Titan is exploring the Beta Quad the Full Circle fleet the Delta, how much of the Alpha Quadrant has been explored?
How much of the Alpha Quadrant has been explored?
- Thread starter GalaxyClass1701
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If you mean physically visited by ships? This is second-hand, but apparently there was a special hosted by Robert Picardo a couple of days before "Caretaker" premiered where he said that 7% of the galaxy had been explored by the time of TOS and 22% by the time of TNG. This doesn't seem to jive with "Where No One Has Gone Before", though, where Kosinski quoted that only 11% of the galaxy had even been charted, or "The Dauphin" where Wesley said 19% was charted. (Closer to the latter, yeah, but I'd think that "charted" wouldn't be the same as "explored". Timo makes an argument in that thread to the contrary, though, so maybe not.)
Either way, though, it's hard to generalize that to just the Alpha Quadrant. Beta is right next to Alpha, and in fact significant parts of the Federation (including Vulcan and Alpha Centauri) are in Beta, so even though exploration would've been just in Alpha and Beta by TNG era, it's difficult to say where the division is. Even harder to get any good information on Alpha Quadrant-only figures from the TNG references if "charting" does just mean "recording", given things like the Friendship One and Quadros-1 long-distance warp probes.
Still, these should give you at least a general sense of things.
Kinda OT, but I never really understood why "they" (either the Federation in-universe, or the writers out-of-universe) decided to have the Alpha-Beta border run right through Sol. So does Earth itself spend half the year in Alpha, and half in Beta? You'd think they'd instead have Sol (or if you want to be slightly less Earth-centric, some mid-way point equidistant to all five UFP founding members) be the "centre point" of the Alpha quadrant instead, so that you didn't have a major dividing line running right through your capital. In fact, DS9 seems to be more inline with this idea, since all the major players in the Dominion war (other than the Dominion itself) are constantly referred to as "Alpha Quadrant" powers.
It just seems somewhat akin to if we had decided to run the International Date Line through New York City. Sure, you could do it, but it seems to create unnecessary issues.
I know someone will probably say it was to try and justify those endless "only ship in the quadrant" lines... but it doesn't even do that logically, so why bother?
The Delta Quadrant was mentioned back in Enterprise (in "Regeneration"), so for what it's worth it's canonically something that predates the Federation. Maybe it was a decision of UESPA or Earth Starfleet for some reason, and it was just carried over to the Federation along with so much else?
It is kind of strange, though, yeah.
It is kind of strange, though, yeah.
^ Thank you, I didn't recall that reference in Enterprise.
I sort of had it in my head that in the TOS-era, "quadrants" were actually a subdivision of "sector", in order to justify the "only ship in the quadrant" lines. But I guess this would rule that out. (And really, "octants" (like in Corona, IIRC) would work better, because then you could have 8 10 ly x 10 ly x 10 ly octants within a sector...)
I sort of had it in my head that in the TOS-era, "quadrants" were actually a subdivision of "sector", in order to justify the "only ship in the quadrant" lines. But I guess this would rule that out. (And really, "octants" (like in Corona, IIRC) would work better, because then you could have 8 10 ly x 10 ly x 10 ly octants within a sector...)
Probably the same reason the dividing line between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres runs right through London (specifically the Greenwich Observatory). It's an arbitrary and physically meaningless distinction invented by a specific culture, so what other reference point would they use but their own home?
Again: London. Having a major dividing line running right through their capital hasn't particularly bothered the British for the past 165 years.
In the same way that all of Europe is considered "Western" even though the vast majority of it is in the Eastern Hemisphere. (Specifically, only Ireland, Portugal, most of the UK and Spain, and part of France are in the Western Hemisphere.)
The International Date Line is defined as the meridian directly opposite the Greenwich Meridian, which... well, you should get the idea by now.
Well, if I lived there, it would bother me.
I thought someone might bring up the Prime Meridian. But honestly... I don't know why they did that either. Since you're just making a purely arbitrary border, why make it go right through your city?
Perhaps my thinking is just weird on this issue.
Well, OK, but as you know, we do intentionally zig-zag it to avoid populated areas, so it doesn't exactly follow the 180 degrees longitude meridian perfectly. So if there was a large city on that meridian, the IDL probably would still not run through it. (And if this was just intended to mean that this is why it doesn't go through NYC... well, since the whole system is arbitrary, if we chose to ignore historical precedent, we could have theoretically defined 0 degrees to be anywhere, so then 180 degrees could have been at a different position than it is now, too.)
Because it doesn't just go through the city, it goes through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, which had the most accurate timekeeping capability in the world. Timekeeping was vital to navigation, as a way of determining longitude from the stars, and so international shipping tended to use the Greenwich meridian as the starting point of reference on their navigational charts, the thing they measured their own position in comparison to. So it wasn't entirely arbitrary.
No, it's intended to mean that there's no reason not to have it pass through NYC, if NYC had been the city where the world's navigational standard had first been established. Before Greenwich was standardized as the global prime meridian, in fact, there were several different Washington, DC meridians that were used as geographic and temporal reference standards in the US at various times.
I think the problem is that you're focused on the idea of a meridian as a "border" when it's really just a reference line, like an axis on a graph. In that respect, it makes perfect sense to put it through the center of something. For all that modern Trek is obsessed with its "quadrants," they're really just a cartographic convenience. The axes that define the four quadrants of a graph are the more fundamental elements of it. And the axis passing between the Sun and the center of the galaxy is treated as the fundamental reference point for the Federation's cartographic standards because the Federation is oddly human-dominated. (Or maybe it's as a compromise, since the Vulcans, Andorians, and Tellarites would've been upset about any of the others getting it. One of the cleverer things Enterprise did was establishing that humans were the most neutral party among the four founders, and thus the only race that none of the other three would object to giving a concession to, implicitly explaining why we ended up with the Federation's capital, its official language, its measurement system and calendar, etc.)
IIRC from Star Trek: Star Charts, pretty much all of what lies between the Federation and the Alpha Quadrant/Gamma Quadrant border and the Galactic core remains largely unexplored. We know the Federation sent the Quadros-1 probe to the Gamma Quadrant, chances are it gave a general lay of the land to starfleet, but it's still a huge chunk of space to explore.
Yeah, I was going to say that, but I decided to go for the more objective take instead. It was actually an international consensus to pick Greenwich as the universal Prime Meridian out of all the various candidates. But to an extent, yes, it's an artifact of the age when the British Empire was the world's dominant power and London was effectively the center of the universe. (Which it still is in Doctor Who, at least, given how many alien invaders come there.) The hemispheres of the planet were defined in terms of "stuff east of London" and "stuff west of London."
Hardly. The problem is, it's very, very difficult for the human mind to grasp just how immense the galaxy is. It's estimated to have something like 400 billion stars, so one quadrant would have 100 billion stars. Even if the Federation could explore one new star system per day, it would take over 270 million years to fully explore even a single quadrant.
Really, it was a bad idea for the Trek writers to get so invested in the quadrant terminology. It's akin to writing, say, a series about King Arthur and having him constantly talking with his knights about issues that affect the Western Hemisphere. It's an enormous mismatch of relevant scales. There should really be some terminology in use to refer to smaller subdivisions of this truly immense galaxy we inhabit. But even a galactic arm is unimaginably huge -- even the small spur of an arm that the Sun occupies would take thousands of years to explore anywhere near fully. And there aren't really that many smaller physical subdivisions that could be used to define regions in the galaxy.
That was always one of the things that struck me about Voyager. Seventy years to get home seems long but not that long when you really think how far they have to travel. Assuming 140 years was achievable in terms of how long someone could live in 24th Century then most people on the ship could conceivably have gotten home within their lifetimes.
The scale of their journey may have been more relevant if it was stated it would take 150 years to get home, or something like that.
The scale of their journey may have been more relevant if it was stated it would take 150 years to get home, or something like that.
Yep, as I said, we had an Empire, the Worlds biggest ever and we felt we had the "right" to do so and is why a lot of American World maps have the USA at it's centre now a days.
As Earth was a driving force for the creation of the Federation and it seems to be the seat of the Federation government, it makes sense to have the line between the Alpha and Beta quadrants through Earth.
Wow, it honestly never occurred to me that the Alpha Quadrant would be that big, I always just thought of it as a few hundred stars. I never really thought about the fact that it would be a quarter of the whole galaxy, I just thought of it as the area where the Federation was.
^Well, that's what a quadrant is -- literally it's 1/4 of a circular area.
^ To be fair, Trek did seem to use the term for something smaller than the full Galactic quadrants, too. (Morgana Quadrant, Drema Quadrant, and a handful of numbered ones...)
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