William Shatner: My Trip to Space Filled Me With Sadness - Variety
In this exclusive excerpt from William Shatner’s new book, “Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder,” the “Star Trek” actor reflects on his voyage into space on Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space shuttle on Oct. 13, 2021. Then 90 years old, Shatner became the oldest living person to travel into space, but as the actor and author details below, he was surprised by his own reaction to the experience.
no wonder bezos quickly shut him up and popped a bottle of champagne
Even dangerous gives it too much of a personality. Its empty. Nothing. On a cosmic scale, even if we devoted everything we know towards colonizing other planets/celestial bodies, the chance that we breach our own solar system with human life is infinitesimally small before our sun goes supernova. even besides that, the chance we successfully colonize a single body in our own solar system is pretty slim.
The void is so empty we can see forever in every direction with a powerful enough telescope. We've been fascinated with doing so as long as we've had recorded history. The only thing we've found is worse than any old gods or advanced race or dangers beyond our comprehension; its that we're anomalous and alone. The only meaning is what we make here on Earth.
We didn't have evidence of extrasolar planets until 1992. Webb is basically the first telescope that can even see Earthlike planet atmospheres to look for oxygen or other biosignatures and it's not even built for that, so it won't be very good at it. Yeah, the place is hella empty, and we're probably separated by time as well as space from anyone else, but we have no evidence one way or the other of inhabited planets because we can't see them yet.
As far as I'm concerned, belief in alien life is similar to belief in ghosts. I'm not gonna yuck anyone's yum, but it is based entirely on Faith at this point. We may be able to rationalize why believing in aliens is More Rational, but at the end of the day there's literal 0 evidence of Any Life or Civilization Existing or Extinct. A lack (rather, complete void, fittingly enough) of evidence one way is evidence towards the antithesis. Or at the very least burden of proof is certainly on Alien Race Enjoyers right now
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This is why I think humanity will first see an alien civilization long before we will ever be able to meet them or even communicate with them.
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I think we have a shot at traveling beyond the solar system with robots
50+ years to get a probe out there and then centuries before it gets to any "something" in deep space.
that's not really a human lifetime-scale endeavor
Absolutely. It's something that would be created by one generation and any success might be observed entire civilizations later.