What is the important similarity between Captain Jean Picard, Christopher Columbus, and the BOOOOOORRRGGG??

      Hint: They're all pasty white guys!! (I'm only kind of kidding). After putting that thought aside, we can see that the obvious similarity is that the are all men of conquest, with that being the case, the real question is why do we generally have such extremely different impressions of each of them? What makes a "good" or "bad" conquistador?
     I think many people would be inclined to say how they treat the land and people on which they arrived, is the defining factor in deciding if they are moral or amoral. I rather, would suggest that it is actually the adventurers motive or mondus operandi, or at least the one that they proclaim, that shifts our perception of that person and possibly even turn a blind eye to their less humane actions. People live vicariously through stories of adventure and like to identify with the main character, so we like a story with a main character with a motive we can aspire to; "To go where no man has gone before", "To discover the New World", but "Resistance is Futile"?, not so much. Because of our bias, we would rather chalk up mortality at the hands of a conqueror we "like", or maybe just their carelessness as just symptom of adventure, than instead destroy our perfectillusion of grandeur, especially if that conqueror is from our direct history.
     In the case of Christopher Columbus many American people will put aside the genocide he committed in their mind as to not destroy the romantic vision of "the Discoverer" and effectively themselves, it's borderline narcissistic. I'm in no way saying that Picard has a similar moral compass to Columbus, just a similar motto. For the same reason that we look past Colombus's atrocities, we look past Picards shortcomings, even if they are partly due to some kind of Butterfly effect. He used his confidence to explore as a way to pick up alot of responsibility, that viewers sometimes let him shed when something goes wrong. For example, because of how Picard handles Q and the Borg, thousands of people die in battle. At the very least, Picard is not mindless, we are just apt to look over the messiness and dark side that inevitably come along with having the drastic influence of leading a civilization to new explorations.
             I think what is most distressing about the Borg, besides the fact that they kill entire species, is that they don't seem to have any heroic motive, at least not from the human perspective. They seem to have a mindless appetite for over consumption and destruction. It doesn't make sense to us, they seem like viruses; why would they even bother with conquest? How can we logically reason with or make sense of a race that's motive is not "self-improvement" or adventure. It is scary to think that a species could erase something so immense like an entire species with out any passion, even if it is nefarious, how do we as humans wrap our heads around it?