Planet Earth 2 Free Online

[Jule Kue]

William Shatner: I have a specific moment in time where I was probably eleven, twelve, somewhere around there, and I had been sent to a summer camp outside of Montreal. I was a city boy, and I was sitting on a log. And it was night. And I was looking up into the stars, and because of the light refraction from the city, I'd never really seen the stars as they were that country night where there was no light pollution.

I'm Michael Roberts, and I remember all the hype when Shatner took his 11-minute round trip flight on the New Shepherd rocket ship in 2021 to just beyond the edge of our atmosphere. In the days after his voyage, and then last fall in his book Boldly Go, he shared many details of his mission. But we wanted to talk to him again as part of an exploration into the power of awe led by Outside magazine contributing editor Florence Williams.

Florence wrote a feature about awe for Outside's July-August print issue. And for the next two weeks on this show, she's bringing us highlights of her reporting on what happens in our minds when we're blown away by something we experience in the natural world.

We couldn't resist starting with her conversation with Shatner. As Florence learned, he went from being decidedly lukewarm about a trip into space, to having a transformational experience that helps us understand a side of awe that we rarely talk about.

So he later said, as a good producer, I didn't take no for an answer. And I called them up and they said, well, come on up to Seattle. So he told me and I thought, all right, we'll go to Seattle and meet Mr. Bezos. Which we did. And Mr. Bezos turns out to be a big fan of Star Trek and we got along very well and sat around a board table and, and these couple of his minions were there and we talked about me going, oh man, it's a pretty good idea.

Michael: But then Covid hit, and apparently social bubbles in space are the same as on the ground. So Bezos took the first Blue Origin voyage to space with his brother. Shatner read about it in the paper.

Shatner: And then they came back and said, would you like to go second? I said, I'm not gonna go second. And then I had lay thinking there one night, why don't I go? I've written this book about saying yes to life and such.

Shatner: Not only did I not think it was profound. I didn't think anybody would notice. I what, you know, so Shatner goes up in the air with, it's no big deal. And, it just went worldwide and apparently so many people were watching and it went on for days of this thing. I, I had no idea that it would be as popular as it was. Nor did I have any idea what, an experience it would be on my psyche.

I just wanted to get to the window and see what there was, and so I looked back. For some reason, I was looking back where we had come from and could see the wake of the spaceship in the air, like a submarine going through the water.

I'm like, God, I'd never heard it. Anybody discussed that? And then I looked ahead. And I saw the blackness of space and I'm as interested as anybody, probably more so than a lot of people, about the awe and wonder of space. I've spent a lot of time with people doing that and, but there was nothing there that was awesome or wondrous.

Michael: Our collective consciousness is filled with beautiful images of the universe taken from both science and science fiction. The swirling eye of Jupiter and the magnetic rings of Saturn. The horseshoe nebula and the twinkling ocean of stars that make up our galaxy. It's wondrous. But space is not at all hospitable to life.

When Shatner looked out through one of the windows of the New Shepherd, he didn't feel the awe he'd experienced as a kid at summer camp, only a dawning awareness of our fragility in the vast and violent cosmos.

There was this paper thin atmosphere, which is, I coached the earth like 50,000 feet. But because I'm a pilot, I know that 12,500 feet is the limit where, where you are required to have oxygen. So about two miles of that air is usable.

So here is this little rock. Can you see the curvature of the earth? And you realize it's a little tiny rock with two miles of air. And that's all that's keeping us alive from all those forces. So how precarious our life is and how, you're clinging to this life raft.

It's really extraordinary. And for people to deny that it's happening is like somebody who owes the rent and doesn't have the rent money, you know, and goes off for a good meal or, or goes to a movie. It's just you, it's so bad. You wanna put your head in the sand.

Michael: When William Shatner traveled to space in 2021 at the age of 90, he had a profoundly moving experience. As he told Outside's Florence Williams, one of the strongest emotions he felt was despair over our treatment of the planet. But there was something else that came with that: a sense of duty to get us to confront the crisis.

Shatner: So I did this thing and I'm sitting around the campfire, in essence, interviewing Jeff Bezos. I, I had, was shooting a documentary. It was my idea to shoot the documentary, but eventually it was taken outta my hands, justifiably so, so other people could edit it and do it. But I put myself in the role of being the interviewer.

So that's an idealistic, wonderful idea. We've got to have hope, otherwise what have we got? But at the same time, millions upon millions of people are being displaced everywhere on Earth. There's this wave of humanity coming, this rogue wave of displaced people that are gonna flood, that are already flooding.

It is a crisis, and to hear people say, oh, there's no crisis. It's like maddening. Like, like are you, are you insane? The fire, the house is burning down. What do you mean the house isn't burning down?

Shatner: I, I, the tears were in my eyes when I stepped out of the vehicle, and I didn't know why I was crying. So while everybody was celebrating having gone up and come down, I'm thinking, what the hell's the matter with me? I'm, I'm, I'm weeping on camera and I don't know what you know. Thank you so much.

And then I go sit down somewhere. What am I crying about? And I realize I'm in grief. What am I in grief? I've been in grief for the world. I'm in grief for the disappearance of things that, that have lived, have evolved to almost four billion years of life on Earth, to evolve into this incredible thing we call Earth.

Michael: Listening to Shatner speak, it sure doesn't sound like he experienced awe. I mean, there's not a lot of wonder at the magic of the universe and our place in it. He's talking about profound grief for humanity and the end of life on Earth.

Florence: Shatner himself kind of doubted that this was an awe experience because he was like, no, what I saw was horror. And when you go back to the writing of philosophers like Edmund Burke and the 18th century, they really define awe as being something that is influenced by feelings of horror and fear.

Awe is basically something that feels kind of a little bit overwhelming in the moment. It's a feeling that you're recognizing forces larger than yourself, and we like to think that those are forces of beauty.

They can be forces of death. They can be forces of fragility, forces of, of also a sense, I think, of community. You know, in the sense that he, I think, really felt affiliated with Earth and earthlings and, and this recognition of we are all really screwing up this planet because it has a very thin atmosphere, and outside of it is the blackness of space.

His point is that, despite what we might expect from decades of Star Trek, we shouldn't be searching out awe in distant solar systems. The best place to find it is right here, on this little rock that's our home.

I mean, Chesapeake Bay 20 years ago was polluted. You couldn't eat the food out of, you couldn't eat the what was ever what people were eating out of Chesapeake Bay 20 years ago, taken 20 years, and now it's as fecund as it always was.

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