Shatner was clearly overwhelmed as you can see from the transcript and had trouble to put the experience to words already. The one thing that I noticed was how ironic I thought it was that Shatner described the vast blackness of space as death and Earth as life. Don't get me wrong, it's certainly true but just not what I would expect from Captain Kirk who would call that a great adventure instead, most likely.
It was jarring and a bit ironic* to hear William Shatner call space "black ugliness" and the embodiment of "death", for sure.
That said, I know we all get his meaning. This tiny blue dot, our collective "blue origin" (har), for humanity is life, livelihood... everything. And it's so fragile and insignificant against the immensity of the universe.
I wish all world leaders could have such an epiphany as he clearly had.
* Notably, Shatner is familiar to us as the confidently-space-faring Captain Kirk, a character that brought to the world the idea that space travel is the mundane, normal, expected next step for humanity.
I think realizing space is an embodiment of death is consistent with the "overview effect" - to realize we are lucky to have the earth keeping us all alive, and while we can develop technology to push us outward into the black, there is not necessarily anything there for us. Might be better to "make it work" on this planet rather than run for greener pastures.
In contrast to people super hyped about space I have a far more pessimistic view.
I feel that if the US spends enough money they will get to Mars, leave some instruments, and maybe go back a few more times, then … everyone will forget about it and move on - just like they did with the Moon.
I don’t get the talk of colonising Mars either. Who the heck would want to live there? After the novelty of “I’m on another planet!” wears off, all you got is a hostile environment that doesn’t support life. It’s a dead planet with insufficient oxygen in the atmosphere to support human life, no magnetic field to protect it, and significantly lower gravity than Earth’s (whose gravitational field our bodies have evolved to function in). Living anywhere but earth seem more dangerous and for most part is a less pleasant experience.
Frankly, if it did become economical to migrate to Mars and live there, it would probably be the poor who would end up on Mars due to the potential gentrification of Earth.
Not saying we shouldn’t make “escape plans” from earth - although with several billion of us I wonder how feasible an escape plan will really be and for how many - but some people’s view of the colonisation of space is a tad too positive IMHO.
> I don’t get the talk of colonising Mars either. Who the heck would want to live there?
I think the idea is more about creating some redundancy for humanity. Every day, there's a nonzero chance of some cataclysmic event happening that wipes out all human life on earth. If we had a self-sustaining colony on Mars, we'd be able to continue on.
But I agree with the take that you wouldn't want to live there until they have vineyards, and creating a vineyard on Mars is going to be orders of magnitude more difficult than creating a vineyard on the South Pole, or the top of Everest.
Sure, the strongest and most adaptable life forms survived each mass extinction event, but our planet itself is middle aged in its “lifespan” of being able to support higher life forms. We (as in life on earth, not just humanity) don’t have much runway for that many more do-overs.
Space travel would be mundane if we could travel at warp speed to other welcoming dots lightyears away, but current the reality now is closer to what William Shatner described — “black ugliness” surrounding our beautiful blue orb.
I am following you here, but I also took this another way.
I think what this comment was about was a person who recognizes his own mortality but could put that against the backdrop of the bigger picture of our own shared human mortality.
I believe Shatner was recognizing the pure inhospitability of space to human life and the fact that we are propelling ourselves into it. If anything I think this was precisely a commentary on the very nature of the risk and adventure that space represents. Also a recognition of how much we thread the needle even just living on the Earth.
For if it were not that true exploration and adventure came at risk of life and limb, if the very risk of living did not include the risk of death, then what is it really? Thinking of the early explorers of the Earth, many who died doing so, and who risked it all in the name of exploration and adventure.
If I ever heard a more realistic characterization of what it truly means "to boldly go" where no one has gone before... I can't think of it.
I am eager to see further debriefing from Shatner, I think he will have much to say. In so far as they wanted to achieve sending a different kind of personality to space, to learn what human experience would be like, I think this was an incredible success.. putting all the commercial aspects aside.
It reminds me of a line from Flash Gordon when Emperor Ming says
Pathetic earthlings. Hurling your bodies out into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would've hidden from it in terror.
Scale is very hard for a human to grasp non-experentially.
You can view all the pictures in the world, but when you actually see the Grand Canyon in person, the scale hits you. This thing occupies the entirety of my visual field.
I imagine this is the same thing, but bigger and starker. A deep, dark black that is vast absence in the entirety of your visual field interrupted only by a bright blue globe.
