Going to Space with William Shatner

What was it like to send Captain Kirk to space? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with William Shatner to discuss his trip into space, Star Trek, and musings about life on Earth.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And today, we have a very special guest. Not just a special guest, a very special guest. Returning to StarTalk, we have William Shatner. The one and only. A beloved actor portrayed Captain Kirk on the Starship Enterprise in the original Star Trek series and movies that followed it some years later. And he's of special interest right now because he was onboard the suborbital flight of Blue Origin's New Shepard space capsule. This is a 10-minute journey where you go across the Karman Line.

• 0:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the line where you enter space. And he was the oldest person to ever do this at age 90. So let's get straight into this. So William Shatner, can I call you Bill? Does that work?

• 1:12William Shatner?

  Yes, if I can call you Neil.

• 1:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, please, please. By all means. So you start out life as wanting to be an actor.

• 1:22William Shatner?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, I must have emerged from my mother's womb not knowing what to do.

• 1:30William Shatner?

  By the time I was six.

• 1:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Given time and food and nourishment.

• 1:34William Shatner?

  Yeah, exactly. After suckling a bit, I thought, yes, I should be an actor. I was about six years of age when I was in a camp play. As the legend goes, and I made people laugh and cry. And I thought, wow, that's wonderful. And I've never done anything else.

• 1:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I was channel surfing one night, and I stumbled on you in a bit role in the movie Judgment at Nuremberg. You were like a court clerk.

• 2:04William Shatner?

  Or a court jester, according to some people, right?

• 2:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A court jester.

• 2:10William Shatner?

  No, but it's true. I sat there the whole movie at that legal table, watching these incredible luminaries from the screen pass by and do a day's work and then leave and come back. It was an extraordinary...

• 2:28William Shatner?

  Experience for a young actor.

• 2:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there I am binging, because on classic and all the old episodes of The Twilight Zone, and you're two episodes. You've got a double credit in two separate distinct episodes.

• 2:46William Shatner?

  Yeah, and they are among the most popular, strangely. The reason for that, I don't know. Perhaps your sagacity, you would be able to analyze why those two shows have remained in the top 13 every time they play a group of them. I don't understand the popularity, but it must have something to do with touching some core of humanity.

• 3:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you play a slightly crazy person in each one, just only slightly, just enough where you can, the viewer can relate to your anxieties.

• 3:24William Shatner?

  Being anxious about something like in one case, flying. We're always anxious about flying. And the other one was about getting your fortune told. And we're always worried about what the future holds and why did I say that for something in the past. So we're always concerned about those two subjects.

• 3:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so for that reason, I think, as you correctly deduced, it reached into us as viewers in a way that while you were a slightly extreme version of it, we felt enough of ourselves in your character to relate to it more deeply than I think other characters portrayed or written for. So I just want to make sure that your acting chops are out there up front, because to take this ramp into space, initially, of course, with Star Trek, ultimately doing it for real. Did you have any space influences when you were a kid? You were already fully grown up during the Apollo era, so we can't credit that.

• 4:33William Shatner?

  Space wasn't mentioned. You know, all those years ago, there was the sun, there was the moon, and people were running around trying to figure out how they hung in the sky. I was after, you know, I was after Galileo.

• 4:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You did, okay.

• 4:56William Shatner?

  You were Galileo, weren't tight? You were tight. No, we weren't quite like that. We were like that, actually. But, no, there wasn't anything about, nothing about space and nothing. I was always interested in football and, and, and, um, and I was acting in Montreal, doing amateur, um, uh, theatricals and, and I somehow, I don't know what it was. I think there's something in my genetic makeup that allowed me to be in, an intuitive actor. I've never studied.

• 5:36William Shatner?

  I don't know how you studied to be an actor, but there are styles and I just fell into those styles. I may have seen them in movies, maybe I was imitating them, but there is a, a, a regality to Shakespeare. There is a, there is a featness to 18th century, uh, 19th century, uh, comedy. There are styles that you sort of acquire. The way you speak, the way you move your hands, your feet. I never studied it, but it's somehow I knew it and I don't know how.

• 6:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so what's happening then is the, the world, you know, we enter the Cold War. There's an arms race and there's also the birth of a space race. And there's a poignant part of Shatner in Space, which is just now posting on Amazon Prime. Uh, if you have a video subscription there, I think it's, it's quote free. The, uh, in that program, there's a, there's a poignant moment where the Star Trek series, which went three seasons, all right? Uh, you know, just barely longer than Gilligan's Island, whatever. Okay. And, and so, and it ends, you're out of a job.

• 6:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You, you and your wife divorce and there you were putting a vision of space into our hearts and minds and now that's gone, yet. You witnessed Neil Armstrong taking first steps on the moon. Could you just tell us about what you were feeling in that moment? The contrast of these two?

• 7:15William Shatner?

  Yeah, yeah, well, I got a divorce just as the show was canceled. And I don't know whether you know this or not, Neil, but divorces are very expensive.

• 7:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 7:27William Shatner?

  So there I was, I had this divorce, I was now broke. And I, and, and I was coming off a series, which in those days meant that the people who hire think, oh, well, he's known for that, and we won't hire him for this because he's known for that. That sort of thinking went on for a while. And I was in that thinking. So it was difficult for me to find a really good acting job. And, and so I decided I would do summer stock. And the summer stock is out on the East Coast, on the Cape Cod.

• 8:09William Shatner?

  And so I, I don't remember whether I bought a truck or whether I had an old truck, and I put a cab on the back of that pickup truck. And it had a shower and a bed, and I had a dog. I've always had a dog, a Doberman Pinscher. So there was a book out in those years called Travel with Charlie.

• 8:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember that. John Steinbeck.

• 8:31William Shatner?

  I did, I did Travels with Charlie, only my dog, I don't remember his name, but a regal, marvelous male Doberman sat beside me. And I drove across country and put together a, a, a play and, and did summer stock. And part of that summer stock goes on to Long Island and the Hamptons.

• 8:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but just to be clear, just to be clear, you were homeless at this point? Okay?

• 9:00William Shatner?

  No, no, I had a hole that was in the back of a truck.

• 9:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, your home was on wheels.

• 9:04William Shatner?

  Like if a guy sleeps in his car, is he homeless or has he got a Chevy? I live, I have my, my address is Chevy.

• 9:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On Interstate 10, exit 20.

• 9:17William Shatner?

  I got the Chevy truck. Uh, yeah, I think I had a Chevy. So are you?

• 9:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's back when cars, that, wait, that's back when cars were big enough, you could sleep full out, flat out on the, on the, on the bench seat.

• 9:29William Shatner?

  Exactly. So the philosophical question is, are you homeless if you're in something you own? And your car, you're not sleeping on the streets. So I, I had, I had a little, uh, tiny house here, which I didn't pay for. Um, so I slept in the back of this truck.

• 9:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you said you also, you ended up from Cape Cod into the Hamptons, is that right?

• 9:52William Shatner?

  I'm in Cape Cod and I park in a pasture. Uh, and I'm living there and I, and I go and I drive over to the theater, uh, a mile or so away, perform at night. And then that night I drive to the pasture and park and sleep in the cab. So it was this evening that I was sitting in a chair in the cab, in the cab, or lying down in the chair, and I'm looking through the window at the moon. And I've got a little black and white TV set and I'm tuned in to Armstrong on

• 10:30William Shatner?

  the Moon. And I had been at the Cape the year before and had, um, some wonderful exchanges. I, I lay down in the, in the lem, I looked around, I, uh, I, I, the, the astronauts took me around. They gave me a ship of the, a, a model of the Enterprise and I signed it, I'll see you on the moon. And it was, I was like, I was like a junior astronaut. Uh, and everyone's, oh, thank you very much. And they laughed and, and then I left. And a year later, I'm looking at Armstrong. Putting his foot on the moon. And we had discovered, or either then or a little bit later,

• 11:15William Shatner?

  that as our ratings in Star Trek went up, the government voted more money for NASA. They became more popular. We popularized, Star Trek popularized space travel. And so in some, and so I felt in some tiny, miniscule way, I had a little something to do with that. And there he puts. And, and, and the world is watching and I'm lying bereft. Money, moneyless, homeless in my Chevy, looking at him go on the moon. And I, and the irony of that incredible moment and my destitution struck me even then. And upon retelling, I'm able to make it even more dramatic.

• 12:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so Bill, here's my analysis. I think what happens is, once we're going to the moon, we don't need you, right? Because all of a sudden, space exploration is real. It's, it's no longer pretend. And then, three years later, only three years, 1969, boots on the moon, 1972, no longer boots on the moon. We stop going into space. And here's my analysis. I think we all say to ourselves, wait a minute. That's not, wait, wait a minute. This is supposed to keep going and it didn't. It didn't. Even the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968, that was imagining 2001. Wait a minute, this all stopped.

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, what do we have left? We gotta go back to Star, Star Trek. Star Trek was that hope. And, and, and so your popularity grew in reruns. Bigger than it ever was during the show.

• 13:01William Shatner?

  Much bigger. Star Trek took off in reruns.

• 13:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in reruns and into the seventies.

• 13:07William Shatner?

  Seven years later.

• 13:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  After we stopped going to the moon. So you, you dude, became our only hope at that point.

• 13:16William Shatner?

  I know.

• 13:18William Shatner?

  You were betting the wrong horse.

• 13:22William Shatner?

  You had your money on the wrong guy.

• 13:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I think, I think that the fact that we became more distant from space made Star Trek that much more important and relevant to us. That's my, how do you, what do you think of that?

• 13:39William Shatner?

  Well, I think it's beautiful and I heartily agree with you that I alone brought the NASA redid itself because of me. No.

• 13:53William Shatner?

  What happened is the expense of going to the moon. Kennedy saying, "We shall go, we're gonna go to the moon in a decade." And American pride made us do it. Once we had done it, it was like, "Oh God, we're not gonna spend any more money on that." We got, you know, we got the politicians' pockets to line and all the money is gone. So they, because of the expense. And I don't know what happened. But it was like the air went out of American determination in space. We lost it for a while.

• 14:36William Shatner?

  You know, I don't know whether this is apocryphal or not. But my understanding is Yuri Gagarin, and for your audience to remind them, he was the Russian astronaut who made the first launch into space. Came down like a stone in a parachute. He was up there for a brief moment. And apparently, he said, "It's blue."

• 15:06William Shatner?

  And then parachuted down. Now, we see the sky is blue and we say, "Oh, that's blue." But knowledgeable people know that's refraction of the sun. The air is colorless. But whatever it is, the water, the moisture in the air gives us the blue color. And, and, and so, we think, "Okay, well, but it's colorless." Just blue because of the refraction of the sun. He gets above it and he says, "Ah, it's blue."

• 15:39William Shatner?

  And I thought, when I heard that story, I thought, what a glorious moment when the first human being looks down upon our planet and says, "It's blue." And what a color. I mean, blue is a beautiful color. It's so engaging. It's so calming. I mean, you paint a room blue because you want the color to be restful.

• 16:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Air Force One is painted blue, in part for that reason. It's a very calming color for that.

• 16:14William Shatner?

  I have gone across this continent many times, uncountable times, in every manner possible. When I was a kid, I thumbed across the United States. I left Montreal, got to San Diego, went to Vancouver, got to Chicago, back to Montreal, on my thumb. I've motorcycled across the continent. I've driven a truck. I've driven a sports car. I've been with the family. I've been alone. I mean, it's endless, Neil. The continent is endless. The roads go disappear into infinity. And you think, "Oh, my Lord, I have to go..." And then you get to that infinite, point of infinity, and it goes even further. It's not. It's

• 16:55William Shatner?

  then, by rising above it and looking down, "Oh, my God." It's minute. The Earth is minute. And only then do you begin to get a sense of the relationship of this little rock to the vastness of space.

• 17:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bill, we got to take our first break, but when we return, more of my conversation with the inimitable, or occasionally imitable, William Shatner.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  I'm Joel Cherico and I make pottery. You can see my pottery on my website, cosmicmugs.com. Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day. And I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 18:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back with William Shatner. So you, I think, are correctly recognizing that Yuri Gagarin sees Earth as a blue planet. Okay. By the way, even in Star Trek, images of Earth were not really about it feeling blue. That really took actual journeys into space. And so are you ever, are you ever thinking while you're starship captain that you'll ever actually be high up above Earth and see the blue planet?

• 18:29William Shatner?

  That's fantasy. The whole thing was fantasy. Sometimes we'd laugh about how fantastical we were on stage 27 at Paramount Studios, pretending to be we're in space and we move the rocks around. Now we're on a planet and we shoot this gun. And later they put a little light thing in and, and, and it's all fantasy. It's all beautiful fantasy about human beings somewhere in the future. But it's all, you know, it's these crazy guys who were thinking futuristically. Never thought, I'm going to go up there.

• 19:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, just to be clear, Star Trek wasn't, at least for me, and I think for practically anyone who observed it, was not just space fantasy. There were space movies and space, you know, there was Lost in Space was a TV show, but that didn't somehow get deep within our soul. Star Trek had messages within it. It had more, there were morality tales.

• 19:28William Shatner?

  The surroundings were fanciful, but the meanings, the reason it's popular, I think, is just what you're saying, that it dealt with human beings. But I meant the surroundings were fanciful. If you're talking about racism and a guy is half-black on the right and half-white on the left, and he meets a guy who's half-black on the left and half-white on the right, he's like, who are you? And we were fighting and we're, because you're different from me. And so the, the stupidity.

• 19:58William Shatner?

  The nonsensical stupidity of racism is evident by this, by these two guys who are fighting over the fact that one's different from the other, slightly.

• 20:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the value of telling a space tale is you get to present that to people without them being confronted in their behavior. They have to sort of internalize it and then realize it for themselves, rather than...

• 20:25William Shatner?

  And think, oh, that would work. Exactly. Think of how that would work. The guy's like, oh, jeez, what's he complaining about? It's got the black hair and the white hair and the... Some guy who, who, who may be prejudiced in any way is laughing at the stupidity of this guy, you know? And he doesn't realize he's laughing at the stupidity of racism until later, in a way, if he's, you know, if at some point in time, whoop, yeah, listen, black, white, what's the difference? So, that, that was the, the beauty of Star Trek.

• 20:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. And it, so it was, it meant more than just a tale told in space. And, and, and by the way, just if I can fanboy a little bit here, anytime I'm asked, okay, Kirk or Picard? This is, you know, this is like, they, they quiz you that when you enter Comic Con, right? Kirk or Picard? Kirk all the time. And let me tell you why.

• 21:22William Shatner?

  Me too.

• 21:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because...

• 21:24William Shatner?

  Me too.

• 21:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I'll, I'll tell you why. I, I'll tell you why. Because your character actually, not that, I'm a very nonviolent person, so let me start with that, but let me just say, your character would fight the bad guys. If, if you see your captain actually getting into a fistfight, oh my gosh, they're invested in this. They care about what is true and righteous on a level where they're putting their own lives at risk. You fought the Gorn. You did, not some pawn that you sent out to do so. And so I thought that level of bravery for a captain, I greatly valued.

• 22:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And my favorite line, my favorite line, and I forgive me, the Star Trek fans for not knowing the exact details, you're on the, your character is on the bridge, your shields don't work anymore, the enemy vessel is out front, and... You execute some command that's mysterious on a channel that's already been decoded. And Spock says, Captain, this is no time for a game of chess. And that command was a self-destruct command that would also destroy the enemy ship. Captain, there's no time for a game of chess. And you said, no, Spock, it's poker. And I said, yes, that's what, that's my captain. Oh, my gosh.

• 22:54William Shatner?

  I totally forgot that.

• 22:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no.

• 23:00William Shatner?

  Can you imagine the wonderful writer who wrote that thing?

• 23:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Best line ever, especially because Spock, you say, you know, Spock is right here. And then you say, no, you are more right because, you know, you're bluffing and they don't know it. Oh, my God. So you got, I'm on the team Captain Kirk the whole way. So now you get tapped by Jeff Bezos and they must have known.

• 23:28William Shatner?

  About two years before that, it's about three years now. Jason Urle, a friend of mine who was a producer on another series I did, said, you know, you should go up in the no, no, I'm not going to go up there. They don't want, who cares? And I don't want to jeopardize that. He says, but it'd be good, no, no, no. Anyway, the idea suggested, they say, come up to Seattle. We fly up to Seattle. I beat Jeff. The whole lobby of Amazon is all Star Trek. We sit down at the table, Shatner up in space. That sounds good. We'll let you know. And we go back. And COVID hits and nothing happens. Then we hear that Jeff Bezos is going to go up in space himself. So we think, well, maybe he'll choose Shatner. No, he chooses his brother and a lady with gray hair and a boy. And they go up.

• 24:13William Shatner?

  I said, well, let's see. Well, maybe they'd like you on the second, but no, I don't want to go up second for God's sake. That's the vice president. We want the president.

• 24:27William Shatner?

  So then they asked me to go up on the second one. Uh, now I'm not going, so I turned it down. But then I, in my, uh, you might have a, an explanation for it. The wonderful moment between sleep and wake. When you're lying there thinking, you know, and your brain is going and you've got all kinds of wonderful ideas which you forget when you get up. Uh, I'm thinking, you know, going up to space is an experience. I should, I should try and experience that. As fearful as it sounds, I would, so I agree to do it. Thinking it's innocuous. I just go up, come down, who cares? And I've had that experience. Who knew that that would be as, uh, as newsworthy as it was? I didn't.

• 25:09William Shatner?

  I thought it would be, uh, unknown.

• 25:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let me just say that you can't just send up any famous actor and have the same reaction as sending you. There's, there's no question about this. So in, in the Shatner in Space documentary, um, he, he's got all this footage in anticipation of you going into space. And some really fun encounter with you and your wife and daughters, where you announced to them that, and they say, Dad, are you, are you gonna die? We don't wanna lose a dad on this. And, um, and of course, if you died, you'd go out completely in flames. Um, but in space and, you know.

• 25:52William Shatner?

  What a glorious ending it would be rather than lose your teeth slowly. One by one, one by one you lose. And you're going, yeah, no, I'm playing Captain Kirk, you know.

• 26:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Toothless Captain Kirk.

• 26:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, and of course, no, there's no reason to have pre-footage of just any random famous person who's about to go suborbital. It's not interesting. We need someone with space legacy. Who, who, who sat at the fulcrum of people's hopes and dreams of space? And that was you. So I'm delighted that, that such a documentary could be made with that footage. And, and we see, we see this side of you. I mean, I'm, I was delighted by that. I was worried. Because you guys had to walk up to the capsule, up all those damn steps? You don't have a cherry picker or something to carry you up? I mean dude, you're 90 years old!

• 26:55William Shatner?

  I'm telling you, they asked me to come a day early. It's hysterical that you should come upon that point. So I'll go there and then maybe Mr. Bezos will be there and I'll have a chance to talk to him. And he wasn't and so there's and here's this and there's the gantry. Let's go to the gantry and see what the gantry is. Okay, let's go and see what the gantry is. Let's walk up the gantry.

• 27:23William Shatner?

  11 flights, 11 flights at 4,000. And I'm going up and I'm going, oh, look how pretty that stop at some landing.

• 27:36William Shatner?

  Well, it's really pretty and then another 3 flights. And I finally get to the top, but I made it. And I now, looking back, I got to assume, somebody said, Jesus, do you think he'll make it up the gantry? He's 90 years old. Let's check him out. I now know it, that was a check out.

• 28:00William Shatner?

  Imagine if I had failed, what would they do? Oh, sorry.

• 28:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we lost Shatner on the 4th step.

• 28:07William Shatner?

  On the night, night 4.

• 28:11William Shatner?

  Oh, Lord, I'm telling you, that was, when I look back on that, I have to laugh. What if I hadn't made it? And they could, so, I was walking up and there'd be like 7 people behind me. You know, scampering up there, 20 years old. Hey, let's go. And I go, yeah.

• 28:33William Shatner?

  I used to be able to scramble up, Neil. You may not believe it, I used to be able to run up 11 flights.

• 28:43William Shatner?

  How old are you?

• 28:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm, I am right now sixty-three.

• 28:48William Shatner?

  Do you feel any of your strength leaving you? Like, can you open a bottle top as easily as you did before?

• 28:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, no, but I take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.

• 29:05William Shatner?

  So do you hand the bottle off?

• 29:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My son.

• 29:09William Shatner?

  Would you mind opening the bottle for me?

• 29:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I've got tools.

• 29:12William Shatner?

  Say, would you mind getting this, the lease up? This bag up, up the upper where they're flying? Okay, I need some help and the bag is heavy. No, I, I.

• 29:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, I've got tools. I got tools now. I got tools. So I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm good with that. Uh, but the, I was saying, so there's some shots of you inside the capsule before and during and after. And there's one of them, when you're weightless, I don't mind, I'm gonna tell you, you look like you were about to barf. Just the, your facial expression. So you, you don't have to divulge that here?

• 29:43William Shatner?

  I was thinking about it. I, I was thinking, I wonder if I, you know, and you know that vomit comet, they, they, they fly?

• 29:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 29:52William Shatner?

  You know, the outside loop that they get everybody ready to go?

• 29:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The airplane that would.

• 29:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, if you barf, there's nothing worse than zero G vomit. Okay, because it doesn't, it doesn't just fall.

• 30:05William Shatner?

  Now all your attention is trying to avoid it.

• 30:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, here comes one straight at you.

• 30:14William Shatner?

  Be careful. And all your attention is dodging the barf.

• 30:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So tell me, so, um, for me, if, whatever I would miss most, I think if I never get to experience this, is the feeling of weightlessness. So can you describe that?

• 30:35William Shatner?

  No, I can't because, um, because, uh, there aren't words, uh, in the English language. Weightlessness is a new thing. There aren't words to describe weightlessness. Oh, you're weightless and lift your arm. Well, you can't, you can't. Uh, yeah, well, we, the whole rehearsal part, the, the practice part was getting in and out of that seat in weightlessness, but of course you're not weightless, so you have no idea of how to get into that seat and tie yourself in and because you're gonna hit seven Gs. So weightlessness, like suddenly I'm floating, but I don't wanna float. I want to get to that window and see and see whatever it is I'm going to see. And and there's footage of Jeff Bezos in the first flight.

• 31:19William Shatner?

  He's weightless and his ass is towards the camera. And this kid and this kid is throwing Skittles at his ass. That's the first moment of weightlessness. And I thought, I'm not going to say weightlessness, having a kid. I gotta get to that window. So that's what I. It just depends how big your ass is, right? So I it's indescribable. You're weightless, but it's not like being in water, which they practice, astronauts practice. It's like nothing. It's indescribable. It's like floating. If you imagine yourself floating, but your body's not accustomed to not feeling gravity.

• 32:04William Shatner?

  So it's like, what? Well, and you're startled. You're like, what is the sensation? And and everybody's had things to plan like we'll we'll lift our hand up. And then and in the first flight, they had hello, mother or something. I had nothing. I didn't, I wanted to, oh, my Lord. And it was awkward, like you didn't know what to do. Now, if you spent time just in weightlessness, like they have that updraft of of air. Oh, yeah, I know what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, the the the skydiving. Uh, right, exactly. So you they you can practice in a in a chamber. That's approaching it, I guess.

• 32:49William Shatner?

  But here, it's it's it it's like it's like being ill with an illness you not don't know. I don't know whether it's feverish or or, you know, something that you what? How am I feeling? What am I? What what am I? It's the complete unknown of weightlessness that occupies you to begin with. It's like startling, like, holy cats, what is that?

• 33:18William Shatner?

  Combined with, in my case, I want to get to that window. I don't want to waste any time being weightless. I want to see.

• 33:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or throwing Skittles. You're not going to throw a Skittles. You're not going to burn weightless time throwing Skittles at anyone's hands.

• 33:33William Shatner?

  Exactly. You have two minutes of weightlessness. Two minutes in that orbit, in that moment, momentum. I wanted to make use of it by looking, by absorbing, having a sensation, seeing something that very few people have seen.

• 33:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got to take another break. When we return, more of my conversation with William Shatner.

• 34:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back with StarTalk's conversation with William Shatner. Bill, are you a different person for having done this?

• 34:17William Shatner?

  Neil, I'm sure that when we talked last, a few years ago, I must have expressed myself in terms of ecology, because I've been an amateur ecologist for the longest time. Rachel Carson wrote a book called The Silent Spring, and I read that 50 years ago, and I thought, my goodness, if that's what's going to be. And then I have a great friend, Michael Tobias. Do you know that name, the ecologist?

• 34:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I do know the name. Yes, I do. I don't know that we've met.

• 34:49William Shatner?

  He's written many books and documentaries. Well, he's a dear friend of mine, and we did a series called Voice of the Planet many, many years ago. We went all over the place, even up into the Himalayas, looking at places that were being degraded as a result of, and this was years ago. This is more than 20 years ago. I saw for my own eyes what we're doing, including ocean stuff.

• 35:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you were early in this. You were early out of the box.

• 35:18William Shatner?

  I was preaching this years and years to the scoffing of reporters. Oh, look at this actor thinking he's a scholar of, you know, he knows something we don't know. There were early interviews. I thought, why were they scoffing? Oh, he's an actor, and he's talking about the world coming to an end. So I, I was tuned in a long time ago. But as it's become increasingly obvious, and now everybody knows, and now everybody should be panicked. Like looking over their shoulder, when is it going to, when is this apocalypse going to hit?

• 35:58William Shatner?

  I, I, I'm a different person because what was theoretical, you know, there are a part, there are buildings, apartment buildings in Miami that I, but probably every, a lot of other places, where they paid millions and millions of dollars to have a sea, a view of the sea. Right, like, right, like on the sea, and, and the windows open up, and they, every morning they get up, they go, "Well, look at the sea." That's why they spent 20 million dollars for their, for their, for their condo. Villa, yeah. And they're erecting 20-foot walls now. To, for the anticipation of the, of higher seas. There are cement walls going up, blocking their view.

• 36:43William Shatner?

  Now, how, how dramatic is that? Guy pays all this money for a view of the sea, and what? Well, that's global warming, folks. Yeah, yeah. So that's happening now. And, and what I saw was the vulnerability of this little tiny speck, this stone, this little rock. Neil, I saw, I saw this, about, the curvature about like that. But that's finite, because you can go, continue the circumference, and you come to an end. I've just described the circumference of the Earth.

• 37:22William Shatner?

  And you look out there, the, you know, don't have to tell you, whole galaxies can come through each other and not touch. Billions of stars not hitting each other because the space is so vast between them. That, uh, what is it coming our way, um, uh, in two billion years, uh, what's the name of the? Oh, I, I, yeah, you mean, um, the Andromeda Galaxy. Uh, Andromeda Galaxy coming this way, uh, and, and I, it's apparently possible for the whole Andromeda Galaxy to come through the Milky Way and not hit anything because the space is so vast. Correct. That's how vast space is.

• 38:04William Shatner?

  And this mote of dust, this little, I love the image of this speck of sand, this kernel of, this, the grain of sand in the Sahara Desert, that's the volume of this earth compared to, uh, space. And we are these little tiny, you know, we don't, we're, you can't describe us as ants because we're, we're smaller than ants compared. We're specks, we're tiny, we're freckles on, on, on earth, you know? That's how. Okay, Bill, I don't need you to blow a gasket remembering thinking this. Yeah, but the gasket is this, the, where I retrieve it is this way, and I know you know this.

• 38:50William Shatner?

  The miracle is us being able to observe, to be a party to, an observer of this miracle of us being conscious enough to be conscious of our, uh, place in space. And that to me is what changed. I understood this theoretically, but I saw it. And I'm filled with that thought, that the miracle of human beings looking and saying, yes, this is a speck of dust, yes, we are a speck of dust on a speck of dust, but we're observing it. We're, we're, we're.

• 39:34William Shatner?

  We're a party to an observer of the grander of it all, the miracle of it all. And the miracle is inside us. And what is that? I don't know what that is. I guess consciousness, we're still trying to figure it out. But that was what I saw.

• 39:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Many a philosopher have waxed poetic on the fact that it's amazing that the universe is knowable at all. Just start with that fact.

• 40:03William Shatner?

  You know this. Ommoa Moa.

• 40:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, Amuamua.

• 40:08William Shatner?

  Amuamua. And Avi, I've forgotten his last name, the wonderful.

• 40:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Avi Loeb.

• 40:14William Shatner?

  Avi Loeb.

• 40:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's a colleague of mine up at Harvard.

• 40:18William Shatner?

  Avi Loeb has written this book on using Ommoa Moa as the chrysalis for the thoughts of other civilizations existing. Whether Ommoa Moa is a relic of some civilization. I mean, there's a great deal of argument about it, but he uses it. And describes the scientific reason to think that it was from another civilization somewhere.

• 40:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just to catch everybody up, Amuamua is an asteroid-like object interloper between the stars that happened to pass through the solar system in recent years.

• 40:59William Shatner?

  And went around the moon and made what's the alels in terms of its trajectory. It changed.

• 41:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The trajectory was not entirely Newtonian, as we say. And so the hunt was to find out why. And Avi Loeb was more embracing of the possibility that it could have been an alien craft sent under its own power.

• 41:27William Shatner?

  Well, not a craft too much. He became to the conclusion, it must have been like a sail, like a solar sail. So we saw this part of it and thought it was like a log. Whereas in fact, it was a dish. That's his theory.

• 41:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you make the good point that if we use that as a launch point to even have that conversation.

• 41:49William Shatner?

  Exactly.

• 41:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Surely has value.

• 41:51William Shatner?

  That's what he does in his book. He uses it as a launching point to have the discussion about how dare we think? Because life is so imperative. When you think that slime seeks the sunlight and mindless, what we think of as mindless things, trying to live, the imperative of life. I talked to Bob Ballard, who talked about seeing those chimneys, the calcified chimneys on 600 degrees Fahrenheit boiling water in 30,000 feet of depth, and worms living and clams living. Life can exist in the extremophiles.

• 42:32William Shatner?

  And so there's life in other places as we surmise. And the whole magic of it came alive for me in that trip.

• 42:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In that moment, wow. So what do you want the future to hold? I can tell you this, we surely agree, that Star Trek, I think, planted some seeds of what we want the future to be, and some taproots have already taken hold. But if we go 10 years, 20 years, should we send every politician? Forget the actors, let's send the politicians into space and then lock them in a room in the UN afterwards.

• 43:14William Shatner?

  There is a whole, there are the animal, the insect, and the fungus lying beneath, we're just discovering this whole other world of fungus.

• 43:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, it's an entire branch, it's an entire sector of the tree of life, correct.

• 43:33William Shatner?

  Exactly.

• 43:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you and I are old enough for it to have not been there when we first learned of the tree of life.

• 43:39William Shatner?

  We don't know this. People don't know this. I like, I love mushrooms, and mushrooms are the fruit thereof. But people don't know that, there's a whole, there's so much going on on Earth, and it's going to end unless we do something now about it, not tomorrow, not wait for funs 10 years from now. We're on the cusp of apocalypse, you know that, right?

• 44:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 44:07William Shatner?

  You agree with that?

• 44:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. Not the apocalypse of our extinction, because I think we will survive, some humans will survive, no matter what. We're on the brink of the loss of civilization, because all the greatest cities in the world are on the water's edge. And how high can you build that 20-foot wall, right? Uh, before the ocean is just completely overrun, most of what we've taken 10,000 years to build, right back when your first horses showed.

• 44:36William Shatner?

  But further, but, but then you go inland, and you have the extreme weather, and you have the fires, and you have, I mean, the, the world as you and I know it, our children, but especially our children's children, are not going to know what we know. And looking in your eyes right now, and seeing the pain, like, I don't want to discuss this, you're saying, this is not what I intended with Shatner. It is a truth that we have to impress upon the person you meet on the street.

• 45:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bill, give me a sense of hope. You spent three years on a TV show where every single show had glimmers of hope deeply embedded within it.

• 45:21William Shatner?

  I interviewed Jeff Bezos, okay? I don't know how much they showed on this, uh, on this documentary, but I had intense conversations with Mr. Bezos, whose view is this, let's get the polluting industries up into the air in orbit, pollute up there because it doesn't, it'll dissipate, and get rid of the pollution here as quickly as possible. That's his, that's his drive. I said to him, but Jeff, that'll take 100 years. We don't have 100 years. And he said, apropos what you just said, we have to have hope. If without hope, what else is

• 46:02William Shatner?

  there? So the hope is that all these worrying politicians, both in our country, and I'm Canadian, uh, and in the world, realize what you and I are talking about, the imperative what you and I are talking about, and the necessity of immediate action.

• 46:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do we do that by sending them all into space?

• 46:25William Shatner?

  Well, in a hundred years, if we're still here and moving along, there'll be a number of industries, people living in space, coming down to Park Lake Earth for restoration.

• 46:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So...

• 46:40William Shatner?

  Why do you smile? Why do you, why do you smile? You're one of the wisest and most communicable of the, of the, of the astral people. Why do you smile?

• 46:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Astral?

• 46:51William Shatner?

  Well...

• 46:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, okay, so, by the way, I think a hundred years is a very long time in the future. When you consider a hundred years ago, we were only just swapping out cars with horses in the cities. So, a lot can happen in a hundred years. So, let's hope it happens sooner than that. But you're, you're suggesting or implying that access to space will become so prevalent that we can just send, send politicians...

• 47:18William Shatner?

  Or for people to make a living, make a living up there and come down here and find the, the Earth with its natural beauty.

• 47:28William Shatner?

  Yes, that's the dream.

• 47:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. All right. So, because if we get a dream from anyone, it's got, you know, it's, it's gotta, it's gotta have Star Trek DNA in it. Because those are the only ones that really...

• 47:41William Shatner?

  Well, look, look, look at the, look at the space, the, the, the, the space vehicle. People have been living there for years now. Coming out every six months, coming back down, and...

• 47:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  About the International Space Station.

• 47:55William Shatner?

  Mm-hmm. Yes. So, that's been there for many years. Now, amplify that. Amplify that so that there's industry going on. They're burning coal or oil if they have to, making electricity, wiring it down here, and, and, because I don't want to use the word beaming, it down here, and...

• 48:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'd be totally forgiven for using the word beaming.

• 48:20William Shatner?

  We've eliminated a large source of pollution.

• 48:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 48:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. Unless everyone recycles everything, then there is no more. Pollution is a, is a... What, Grandma, you used to have, what's that word?

• 48:35William Shatner?

  Pollution. There were vast areas of the ocean with plastic in it, what, Grandma?

• 48:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Bill, we gotta land this plane. Let me just remind people that it was the New Shepard that was the capsule you went up with. And in the interest of disclosure, Jeff Bezos owns Amazon and owns Prime where your documentary is being shown. So...

• 49:03William Shatner?

  He's a remarkable man. He's a remarkable man. Remarkable, the dream, and you want to use his fortune. I learned to really care about him.

• 49:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What I learned from the documentary, because we learned a little bit about Jeff Bezos as well, is that he has very long history dreaming about going into space. So this is not just some latter-day thought when you have some cash falling out of your pocket.

• 49:27William Shatner?

  Driving force, driving force. Also wanted to mention that I do a talk show called I Don't Understand.

• 49:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I was a guest on your talk show. Thank you. Yes.

• 49:39William Shatner?

  And you were a wonderful guest, and it's all about things I don't understand, which is everything. I hate to admit it. I don't understand anything.

• 49:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was a brilliant title. I enjoyed my time there. Yes, definitely.

• 49:51William Shatner?

  It was wonderful. And then there's this wonderful show called The Unexplained on the History Channel, which is really great fun. It's very popular.

• 50:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, people love stuff that's not explained. What happens is sometimes they jump too quickly to conclusions. "I can't explain that. It must have been aliens who built it," you know? So I'm not that quick to... I love the mystery, but I'm not so quick to sort of invoke an explanation. William Shatner, thank you for lending us your time on StarTalk. This is not your first time you've been on this show. And when you're 100, we'll bring you back and we'll get your 100-year perspective on this world. Because you don't look like you're going out anytime soon.

• 50:39William Shatner?

  No, I hope not. But I also want to say how much I admire you, and not only your intelligence, but your ability to communicate. It's very important. I thank you.

• 50:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Bill, that's all the time we had. Gotta land this plane, land this starship. Thank you once again for being a guest on StarTalk, this not-your-first rodeo with us. Live long and prosper, or rather, live longer and be even more prosperous. How's that? You already satisfied the first two conditions.

• 51:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're out of here. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Four Star Talk, as always. Keep looking up.