These Aliens Hunt the Cosmos
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ส.ค. 2024
- #startrek #aliens #lore
The Hirogen are a major recurring antagonist species in Star Trek: Voyager. Known for being nomadic hunters, the Hirogen's civilization is believed to date back over 100,000 years. So how and why did their culture and technology stagnate?
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- CHAPTERS -
00:00 Intro
01:12 Biology Overview
02:40 Society
04:28 History
07:47 Merits of The Hunt
14:11 Outro - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
So Star Trek's version of Predators
From the episode where Voyager finds out that the Hirogen have made their holographic prey sentient and capable of feeling pain it is obvious that there ARE Hirogen who are NOT hunters. For all we know they majority of them may not be but due to the behaviour of the hunters we see them more. Another possibility is that they have a history similar to that of the Klingons, that they were a low-tech civilisation that was conquered and then later regained their freedom having absorbed their oppressor's technology in the process. Maybe they went from crossbows to plasma weapon in one step skipping everything in-between. Do they even know how their technology work, or can they just copy it from ancient blueprints? That their ships are running with skeleton crews are worrisome and hinting on not only stagnation but a rapid decline. You could probably operate Voyager with a single person, but it will not last, something WILL break eventually.
This take seems the most reasonable, since there are some logical problems with a spacefaring race of 'hunter Gatherers'. My thoughts are that there was an 'elite aristocracy' that prized hunting (something which very much did exist in Europe throughout the Middle Ages to various degrees). So the ruling class became these "hunters' that all other species encounter, but then there are Hirogen worlds who handle the boring, 'day-to-day' matters. This makes them much more like the Kzin, using their original, Larry Niven-based lore. They had various occupations in their society, but the warriors looked down upon everyone else (we see similar among the Klingons, to a lesser degree). So somewhere there are scientists and what-not, we just never see them, because the 'important folk' are out doing their dumb 'big game hunts'. This makes even more sense considering how they embraced and adapted the Holodeck tech - I can see the bureaucrats and scientists getting together to figure out a way of please the 'nobles' while making things more manageable from their end (because such a lopsided society would begin taking its toll on resources). But even if all of this were true, I still feel the communications network was built by someone else, perhaps even one of the great, fallen Alpha-Quadrant powers (also be aware that this network seems to stretch pretty much along the path the Voth would have taken from Earth to their new area, and they preexisted the Hirogen Network by millions of years). Thus, the Voth may have had an even larger territory at one time, and then got pushed back by other species, like the Borg, over hundreds of thousands of years. If that Network was ancient Voth tech, they likely have developed even more sophisticated means of communication, which is why you don't see that tech near their current holdings. In this scenario, they may be completely unaware that the Hirogen are using their old stuff, or simply do not care. In fact, given the sauroid nature of synapsids (reptile-like mammals), one could even theorize the Hirogen are a lost branch of Voth, or even a creation of the Voth.
I could see the Hunters being a class of Hirogen's that see themselves separate from the rest of their species, they travel and hunt while the main part of their people live in a solitary system or even a Dyson Sphere with no drive or want to explore space or meet other cultures.
They could literally be the equivalent of modern sport hunters instead of a poor man's Yautja.
Don't forget the short Hirogen!
I imagine it's tough to find a constant supply of very tall actors 😀😉
i did came here for some star trek lore ... and i did get so much more ....thank you so much .... long live the hunt
3:06 I was half expecting to find a Xenomorph 121 skull there.
Hirogen are Star Trek "Yautja Lite"...
Makes me wonder what would happen if the Klingon Empire encounters the Hirogen.
The Klingons would get wiped out
FIGHT!
@@canis2020 I doubt it ship for ship certainly but that won't matter in a war. The Klingons are at worst slightly weaker then the UFP and have actual infrastructure. As well as a large amount of territory and population. Nothing we see from the Hirogen indicates a large scale civilization. In fact they seem to be very tribalistic and unorganized
thanks for the video - that long live the hunt bit scared me! Live long and prosper!
I wonder if they "went back to how they were" and it was a cultural revolution. They may have started out as hunters, went to agriculture, depleted advanced teck but has huge social issues due to ignoring their basic instincts.
An interesting aspect is that in Star Trek Prodigy, they travel to the Hirogen System, which, if it is indeed the home system of the Hirogen, they encounter Murder Planet, which wanted to eat the crew of the Protostar, and has consumed numerous populations before them.
That's an interesting idea. Perhaps there was some sort of apocalyptic event that made the planet want to murder all that walk its surface. Maybe that's why The Hirogen are the way they are: It's Mad Max in space, but their society formed to become dominated by the hunters over millennia
I truly enjoyed that you pulled so much history of human development (including Gobekli Tepi!) in an effort to grasp the concept of a civilization's overall development toward a technologically advanced society. You totally nailed the facts of that lesson. And I do think it yields attributes to the Hirogen eventual outcome, and that perhaps the "hunt" was an attempt to get back to the time where their society had a purpose and function.
Thanks for this killer episode!
This is the deepest Trek take I have ever heard. Thank you for the education.
that network gag never gets old.
I’d say the Hirogen didn’t see the holograms as life so had no issue programming them with feeling and what not since they want the real experience as hunters and wouldn’t have an issue with it
You might be interested in The Dawn of Everything by anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wengrow. They argue (pretty convincingly imo) that there was no real agricultural revolution that inevitably lead to centralized power. Among other things (it's a monster of a book) they show examples of hunter-gatherer societies with all the evils we attribute to post agricultural civilization as well as fairly egalitarian and democratic people who are mainly agricultural.
Interesting - I have to say, everything I discuss in the video notwithstanding, I wouldn't be surprised if this more nuanced version of history were closer to the truth.
Yuval Noah Harrari in "Sapiens" also makes the argument that agriculture was really bad for humanity, at least until you reach the industrial age. It was very good for the noble class but the average peasant in, like, Medieval England or Ancient Rome had a far worse diet than their hunter-gatherer ancestors.
(The book cover's sole pull quote is from Jared Diamond, but I found it much easier to reach than Gun, Germs, and Steel)
@@qetoun Harrari is a vegan so I'm sure he's aware!
As I clicked on the image, and not reading the caption. I thought to myself, "I would like to see Taylor do a video on the Hirogen." Then after the add, "Hi guys, Taylor here." I was pleasantly surprised. Good video and as always I learned something new.
Well, consider me entertained for all the right reasons. Keep up the good work dude. 👍
Thank you Michael!
Much like what Procyon said, this is what makes your videos great. Even though this is a short video you've packed in so much, injecting humour and really making us think. You don't just skim the surface with the allegories of what inspired storylines in Star Trek. Layering in real-world influences and helping people understand how facts inspire fiction. Your videos are always great but this is really good. People's minds can sometimes be lazy when it comes to analysing concepts, you turn black and white into colour. Well... orange and green anyway. Fantastic work.
Thank you James!
@@discobolos4227 Procyon is the name of someone else who commented, if you scroll down a little you'll see them.
Could it not be said that, with food replicators, the Federation or at least humans, are also "post-agricultural"? I have only ever seen a very small handful of scenes where some kind of food is "harvested" or that it was mentioned or implied. They also seem unnecessary and more done for possibly pride or as a hobby. Say for example Picards family vineyard. They only seem to be still at it because it was a family tradition. There was the "grain" in "The Trouble With Tribbles" but, it was never shown to be harvested, only stored. I recall in "The Conscience of the King" that the reason Kodos was wanted was because of the Tarsus IV massacre. He liquidted half the populace because of a "crop blight". Although, it is assumed that the technology of TOS was slightly inferior to TNG, as the replicators in TOS seemed able only to provide certain things, by the time of TNG, you could replicate any food, in addition to devices and gadgets and clothing etc.
Many Federation worlds do not have access to replicators. At least not enough replicators to feed their entire populations. Some Federation worlds are purely agricultural, they export their food surplus to non-agricultural worlds. Some Federation worlds lack enough technology and energy infrastructure for replicators. Few worlds are as wealthy and developed as Earth.
Replicators are mostly useful in space structures were space is at a premium, growing food is still more energy efficient than the overhead of assembling it in a transporter buffer. Plus many Maquis were described as ex-farmers who just wanted to make something of their land, so I assume the Federation has space for all kinds of ways of life among the total of all their colonies.
I'm assuming the only real reason why food is still planted besides a hobby is because it's cheaper to grow than replicate.
great video. i really liked the historic and sociological context.
Great episode. What is 1,000 years to a civilization that is 100,000+ years old? To all of the idealists that look forward in belief in our potential don't despair at a set-back. Time is far more expansive than a momentary contraction.
Interesting video Tyler The Hirogen are an interesting species and of course one of them was played by Tony Todd in the series who as you know also played Worf's brother Kern and a few other characters in ST franchise.
I got Star Trek lore, and an Archaeological & Anthropological discussion in one video! Well done, sir. Thank you.
Star Trek’s Predators
Every time I click on one of the videos I ask myself who is here? And in a second I get the answer, yep its Tyler.
My idea on the Hirogen communications network is that its a remnant of their past when they had a more advanced civilization. Its still around and they still use and maintain it, even if they wouldn't be able to build it again in their current state. And its useful for a wide-ranging species of galactic nomads. An interesting story to explore would be what exactly caused the Hirogen civilization to collapse to such a point. Where is or what became of their homeworld or any colonies? My thoughts are that Hirogen society may have originally been more settled and populous, with great scientists and a large star federation or sphere of influence based on the size of their network. At some point they may have faced some kind of severe natural disaster, like the loss of their homeworld similar to what happened to Romulus. In that case, those who were already in space may have been more suited to survive by adapting to this "hunting" culture. Or it may have been a subculture of theirs that already existed, and became their main culture when their civilization collapsed.
In the episode where Tom Paris gets demoted, we encounter a race living in a "space ocean". That race has colouration and markings similar to that of the Hirogen (although much smoother), and relies on a piece of ancient technology that they don't quite understand. It's possible that the Hirogen homeworld suffered a catastrophe (perhaps the Borg, a hypothesis postulated in the art showcase book "Strange New Worlds" - look it up, a delightful read), and their people fled; some were tasked with preserving the aquatic wildlife (several millennia later, they've forgotten how and why they're there), whilst others just fled, becoming nomadic as a result, and rebuilding a society from the remains they had. It's possible, therefore, that the two species are related, and have just forgotten their joint past.
Edit: now that I've had some time to research, the episode is "Thirty Days", and the pseudo-hirogen race are the Moneans. Similar markings, proximate nostril position, near-identical colouration, but generally less robust features and stature. This is suggestive of the divergent evolution of two different levels of a caste-based originating society. This is my hypothesis, I'd be interested to hear thoughts on this
"Similar markings, proximate nostril position, near-identical colouration, generally similar features and stature."
Like humans and vulcans. Or humans and betazeds, trills, bajorans. They all must obviously be diverged from a recent common ancestor with common civilization, society, and technology.
This episode is a banger!
May the mycelial network aid your journey!
Thank you so much!
Great work Tyler thanks I love STAR TREK and your videos 😀
Thanks. That was fun.
Great video! Bravo. I hope you speak more about the Borg coming in waves. You probably addressed it in your borg centered videos, but I don't remember. I'll have to rewatch!
Yep, I did talk about it in my Borg video last year!
I'm digging your videos. You're my Star Trek source.
Great video! Long live the hunt! 😁
@Orange River I’m a bit surprised you don’t discuss the recent Star Trek: Prodigy episode where it reveals a giant telepathic plant which has totally taken over a planet in the Hirogen system, luring victims to stay with visions of their greatest wants. While very little is said of the species itself, it’s an interesting coincidence that such a thing exists on a world so close to the Hirogen homeworld if not directly on it (though likely abandoned long ago).
Sounds like hes been reading Daniel Quinn's writing on totalitarian agriculture and the Great Forgetting. Great vid, very engaging as always
That was the best most in depth video on Hirogen have seen thanks so much. Always been fascinated by that species have no idea why. And analysing thru the lens of our history making me think about Hirogen a bit more in depth. Also learnt some big words
Looking back at our species past would never want to regress to any pre-digital ye-oldy-times cos don't see any great moral virtue in being uncomfortable and limited in lifestyle choice 🖖
You know, in a lot of fiction, as in real life, the decision to limit technology is usually for a religious reason (i.e. The Amish,) or because of some cataclysm brought about by technology running amok (The Terminator.) Dune is an interesting case because one leads to the other. The cataclysm leads to religious restrictions on technology.
Please can you make a video about the sonic screwdriver from Doctor Who end of maybe someday we will have something like the sonic School driver
what if the harogen homeworld went throught a cataclysm and they did not have a contingency plan like we have with the World Seed Vault project....all the vegetation on the harogen homeworld died out so they had to become hunters and now they have a society built around it
Like if the planet was turned into a giant, hungry, psychic monster that devours everything on it and lures people to their doom?
I can see the Hirogen in the past took a Klingon turn like from enterprise from a science and social society to a warrior based one. At least how I think of what might have happened
Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes!
If you look at the middle ages and into the modern era, hunting was still practiced by the nobility. They did not realy rely on it to get food, but it was more than a past time. There was a culture around it. The Hirogen might have a similar aproach to it.
RightOn Tyler! 🖖🏻😎
The current population explosion came about as the result of the Haber-Bosch process. Mechanization of agricultural (including irrigation practices), improved municipal water quality/supply,medical care for infants, and germ theory pretty much explain the rest of the increase.
For a second there... I thought that pun was intended.
Without agriculture we wouldn't have Star Trek so in my eyes, it was one of the greatest decisions ever made in human history.
I knew a guy who played a Hirogen one or two times, he was quite tall as you would imagine.
I really wish that the Hirogen had been the final Big Bad for Voyager rather than the Borg. The Borg had already been done to death even by the time Voyager premiered. The Hirogen were a good concept, a new alien, and intimidating, not to mention Tony Todd. :) I think it would be very easy to set up the Hirgoen wanting to invade the Alpha Quadrant as a new hunting ground even if they had the holographic tech, maybe even splitter groups to deal with or ally with in the last season, the ones that want to use the tech (With added moral complication of the cruelty they inflict on the holograms) and traditionalists that want to invade the Alpha Quadrant, and it can all have a call back to The Killing Game. Continuity!
Live long and prosper better than long live the hunt 👍🏼
I admire your humour attempts. I too have trouble with practiced humour.
Please can you make a video about the Time Lords from Doctor Who the History der biology
The mycelial network meme gets me every fucking time
More please.
It has to be one of my favourites
Advancements & progress aren't inherently positive developments. If they were, the Borg collective would be the best possible outcome for a species
Really enjoying these.....bigging up voyagers trip in the unknown more than the show itself did is great in my book! Also love the real science, thanks for the effort really appreciated! (When will we get to the ramifications of Jayneway Tom newt babies?)
Super fun video. The Hirogen have been a long time favourite of mine.
I sure hope you can loop in paleontology, anthropology and archaeology into more future videos. I'll sub to a channel all about that.
Thanks Trevor!
I always wondered if the Hirogen were the race that hunted Tosk, in that one DS9 episode. Nothing in Memory Alpha about that though.
Who’d win a threeway? A klingon, a Jem ‘ Hadar or a Hierogen?
Bit late but... Couldn't help notice the mentions of Göbeklitepe and human history as a whole - Bit off topic but I recommend checking out Graham Hancocks Netflix series Ancient apocalypse, as well as his and Randall Carlsons episode on the JRE podcast, etc... Good video man 🤙
If the Hirogen are engineered perhaps there is a hyper Empathic species created as an opposite. Sounds like something the Nihilum might do.
"evolutionary...get it?" Yeah, it got me more than it should have 😂
Orangeriver the best content on TH-cam?! Maybe… maybe…
Good video, as a political science major I appreciated this one quite a bit. I'll throw you a subscription here soon, loving all the ST videos
Thank you!
Okay, Voyager first. I think the Hirogen were not hunters and had a history like Starfleet, but there is a lot of evidence that they were early to the game. It's also possible that they developed a society similar to The Orville's Krill, thinking that they are the only true intelligent species. That's how I've always thought of them.
As for the agriculture brought on inequality, that argument is too easy to debunk. Even while being hunter gatherers, there is clear signs of societal issues I'm those civilizations. For example, women were often seen as dominate in those civilizations to the extent that a lead female chose who could mate if at all. We also know that pre-historic civilizations engaged in fighting and war, even cannibalize people from other tribes. So...argument rested.
Interesting idea but yeah those cultures that remained nomadic never advanced and sadly got overrun by cultures that did.
Really surprised you don't mention the movie series "Predator" at all in this. They clearly seem like Star Treks take on that.
@@subraxas This essay most certainly could be applied to some ideas of the Fox movie Predator as well, which is great. Getting into socieital evolution of a culture was deep and indeed fresher.
Live long and prosper 🖖
I'd like to see them fight the Predators
To an episode on all the Data and all the Songs through time, and one on augments/generally mutations in humans
From what I gather... Solution to the impact of Agriculture.... Mono-cropping sucks, free education rocks, everyone gets to grow their own companion crops in food forests and share with the community :P
If Voyager was made today The Hirogen would look like Voehn from Banks' The Algebraist.
Great video, a bit late to the party but,
Have anyone else noticed that at around 14:15 the like/dislike buttons flash, on PC that is.
How long have this been a thing? >.>
Star Trek Nausican+Hirogen=Predator
5:16 was that an edit error or intentional?
Haha, it's a small reference to a channel in-joke: th-cam.com/users/shortsWNa-dJdKefA
I love this video
Göbekli Tepe - A society of hunter-gatherers, capable of erecting dozens of monoliths weighing several tons, capable of tracking astronomy with precision and then burying such an immense structure (2000 square meters) quickly to preserve it. Yes, A society of hunter-gatherers...trust!
@@subraxas The biggest problem isn't lack of funds...It's academic resistance to something that can contradict every classic timeline. This is the biggest problem and this in several other archaeological sites... anything that goes against it is immediately stopped from proceeding.
Exactly. There's still so much we don't understand from that far in the past.
@@subraxas No Ancient Aliens...but a much older civilization than we think!
@@subraxas Boa! KKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK
I liked the horigens
Your great!
wasn't gobekli tepe more like 12000 yrs ago?
🖖
🙂
@@subraxas 😁
They are same as reptailians
They are literally predators
We should never seen their face it would make them more interesting for example if they breath different kind of air composition.
Lots of Trek aliens would be more interesting if they made different design choices like this, yep :/
Sabotage!
When I first saw the Hirogen I thought they were rip-offs of Predator (the get to the choppa ones) but what I like about Voyager (!) is that unlike the Predator movies they gave these characters a backstory and culture, the Predator films tried to do the same but it didn't work, the best Predator movies are the one's where we know next to nothing about them.
Also the hunt may not necessarily be a new thing for them, they may have developed as a hunter culture, just as Klingons were a warrior culture, long before developing technology and space travel, or maybe their world was visited by the race who built the communication network and they appropriated their technology.
They are Yautja from wish
Word
War paint = 2 out of five stars
lots of talk about hunters from other hunters
these guys always confused me whenever they came on - thank you for eloquently postulating what my brain was not capable of
So basically they're the Predators
I thought they transitioned to nomads and hunts as a distraction.
The society was beginning was get overpopulated and bloated. It was taking apart.
So they came with a way to get people off the planet, isolated and uninvolved with each other and the homeland business.
I always considered them the predator rip off.
Probably off shoots of the voth...who left earth a LOOOOONNNNNNGGGG time ago and left across the galaxy
Star Trek is a fascinating body of art. I find that most of the nonterrestrials, and the unique qualities on each species, are loosely based on real races and situations that have been encountered by our modern military intelligence programs, or covert programs which have investigated, retrieved and replicated alien vehicles over the past 70 years of our modern history. Que DS9’s “Little Green Men”. The traits and challenges presented by the Hirogen, Gorn, and Voth are, combined, an almost spot-on allegory for the Alpha Draconian extraterrestrial civilization. Star Trek will be fascinating to re-watch once enough information about our real nonterrestrial neighbors is disclosed to the public. Excellent work!
Actually, the Star Trek Encyclopedia IS canon, due to the fact that it only references the shows and movies. Therefore, it is a reference book, much like the Star Trek Chronology (which is also considered canon), unlike novels and technical manuals and the like which "create" new facts that are not in the shows and may tie the hands of future script writers.
Well, technically, the Encyclopedia and other reference books--even if they reference information from canon--still engage in some speculation. So, by definition, they're not canon. Canon is only what's in the TV shows and films, period. That said, they do update these reference books periodically to bring them in line with new canon material, and they are often helpful in giving readers a general "guide" to the universe.
@@OrangeRiver Hmmm... Thank you for clearing that up.
I would just like to add, that both books do properly indicate when they are engaging in speculation by putting such at the end of the entry and making the text italicized.
Not contradicting you, I just thought that would be important for those who don't know.
Yeah I think that's an appropriate clarification
Ahhh, yes. The discount predator.
@10:29 nah, religion is the worst mistake humanity has ever made.