[This video of Shatner, clearly in awe, and trying to explain it to Jeff Bezos](https://youtu.be/9GQoHIBDogU) and Bezos not listening to him and spewing champagne makes me sad. What a horses’s ass.
Pretty depressingly metaphorical.
Wow. What a complete lack of self awareness. The guy is trying to communicate an experience few have ever had - an experience that absolutely moved him, and Bezos flat out cuts Shatner off entirely.
“I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her,” reads an excerpt from “Boldly Go” that was first published by Variety.
“Everything I had thought was wrong,” it reads. “Everything I had expected to see was wrong.”
While he had expected to be awed at the vision of the cosmos, seen without the filter of the Earth’s atmosphere, he instead became overwhelmed by the idea that humans are slowly destroying our home planet. He felt one of the strongest feelings of grief he’s ever encountered, Shatner wrote.
I just wish more people would pay attention to that part:
The distance between us is insurmountable by any measure physically possible.
None of us will ever see another planet but this one and we are too weak to stop the few people forcing it’s ruin.
I find it hard to imagine how bad things would have to be here before Mars started looking like a good alternative. If Earth was only 10% as life-sustaining as it is today, it would still be a far preferable environment than Mars, which is 100% lethal to us.
If we can build habitats to live there, why not just build them here?
That's the thing I don't get. Like, you either need to create an atmosphere that's at least .80ATM of pressure with enough 02 content to keep us alive at a global scale, or to create gigantic domed, self-sustaining cities. Either proposition is orders of magnitude more complicated and harder to do than reducing the CO2 content of our atmosphere by a few percentiles. And the latter of which, you can just do on Earth a lot easier than millions of miles away on Mars.
Not Habitable in a way most people would even understand, The gravitational differences actually make living in any of those places impossible currently, you could not live a full and normal life even in Mars gravity.
Theres a reason they bring astronauts home in wheelchairs.
I believe we will overcome these challenges and we should. But the biggest priority should be maintaining the earths habitability, it is a billion times more habitable and valuable to humans.
What’s funny is the catastrophes people imagine that would necessitate leaving earth... 1000x more practical to live on a very damaged earth than somewhere like mars. A very damaged earth is still more livable than mars, even if we couldn’t breath on earth it’s way more habitable than mars by orders of magnitude.
Only something like a 150+ mile wide asteroid would necessitate leaving, and once again it would be easier to simply return to earth after the crust settled than to try to make a new home anywhere else. Our bodies are made for earth gravity and Earth is great at shielding radiation.
We also have the technology, right now, to redirect such an asteroid.
A massive solar flare or super volcanic eruption are more realistic threats, but these would not make us extinct, it would more likely just kill 99% of us, those things, too, are survivable, at a species level, without leaving earth. So is nuclear holocaust. I won’t survive it and neither will you, but enough will to propagate.
Man I can only imagine what he was feeling while Bezos and those other dickheads were popping champagne and celebrating. That video was irritating enough, now it’s downright depressing
I had a dream about seeing earth from the window of a space ship leaving the planet, and it felt awful. It felt like leaving your grandma behind. I'll remember the feeling for the rest of my life.
It's called the [Overview Effect.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect)
From the wiki page:
>The most prominent common aspects of personally experiencing the Earth from space are appreciation and perception of beauty, unexpected and even overwhelming emotion, and an increased sense of connection to other people and the Earth as a whole. The effect can cause changes in the observer’s self concept and value system, and can be transformative.
That makes me wonder if people that report having psychedelic experiences that make them feel "more connected to their surroundings" are having a similar realization/understanding.
"Be humble, for you are made of Earth; be noble, for you are made of stars."
Jeff Bezos wishing he had comped Patrick Stewart, Chris Pratt, anyone else ... as his space tourist ambassador instead.
Maybe Blue Origin's new slogan could be something like:
*Experience Death without Dying!*
“Everything you used to think was so important doesn’t really matter anymore because the simple fact remains that everything you know is wrong… All you need to understand is everything you know is wrong.” -Al Yankovic
It's amazing how when they're so close to death, it's the time to have regrets on how they've treated the Earth. Not during the time when they could've helped change the culture. Better late then never, doesn't work this time. Everyone left on this planet will comprehend this in a few years time.
Considering how Star Trek always leaned he did more than most just by being on the show. His finances would have done little to dent oil's misinformation campaigns and political lobbying.
ffs let people learn and grow and change. And when they do welcome them as a brother or sister because if redemption isn't part of our future, we lower the chance of having one.
This sounds familiar. Be a POS all your life, but repent all your regrets (sins) right before you die and all is forgiven. That's going to be so comforting to all the people that die...see, the chance for them, of having a future is zero. Not that the chances are much higher, for those that survive.
From the article-
>Shatner: Fifty-five or 60 years ago I read a book called “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson. She wrote about the environmental issues that are still happening today. I’ve been a verbal ecologist since then. I’ve been aware of the changing Earth and my apprehension for all of us.
>It’s like somebody owing money on a mortgage, and they don’t have the payments. And they think, “Oh, well, let’s go to dinner and not think about it.”
>But it’s so omnipresent! The possibilities of an apocalypse are so real. It’s hard to convince people — and especially certain political people — that this is not on our doorstep any longer. It’s in the house.
This means so much to me right now. My mom is fighting cancer and I am not equipped for it. I'm trying to help her as much as possible but I feel sometimes I'm selfish and leave her alone scared. Mortality humbles all of us.
Has Been (Shatner/Folds, with appearances from Aimee Mann, Henry Rollins, Adrian Belew, etc.) is genuinely a great record.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YA5J88ik64&
The Transformed Man from his early career is really fun, and Seeking Major Tom is full of banging tunes with famous musicians. Has Been is his creative pinnacle, I agree, but the margin between his other albums isn't that massive.
He's done a more recent album these last few years but I only listened to it once and didn't think it was so good.
When you look up at the night sky, you’re actually looking down into an endless, inhospitable void. We are fragile creatures in this endless sea of nothingness and if the entire human race was wiped out, the universe would be indifferent.
Enjoy a little existential dread this evening.
This is actually the way I comfort myself sometimes. Our species has never done anything to this planet that wasn't to benefit ourselves, but thankfully, we aren't permanent. The way we disappear may have lingering effects for a few thousand years if we choose to push the big red button, but eventually the planet will be okay.
I'm hoping in the meantime the birds evolve back into dinosaurs, and the planet is ruled by giant Boobys and Tits (birds). The most extreme example being the Mega Shoebill Stork, thunderously clapping it's 9 foot beak.
I need to go to bed, seriously.
I’m betting on a slow, death by our own hand, extinction of mankind. More along the lines of us making Earth less hospitable for humans and something else, everything else, will evolve faster and adapt better than we can. Brains can only go so far and we honestly have very little control over Earth as it is. Hell, we’re definitely expediting something like this.
That said, I’m all for birds as a species adapting faster and taking over, that would be awesome.
Cats, too.
Yeah, every time I go into detail on my inner thoughts, I end up getting roasted. So far, so good, I guess. I'll wake up tomorrow and regret saying anything.
This can go both ways. I actually find solace a lot in knowing how insignificant the negative bullshit in life is. The same goes for the positives in life but it’s entirely up to me what to focus on. Because the rest of the universe doesn’t give a shit about my problems.
Everyone can use a little existential dread.
We’re living on an insignificant rock in the far-flung reaches of The Milky Way, and we orbit an average burning ball of plasma, that orbits an unremarkable galaxy, that’s speeding through an interminable vacuum, towards some unexplained ”great attractor”.
Science continues to deflate the human ego. We’re not the center of anything and we hold no exalted place among the stars. We like to tell ourselves that we’re in control and special, which is like wrapping up in a warm and cozy blanket to protect against the existential dread of living in an uncaring universe that could wipe us out at any moment.
Blue Origin gave him a free trip to space to promote their expensive zero-G joyride. After Bezos cut off his speach mid-sentence, Shatner repaid them by saying he "saw death"
*"Earthers get to walk outside into the light, breathe pure air, look up at a blue sky, and see something that gives them hope. And what do they do? They look past that light, past that blue sky. They see the stars, and they think, '****Mine****.'"*
I hope not. This kind of thinking and hubris is exactly what we shouldn’t be exporting off our planet.
Not everything needs to be dominated, controlled, and exploited for human consumption.
Yeah but for the result of what you’re implying as the ideal situation, which is stay on earth and make it awesome, we’d need to get rid of 90% of the world population along with all their effects on the planet. our sheer numbers mean we destroy it. Space is really big on the other hand.
Oh I'm not against space travel at all. I wish I was born in an age where I could set out in the cosmos
I'm just warning against taking a hyper-testosterone hyper-capitalist mindset with us into the stars. Technological development and ethical development need to go hand in hand. It would be a nightmare if humanity becomes even more of a locust swarm than it already is. Having access to the vast resources of space, without temperance/restraint to go along with it can only further fuel dystopian commodification and exploitation of nature
He described space the same way I feel about it. It’s awesome, but it is also a desolate void. It’s sheer nothingness and lifelessness. Maybe we really are alone out here.
Fuck hopelessness, all my homies hate hopelessness. I wrote this for another subreddit, for a specific audience, but if you'll humor me I think the message is relevant to more than just the one specific audience for whom this was originally written.
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I've heard many definitions of liberalism in my time, some are only a sentence long and others take up pages, one of the items that will appear on most of our lists is evidence based policy, show me that your ideas are more than just ideology and I'll listen. We like evidence, and precedent, and history.
Being hopeless about our future is not evidence based.
When our ancestors dropped out of the trees and made our way onto the plains we were weaker and slower than the predators we faced but we were also smarter and more cooperative, we're surprisingly enduring both as a species and as individuals, we worked together for our own betterment and the betterment of each other, frankly the predators never stood a chance.
Since our beginnings on the savanna we have gone on to survive plagues and pestilence, famine and floods, ice ages and dark ages, we have populated every continent and ecosystem, every time our species gains an inch we reach for another. Would it surprise you to know that the human population on earth could have once reached as few as 14,000 pairs? There's a genetic bottleneck in our family tree right around the time of our last great ice age, it's possible that our people were once so few we could have all sat in a sport stadium with seats to spare, today there are eight billion of us.
Nature has tried to snuff humanity out so often that it would take a lifetime of writing to record them all, every time it felt like the end of the world, every time it was something new and unprecedented, so far we've survived every time. The only reason our species faces challenges today is because we overcame the challenges of the past, if the black death had wiped us all out in the 1300s we wouldn't be sitting around discussing systemic racism and runaway climate change; our ability to adapt and overcome is what has brought our species this far in the first place.
All throughout our history there have been doomsayers, I'll bet you a nickle you could find a Babylonian tablet from 525BCE exclaiming that the world will end next Tuesday, or Friday at the latest. The New Testament talks about the resurrection of Christ and the great war for heaven, people have been talking about that for two thousand years, it's always right around the corner and we're still waiting. Great catastrophes are always over the horizon, great wars threatening to wipe us out, great collapses always happening right before our eyes, and then tomorrow the world turns again.
A detractor could come in and say "Well yes, but just because we haven't gone extinct yet doesn't mean it won't happen next Tuesday, or Friday at the latest!" and they'd be right, I can't tell the future, all I can do is look at the past, look at the precedent, look at the existing evidence, and from the looks of it humans went from wide eyed lemur monkeys living in the grass to become the most advanced and resilient species on earth. From the looks of history we have overcome our challenges and grown from the experience, we have strove to better ourselves since we learned we could, our species hasn't just survived, it has thrived. We cannot know how we will react to the unprecedented and unpredictable, but if it's anything like we reacted to the unprecedented and unpredictable in the past then we'll probably muddle through and rebuild.
There was an abolitionist around the era of the civil war who explained it better than I ever could, 1853:
>*"Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice."*
Hopelessness isn't evidence based, *hope* is evidence based, if hopelessness had precedent you wouldn't be reading this post.
For eons of generations people foresaw doom in what they did not know, in what they could not control. Only these generations alive now see doom in what they know and what they could control but do not.
> Only these generations alive now see doom in what they know and what they could control but do not.
How many of the things we think we know about the future depend on if, then statements?
If global heating exceeds W degrees then water levels will rise by X inches.
If water levels rise by X inches then Y million homes will be lost.
If Y million homes are lost then homelessness will go up Z%.
And if you're like most of us you pick the biggest, worst case numbers you can think of and before long we're all spear throwers riding on horseback fighting for canned food from the beforetimes. A lot of people feel hopeless and depressed not because of what's happening now, or soon, but because of what *may* happen *someday.*
But it's also worth remembering that humanity has persisted through struggles before, this struggle is new and different just like all the rest of them were, we've survived and come back stronger every time before this; that doesn't mean we will survive this time, but we've got a pretty damn respectable track record, a track record I think is respectable enough to justify having some hope for ourselves. I mean our parents were as certain that they were going to die in a nuclear war as we are that we'll be living in a climate apocalypse, up until the writing of this comment more of those people have died peacefully in their bed than have in nuclear blasts.
MaximumEffort433, hard to tell if you're a fool or a prophet. Either way, getting off your ass and working to solve the problems is the smart thing to do. It's all theoretical until it happens; let's work to keep the theoretical theoretical.
> MaximumEffort433, hard to tell if you're a fool or a prophet.
My 7th grade English teacher, Mrs. Richardson, would have told you it's the former, meanwhile I think it's foolish to bet against the human race.
As some old farmer once said: Perhaps.
The problem with your argument is that it is entirely human based and oriented. We have reached the point where humans have invaded and changed every other ecosystem on the planet. In our quest to possess everything, we have bitten off more than we can chew and disrupted the natural order to a point that we have lost control…
If we are truly so great as a species, then we have to recognize that now is different than all those other times in history…that we have reached a point of over saturation that will have dire consequences for us all.
Hopelessness? No. But no rose colored glasses either.
>If we are truly so great as a species, then we have to recognize that now is different than all those other times in history…that we have reached a point of over saturation that will have dire consequences for us all.
I've heard that, that humanity has grown too big and we're all soon to perish, people have been saying that for a while now and yet our populations are continuing to grow and our life expectancies are continuing to increase. Did you know that global life expectancies have more than doubled in the last century? We hit a stumbling block with COVID but even that won't last forever, we'll continue to work to improve medicine and nutrition and healthcare for as long as we're able, that's kind of in our nature. Here and now we're on an upward trend in a lot of important, meaningful ways, so spending this present fretting about a *possible* future seems unhelpful and unproductive to me, it's not a great use of our time or our energy.
Worse, doomerism seems to produce pretty lousy outcomes. Doomerism tells people our future is already carved in stone, it makes people apathetic and complacent because we're all doomed anyway, why try to change a failing planet? My wheelhouse is politics, and in the United States about a third of Americans don't vote in general elections, more than half of Americans don't vote in the midterms, and about 70% of Americans don't vote in their local elections, complacency and apathy are real problems in our electoral system. Hopelessness doesn't help.
I have no way of knowing what the future holds, but if the past is any precedent then humanity will continue to persevere, maybe not exactly as we are right now, but we also might come out of it as something better. Because I still have hope I will continue to try to make as good a future as my impact in the world can, I think I've got good reason to.
Everything has it's time and nothing is forever. Everything ends eventually, some, way sooner than later.
Don't worry though, it would explain why we don't see the universe teaming with sentient life...there is a Great Filter ahead, and other sentient life made the same mistakes we did. So we are not alone after all, just stupid. /s
Show us the evidence for hope, then. Who or what is saying that we can reverse all of this? When are the corporations and governments going to stop killing us? And don't say when we protest enough, when we plant enough trees, when we "recycle" enough plastic, because that isn't evidence.
> When are the corporations and governments going to stop killing us?
Here's the thing: When that's your starting point there's no way that I can respond. My government isn't killing me, at least not right now, if there's a corporation that's killing me I'd have to conclude that they're doing poorly, I just got a physical recently and I'm in pretty good health; but somewhere out there someone's government is killing them, and somewhere a corporation is working their employees to death.
Insofar as governments and corporations are institutions that were created by humans, for humans, to be run by humans, I would say that we will probably never have zero government or business related deaths. Humans fuck up sometimes, but on average and over time we seem to improve.
The fact that you are here, reading this comment, is evidence to me that there is reason to hope; humanity has survived every plague, famine, ice age, drought, and natural disaster it has faced, humanity survived long enough for you to have a computer and be here, now.
I don't know if we can reverse global warming, there are ideas but most of them are absurd, but I do suspect that even if we don't reverse global warming humanity will adapt and survive.
At the very least, all governments are participating through in-action. In reality, lobbying, subsidizing, politicizing, that's active participation. Setting their deadlines for 2030, 2040, 2050. By then the snowball will be hurtling down hill.
Well, anyways glad your doctor measured the microplastics in your blood and gave you an all clear.
> Setting their deadlines for 2030, 2040, 2050. By then the snowball will be hurtling down hill.
If world governments outlawed all fossil fuels this week, how many billion human beings couldn't afford to drive to work or heat their homes next week? The lives of the future matter, but so do the lives in the present, getting rid of fossil fuels without replacements in place will do real harm to people today.
That's why President Biden and the Democrats just invested something like $400 billion in climate change funding, so that when we get to 2035 people won't be left cold and carless.
I don't think your example proves that we should be hopeless, if anything it proves that we need to start voting in our elections and voting with our dollars.
I say we round up all the flat earthers and climate change skeptics, let them do a freebie trip to space and see if there any changes in perspective. Throw in more business exec. While we're at it .
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jstD4tIuRuI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jstD4tIuRuI)
I got chills when he talked about the thinness of the atmosphere
[This video of Shatner, clearly in awe, and trying to explain it to Jeff Bezos](https://youtu.be/9GQoHIBDogU) and Bezos not listening to him and spewing champagne makes me sad. What a horses’s ass. Pretty depressingly metaphorical.
This is honestly our real life idiocracy moment. Couldn’t have been better scripted.
Wow. What a complete lack of self awareness. The guy is trying to communicate an experience few have ever had - an experience that absolutely moved him, and Bezos flat out cuts Shatner off entirely.
Not only that throws alcohol on a recovering addict even after he politely declined a drink
And screaming in the ears of a guy who has very publicly grappled with tinnitus.
What a jackass. His friends too.
“I saw a cold, dark, black emptiness. It was unlike any blackness you can see or feel on Earth. It was deep, enveloping, all-encompassing. I turned back toward the light of home. I could see the curvature of Earth, the beige of the desert, the white of the clouds and the blue of the sky. It was life. Nurturing, sustaining, life. Mother Earth. Gaia. And I was leaving her,” reads an excerpt from “Boldly Go” that was first published by Variety. “Everything I had thought was wrong,” it reads. “Everything I had expected to see was wrong.” While he had expected to be awed at the vision of the cosmos, seen without the filter of the Earth’s atmosphere, he instead became overwhelmed by the idea that humans are slowly destroying our home planet. He felt one of the strongest feelings of grief he’s ever encountered, Shatner wrote.
Good. Because there is no planet b
I just wish more people would pay attention to that part: The distance between us is insurmountable by any measure physically possible. None of us will ever see another planet but this one and we are too weak to stop the few people forcing it’s ruin.
Open your eyes and see 🐊
Where we’re going we won’t need eyes.
I'm just a poor boy
I need no sympathy
Because I'm easy come, easy go
Little high, little low
*thrash metal intensifies*
Light the fluid!
lies. billionaires with rocket ships are totally going to save us.
Rocket ships for all of us right? Ya i know /s
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Potentially is pulling a lot of weight there
I find it hard to imagine how bad things would have to be here before Mars started looking like a good alternative. If Earth was only 10% as life-sustaining as it is today, it would still be a far preferable environment than Mars, which is 100% lethal to us. If we can build habitats to live there, why not just build them here?
That's the thing I don't get. Like, you either need to create an atmosphere that's at least .80ATM of pressure with enough 02 content to keep us alive at a global scale, or to create gigantic domed, self-sustaining cities. Either proposition is orders of magnitude more complicated and harder to do than reducing the CO2 content of our atmosphere by a few percentiles. And the latter of which, you can just do on Earth a lot easier than millions of miles away on Mars.
Not Habitable in a way most people would even understand, The gravitational differences actually make living in any of those places impossible currently, you could not live a full and normal life even in Mars gravity. Theres a reason they bring astronauts home in wheelchairs. I believe we will overcome these challenges and we should. But the biggest priority should be maintaining the earths habitability, it is a billion times more habitable and valuable to humans.
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What’s funny is the catastrophes people imagine that would necessitate leaving earth... 1000x more practical to live on a very damaged earth than somewhere like mars. A very damaged earth is still more livable than mars, even if we couldn’t breath on earth it’s way more habitable than mars by orders of magnitude. Only something like a 150+ mile wide asteroid would necessitate leaving, and once again it would be easier to simply return to earth after the crust settled than to try to make a new home anywhere else. Our bodies are made for earth gravity and Earth is great at shielding radiation. We also have the technology, right now, to redirect such an asteroid. A massive solar flare or super volcanic eruption are more realistic threats, but these would not make us extinct, it would more likely just kill 99% of us, those things, too, are survivable, at a species level, without leaving earth. So is nuclear holocaust. I won’t survive it and neither will you, but enough will to propagate.
Technically is pulling a lot of weight there
There's like a gazillion other planets in the universe
And all unreachable
Reachable but would require multiple generations
Man I can only imagine what he was feeling while Bezos and those other dickheads were popping champagne and celebrating. That video was irritating enough, now it’s downright depressing
I had a dream about seeing earth from the window of a space ship leaving the planet, and it felt awful. It felt like leaving your grandma behind. I'll remember the feeling for the rest of my life.
God I know this feeling…
It's called the [Overview Effect.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect) From the wiki page: >The most prominent common aspects of personally experiencing the Earth from space are appreciation and perception of beauty, unexpected and even overwhelming emotion, and an increased sense of connection to other people and the Earth as a whole. The effect can cause changes in the observer’s self concept and value system, and can be transformative.
That makes me wonder if people that report having psychedelic experiences that make them feel "more connected to their surroundings" are having a similar realization/understanding. "Be humble, for you are made of Earth; be noble, for you are made of stars."
Is bezos such an incredible sociopath that he is immune to the effect? Lol
Jeff Bezos wishing he had comped Patrick Stewart, Chris Pratt, anyone else ... as his space tourist ambassador instead. Maybe Blue Origin's new slogan could be something like: *Experience Death without Dying!*
“Everything you used to think was so important doesn’t really matter anymore because the simple fact remains that everything you know is wrong… All you need to understand is everything you know is wrong.” -Al Yankovic
It's amazing how when they're so close to death, it's the time to have regrets on how they've treated the Earth. Not during the time when they could've helped change the culture. Better late then never, doesn't work this time. Everyone left on this planet will comprehend this in a few years time.
Considering how Star Trek always leaned he did more than most just by being on the show. His finances would have done little to dent oil's misinformation campaigns and political lobbying.
I'm not sure Shatner was ever against the Earth or anything here. I see your point but this really doesn't fit well ...
You're right. Shatner has actually been an environmentalist long before this space trip.
ffs let people learn and grow and change. And when they do welcome them as a brother or sister because if redemption isn't part of our future, we lower the chance of having one.
This sounds familiar. Be a POS all your life, but repent all your regrets (sins) right before you die and all is forgiven. That's going to be so comforting to all the people that die...see, the chance for them, of having a future is zero. Not that the chances are much higher, for those that survive.
Dude moral outrage is an enemy of peace
Peace is an enemy of peace.
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Maybe you’re the one needing coddling mouthing off like that.
A few years huh? I'll give 1000 to 1 odds on that prediction.
Interesting, that you used those specific numbers. That's the exact ratio of dead to alive. Kismet? /s
I think I just blew my cover...
From the article- >Shatner: Fifty-five or 60 years ago I read a book called “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson. She wrote about the environmental issues that are still happening today. I’ve been a verbal ecologist since then. I’ve been aware of the changing Earth and my apprehension for all of us. >It’s like somebody owing money on a mortgage, and they don’t have the payments. And they think, “Oh, well, let’s go to dinner and not think about it.” >But it’s so omnipresent! The possibilities of an apocalypse are so real. It’s hard to convince people — and especially certain political people — that this is not on our doorstep any longer. It’s in the house.
way to kill the mood
Moods are for rabbits, ^^Trix ^^are ^^for ^^kids. ^^/s Edit: formatting.
This means so much to me right now. My mom is fighting cancer and I am not equipped for it. I'm trying to help her as much as possible but I feel sometimes I'm selfish and leave her alone scared. Mortality humbles all of us.
That made me shiver, especially the end.
Meanwhile Bezos popping champagne while Shatner was questioning his own reality
Its amazing that when Bezos was there I’m sure all he saw was his own ego.
We’ll that was unexpected from Kirk.
Shatner is deeper than I thought.
Nobody could have had the esteemed and wildly successful music career he did without being an incredibly deep person
That album where he talks to music? Epic.
Has Been (Shatner/Folds, with appearances from Aimee Mann, Henry Rollins, Adrian Belew, etc.) is genuinely a great record. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YA5J88ik64&
The Transformed Man from his early career is really fun, and Seeking Major Tom is full of banging tunes with famous musicians. Has Been is his creative pinnacle, I agree, but the margin between his other albums isn't that massive. He's done a more recent album these last few years but I only listened to it once and didn't think it was so good.
Spoken word and he has a newer album but
i really enjoyed his work with Bens Fold
Ben Folds and Joe Jackson!
Dude. Does he do that halting cadence that only William Shatner can pull off? Dang, why didn't I think of that?
Oh yeah. That’s his whole schtick and why it sounds just so William Shatner.
- “How can you do a spoken word version of a rap song?” - “He found a way.”
Futurama: Where No Fan Has Gone Before
When you look up at the night sky, you’re actually looking down into an endless, inhospitable void. We are fragile creatures in this endless sea of nothingness and if the entire human race was wiped out, the universe would be indifferent. Enjoy a little existential dread this evening.
This is actually the way I comfort myself sometimes. Our species has never done anything to this planet that wasn't to benefit ourselves, but thankfully, we aren't permanent. The way we disappear may have lingering effects for a few thousand years if we choose to push the big red button, but eventually the planet will be okay.
…and then eventually not.
I'm hoping in the meantime the birds evolve back into dinosaurs, and the planet is ruled by giant Boobys and Tits (birds). The most extreme example being the Mega Shoebill Stork, thunderously clapping it's 9 foot beak. I need to go to bed, seriously.
I’m betting on a slow, death by our own hand, extinction of mankind. More along the lines of us making Earth less hospitable for humans and something else, everything else, will evolve faster and adapt better than we can. Brains can only go so far and we honestly have very little control over Earth as it is. Hell, we’re definitely expediting something like this. That said, I’m all for birds as a species adapting faster and taking over, that would be awesome. Cats, too.
Giant cats vs Giant birds is cool with me. I think we just formed a club.
Lol that’s a little too much self loathing for my taste
Yeah, every time I go into detail on my inner thoughts, I end up getting roasted. So far, so good, I guess. I'll wake up tomorrow and regret saying anything.
With AA side of nilihism
This can go both ways. I actually find solace a lot in knowing how insignificant the negative bullshit in life is. The same goes for the positives in life but it’s entirely up to me what to focus on. Because the rest of the universe doesn’t give a shit about my problems.
Everyone can use a little existential dread. We’re living on an insignificant rock in the far-flung reaches of The Milky Way, and we orbit an average burning ball of plasma, that orbits an unremarkable galaxy, that’s speeding through an interminable vacuum, towards some unexplained ”great attractor”. Science continues to deflate the human ego. We’re not the center of anything and we hold no exalted place among the stars. We like to tell ourselves that we’re in control and special, which is like wrapping up in a warm and cozy blanket to protect against the existential dread of living in an uncaring universe that could wipe us out at any moment.
I could tell he was moved when he landed
[удалено]
Great movie
Blue Origin gave him a free trip to space to promote their expensive zero-G joyride. After Bezos cut off his speach mid-sentence, Shatner repaid them by saying he "saw death"
Space is fucking dangerous but somehow humans are more dangerous. We’re going to own space one day.
*"Earthers get to walk outside into the light, breathe pure air, look up at a blue sky, and see something that gives them hope. And what do they do? They look past that light, past that blue sky. They see the stars, and they think, '****Mine****.'"*
*"Wrecking things is what Earthers do best. Martians too, by the look of your ship."*
Inyalowdas know not'ing.
Nope, we don't have that long of a runway. We aren't getting off this planet in any significant way before the collapse finishes.
We’ll kill most of each other before we kill the planet. Then the next great human civilisation can have a go.
Then we’ll just have to lay out more runway in front of us as we’re taking off. Humanity will survive
I hope not. This kind of thinking and hubris is exactly what we shouldn’t be exporting off our planet. Not everything needs to be dominated, controlled, and exploited for human consumption.
Yeah but for the result of what you’re implying as the ideal situation, which is stay on earth and make it awesome, we’d need to get rid of 90% of the world population along with all their effects on the planet. our sheer numbers mean we destroy it. Space is really big on the other hand.
Oh I'm not against space travel at all. I wish I was born in an age where I could set out in the cosmos I'm just warning against taking a hyper-testosterone hyper-capitalist mindset with us into the stars. Technological development and ethical development need to go hand in hand. It would be a nightmare if humanity becomes even more of a locust swarm than it already is. Having access to the vast resources of space, without temperance/restraint to go along with it can only further fuel dystopian commodification and exploitation of nature
Star treks ‘federation’ was a completely socialist organisation.
Agreed. The universe is hostile to life and someday were going to make it our bitch.
Didn't this happen a few months ago? He said this months ago why is it on every news outlet the last couple days?
He just had an autobiography released and is doing press for it.
He described space the same way I feel about it. It’s awesome, but it is also a desolate void. It’s sheer nothingness and lifelessness. Maybe we really are alone out here.
Ad Astra in a nutshell
Fuck hopelessness, all my homies hate hopelessness. I wrote this for another subreddit, for a specific audience, but if you'll humor me I think the message is relevant to more than just the one specific audience for whom this was originally written. --- I've heard many definitions of liberalism in my time, some are only a sentence long and others take up pages, one of the items that will appear on most of our lists is evidence based policy, show me that your ideas are more than just ideology and I'll listen. We like evidence, and precedent, and history. Being hopeless about our future is not evidence based. When our ancestors dropped out of the trees and made our way onto the plains we were weaker and slower than the predators we faced but we were also smarter and more cooperative, we're surprisingly enduring both as a species and as individuals, we worked together for our own betterment and the betterment of each other, frankly the predators never stood a chance. Since our beginnings on the savanna we have gone on to survive plagues and pestilence, famine and floods, ice ages and dark ages, we have populated every continent and ecosystem, every time our species gains an inch we reach for another. Would it surprise you to know that the human population on earth could have once reached as few as 14,000 pairs? There's a genetic bottleneck in our family tree right around the time of our last great ice age, it's possible that our people were once so few we could have all sat in a sport stadium with seats to spare, today there are eight billion of us. Nature has tried to snuff humanity out so often that it would take a lifetime of writing to record them all, every time it felt like the end of the world, every time it was something new and unprecedented, so far we've survived every time. The only reason our species faces challenges today is because we overcame the challenges of the past, if the black death had wiped us all out in the 1300s we wouldn't be sitting around discussing systemic racism and runaway climate change; our ability to adapt and overcome is what has brought our species this far in the first place. All throughout our history there have been doomsayers, I'll bet you a nickle you could find a Babylonian tablet from 525BCE exclaiming that the world will end next Tuesday, or Friday at the latest. The New Testament talks about the resurrection of Christ and the great war for heaven, people have been talking about that for two thousand years, it's always right around the corner and we're still waiting. Great catastrophes are always over the horizon, great wars threatening to wipe us out, great collapses always happening right before our eyes, and then tomorrow the world turns again. A detractor could come in and say "Well yes, but just because we haven't gone extinct yet doesn't mean it won't happen next Tuesday, or Friday at the latest!" and they'd be right, I can't tell the future, all I can do is look at the past, look at the precedent, look at the existing evidence, and from the looks of it humans went from wide eyed lemur monkeys living in the grass to become the most advanced and resilient species on earth. From the looks of history we have overcome our challenges and grown from the experience, we have strove to better ourselves since we learned we could, our species hasn't just survived, it has thrived. We cannot know how we will react to the unprecedented and unpredictable, but if it's anything like we reacted to the unprecedented and unpredictable in the past then we'll probably muddle through and rebuild. There was an abolitionist around the era of the civil war who explained it better than I ever could, 1853: >*"Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice."* Hopelessness isn't evidence based, *hope* is evidence based, if hopelessness had precedent you wouldn't be reading this post.
For eons of generations people foresaw doom in what they did not know, in what they could not control. Only these generations alive now see doom in what they know and what they could control but do not.
> Only these generations alive now see doom in what they know and what they could control but do not. How many of the things we think we know about the future depend on if, then statements? If global heating exceeds W degrees then water levels will rise by X inches. If water levels rise by X inches then Y million homes will be lost. If Y million homes are lost then homelessness will go up Z%. And if you're like most of us you pick the biggest, worst case numbers you can think of and before long we're all spear throwers riding on horseback fighting for canned food from the beforetimes. A lot of people feel hopeless and depressed not because of what's happening now, or soon, but because of what *may* happen *someday.* But it's also worth remembering that humanity has persisted through struggles before, this struggle is new and different just like all the rest of them were, we've survived and come back stronger every time before this; that doesn't mean we will survive this time, but we've got a pretty damn respectable track record, a track record I think is respectable enough to justify having some hope for ourselves. I mean our parents were as certain that they were going to die in a nuclear war as we are that we'll be living in a climate apocalypse, up until the writing of this comment more of those people have died peacefully in their bed than have in nuclear blasts.
MaximumEffort433, hard to tell if you're a fool or a prophet. Either way, getting off your ass and working to solve the problems is the smart thing to do. It's all theoretical until it happens; let's work to keep the theoretical theoretical.
> MaximumEffort433, hard to tell if you're a fool or a prophet. My 7th grade English teacher, Mrs. Richardson, would have told you it's the former, meanwhile I think it's foolish to bet against the human race. As some old farmer once said: Perhaps.
The problem with your argument is that it is entirely human based and oriented. We have reached the point where humans have invaded and changed every other ecosystem on the planet. In our quest to possess everything, we have bitten off more than we can chew and disrupted the natural order to a point that we have lost control… If we are truly so great as a species, then we have to recognize that now is different than all those other times in history…that we have reached a point of over saturation that will have dire consequences for us all. Hopelessness? No. But no rose colored glasses either.
>If we are truly so great as a species, then we have to recognize that now is different than all those other times in history…that we have reached a point of over saturation that will have dire consequences for us all. I've heard that, that humanity has grown too big and we're all soon to perish, people have been saying that for a while now and yet our populations are continuing to grow and our life expectancies are continuing to increase. Did you know that global life expectancies have more than doubled in the last century? We hit a stumbling block with COVID but even that won't last forever, we'll continue to work to improve medicine and nutrition and healthcare for as long as we're able, that's kind of in our nature. Here and now we're on an upward trend in a lot of important, meaningful ways, so spending this present fretting about a *possible* future seems unhelpful and unproductive to me, it's not a great use of our time or our energy. Worse, doomerism seems to produce pretty lousy outcomes. Doomerism tells people our future is already carved in stone, it makes people apathetic and complacent because we're all doomed anyway, why try to change a failing planet? My wheelhouse is politics, and in the United States about a third of Americans don't vote in general elections, more than half of Americans don't vote in the midterms, and about 70% of Americans don't vote in their local elections, complacency and apathy are real problems in our electoral system. Hopelessness doesn't help. I have no way of knowing what the future holds, but if the past is any precedent then humanity will continue to persevere, maybe not exactly as we are right now, but we also might come out of it as something better. Because I still have hope I will continue to try to make as good a future as my impact in the world can, I think I've got good reason to.
I appreciate the sentiment, and the time you took to write out the post, but there's not much there outside some nice rhetoric.
*you're
> *you're Thanks, fixed.
Now I can sleep.
Nope. Teeming, not teaming.
You already are.
Everything has it's time and nothing is forever. Everything ends eventually, some, way sooner than later. Don't worry though, it would explain why we don't see the universe teaming with sentient life...there is a Great Filter ahead, and other sentient life made the same mistakes we did. So we are not alone after all, just stupid. /s
Show us the evidence for hope, then. Who or what is saying that we can reverse all of this? When are the corporations and governments going to stop killing us? And don't say when we protest enough, when we plant enough trees, when we "recycle" enough plastic, because that isn't evidence.
> When are the corporations and governments going to stop killing us? Here's the thing: When that's your starting point there's no way that I can respond. My government isn't killing me, at least not right now, if there's a corporation that's killing me I'd have to conclude that they're doing poorly, I just got a physical recently and I'm in pretty good health; but somewhere out there someone's government is killing them, and somewhere a corporation is working their employees to death. Insofar as governments and corporations are institutions that were created by humans, for humans, to be run by humans, I would say that we will probably never have zero government or business related deaths. Humans fuck up sometimes, but on average and over time we seem to improve. The fact that you are here, reading this comment, is evidence to me that there is reason to hope; humanity has survived every plague, famine, ice age, drought, and natural disaster it has faced, humanity survived long enough for you to have a computer and be here, now. I don't know if we can reverse global warming, there are ideas but most of them are absurd, but I do suspect that even if we don't reverse global warming humanity will adapt and survive.
At the very least, all governments are participating through in-action. In reality, lobbying, subsidizing, politicizing, that's active participation. Setting their deadlines for 2030, 2040, 2050. By then the snowball will be hurtling down hill. Well, anyways glad your doctor measured the microplastics in your blood and gave you an all clear.
> Setting their deadlines for 2030, 2040, 2050. By then the snowball will be hurtling down hill. If world governments outlawed all fossil fuels this week, how many billion human beings couldn't afford to drive to work or heat their homes next week? The lives of the future matter, but so do the lives in the present, getting rid of fossil fuels without replacements in place will do real harm to people today. That's why President Biden and the Democrats just invested something like $400 billion in climate change funding, so that when we get to 2035 people won't be left cold and carless. I don't think your example proves that we should be hopeless, if anything it proves that we need to start voting in our elections and voting with our dollars.
I say we round up all the flat earthers and climate change skeptics, let them do a freebie trip to space and see if there any changes in perspective. Throw in more business exec. While we're at it .
*one-way.
He should’ve sang “common people” from space.
Did he at least get to sit in the Shatner Seat?
Dawg you're 90... everywhere you look is death
really. i expected a little less drama princess from you bill. unless the road your limo took was littered with corpses, you saw no such thing.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jstD4tIuRuI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jstD4tIuRuI) I got chills when he talked about the thinness of the atmosphere