Captain Kirk: The Earth is our only home. Everything out there in space is hellish. We need to start taking care of our home before it, too, becomes a hell.

At age 90, the actor William Shatner got to ride briefly into outer space. He was expecting an epiphany of connection to the Universe out there.

He was not prepared to feel a deep sense of grief.

(I have been making the same argument on this as Shatner for many years now.)

Here is what he wrote:

The age of extinction

My trip to space made me realise we have only one Earth – it must live long and prosper

William Shatner

Star Trek prepared me to feel a connection with the universe. Instead, I felt terrible grief for our planet. At Cop15, our leaders must negotiate to protect it

Wed 7 Dec 2022 10.00 ESTFollow William Shatner

Click to see figure captionThe age of extinction is supported byAbout this contentLast year, at the age of 90, I had a life-changing experience.

I went to space, after decades of playing a science-fiction character who was exploring the universe and building connections with many diverse life forms and cultures.

I thought I would experience a similar feeling: a feeling of deep connection with the immensity around us, a deep call for endless exploration. A call to indeed boldly go where no one had gone before.

I was absolutely wrong.

As I explained in my latest book, what I felt was totally different. I knew that many before me had experienced a greater sense of care while contemplating our planet from above, because they were struck by the apparent fragility of this suspended blue marble.

I felt that too.

But the strongest feeling, dominating everything else by far, was the deepest grief that I had ever experienced.

While I was looking away from Earth, and turned towards the rest of the universe, I didn’t feel connection; I didn’t feel attraction. What I understood, in the clearest possible way, was that we were living on a tiny oasis of life, surrounded by an immensity of death.

I didn’t see infinite possibilities of worlds to explore, of adventures to have, or living creatures to connect with. I saw the deepest darkness I could have ever imagined, contrasting starkly with the welcoming warmth of our nurturing home planet.

I worry about the world my grandchildren will be living in when they are my ageThis was an immensely powerful awakening for me. It filled me with sadness. I realised that we had spent decades, if not centuries, being obsessed with looking away, with looking outside.

I played my part in popularising the idea that space was the final frontier.

But I had to get to space to understand that Earth is, and will remain, our only home. And that we have been ravaging it, relentlessly, making it uninhabitable.

I was born in Montreal in 1931. During my lifetime, this world has changed faster than for any generation before us. We are now at an ecological tipping point. Without the bold leadership that the times require, we are facing further climate breakdown and ecosystems collapsing before our eyes, with as many as one million species at risk of extinction, according to the latest scientific assessments.‘We are at war with nature’: UN environment chief warns of biodiversity apocalypseRead more

And of all places, it is in the city where I was born that a crucial meeting of the United Nations is being held. At Cop15, the UN biodiversity summit in Montreal, taking place from 7 to 19 December, world governments will negotiate a global deal to stop the loss of biodiversity by the end of the decade. We need world leaders to give their diplomats a powerful mandate for these talks: agree on strong targets to change the way we produce food, to drastically cut pollution, and to conserve 50% of our planet’s land and ocean, with the active leadership of Indigenous peoples and local communities, who have historically been pioneers on all these necessary actions.

I was the oldest man to go to space.

I worry about the world my grandchildren will be living in when they are my age. My generation is leaving them a planet that might pretty soon be barely livable for many of Earth’s inhabitants. My experience in space filled me with sadness, but also with a strong resolve. I don’t want my grandchildren to simply survive. I want them, as an old friend used to say, to be able to live long and prosper.I will do everything I can so that we can protect our one and only home. Our world leaders have an immense responsibility to do the same in Montreal.

William Shatner is a Canadian actor who played Captain James T Kirk in Star Trek for almost 30 years.


He is also author of Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and WonderThe age of extinctionCop15OpinionEnvironmentConservationBiodiversityStar TrekWilliam ShatnerArticleCommentWilliam Shatner

The age of extinction

Why is the moon so high in the sky in winter?

And was it in fact directly overhead last night, near the beginning of the eclipse?

It sure looked like it was to me – though I didn’t take any measurements because I was only wearing my pajamas, my coat, and my slippers as I stood in the freezing cold on the snow-free but still-frozen concrete walk in front of our south-facing, Northeast DC  house.

[Yeah, I was being wimpy, only going out twice all night to look at the eclipse, but I was really tired, and I had to get up in the morning to give a full day’s guest lesson on astronomy to four, 70-minute middle school classes for a fellow teacher, so it was kind of  out of the question to stay up all night. (There is no way I could have followed through with the lessons if I had!)]

Maybe I’m just weird, but I have from time to time noticed, and marveled at, the fact that during the winter, the moon at times appears like it’s almost directly overhead. Let me emphasize that: to my unaided, subjective vision, without taking the trouble to measure it, during the winter, the moon sometimes appears to me to be directly overhead (at zenith).

However, everything I know about astronomy of the solar system tells me that this is probably impossible, simply because we do not live in the Tropics (with a capital T: the zone between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn). That’s the only part of our planet where the sun is ever directly overhead. (Don’t believe me? Use your internet resource skills and look it up. I’m not going to tell you just how to do that, because since you are reading this blog, you already know how.)

If you live in Washington,  the Sun will never appear directly over your house, no matter where you live in Washington, DC, and no matter how hot it may feel in the middle of summer.

And I figured that if the Sun and the Earth and the Moon were all aligned with each other, as in last night’s lunar eclipse, then the Moon would appear in our sky here in Washington as if it had simply traded places with the Sun for a while, and was at the same elevation. And that elevation just ain’t all that high.

Or so I thought.

Was I suffering from a version of the famous ‘moon effect’? (Which is a poorly-understood but almost-universal optical illusion about the apparent size of the moon,  a visual hallucination of sorts, caused by some internal human visual processing “bug” inside the various centers responsible for actually interpreting the photons and light waves that enter one’s eyes.)

Or is everybody else normal and it’s just me?

Or was the moon, in fact, at the zenith?

Or just very close to it, but within the theoretical and experimental range of error for this sort of thing?

I am going to try to settle this in two ways.

First of all, theoretically.

I used a rather widely-used piece of instructional geometry software called “Geometer’s Sketchpad” (version 5 in this case) and a couple of drawing and painting programs. I also used Google Earth to find out where on Earth are the places that are directly south of Washington and are on the Tropic of Cancer or on the Equator, as well as the spot on our planet that is diametrically opposite in position to Washington, DC.

I was rather surprised to find out where those places were. They weren’t really where I expected, and I of all people should have known better.

For example, I thought I remembered that Havana, Cuba, was just inside the Tropics, but Miami, Florida, was just north of the Cancerous Tropic. Or was that the Topic of Cancer? (Ha, ha, that was two intentional puns. If you don’t get them, or don’t think they are funny, that’s fine with me.) And I also remembered having been to some places in Florida that it was south of DC.  So I kinda figgered that the Tropic of Cancer would intersect our DC line of of longitude (about 77 degrees west) somewhere in the water between Havana and Miami.

Surprise: not very close. Just for fun, try guessing or figuring out the answer yourself. I’ll hide the answer at the end of this column, at (1).

And directly south of DC, on the equator? I always kinda figgered it would be somewhere in Brazil.

No surprise this time, I was wrong again. When I looked carefully, I discovered that 77 W and 0 degrees N or S is located… (2).

How about the point diametrically opposite to Washington, on the exact other side of the globe? Well, on this one I was fairly close. But calculating where this is, is a bit tricky. The latitude is OK. Any point at X degrees north is directly opposite some point that is X degrees south. So wherever it is, it’s at 39 degrees south. But the longitude is harder, because for most locations, Y degrees west is not opposite Y degrees east. What you have to do is change your latitude by exactly 180 degrees. Now here, you can either add or subtract. I would prefer to subtract, here. So 180 minus 77 gives us 103. (Of, if you prefer, 77 minus 180 gives -103.) And the way I interpret that 103, or -103, is to consider that as being 103 degrees east longitude.

Now knowing that DC’s literal antipode is roughly located at 39 degrees south and 103 degrees west, can you guess, or find, where that is? (3)

Here is the diagram that I made.

Bottom Line: if my diagram is correct, the full moon last night, at its greatest elevation or altitude last night, should have been about 15.5 degrees from the vertical (or 74.5 degrees from the horizontal). And that angular distance from the zenith should have been clearly and plainly obvious.

But it wasn’t. To me.

Now that’s just last night. Is it possible for the moon to be inclined a bit to the apparent orbit of the sun – that is – when the moon is not undergoing an eclipse? And can that cause the moon to be even higher in the sky than it was during last night’s eclipse?

Answer: YES. The moon ‘s orbit around the Earth is inclined by just about 5 degrees from the Sun’s apparent orbit. Thus, in different years and months, the details of which I will ignore right now ’cause it’s way too complicated for this here blog today, the moon might be as high as 10.5 from the vertical (79.5 degrees from the horizontal).

Next time: actual measurement

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Spoiler

answers below

or you could interpret my diagram..

(1) 77W and 23.5N turns out to be right next to Nassau, the capital of the Bahamas!

(2) it was about 100 or so miles east of Quito, Ecuador, along the banks of some huge jungle river that probably flows into the Amazon River, but doesn’t even seem to have a name. Nor any towns. Or roads.

(3) It’s located several hundred km, mi, or nm west-south-west of Perth, Australia, in the middle of the Indian Ocean. No land for hundreds of leagues in any direction, as the pirates or sailors or yarntellers of yore might say.