when voyager says they are from the alpha quadrant how come no one in the delta quadrant says no we ate from the delta quadrant : well at least maybe you see and what I am getting at ? why doesnt anyone say at least what you mean delta quadrant . i understand the 4th wall answer but ignoring that its just a teleplay for a moment : you would think that someone would be like whats this chic talking about delta quadrant
why does everone in the delta quandrant call it the delta quadrant
- Thread starter soornge
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This in a nutshell. In their own native language, "Delta Quadrant" is likely called something else.
I just had this talk with my boyfriend. I was saying it's a little arrogant to assume the inhabitant of the galaxy agreed where each section lies or if it has those names at all. Especially with the Delta Quadrant not established by Humans, assuming human's named the galaxy quarters. Or did the Vulcans and this is our translation? heh I don't know. But assuming since not everyone has heard of everyone, you can't say everyone knows universally and agreed to divide in fours and call it this and this. So we chalked it up to mean it's just the universal translator in play and the aliens don't call it that.
i imagine " brother i dont know that captains crazy just nod your head a lot when she speaks and hope she doesnt blow too muchh stuff up " lol
thank goodness it really bugs me a bit in the writing
easy enough but it doesnt work pyxhically like doctor who ... but dont get me started on the ut some boxes you just do not open lol
Although it's still a coincidence for them to use the same "quadrant" designation at all, since it's purely arbitrary to divide the galactic disk up in that way. And there's no reason they'd define the quadrant boundaries the same way the Federation does, since the Alpha/Beta Quadrant border is defined as passing through Sol (in much the way that the boundary between Eastern and Western Hemispheres is defined as the meridian passing through the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England). A civilization that had never heard of Earth before would have no reason to divide the galaxy along the identical axes.
I would imagine they don't necesarrily mean litterally quadrant, just an area that the translator interprets as the word quadrant.
^Yeah, but I kinda wish the "quadrant" designation hadn't caught on so strongly in Trek. The galaxy is so immense that dividing it merely into four pieces is effectively useless -- like talking about countries and cities on Earth purely in terms of what hemisphere they're in. There are relatively few contexts where that information is actually useful.
Well for the delta quadrant that makes sense. It is an area the federation has not explored and hasn't designated specific areas to. But in the Alpha Quadrant there are more specific divisions
I never recall them calling it the delta quadrant I do remember Delties calling it the Quadrant. So I dunno-maybe everybody divides the Milky Way into four regions
Which is an unlikely coincidence, especially since -- as I said -- it's a completely arbitrary and generally useless way of subdividing the galactic disk. And different cultures that did happen to divide it into quadrants would not pick the same quadrant dividing lines, certainly not ones based on Sol as the anchor point. Before the 1884 international agreement to accept the Greenwich Meridian as the global standard, there were a lot of different "prime meridians" used by different countries.
I think a more useful way of subdividing the galactic disk would be radially, as concentric rings -- the core, the inner disk, the middle disk, the outer disk, the halo. After all, there is a meaningful physical distinction between those regions -- the stars are packed closer together the closer in you get, the cosmic environment is more turbulent and radiation-rich closer in, and many scientists believe that the middle disk represents a "galactic habitable zone" where life is most likely to form (though I prefer to think of it more as a temperate zone, since perhaps life in the inner disk would simply evolve to be hardier and more radiation-resistant, and of course stars can drift from one region to another as they orbit). Of course, that means that two stars could be in the same ring yet on opposite sides of the galaxy, so maybe combining the ring divisions with a quadrant or octant system would help a bit, although that would still make each segment extremely huge and in need of finer subdivisions within it.
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I don't see why not-four is an easy number to work with and to plot on a astrocartographic map
