TOS came out at a time when people still talked of Columbus discovering america.
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
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TOS came out at a time when Columbus was still being held in high regard. :)
Quick search suggests that the people of Columbia are still pretty happy with the name.
Meanwhile the people of Ohio's capital aren't
I live in NYC and no one is actually pushing to get rid of Columbus Circle.
otoh, Trump has a Building right on Columbus Circle, so maybe we should ask Mamdani to rename it Obama Circle.
Meanwhile, Amerigo Vespucci, America's namesake:
That's the part of the story I can find funny. Columbus made four trips to the New World, set up colonies, and explored. He never set foot on the American mainland but he saw it with his own eyes, sailing up and down the Mexican coast looking for the Singapore Straight, which he obviously never found because it was busy being on the other side of the planet. He went to his deathbed believing he'd visited Asia. It wasn't until Mr. Vespucci made it all the way to Argentina before going "Dudes...there's no fucking way we're in the Philippines. There isn't a landmass thousands of miles long in the Philippines."
And he was right, which is why AMERICA! FUCK YEA!
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To be fair, it would be a boring show if they didn’t.
Ship enters orbit of a planet
‘Spock, what do our scans show?’
‘Intense geologic activity, no atmosphere, no life signs.’
Ship spends the next 3 months in orbit collecting data, moves on to the next target
‘Spock, what do our scans show?’
‘Planet is frozen, no geologic activity, no life signs.’
Ship spends the next 3 months in orbit collecting data
Realistic sci fi is waaayyy too boring.
I choose to believe that it's usually like that, and we're just seeing the days where something interesting happens.
I mean it has to be.
They age and have discussions of things we don't physically see.
Talking about the first encounter of the Q being 3 years ago not 1000 episodes ago
Yeah, it kinda feels like you could do a very ‘boring’ science series just showing all of that. But I feel like that’s just ‘sci’ with no ‘fi’.
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Hey look, it's Starfield!
I'm glad you made this comment because I was about to.
Starfield, a surprisingly great framework for a game from Bethesda, but they forgot to put the actual game inside it
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realistic scifi can be fun for general audiences still. they just have to focus on the right bits.
look at the early seasons of for all mankind. it's about the realistic process of achieving space flight goals. it spends 60% of its runtime on how the launch even comes to happen. then it shows the bits that go wrong and the ways they manage fix them and the political/personal drama of the decision making process on all sides.
now, that's a very dry show for people that like science, politics, and history, but the realistic scifi could just as easily be wrapped in a funny show about dumb politicians and crazy rich people. use the same strategies, but make it about the engineers at space x having to work under musk. show them having to suddenly pivot away from lidar for no reason other than musk's ego. show them trying to talk about space flight with a podcast bro. create drama when one of the main character's lives is actually on the line because no one trusts the new valve gasket supplier musk brought in for political clout.
the parts stat trek glosses over are the parts realistic scifi focuses on. like how they decide what planet to go to next. the episode always starts with them already there or randomly being drawn somewhere. or like what actual physics would matter in what they're doing and not "plasma phase inverter coils" needing to be "degaussed of subspace radiation".
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I mean the original line was "where no man has gone before" which at least made sense, although it didn't represent the female crew very well.
English uses 'man' and 'mankind' interchangeably.
Grammatically, 'no man' makes more sense than 'no one.'
I've always thought it was an odd change. I get why they did it, but the original clearly wasn't being used that way.
It has the same energy as saying that you can't use the term "whitelist" and must substitute "allowlist", or "master bedroom" to "primary bedroom", or that time they changed "monkeypox" to "m-pox".
"Master bedroom" being changed is such a silly one. That term wasn't even used until the 20th century and referred to the master of the household. It has nothing to do with slave masters.
It speaks to a larger cultural ignorance or poor literacy to even consider it, in my opinion. I've seen similar reactions to talking about "plantation-style" home architecture. It's as if many people have only ever heard these words in connection with slavery from their lessons in school.
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Yeah it’s be hard to argue TOS was excluding women in that sentence given the presence of female bridge crew members.
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"I am no man!" Says the female crew, who proceeds to stab the space Nazgul in the eye.
Yes, it did though. Women, too, are human.
It was a list:
- to explore strange new worlds
- seek out new life and new civilizations
- boldly go where no one has gone before
Boldly yes, but It's been a long road gettin' from there to here.
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Where no MAN has gone before. Therefore plenty of space chicks
TBF in the ToS it was ”Where no man has gone before”, not “Where no one has gone before.”
So if it was aliens then the statement was correct, we’d just have to skip all the weird human populated worlds they found.
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Just watched an episode where they literally went to a section of space completely absent of all energy and matter and still somehow met this
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There wasn't even coffee in the nebula
I mean, isn't this basically what every European did in the Americas and Africa?
Columbus: "Look, I'm the first human being ever to set foot here!"
200 Taíno people staring at him wondering WTF was going on
Columbus: "Look, I planted a flag, that way if anyone else ever comes here, they'll know this is Spanish land now."
There are parts where no one has gone, but landing on a barren rock probably isn't a good story
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As progressive as the show was for its time, it is informed by narratives of the settler imperialism that helped Europeans "conquer the new world".
There's a reason why the intro casts space as "the final frontier." The frontier myth and its accompanying ideology of Manifest Destiny still formed the widely accepted version of U.S. history. Not the land-grabbing, genociding, slavery-spreading version we know today.
Bonus thought: Exploring space was obviously a big thing back then so it's understandable how Roddenberry came up with this line. But when you really think about it, time is the final frontier that we haven't managed to break through yet. Not space.
The people who were already there didn’t go there if they were always there
The further we go the more we find ourselves.
Colonizer mindset.
They said no "one". They can go places as long as there are many things there.
Should they maybe have put "from Earth" in there?
Just empire things.
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