Eh. You don’t have to be the first person to discover something to discover it. This is what people always miss with the vapid line about Columbus not discovering the Americas. Sure, there were already people there. But the vast majority of the human population in 1492 was ignorant of the very existence of the American continents. And their discovery instituted an epochal change that upended both the Americas and the old world.
We can condemn genocide and displacement without becoming pedantic gotcha warriors.
If all that matters is the first person to discover something, no scientist in human history has ever discovered anything. After all, relativity was probably first discovered 5 billion years ago by some alien physicist living several galaxies away.
This specific quote doesn’t say discovered, though. It says that no one had been there before, which implies that the people who are already there are no one.
Sure. But text contains more than just the words on the page.
Okay yeah, but this specific text is talking about a place no one has been that’s already populated, not the general concept of discovery.
Like if I say “I’ve discovered David Lynch”, that doesn’t imply that anyone other than me hasn’t seen Twin Peaks. If I say “I’ve been watching a director that no one has ever heard of before, his name is David Lynch”, I’m just wrong.
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.
“Man” and “woman” has never referred to humans exclusively in Star Trek, though.
“Mr. Data, you are a clever man - in any time period.”
And, not take any women along, which of course was never an option on Kirk’s ship.
At the time “man” was often used to reference the human species as a whole. Like, when they’d say something like “the dawn of man” they were specifically referring to the earliest humans regardless of gender.
Obviously this is not particularly representative of roughly half the species, which is probably why it’s less common today. Taking that into consideration, though, TNG’s intro is arguably more colonialist than TOS.
for most of the history of the word, “man” has generally meant all humanity, or any human.
male men were called something like “wer”, which survives in “werewolf”.
There wasn’t even coffee in the nebula
Huh…
…
huh…
You wrote Starfield wrong.
…and No Man’s Sky.
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.
Yes, it did though. Women, too, are human.
English uses ‘man’ and ‘mankind’ interchangeably.
Grammatically, ‘no man’ makes more sense than ‘no one.’
I hate pointlessly gendered shit. No one sounds much better to me and makes the same grammatical sense as no man. I don’t see it as any different than using they instead of he or she.
To boldly go where no ugly giant bag of mostly water has gone before.
It wasn’t considered as gendered, as referring to humanity as “man” is a holdover from when “man” wasn’t ever gendered; we don’t have any recordings of it specifically referring to males until around 1000 CE.
The old words for male/female were “wer” (see: werewolf) and “wīf”, the latter of which diverged into “wifmann” (“female human”), later “woman”, and “wife”, specifically referring to a married woman. You still see “wife” used without implication of marriage status in words like “midwife”.
Anyway tl;dr “man” historically wasn’t gendered, hence it commonly being used to refer to humanity as a whole even in modern use. Also it more accurately states that no humans have been there before, rather than discounting present natives.
Edit: also, as another comment played on, this was used as wordplay in the Lord of the Rings, in which humanity is referred to as “the race of man”, where a prophecy refers to no man being able to defeat one of the antagonists but doesn’t specify that a woman can’t.
wait, so are werewolfs trans people or intersex.
I don’t have anything to add, but I want to say that I found this comment super interesting.
Yeah I don’t disagree, but that is still why they changed it. Using “man” to refer to all mankind (and even “mankind” for that matter) is going out of style.
What’s the preferred replacement?
Humankind and person I guess. Idk I’m not a stickler on that kind of thing.
I’ve always thought it was an odd change. I get why they did it, but the original clearly wasn’t being used in the way the change implies.
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”.
Yeah it’s be hard to argue TOS was excluding women in that sentence given the presence of female bridge crew members.
You mean space secretary and space operator? The pilot had a woman as first officer but we couldn’t keep that for some reason…
You mean the Yeoman and Communications Officer?
Those are actual roles on warships that at the time women were not allowed to fill. How come when a woman is in those roles you reduce them “secretary” and “operator”?
I don’t. The show did.
As I pointed out there was a woman first officer, but we could not keep that.
The show didn’t, you did. The show put women into positions reserved for men at the time. The men in those positions weren’t called secretaries or phone operators, the female characters in Star Trek weren’t called secretaries or phone operators. The only person being reductive of their roles is you lol.
The reason was Gene Roddenberry had cast his mistress in a costar role, and wasn’t yet the Lucas-esque TV god that could get away with it.
That’s true, but they could have kept the part as a woman. There were other motivations in removing the role entirely.
They told Roddenberry he could keep Spock or Number One, but the network didn’t think the 1960s audience was ready for both at once.
Look it up.
I honestly don’t know if Majel minded that much in retrospect; she’s still the only actress to voice the Enterprise herself. She died in 2008 and most recently voiced the Enterprise D in what? 2024?
Progress happened. Uhura wore Lieutenant’s stripes so Janeway could wear Captain’s pips.
“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.
A place I worked out stopped carrying “Plantation” brand peanuts because somebody complained.
Nevermind the fact that the word “plantation” existed long long before America ever existed and associated it with chattel slavery in the minds of Americans, or the fact that the peanuts in question literally come from a modern, active plantation still today!
The etymology of “Plantation” is very transparent too. And with the centralization of agriculture almost anything we eat comes from plantations today.
Someone else posted that they didn’t consider getting rid of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben as big wins.
Most of the changes are performative and not material. imho.
They were big wins the same way getting rid of the Redskins was a big win for Native Americans. It’s not about the specific instance. It’s about what growing up in a world that tolerates that kind of portraying of ethnicity does to young minds.
I still think that Master and Slave were the most apt descriptions for IDE drive roles
“I am no man!” Says the female crew, who proceeds to stab the space Nazgul in the eye.
Goes into the women’s bathroom because I really have to shit and the men’s has been occupied for 20 minutes
Just empire things.
Should they maybe have put “from Earth” in there?
The further we go the more we find ourselves.
There are parts where no one has gone, but landing on a barren rock probably isn’t a good story
I’m struggling to come up with an example of them landing on a barren rock and anything neutral or positive happening. It’s almost always bad
It doesn’t have to be a barren planet it could also be a planet with no intelligent life. Maybe a solar system with that’s void. Idk
Well, sure - the times it turned out fine don’t make for an interesting story!
Colonizer mindset.
Well, it was supposed to be where no ‘man’ has gone before, but people had to whine about it, and here we are.
I’m just realizing that the wording change made humans seem REALLY pretentious!
Star Empire leaking, if it ain’t human it ain’t no one.
Why is the sky lesbian?
Look, they are trying.
They just keep getting distracted on the way and where overtaken.Where no MAN has gone before. Therefore plenty of space chicks
That was in TOS. They changed it to no one in TNG
Star Empire vibes, if they’re not human they’re no one.
