Body
Earlier this month, James Tiberius Kirk, Captain of the Starship Enterprise, and otherwise known as William Shatner, ventured where few have gone before — into outerspace. Not in his official capacity as a senior Star Fleet officer, mind you, but as a civilian just like you and me. Shatner made the suborbital flight atop a Blue Origin rocket at the invite of that company’s owner, Jeff Bezos (purportedly the richest person on the planet). And Shatner’s reactions to the adventure were much as mine would be, I’m sure: initially, terror at the thought that the rocket (fed up with the ups and downs of space flight) might decide to commit suicide by exploding, followed by the giddiness of gamboling about in the space capsule weightless as a feather, then amazed at the view of Mother Earth laid out below him. But finally, awestruck; awed at how thin and vulnerable Earth’s biosphere truly is. The only known life-sustaining biosphere in the whole of the universe.