TOS came out at a time when Columbus was still being held in high regard. :)

which makes no sense, because even then, we knew Columbus wasn't the first person there.

I choose to believe that it's usually like that, and we're just seeing the days where something interesting happens.

Hey look, it's Starfield!

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".

The aliens didn't go there though. They're just there.

English uses 'man' and 'mankind' interchangeably.

Grammatically, 'no man' makes more sense than 'no one.'

"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.

Goes into the women's bathroom because I really have to shit and the men's has been occupied for 20 minutes

Boldly yes, but It's been a long road gettin' from there to here.

Discover new worlds, name them after yourself and then sell them things.

That was in TOS. They changed it to no one in TNG

I scrolled down and I was jumpscared by this. XD

And, not take any women along, which of course was never an option on Kirk's ship.

"Man" and "woman" has never referred to humans exclusively in Star Trek, though.

"Mr. Data, you are a clever man - in any time period."

I'm just realizing that the wording change made humans seem REALLY pretentious!

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

mind=blown

star trek isn't science fiction as much as naval mercantilism with a sci-fi coat.

so much is taken from that genra, like the whistles when an officer enters the bridge, or absolute lack of seatbelts, because it isn't a spaceship, but a reskined naval bridge.

I don't even think many people will disagree with that. The appealing thing about Star Trek was always the utopia, the idealism, the philosophical questions, and (in some cases) the sciency details. Most attempts to make Star Trek into some kind of uber-galactic-struggle-between-alien-races or quest-to-avoid-the-destruction-of-the-universe that were the focus of many later sci-fi shows ended up making it worse.

As fully fledged sci-fi universes that were explicitly written with these "big" stories in mind, Mass Effect or The Expanse are clearly ahead.

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.

...and No Man's Sky.

No no, they didn't do that until TNG

If you immediately know the candlelight is fire, the meal was cooked a long time ago.

Using warp engines, you don't really go anywhere; you bring the other place to you! 😃

Dunno. If i see my neighbor fucking cats i think i have made some sort of discovery, even if my neighbor clearly knew before me what he is doing.

Discovery is relative to perspective of the explorer, it is not a characteristic of what is explored. A person can be an explorer, a group, a society, a people can be the explorer on behalf of the group. All of humanity was not the group those explorers were exploring on behalf of.

You have to have some kind of racist perspective in you to claim that it is a white person issue. It is absolutely certain that individuals and groups had, and continue to have, similar concepts of discovery on behalf of their people or themselves, even if other people already knew of a thing. "Look what I found." Is literally that. If someone else knew about the thing, was it actually found since it wasn't really lost if anyone else knew already?

That said, from a perspective relative to humanity as a whole, no, white people didn't discover many things first, but it's relative to themselves and the people who learn of it from them. White people discovered the Americas for themselves and for most of the rest of the world. While First Nations were the first to make the discovery, that knowledge not being shared means others had to discover it as well. White people discovered the Americas and shared that knowledge with the rest of humanity so while not the first to discover the Americans they were the only ones who did who informed the rest of humanity, meaning they discovered it on behalf of most human beings and in doing so, get a relatively larger amount of credit for it. They absolutely did discover the Americas, they just weren't the first humans to do so.

It does bring up the point that "discovery" can also be a relative term.

Here's a fun one: Columbus is also credited with discovering the concept of magnetic declination (the difference between true and magnetic North.) In his logs, he noted that his compass had become somewhat misaligned with the North star. He was the first Western European to write about this, but it had been known since antiquity by those sailing the Indian ocean. But none of that was done by people who wrote in the Latin alphabet.