OK, so in TOG is was: “Space the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Star ship Enterprise. It’s five year mission To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations. To boldly go where no man has gone before.”
So, in the Star Trek TOG that is how every show starts. In TNG the words have changed. Five year has changed to continuous, which I don’t have a problem.
My problem is the next one where and man turned to one.
Now here is my beef. Man not only was the word for people who are male, but it was also used to represent all humans. So saying man in this context, it would mean all humans. One on the other hand could be anyone, even none humans. Wouldn’t it be wrong to say “Where no one has gone before”, when it’s not necessarily true?
Although it may be a first place man has been to, it seems some other one has been there first.
Maybe this is a nitpick. Too much time on my hands lately.
Dammit, Jack, now you’ve got me thinking about this way too much.
I suspect that the original “to boldly go where no man has gone before” was so memorable partly because it echoed Neil Armstrong’s “one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.” Changing “man” to “one” eliminates that, in the interest of… political correctness? sexual inclusiveness? or was it meant to include other species (like Vulcans or Klingons) among the Boldly Go-ers?
In the original, was “to boldly go where no man has gone before” intended as a poetic restatement of, or as an addition to, “to seek out new life and new civilizations”? 'Cause if you’re finding new civilizations, you’re not going where no one has gone before, except in the ethnocentric sense that Columbus discovered a new world where no one had gone before.
Except that the show pre-dates Apollo 11 by a couple of years.
I’m pretty sure it was done as a PC move. I first heard about it at a convention, and I sort of remember the person who said it (a producer or somesuch) saying as much.
It was the first of many moves to pull a great 60s show into the sanitized 80s.
Whether or not it was changed because it was the '80’s and sanitized for your protection could have been the motto of the The Next Generation, with in the context of the show humans were not the only ones on the Enterprise or in Starfleet. The original version was human centric, the revised was not. The implied meaning of “no one” was “none of us”.
They also needed a one syllable word to replace “man.” It ruins the scansion to say “where no human being of either sex or transgender has gone before.”
Maybe it really was their mission to go where no one had gone before. Maybe every time they arrived at an uncharted planet and discovered an alien race already living there, they collectively muttered “shit” and scurried off to find planets that truly hadn’t been visited by anyone. And it just happened that none of those shows were interesting, for obvious reasons, so they never aired “Picard and the crew show up at yet another empty planet. They take samples; nothing happens.”
Well, it’s like saying Columbus “discovered” the New World. There were certainly several million natives who’d be surprised to find their home was undiscovered. There’s the implicit assumption that the discovery was from the European POV and a similar assumption in the TOS intro monologue.
Why can’t it be both? It was changed for the show to be more inclusive, maybe they found out that women were watching the show too? It also changed within the show to be more inclusive of non-humans, given that Starfleet by now commonly included members of many different species amongst its ranks.
As far as the new life, new civilizations/ where no one has gone before thing goes, they need not do both at once. You might work at a law firm where your job is to do research on case history to help the lawyers win The Big Case. Your job at that law firm might also involve making coffee. Despite being two very separate things, these two facets of your job would in no way be mutually exclusive.
Anyhow, Starfleet goes forth and meets civilizations new to them, and they ALSO go forth to unexplored regions of the cosmos, where literally nobody has been before them. Different parts of the same job.
“Where no one has gone before” isn’t the same as “Where no one has been before.”
So if they show up on an inhabited planet, they are the first to have gone there, since the others didn’t go there, they *started out *there.
This has bugged me, too, ever since TNG was in its first run.
No, it’s the later one that was human-centric. The first version was correct: Maybe someone else has been there before, but humans (i.e., “man”, in the inclusive sense) haven’t yet. When you start saying “where no one has gone before”, though, you’re saying that all those folks who were already there don’t count; they’re no one. I’m sure that the intent was to make it more PC, but the actual effect was to make it less.
In one of the TNG novels, the *Enterprise *is sent to an unexplored region from which the Vulcans picked up a distress message (“Our planet is dying”)almost three hundred years previously. They never investigated it.
Riker grumbles, “We’re boldly going where no on has bothered to go before.”