Emptiness...cold, dark, black emptiness

William Shatner, now 91 years old, who played Captain James T Kirk in the original Star Trek television series in the 1960s, had the opportunity to travel beyond Earth's atmosphere in a space tourism flight last year, has released his autobiography which included a description of his feelings while up there. According to a CNN story, it wasn't a feeling of exhilaration.

“All I saw was death,” he wrote in his book called Boldly Go, “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. Everything I had thought was wrong; 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. It was one of the strongest feelings of grief he had ever encountered. 

And in a CNN interview later, he elaborated, “When I got up to space, I wanted to get to the window to see what it was that was out there. I looked at the blackness of space. There were no dazzling lights. It was just palpable blackness. I believed I saw death. And then I looked back at the Earth. Given my background and having read a lot of things about the evolution of Earth over 5 billion years and how all the beauty of nature has evolved, I thought about how we’re killing everything. I felt this overwhelming sadness for the Earth. I didn’t realize it until I got down. When I stepped out of the spacecraft, I started crying. I didn’t know why. It took me hours to understand why I was weeping. I realized I was in grief for the Earth. I don’t want to ever forget, nor have I forgotten, the momentousness of that occasion.”

Read the CNN story here.