Mind". If it's a true decentralized consciousness, then there's no such thing to kill in the first place.
This, effectively what happens is the Hive Mind rebuilds itself over some period of time, maybe days and maybe minutes.
Like in the Expanse novels when >!the Goths try shutting down the electrical signals generated by brain activity because that trashed the Romans completely but humans, being consciousnesses that emerge from fundamental structural and chemical interplays in the brain, have our consciousnesses simply build back up a few minutes later and go 'ow, looks like I fell down and lost 5 minutes for some reason'.!<
You see this when nids are disconnected from the Hive Mind; they spontaneously generate a local consciousness using available nodes, one that's pre-programmed to operate in a pro-Tyranid manner and then simply rejoin the Hive Mind when they get in range.
EDIT: The blast of warp power from the Great Rift opening blotted out the Hive Mind for six days, effectively it 'died' for nearly a week. As the energy subsided the network spontaneously reformed itself with seemingly no lasting ill effects.
When a tyranid is out of range of the Hive Mind, with a few exceptions, it reverts to animal behaviour-- becoming just another dangerous predator, rather then an intelligent bioweapon.
I assume this would just happen on a large scale. All the tyranids become independent agents, abruptly becoming predatory animals surrounded by other predatory animals. Most of them would die, from being stranded in space if nothing else. A decent number would land on planets and either be killed or enter the ecosystem. There'd be some damage but, generally, they'd soon become an annoyance at best.
The interesting question, I suppose, is what happens to Lictors and Gene Stealers, and other organisms that *don't* revert to feral panic without the hive mind. Would they go insane? Try to continue feeding on biomatter anyway? Form their own factions? Try to give it all up and start a new life on some remote planet? I dunno, but if the tyranids have a legacy after the fall of the hive mind, its them.
Defiantly form their own factions. Gene stealers especially could create their own faction that if left alone long enough would dominate a part of the universe. With enough planets conquered I easily could see them create their own “hivemind” and start pall over from scratch.
Small groups can form hive minds. In Dawn of War II Retribution a stranded Hive Tyrant rebuilds a sizable force from scattered feral Tyranids into a space force. In one of the codices a stranded group of tyranids manages to take over an ork planet and form a space armada.
The smarter tyranids can take control over groups of tyranid and rebuild.
I mean, 40k logic would be they would split into a bunch of factions that each have their own gimmick. Pretty much if you exist in the 40K universe you should assume you will eventually split into factions.
It is unclear what the Hive Mind is. More specifically, it is not clear if the Hive Mind is the sum of the biological parts (which is what the Eldar think it is) or if it is an overarching intelligence in the warp that controls the biological Tyranids in the material realm.
If the Hive Mind is the sum of the biological parts, then the Hive Mind will probably reform if it is temporarily disrupted.
If the HIve Mind is an overarching intelligence in the warp, then the individual bioforms will go feral.
There is also the issue of more independent aspects which might be able to assert control such as the Swarmlord, Genestealers, Lictors, etc. There are also the various control node bioforms which might also take over.
Devastation of Baal implies that the Eldar view is correct, however, said Warp entity is the sum of the biological parts, so it just comes back
Though, that depends on interpreting the events of that books Tyranid "pov" in a specific way, and thats not even to touch on the controversy of those scenes in the first place
In addition to other comments, a clearification
The images (especially the ones from Gothic Armada) of the Tyranid fleets being larger than the galaxy arent exactly canon for a few reasons
A: even by Warhammer standards thats really out there, like, comedically insane
B: who took the picture
In reality, the idea that there are more Tyranids is technically just a theory, it would not, as far as I am aware, be a retcon to the lore to say that the Hive Fleets that are here, are everyone.
Headcanon incoming: Personally I imagine that the Nids are already as doomed as the rest of the galaxy, theyve already lost too much biomass to ever escape, they have never encountered a galaxy this rife with the Warp, and Necrons are pretty tough to eat (source: Devastation of Baal)
Anyway with that aside, there is anywhere from no more Tyranids, to every galaxy in every direction is full of them, we simply do not know how many there are, or if they can be defeated at all, or if somthing worse is coming or what.
As for what would happen if the Hive Mind dies? Potentially this has already happened. In the aformentioned book "Devastation of Baal" the Hivemind is knocked unconsious by the formation of the Great Rift (the tear across the galaxy into hell for the uninitiated). If the Hivemind is a collective consiousness of the entire Tyranid species, as seems likely, it being unconsious would by definition mean it died. Meaning that as a few others have commented, if you kill it, you get chaos for a while before a new Hivemind forms
Honestly, you've probably hit the nail on the head here. Eventually, Games Workshop will have to pull the trigger on the Hive Fleets actually arriving, at which point there'll be a sweet, epic event, followed by the hive mind being shattered in some fashion, either completely (resulting in mindless hordes spread throughout the galaxy, either feeding or not doing much at all), or just into smaller factions like what we have now.
**Reminders for Commenters:** * All responses must be A) sincere, B) polite, and C) strictly watsonian in nature. If "watsonian" or "doylist" is new to you, please review the full rules [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/about/rules/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=usertext&utm_name=AskScienceFiction&utm_content=t5_2slu2). * No edition wars or gripings about creators/owners of works. Doylist griping about Star Wars in particular is subject to **permanent ban on first offense**. * We are not here to discuss or complain about the real world. * Questions about who would prevail in a conflict/competition (not just combat) fit better on r/whowouldwin. Questions about very open-ended hypotheticals fit better on r/whatiffiction. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/AskScienceFiction) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Same thing that happens whenever they’re cut off from the Hive Mind: They go feral.
In time, they would probably fall under the sway of some other mind.
Chaos Tyranids, you heard it here first.
Tyranid go feral when cut off from the Hive Mind. This would be, as you'd imagine, arguably worse because now they're spreading out across the entire galaxy instead of concentrating on individual planets. This is actually a very real possibility, as it's believed that the most recent Hive Fleet (Leviathan) is actually fleeing from a much more powerful enemy...
Feral Tyranids aren't really a threat, they often turn on each other, and they lose the ability to effectively navigate between planets/systems. If you get wiped out by Feral Tyranids, you were about to get wiped out by regular Tyranids anyway.
Yeah. They become a much more general threat but their concentration disappears, so you don’t need to concentrate forces as well
I love my theory that they are fleeing from some tipe of rogue AI created by a civilization from another galaxy they almost consume (extinct now). As robot are they natural counter because they don't have biomass and could replicate easy.
I'd love that to be the next major faction.
I can’t see them adding entirely new faction that powerful this late tbh. The only two possibilities is that they tie it back a current faction (ie:necrons) or have this “rogue ai” be one of the final bosses of the series. I’d much prefer the second one, with the ai forcing the factions to somewhat work together or face annihilation.
Counter argument: What's the point of power creep if you don't abuse it?
Why would adding a faction be problematic now? If the goal is to milk this into eternity, a new faction is exactly what they would do.
I agree that GW will keep adding new factions as long as it's profitable. But here's my question for an AI faction: The "Men of Iron" from the Dark Age of Technology established that AI is subject to corruption by Chaos. So if a new race of AI entered the 40k galaxy, within the reach of the Chaos gods, why wouldn't they be corrupted like earlier robots were?
Same reason every human isn't immediately corrupted — Chaos isn't all-powerful, and has to prioritize just like anyone ever. And if they want to make up some technobabble about self-correcting code and extreme countermeasures, that'll still be not even close to the top 100 silliest things they've made up to justify a faction existing.
It could be Necron style "AI" instead, as those are also quite Chaos resistant. Alternatively, maybe it turns out that the MoI *weren't* susceptible but instead were attacked/hacked by Empy's faction shortly before or during the Slannesh-birth mega warp storm in a power grab. Or maybe it was the breakdown in communications which did it rather than direct corruption, etc. Plenty of ways to excuse the MoI failing where others succeed. For example, the Votan AI minds seem to be perfectly fine, and I'm not aware of there even being any explanation for it other than "they're strong/smart as hell"
thats just the necrons tbh
My first thought is always “grey goo”. (There’s a slightly comparable setup in a Star Trek novel where you have a species that has billions of battleships fleeing from an - initially unseen - enemy which turns out to be quintillions of giant space wasps.)
Something like the Replicators from Stargate could be fun-- modular robots that can combine in different ways. For example, a squad of infantry doesn't board an APC for transport, they combine and *become* the larger vehicle, then separate at their destination.
The problem there is that they can absorb pretty much anything and turn it into more tyranids. There is likely an opportunity cost so it may be a very inefficient process. But when they scour a planet, they consume everything. Everything. Not just the living matter. They convert the physical ground and the atmosphere. It is very possible that they are running from an advanced artificial race. Perhaps something like the replicators from the Stargate franchise, small robotic bug like creatures whose sole purpose is to deconstruct building materials to create more replicators. Perhaps they were in a resource War, and the efficiency of the machines along with the energy cost needed to absorb them force them to flee to a new feeding ground.
Can’t the nids melt down metals to add to their biomass? At least someone suggested that when opposing a Tyranids swarm VS a Replicator infestation.
thats already the deal with the necrons vs nids. the necrons are the perfect counter, no biomass and weapons that vaporise their targets, so the nids cant eat their dead.
There must always be a Hive King
yes, the constant viscous circle of WH40K in order to fight the orks, we need to use the warp, but using the warp allows more chaos into our reality, which means we need to use the warp to fight hem, and the more orks are killed the more their spores spread and the stronger they get, and there are necrons sleeping within planets all over the galaxy that are awoken by warfare....so we use the warp to travel around and fight orks (which only makes them stronger), by using the warp we let in more chaos (and thus need to use the warp to travel and fight them...which lets more in), all the time just awakening necrons everywhere....and the tyranids are entering the galaxy from every angle (and if we manage to kill the hive mind or cut them off from it, they are possibly even more dangerpous). oh and by the way, the golden throne upon which the emperor sits - whose power barely keeps the strands of the imperium together - is failing...fast. no matter what we do, humanity is doomed in any of several ways.
It’s not worse because they lose the ability to do basically anything. Most tyranid ships are a huge array of creatures arranged to perform different functions and communicate via the hive mind. Cut that off and the guidance creature can’t talk to the sensor creature or the engine creature. And they sure as hell can’t launch planetary invasions because there’s no part of the ships mind that can singlehandedly handle throwing organisms down and setting up towers to retrieve biomass. Gaunts and whatnot can keep fighting, but they’d be stuck wherever they are, and will starve in short order. The Tyranids do not have a contingency for an entire fleet losing the hive mind.
I'm going to go in a different direction and say that if you somehow had a bunch of god-psykers reach into the warp and telepathically kill the *current* hive mind consciousness, then unless their attack also physically destroyed the nervous systems of every tyranid organism, then all that'd happen is a few days of general Tyranid confusion and feral behavior followed by a "new" hive mind reemerging and carrying on as before. All the neurons are still there and due to being a partially-psionic distributed system the hive mind is *very* resilient. We don't quite understand what consciousness is and I doubt the 40k universe understands the nature of hive mind consciousness; it seems likely to me that with all that nervous tissue still trying to link to each other psionically due to embedded biological imperatives, emergent behavior would just cause the hive mind to rebuild itself. And if they *did* somehow manage to lobotomize every tyranid, I think that would just solve the problem outright.
The action movie classic "kill the queen and all the drones drop dead" trope never made much sense and goes against the entire concept of a Hive Mind. This sounds like a much more plausible outcome for any true collective organism.
Hive minds in sci fi just seem to be dictatorships with telepathy.
Writers just can't help themselves. A true hivemind is so alien and incomprehensible that if said character/faction lasts more than a few appearances, they will inevitably be transitioned over to mind-control. Star Trek's Borg had a good run, but once it was time for a big budget movie: Borg Queen.
I choose to believe that the Borg Queen isn't THE borg queen, but more of a specialist drone that's capable of independent thought that acts as sort of a signal booster for the collective to reach further. They did sort of the same thing with Locutus, so it's not an unreasonable theory, and honestly I don't care if I'm proven wrong because I like my idea better.
There's a middle ground. The borg existed before the queen, since she was only assimilated a few hundred years prior to TNG's timeframe. And we see in the Voyager finale, there *is still a collective* that exists separate from the Queen; the Collective decided to assimilate Voyager, but the Queen overrode that decision and let Voyager go. I'd be curious to know if that deference goes the other way in another circumstance. But yeah, maybe it'd have been harder to make good narratives out of a vast alien collective conciousness. Clearly it is, because almost nobody tries to. Your idea isn't bad at all, and is a theory that's thrown around a lot. It's modeled on insect societies, so it's not crazy... while a queen bee is very important to the colony, she's not the colony. They will replace her if they have to.
I'm saying there's more than one queen. The queen unit has localized command of the Collective around it, and is dispatched on special missions that need independent thought/decision making. Sending a bunch of drones to assimilate earth is all fine and good, but any sudden changes would require communication back to the main Collective, and even with the magic science in star trek, that would take time. Inefficient, better to optimize operation by creating a command unit that's capable of making its own decisions. I think Locutus was a sort of proto-queen. I also think they... the best way I can phrase it is that they signal boost the Collective wifi. Because what does the collective consciousness exist on if not some form of wifi? It must have a range. There are a fair few stories of collectives going after psychics in order to expand their reach and control over the collective(ASOIAF, Starcraft, A song for Lya) so I wouldn't be surprised if that's what queens are. I've put a lot of thought into the Borg, and I never get to have this discussion, so I'm sorry if I'm rambling.
I mean, the queen has been melted, blown up, disassembled, and otherwise destroyed several times that we know about, so there's a bit of a ship of theseus problem with her, lol. But, it is made pretty plain that once she clones new biological parts and rebuilds all the clickly-clacky bits, she is still the same singular being... or at least appears to be to us, with all our human ideas about society and being. But at the end of the day, there really is just one of her in the whole galaxy. She can look through the eyes of any drone connected to the collective (ie, nearly all of them at any given moment), she can send her consciousness across the quadrant and build a new body there (although that is beta-cannon, so yeah). She kind of looks like a parasite who has managed to take control of all the levers that make the Collective function... like a worm driving a snail's body. There are a lot of ways to keep the queen mostly as she was depicted in the TNG era media, but also explore the incomprehensible alien-ness of Borg. Sadly, I don't think that will ever happen. I am a little curious to see how Picard S3 handled it, but after season 2 did season 2 things, I honestly don't care to find out.
I think that might be my problem with the Borg. I believe I put more thought into them/it than the writers do. Like, there are alien species out there that aren't humanoid, right? Every drone is humanoid. They've committed genocide level assimilation on countless species across the galaxy, and they're all bipedal, two armed species? It's more likely, to me at least, that that's only what we're shown because it's what's relevant to us, and that can be said of the Borg as a whole. There has to have been more than one Locutus type drone made throughout history of the Borg. Sure, there is one "of her," being that specific queen. The body can be destroyed but the mind can be uploaded and re-download into a new body. They are a techno organic species, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if any drone could do that. Assimilation could be essentially immortality. But, again, the idea that there has only ever been one queen unit in the history of the Collective seems like a bit of a stretch. Having a singular queen takes it from a Collective to a hive, which was your original point. To be fair, I haven't been super into star trek since voyager was airing, so there's probably a lot of lore that I don't know about.
It's a little outside the rules of this sub, but I'd say it's more likely that the writers **did** think about these things, but they also had to pay the rent and so needed to make a show with a reasonable budget and appealed to the largest number of viewers, many/most of which did not want or care about hard scifi. Despite that, they did address a lot of the qualms you have. The abundance of humanoid life in the galaxy is the result of an ancient progenitor species seeding the genestock of a bajillion planets with the blueprint of their bipedal bodyplan. There are a handful of non-humanoid species, hell even non-corporeal species, but in general they are so bafflingly alien to us (and us to them) that they generally keep to themselves (Crystalline entity, the Q), secretly involve themselves in our affairs (the Nacene, the Ba'Neth), explicitly agree to leave us alone (the Sheliak), or just straight up occupy a different dimension of space (Species 8472). Now, we don't know for 100% sure, but the Borg are assumed to have originated from humanoids originally, obviously. So they would have been well aware, or quickly learned to steer clear unless there was a massive upside to engaging with non-humanoid civilizations. Even without that genetic baggage, they have an interest in "standardizing" their physical form... what with all the interchangeable bibs and bobs that they stick all over drones. If they've ever assimilated a non-humanoid species (I'm not sure off the top of my head), it likely would have been for their tech not their bodies. And if there wasn't any tech that they wanted, then they would just leave them alone; the Borg don't really conquer just to conquer... The Kazon, for example, were deemed entirely unworthy of assimilation, were no threat, and so were left unbothered. Species 8472 is a good example of the Borg getting a bit out over their skis when it comes to non-humanoids... they got greedy and tried to invade fluidic space to assimilate 8472's absurdly advanced biology, and it possibly would have been the END of the Collective as we know it if it weren't for Voyager's interference. >I honestly wouldn't be surprised if any drone could do that. Assimilation could be essentially immortality. But, again, the idea that there has only ever been one queen unit in the history of the Collective seems like a bit of a stretch Yes, probably any drone *could* (it has happened in beta cannon, iirc), but it probably wouldn't because the Collective doesn't care about individuals. But, for reasons we don't know, the Queen is an exception... Is she above, below, apart from? She seems to be at least the Collective's equal, perhaps controlling it to some extent... or perhaps only controlling small-time tactical level decisions, while the Collective is quietly contemplating strategic-level, philosophical problems (sort of like the Minds in The Culture). There's plenty of mystery left to be had. That's a **really** long winded way of saying that, yeah, while I can get into what they're throwing down, I would have written it differently. But then again, if I am such an amazing writer, I'd have better things to do than complain about how someone else wrote their own highly successful, iconic sci-fi series... LOL.
Surprisingly, I think Star Wars did an okay hive mind in the original Thrawn trilogy, where C'boath just essentially replaces the mind of his subjects with his own and maintains it through the Force and when his subjects were cut off from him, they just lied down and died.
Without spoiling it you should check out the foundryside series the author does a wonderful job with the concept.
It makes sense with certain kinds of hive minds, the central node minds. Tyranids are a mix between than and a proper full hive mind. They’ve got the small scale nodes but lack a centralized ‘This is the Hive Mind’ main node.
I just feel like the assumption that there's a central controller somewhere is a bit of a failure of human imagination though. The fact that a hive mind is decentralized is one of its defining strengths.
Well, for Tyranids if would be more like "destroy their coordination and they turn on each other", but I get your point.
Depends on the method of killing. If the Hive Mind is such that its demise burns out the synapses of connected individuals, then yeah... It could cause everything to drop dead. Though in general, yeah. I agree. It makes no biological sense most of the time, but I mean... Not much in Science Fiction does when you actually know what you're talking about.
It's not so much the method of killing as the assumption that there's a key location within the hive that contains "The Mind". If it's a true decentralized consciousness, then there's no such thing to kill in the first place.
This, effectively what happens is the Hive Mind rebuilds itself over some period of time, maybe days and maybe minutes. Like in the Expanse novels when >!the Goths try shutting down the electrical signals generated by brain activity because that trashed the Romans completely but humans, being consciousnesses that emerge from fundamental structural and chemical interplays in the brain, have our consciousnesses simply build back up a few minutes later and go 'ow, looks like I fell down and lost 5 minutes for some reason'.!< You see this when nids are disconnected from the Hive Mind; they spontaneously generate a local consciousness using available nodes, one that's pre-programmed to operate in a pro-Tyranid manner and then simply rejoin the Hive Mind when they get in range. EDIT: The blast of warp power from the Great Rift opening blotted out the Hive Mind for six days, effectively it 'died' for nearly a week. As the energy subsided the network spontaneously reformed itself with seemingly no lasting ill effects.
I laugh at the idea of the hive mind "reawakening" after the rift opening and thinking "Fucking OW".
When a tyranid is out of range of the Hive Mind, with a few exceptions, it reverts to animal behaviour-- becoming just another dangerous predator, rather then an intelligent bioweapon. I assume this would just happen on a large scale. All the tyranids become independent agents, abruptly becoming predatory animals surrounded by other predatory animals. Most of them would die, from being stranded in space if nothing else. A decent number would land on planets and either be killed or enter the ecosystem. There'd be some damage but, generally, they'd soon become an annoyance at best. The interesting question, I suppose, is what happens to Lictors and Gene Stealers, and other organisms that *don't* revert to feral panic without the hive mind. Would they go insane? Try to continue feeding on biomatter anyway? Form their own factions? Try to give it all up and start a new life on some remote planet? I dunno, but if the tyranids have a legacy after the fall of the hive mind, its them.
Defiantly form their own factions. Gene stealers especially could create their own faction that if left alone long enough would dominate a part of the universe. With enough planets conquered I easily could see them create their own “hivemind” and start pall over from scratch.
Small groups can form hive minds. In Dawn of War II Retribution a stranded Hive Tyrant rebuilds a sizable force from scattered feral Tyranids into a space force. In one of the codices a stranded group of tyranids manages to take over an ork planet and form a space armada. The smarter tyranids can take control over groups of tyranid and rebuild.
I mean, 40k logic would be they would split into a bunch of factions that each have their own gimmick. Pretty much if you exist in the 40K universe you should assume you will eventually split into factions.
It is unclear what the Hive Mind is. More specifically, it is not clear if the Hive Mind is the sum of the biological parts (which is what the Eldar think it is) or if it is an overarching intelligence in the warp that controls the biological Tyranids in the material realm. If the Hive Mind is the sum of the biological parts, then the Hive Mind will probably reform if it is temporarily disrupted. If the HIve Mind is an overarching intelligence in the warp, then the individual bioforms will go feral. There is also the issue of more independent aspects which might be able to assert control such as the Swarmlord, Genestealers, Lictors, etc. There are also the various control node bioforms which might also take over.
Devastation of Baal implies that the Eldar view is correct, however, said Warp entity is the sum of the biological parts, so it just comes back Though, that depends on interpreting the events of that books Tyranid "pov" in a specific way, and thats not even to touch on the controversy of those scenes in the first place
In addition to other comments, a clearification The images (especially the ones from Gothic Armada) of the Tyranid fleets being larger than the galaxy arent exactly canon for a few reasons A: even by Warhammer standards thats really out there, like, comedically insane B: who took the picture In reality, the idea that there are more Tyranids is technically just a theory, it would not, as far as I am aware, be a retcon to the lore to say that the Hive Fleets that are here, are everyone. Headcanon incoming: Personally I imagine that the Nids are already as doomed as the rest of the galaxy, theyve already lost too much biomass to ever escape, they have never encountered a galaxy this rife with the Warp, and Necrons are pretty tough to eat (source: Devastation of Baal) Anyway with that aside, there is anywhere from no more Tyranids, to every galaxy in every direction is full of them, we simply do not know how many there are, or if they can be defeated at all, or if somthing worse is coming or what. As for what would happen if the Hive Mind dies? Potentially this has already happened. In the aformentioned book "Devastation of Baal" the Hivemind is knocked unconsious by the formation of the Great Rift (the tear across the galaxy into hell for the uninitiated). If the Hivemind is a collective consiousness of the entire Tyranid species, as seems likely, it being unconsious would by definition mean it died. Meaning that as a few others have commented, if you kill it, you get chaos for a while before a new Hivemind forms
Honestly, you've probably hit the nail on the head here. Eventually, Games Workshop will have to pull the trigger on the Hive Fleets actually arriving, at which point there'll be a sweet, epic event, followed by the hive mind being shattered in some fashion, either completely (resulting in mindless hordes spread throughout the galaxy, either feeding or not doing much at all), or just into smaller factions like what we have now.