Kirk Over the King

According to CNN, “William Shatner is firing a rhetorical rocket back at Prince William after the future king criticized space tourism. … ‘He’s a lovely, gentle, educated man, but he’s got the wrong idea,’ Shatner said during an interview with Entertainment Tonight. ‘The idea here is not to go, “Yeah, look at me. I’m in space,”’ Shatner added, claiming that trips such as his represent a ‘baby step’ toward relocating polluting industries to space.” First of all, no one on Earth (and now in space) is more deserving of a trip to just beyond the Kármán line than Shatner. This is truly life imitating art! And Shanter is right. Not that Prince William is wrong, but he is missing the mark when it comes to the nascency of democratizing space travel. And I will say the same for every other liberal I see going apoplectic about billionaires “wasting” money on their ego space race. Liberals act as if the money spent on private ventures to establish commercial space travel is somehow taking the food out of babies’ mouths in the third world. Ugh, hyperbolic much? Look, morons! Space is the final frontier. (Well, some may argue time is the final frontier.) It is only natural humanity progresses toward that end. Last I checked, human advances do not stop at the expense of fixing every worldly problem first. In fact, it is usually the world’s problems that necessitate progress. Shatner is correct by saying space travel is required for future innovation that can ultimately benefit the planet. And I further argue that we can tackle climate change and space travel simultaneously. What is lacking with climate change is the global will. Yeah, yeah. People and politicians say a lot about it, but in reality not much is being done. If anything, we are advancing space travel faster than we are taking climate change seriously as a species. At this rate, we may crack the code to living in space and colonizing our solar system quicker than we decide to actually save the planet from climate change. Billionaires channeling their resources toward space tourism is not the problem; we are (humanity is) the problem for not tackling climate change sooner and with more urgency.