A little more than a year ago, the morning that Blue Origin launched its rocket carrying Mr. Bezos and his extremely special guest William Shatner for their brief but exhilarating spin into earth's orbit dawned a pretty one. I was watching and waiting with millions of others, in my case, in the driveway of a Boston area office. My iphone was propped up on the dash of my unremarkable rental car thousands of miles from home, and with people waiting for my arrival inside. I had a crucial meeting to attend, but resisted going inside the building until I witnessed the launch. Soon someone came looking for me, climbed into my car, then another, then another and soon, we were all crammed in my car waiting for the historic moment this 90 year old space icon launched once again into space and into history.
People were a bit surprised at my enthusiasm, they knew me as an artist and musician, even though they knew who Bill Shatner was, they didn't really get the connection...why did I care what he did, or what it meant...they had no idea about my work in space.
I have many memories of watching Star Trek after school for years, sitting cross-legged in front of an old Zenith color television, on many a cold winter afternoon. We were spacers in our household, every one of us, WAY before that was a thing. I did not make much distinction between NASA whose launches I watched faithfully and the Federation of Planets as a kid. I'm not old enough to have watched the original Star Trek series during its short tenure in prime time, but my imagination was well fueled by decades of re-runs and new ST iterations, like many of us.
It was a great week, mid January, my article was finally published in the beautiful ROOM magazine (www.room.eu.com) that discusses possibilities of evolving our potential as a species to a higher realm of functioning, behavior, preparing us for our future in outer space. I reflected on Mr. Shatner's comments after his historic Blue Origin flight in the article, and then lo and behold! Mr. Shatner showed up in my hometown for a live appearance the week my article came our and I was able to get a copy to him.
It was a great privilege to see him, he is very vibrant, animated, and he is carrying a powerful message of appreciating our planet, acknowledging our oneness with Earth, as well as our inherent connectedness with each other on this planet , how important it is to preserve our precious planet for future generations, because exploring space, especially at first, is not going to be easy.
Ultimately my hope for humanity and Mr. Shatner's deeply potent realizations from his flight are tied up in that conscious and sincere hope and aspiration for humankind. I feel that we DO have the capacity, we DO have the ability to evolve and transcend into our future, but we must as a collective species on planet Earth, actively CHOOSE it. We can easily witness chaotic churning global struggles as we grapple with all aspects of our own humanity. Who knows whether we will succeed in choosing a higher state of being, or whether we continue to descend into a bizarre isolated and angry anarchy?
In my work with the space initiative Asgardia, I am hosting a 60 minute webinar, streaming live on AsgardiaTV.com, on Thursday Feb 2 at 17:00 UTC (9amPT, 11CT and 12ET) titled the same as my article "Evolving Space Culture", featuring Overview Effect author Frank White, ROOM editor Clive Simpson and colleague Chair Ariadne Gallardo. We will discuss and debate the possibilities and capacity for humanity to transcend our baser natures as we establish ourselves in space, can we evolve in time? Also plan to touch on aspects of AI and our future. Should be pretty fascinating, I made a heartfelt 2 min short describing the basis for our discussion, please watch it here... https://youtu.be/pPSY-6n_VoM The webinar is free, do join us, let us know what you think!
