• Ephera@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    8 hours ago

    So, back in 2021, William Shatner accepted an offer from Bezos to be flown into space for a few minutes. He played Captain Kirk in Star Trek for a gazillion years, so actually going to space was a life-long dream for him.
    Despite that, his experience was very much like the comic, just more …profound:

    […] when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.

    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. […]

    It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. […] My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.

    Source: https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/william-shatner-space-boldly-go-excerpt-1235395113/

    Also, if you want to see some real cringe, there’s videos of Shatner talking to Bezos after the landing, where he’s articulating these same deep thoughts. And when Bezos realizes that Shatner didn’t like space very much, he has to shut him up, of course, so he calls for his emotional support sluts to pass a champagne bottle for him to ejaculate over them.

    It’s such a bizarre disconnect from this 90-year-old man completely shook to his core, where you really want to listen to what he has to say, to Bezos interrupting him mid-sentence to just go do something else.

  • Diplomjodler@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    6
    ·
    18 hours ago

    Don’t worry. Soon the Earth will look like Mars, so we don’t have to bother going there to experience it.

  • x00z@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    27
    ·
    2 days ago

    I would also say “oh no” when I get to the moon and only then realize it’s not a planet.

  • Enkrod@feddit.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    21
    ·
    edit-2
    2 days ago

    To quote Tim Minchin:

    Isn’t this enough?
    Just this world?
    Just this
    Beautiful, complex, wonderfully unfathomable, natural world?
    How does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it with the invention of
    Cheap, man-made myths and monsters?
    If you’re so into your Shakespeare
    Lend me your ear
    “To gild refined gold
    To paint the lily
    To throw perfume on the violet
    Is just fucking silly”
    Or something like that
    Or what about Satchmo?!
    “I see trees of Green
    Red roses too”
    And fine, if you wish to glorify Krishna and Vishnu in a post-colonial, condescending bottled-up and labeled kind of way then whatever, that’s ok
    But here’s what gives me a hard-on
    I am a tiny
    Insignificant, ignorant bit of carbon
    I have one life
    And it is short and unimportant
    But thanks to recent scientific advances
    I get to live twice as long as my great great great great uncleses and auntses
    Twice as long
    To live this life of mine
    Twice as long to love this wife of mine
    Twice as many years of friends and wine
    Of sharing curries and getting shitty at good-looking hippies with fairies on their spines and butterflies on their titties

    I know it’s about superstition, new-age nonsense and “spirituality”, not other planets. But it’s just so on point to me for everything where we fail to appreciate this wonderful world around us.

    • Rhaedas@fedia.io
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 day ago

      It’s not that people didn’t want the first perfect Matrix, it’s that their disbelief that it could be true made it unstable.

        • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          3
          ·
          2 days ago

          Dunno. But it sounds awesome. Peaceful. Absent all the people I don’t like.

          Plenty of time to build out the infrastructure there. Especially the laser defense system to keep others away.