TOS came out at a time when people still talked of Columbus discovering america.

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 for a general audience.

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.

It was a list:

• to explore strange new worlds
• seek out new life and new civilizations
• boldly go where no one has gone before

Where no MAN has gone before. Therefore plenty of space chicks

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

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.

Well, it was supposed to be where no 'man' has gone before, but people had to whine about it, and here we are.

The people who were already there didn’t go there if they were always there

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

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.

Just empire things.

They said no "one". They can go places as long as there are many things there.

And not just natives (who are invariably human shaped), they often have entire databases of info on them from presumably when they were "discovered".

Mass Effect was a better sci fi universe and I'll die on that hill.

The further we go the more we find ourselves.

Look, they are trying.
They just keep getting distracted on the way and where overtaken.

It says to baldly go...

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.