My Trip to Space Filled Me with Overwhelming Sadness
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Everything did proceed as I expected (including the shadow bands), but when the eclipse was full, the earth went quiet. All the animals stopped and wondered (including the younger children who were boisterously playing seconds before the full effect).
As I stared up into the heavens, I had this deeply profound realization that our planet is traveling through space like all the other planets. The observation and experience of an eclipse made the abstract concept of space a reality and brought it closer to me in a way that just thinking (a lot) about space has never done.
I'm hoping to repeat this again in for 2024 eclipse crossing North America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_April_8,_2024
I genuinely don't understand what would be sad about that. The possibility of the next generation being able to explore at least one of those planets is very real.
Very well written. Conveys his feelings quite well I find.
To be human is to have emotions, being sentimental is one type of emotion you can feel. Especially if you feel like Earth is currently being overrun and destroyed by humanity at breakneck speeds. To feel emotional about this OK, as long as you also stay grounded and realistic.
But we should not hide our emotions, it's possible to be both emotional and rational.
Just like arriving onto a crime scene and yelling at the crying survivors to shut up, without any consideration for the crime committed before, or any of its consequences.
If we don't get society under "control" - and not through the ideological-tyrannical effort underway globally currently - but through voluntarily taking action through adequate organization of listening to and following competent leadership (voting with our dollars, say by buying a Tesla vehicle, etc) - then we'll probably destroy most humans/life on Earth anyhow and whatever survives will be able to continue to evolve; and maybe, if any humans remain, they'll be wise enough to pass on and successfully counter tyrannical forces that exist within the human genome.
Extinction happens, and, more broadly, death happens. However, we don't stand and deliver a eulogy composed of "idk, people die, no big deal" at a family member's funeral. Immense loss imparts grief.
From all I can see is you incorrectly simplified what I said to a strawman argument of '"idk, people die, no big deal"'.
The reality is over the last 10+ years, without going into any details, I've been working towards and exponentially being closer and closer to helping humanity survive and change course as quickly and efficiently as possible; the current issue is a lack of adequate communication and organization, and properly designed tools, systems, and protocols - along with most major existing systems having been captured partly or fully by bad actors who seem hellbent on destabilizing society to prevent them from being held accountable, as well an attempt to gain full control over everything and everyone.
But being a realist is important if the odds are unknown, like how Elon is aiming for and where all signs point to him being successful creating a colony on Mars far sooner than later as a backup plan, backup site for humanity - when even 5 years ago that wasn't even on anyone's radar; seeing exponentials, as Elon has said, are very difficult for people to see - but that is where hope, along with automation and technology leveraged and utilized for good, in the right organization for the right purposes, is what can very quickly right the spaceship called Earth; unimaginably quickly - that even those who see and setup these systems following foundational principles will be surprised by their speed of development and uptake.
I wasn't making a straw man, or simplifying, I was pointing out a lack of recognition that said grief is kind of the topic at hand.
Side note, saving humanity on Mars is cool and all, I'm totally for it, but in the event that actually happens, all of an entire planets lives and ecosystems will be destroyed. Exploration is aspirational, but, as a "backup plan," Mars is an incredibly bleak and sad future to rely on.
Buying a Tesla is not going to save the climate. Not even if everyone does it. We need transportation options that scale. That means density, bikes, buses, trains. It means anything except personal 2+ ton motor vehicles.
I'd counter that tyrannical forces actually spurs humanity in the right direction. I say this because I have notice over the years that our species have been dealing with this problem since the birth of mankind. This is an observation, not a plug for tyranny.
We've been in a yin-dark ages cycle, relatively slow moving, and will be moving into yang cycle - fast, exponential change. The technological innovation and distribution of technology via automation and capitalism has overlaid the relative stagnancy of this current cycle making it appear to not be a dark age, when clearly, with any critical analysis things are far worse than they could or should be.
and yet almost every selection mechanism can only operate on phenotypic forms. The nature of a "species" is a shorthand for "sufficiently distinctive phenotype(s) that evolution will operate distinctly on this group of individuals", and in this sense, "species" do matter.
> Extinction of traits in favor of better ones is baked in to the very definition.
I don't know what definition you're talking about, but this also completely wrong. Evolution can generate new traits without old ones vanishing, and that can be true whether the new ones have higher or lower fitness than the old. Evolution is a change generation mechanism primarily; selection is a secondary mechanism and at various times and places, selection pressure can be extraordinarily weak, allowing a large diversity of traits to coexist.
We’re good at technology but woefully bad at many things.
I’m not aiming to argue here, especially not to suggest we shouldn’t be accountable. I suppose I think we give ourselves too much credit and other species not enough. We are objectively bad, especially collectively, at making good choices for the world we inhabit. It’s evidently a deficiency of our species.
Reading this guy paid millions of $ to realize these basic facts fills me with overwhelming sadness too. Can his experience be of value for us? Given that he could have discovered what he just experienced by reading good books, I think this n+1 experience has zero value. Send human beings in space to perform scientific experiments. Period.
My impression is that Shatner’s participation was the classiest part of the trip, which is really saying something. The moment after the landing when Jeff Bezos popped a bottle of champagne in Shatner's face while he was trying to express his feelings about the experience really summed it all up for me.
But on the other hand, the shit that most green types focus on like plastic straws & grocery bags, meat, low flow showers, space tourism and such is usually very small percentage of actual environmental damage, while paradoxically ignoring the actual big causes such as gasoline motors, industrial processes, coal power plants, high water crops such as almonds, water & $$$ subsidies for agriculture, non-regenerative agriculture and fighting great solutions like nuclear power and EV cars. An effective environmentalist would shame people for buying almonds and tell them to eat pistachios instead, take the train / bike everywhere and lobby to get more nuclear power plants installed.
I think it comes down to a combinations misplaced 'personal responsibility & morality' principle because you feel powerless, along with dislike of the rich wrapped in environmental concern, where people would cut off their nose to spite their face.
this paragraph felt so profound, i sprang a few tears. hearing someone who has been through so much talk about death always gets to me.
At some point during the Covid years, I turned a mental page and decided that 'carpe diem' is my new motto.
Not in the traditional "bucket list" sense, until Covid I had a mental list of places I [thought I] wanted to go ... and experiences I [thought I] wanted to have. Daft stuff usually involving long-haul travel and/or hard to get to places.
I've ditched all of that.
Now it's about seeing people.
Mundane stuff (but not mundane during the Covid years!) such as taking our kids to see their grandparents. Taking time off work to visit my sister, who lives 1000mi away, and partially due to our rather complex relationship, I've not actually visited at any of her various homes for <hangs head in shame> just over 20 years. Encouraging/enabling my wife to make time to visit her parents, who also live a long way from us.
Life has a habit of sneaking up on you when you're not paying attention. Seize the day (while you can).
happy walking.
For myself, I think it's not just being there, but actually engaging them.
Expressing myself openly, with an open heart, and mind.
I've not been good at that in the past but as I get older, it is what I hope and wish for, and am trying to be better at.
It's a little terrible, but it's still hard for me to escape that prejudice when watching him speak.
Commercial space operations are sending celebrities to space because its seen as a wothwhile promotional expense. “We“, except to the extent that refers to the owners of these operations, aren’t involved.
Each manned space orbital launch has massive spin-off benefits, and brings forward the day when space flight is accessible to the masses.
And a singer! Who sang about space!
The cost of launching to space has declined by orders of magnitude over the last 50 years and can be expected to decline by orders of magnitude more in the coming decades.
At one point, air travel was reserved for the richest of the rich, and today hundreds of millions of people fly every year. There's no reason the same couldn't happen with space flight.
(also, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/29062022/space-tourism-cl...)
Some of his words immediately after landing are poetic, “I hope I never recover, that I can maintain what I feel now.”
They did send a poet.
Dont you think that once space flight has been more normalized there will be a whole slew of young poets who do exactly what you describe?
Fire != Pollution
Anyways, this overview effect is something I always felt, even without going into space. I always felt we were wasting time with our squabbling over borders down here. I think most scifi geeks feel this way, and I don't mean star trek scifi, I mean Alastair Reynolds, Ian Banks and such.
But the problem is that the solution my mind always reaches for requires autocracy to fix the problems. So in a sense our problems are caused by our desire to be free.
Honestly I don't think most of us are more than trained apes, do we deserve to be free and pollute our earth? I don't want autocracy but I definitely want a lot stronger government to regulate our problems away. Globally.
Maybe try reaching for something else (such as technological solutions). We are currently on the brink of armageddon due to an autocratic regime. Centralization IRL necessarily leads to corruption over time. It's efficient but not robust.
this is an important point. and the next step is the realization that, therefore, the only way to make the world better is through education, and motivating people to strive to be better themselves, to think about our future, to contribute to the advancement of society.
Very interesting. Have you met anyone else IRL who shares the overview effect?
> ...autocracy to fix the problems.
Tchaikovsky's novel Children of Time explores how two different cultures try to tackle this problem. I won't spoil it for you. It's a notion I keep chewing on.
Humanity needs to constantly run away from itself.
In game theory there are exploitative solutions that focus on achieving the most optimal best case scenario (you picked rock 100 times in a row, I'm going to pick paper), and game theory optimal solutions that focus on achieving the least awful worst case scenario (you picked rock 100 times in a row, but I'm still going to pick my choice randomly because otherwise you could predict I'm going to pick paper, suddenly swap to scissors, and exploit me). When things are going optimally, the exploitative solution will dramatically outperform the optimal. But when things are going poorly, the optimal will even more dramatically outperform the exploitative.
So do you pick the scenario that will never do especially well but will also never do especially poorly? Or do you pick the one that can have extremes of achievement, but also extremes of failure? I suspect framed this way, few would ever pick the latter. But we humans have this annoying ability to convince ourselves of things like the failure scenario being impossible - even though history has endlessly repeated that not only is it possible, but it will happen, and generally far more quickly than one could ever imagine.
However, we also need to significantly revise the way that government and money work. They need to become high technologies. More than that, we need those technologies to be built around more encompassing and well-rounded ideologies.
These are huge challenges. But the alternative to working on them is to just accept the status quo.
This alone is already a really good reason to keep going into space IMO. Even though Shatner says it depressed him, this kind of awareness is really what we need as a species. It might be depressing but that might cause us to finally actually do something about the problems we're causing.
Of course the environmental impact of sending even a token percentage on a trip to space would make our problems a lot worse so it's not going to happen...
By the way Shatner keeps calling it "Orbit" but that is not what he was in. I'm surprised this was not explained to him.
— Roy McBride, Ad Astra
War and all the idiocy down here are so..... when you realize how lucky we are and how fragile all of this really is...
Hopefully with the event of space tourism this will be a common theme and the experience will serve to educate and raise the bar for humanity.
Shatner went to space and was profoundly changed. What do we need to do for us all to be profoundly changed?
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3129/emission-reductions-from-...
Thank you for pointing that out. I still feel like it's not the same thing that people who orbit experience. Of course some people think differently, and I'm sure Bezos and Shatner think very differently. Of course who I am to speak; the highest I've been is in an airliner (so far).
Billionaires: It's so small... Maybe I can own it?
Billionaires: It's so small, I have to go to mars so I can own that too.
How meta. How ironic.
I get your point. What i meant was, the internet empowering mankind to communicate in 'real-time', transparent to man made concepts like borders and countries. I was hoping that this 'wormhole' would strengthen the sense of a global community.
―Edgar D. Mitchell
Nope.
>> an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world
No.
>> and a compulsion to do something about it
Lawl, no not all.
>> You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, Look at that, you son of a bitch
No, didn't have that effect on me. You're thinking about meth maybe?
—Douglas Adams
Shatner is also rich and famous (and known for his arrogance) but not to the degree that he can make governments fight for his amusement the way Bezos can. Shatner is still grounded enough to be capable of seeing reality, and being transformed by it, whereas Jeff Bezos can only see the hall of mirrors he's constructed around himself.
A few ambient tracks from CBL made me tear up: they used field recordings of the world (birds, children, trees, cities), woven through low frequency drones and rifts. It would sort of create a distance between the recording samples, and then, through sound, you zoom out, glide, become ephemeral in the face of the planet, like a cloud.
Freeorion primed my mind to think in some detail about a reduced form of state-level strategy (as 4x games tend to do). I realized that the first 10 rounds were highly predictive of success for the next 100 rounds, and so forth, so I understood that my actions could have the same non-linearity and influence (and the predictive power of that influence was based on my model of the world, which is easy in a 4x game but difficult in meatspace).
Combined, I saw in detail the cybernetic flows around the world… i was a world systems thinker. it’s taken some work not to pop my head out of frustration.
Now that part of me is applied to more localized systems and small things: seeds around me that grow via the world into things i may never witness directly, and putting out small fires around me that I hope to never witness as big fires. Memes, basically (or anti-memetic memes? Not so sure).
I don’t think her emotions were grief, but the overwhelming feeling for our species and that we’re all on this planet together. I remember it being beautifully filmed.
I wish we could all experience these emotions.
With the euphoria of the 60's now merely a tiny dot in our societal rear view mirror, crowded out by decades of bad news, I think people are on a certain level aware of this. We distract ourselves to avoid contemplating it too deeply. With an abundance of such distractions, people don't take time to think about the future of our species and planet as we know it, decades and centuries from now. It's less painful to live in the moment and worry about small, human problems.
when I looked into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death. Increasingly I feel this way too. I, as a human, was built for this earth, of it. There's nothing good out there for me. This is my home.
Conscription is a huge difference. Hundreds of thousands were sent to Vietnam against their will.
> Somehow occupying sovereign countries and killing kids is a bad thing only when putin does it.
Ugh this both sideism.
We could atleast have pulled them back home, before pointing a finger at putin, but we didn't even do that (and they'd all fit in a minibus).
We're currently destroying our own economies because someone else is doing something that we've been doing for years now. Technically we deserve being cold and maybe some kind of a revolution, because we've deserved it for destroying countries all around the world, but I'd prefer things to stop and normalize before we all freeze to death here.
Invading other countries is bad (including when the EU does it).
Invading and massacring Ukraine is bad.
Both can be true at the same time. And only because we haven’t eliminated the first doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight the second.
Look at the french for example... they have literally their embassies burning now, because people want their army out of their sovereign country, and the media sits quiet, mentioning maybe "some protests". The EU is threathening Hungary for wanting to buy russian gas, while sitting quiet about France.
Why should putin have to stop, if we don't? And if we care for peoples lives and sovereign countries, why don't we care about the ones we're destroying right now?
Or was it when there was a brutal civil war and the state used chemical weapons against civilian populations?
Yes, my country had soldiers in all the mentioned countries too.
Can't afford US college? Go to army! Can't afford a doctor? Army will fix you up! Join, a few peaceful years at a few bases, you'll have a college degree, you'll make mama proud, just sign here, you're 18 already, you can't buy beer yet, but you can join the army!
Add some "fighting for US freedom" propaganda, and end up as a homeless disabled veteran after the war.
If you don't see a difference between a war where soldiers that rape and pillage are criminals in their own country, where questionable decisions that caused civilian suffering are widely condemned, a war that saw very large domestic movement against it as it unfolded and another one where rape, torture, slavery, ethnic genocide and killing/exploiting of innocent people is an openly admitted state policy with the worst offenders getting decorated for it, with the majority of the population not only in support, but craving blood, more torture and use of nuclear weapons. I have no words to convince you. I can only hope that you will reflect on this in future.
All of those are claims that are made by the very ones who lied 8 years about nonexistent WMDs.
Moreover, the Ukrainian minister who made those lies up was fired by the Ukrainian government because even the govt. found it way too extreme. She is now busy backstabbing her former employers by saying that "They made me lie that way"...
Which individuals are those? Can you name them?
Re “the Ukrainian minister who made those lies up,” I’d also like a name for that. Russian atrocities have been reported broadly across many outlets, and even Russian media is clamoring that it’s not brutal enough.
All the mainstream media said iraq has WMDs... it was basically on every european and american tv channel in preparation for the war. Once before that, we heard that iraqi soldiers killed babies... that was a "fun" one too...
Even tony blair admited it (the WMDs) was a lie: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/06/chilcot-ton...
The same media also reported of the "Ghost of kiyev".. so yeah... surely we must believe them "now".
> Re “the Ukrainian minister who made those lies up,” I’d also like a name for that. Russian atrocities have been reported broadly across many outlets, and even Russian media is clamoring that it’s not brutal enough.
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/russia-ukraine-latest-news-...
> Lawmaker Pavlo Frolov said Ms. Denisova was also accused of making insensitive and unverifiable statements about alleged Russian sex crimes and spending too much time in Western Europe during the invasion.
> “The unclear focus of the Ombudsman's media work on the numerous details of ‘sexual crimes committed in an unnatural way’ and ‘rape of children’ in the occupied territories that could not be confirmed by evidence, only harmed Ukraine,” Mr. Frolov said in a Facebook post.
Also your evidence of Ukraine lying about war crimes is the firing of a woman who lied about war crimes? Sure, people lie, but then that obviously prompts the question of why haven’t all the other people who have been discussing Russian crimes been fired as well (since, as you’re implying, the crimes are fake?)
The mainstream media told us about dead babies in iraq, told us about WMDs and told us about nazis in ukraine ( https://i.imgur.com/mRAaOo0.jpg ). Then the war started, and suddenly nazis are a conspiracy theory.
It's a war, shit happens, media focuses on every dead civilian who died because of russians, and ignores all the dead civilians killed by american bombs, even at weddings in countries US is not even at war with, and it ignores all the dead civilians killed by ukranians, and it ignores all the dead civilians killed by israelis, etc.
This point is never raised as an effort to get said Nazis out of combat/prevalence (in which case, sure, let’s do it). It’s just used to suggest we shouldn’t be supporting a democratic ally who got invaded by an autocratic warlord with imperial motives.
There was a great article a few years ago about the huge Neo-Nazi element in the German military. It’s a huge problem. It’s bad. Does this mean we need to allow Russia to roll tanks into Berlin and put up a wall again? That’s why you’re getting dismissed so readily that you think it’s because people believe it’s a “conspiracy theory.” It’s a completely meaningless point. It has no bearing on the situation whatsoever.
These are not 'Neonazi elements'. They are actual Nazi brigades comprised of actual nazis who know their theory, who think that they are ubermensch and everyone else either should be enslaved or killed. They are not your average skinhead occasionally attacking immigrants.
And yeah, the media is now past saying that Nazis are a conspiracy theory - that was until a few months ago. Because the Nazis were unrepentant in their Nazism, now the media is whitewashing them.
I'd be curious for any source where any outlet with a readership above, say 1MM people, said that neo-Nazi battalions don't exist and that it's a conspiracy theory. Surely if "the mainstream media" was all about this position, you'll be able to find a source? I just looked and I couldn't find even one.
And before you go ahead and trick yourself in this search for sources: there are conspiracy theories that the upper echelons of Ukraine's national government is comprised of neo-Nazis. This is referred to as a conspiracy theory because it is.
That 'spooky' mainstream media lied about babies in incubators in Iraq, then nonexistent WMDs, then about freedom-loving Libyan rebels, then freedom-loving Syrian rebels, and now they are telling other things in the latest foreign policy project.
Why the hell are you people even giving them any credibility, leaving aside actually believing them? Where does the buck stop?
The corporate media not lying about matters that do not touch the economy, military or the foreign policy does NOT make them trustworthy in other matters.
> why haven’t all the other people who have been discussing Russian crimes
She was not fired for 'discussing'. She was fired for an outrageous lie that she produced as the person responsible for the official position of the government.
> Also your evidence of Ukraine lying about war crimes is the firing of a woman who lied about war crimes?
Amazing how you contort actual evidence of lying by an administration from the highest levels to a proof of it being honest.
Mental gymnastics. Apparently that's what enables you people to believe your establishments.
> She was not fired for...
This is a non sequitur so I don't really know what to say here. Try re-reading what I had said.
> Amazing how you contort...
Well it wasn't the highest levels lol. It was a few rungs down from the highest level, and the highest level then held that lower level responsible for its misbehavior. That's exactly what you'd expect to see from an institution holding itself to a high bar.
Entire mainstream corporate media, foremost Angloamerican, current US State Dept., CIA, other 3-letter agency top officials, who were the mid-level foot soldiers implementing the lies, the ex top officials of those agencies, who are retired and who are now called 'the intelligence community' now, making 6 figures while working in private think tanks who manufacture and sell those lies, all the privately-owned satellite media with Angloamerican and local neoliberal shareholders, the entire 2003 shtick.
> Russian atrocities have been reported broadly across many outlets
They haven't been. BBC, Le Monde or Spiegel are not 'broad, different outlets'. They have been lying about everything along with their big daddy since a long time, including the nonexistent WMDs.
There isn't anything as such in Indian, Indonesian, South American, Vietnamese, Egyptian or South African media. That's broad. Not the outlets who are owned by the same lot.
The below article bluntly demonstrates the falsity of the existence of 'free media' in the capitalist West.
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/five-reason...
When your 6 figure salary depends on agreeing with the majority shareholder, you 'just' find reasons to do so.
Buenos Aires Times: https://www.batimes.com.ar/news/amp/world/tougher-russia-san...
India at the UN condemned “war crimes in Bucha,” which they stopped short of accusing their strategic partner of, but obviously it wasn’t Ukrainian armed forces walking through Bucha executing civilians, right?
Seems odd to lament the lack of truly free media in the west and then believe even half a word out of Russia’s mouth.
Also FYI, “intelligence community” does not refer to retired government people on the media circuit. It refers to the actual intelligence agencies themselves.
> then believe even half a word out of Russia’s mouth.
That's your own personal bias - 'either/or'. There are many other sources than 'Russia'. The world is not bipolar like in Anglosphere.
> Also FYI, “intelligence community” does not refer to retired government people on the media circuit
No. 'The intelligence community' as a term is used to include the retired personas now working in think tanks, in order to give them authority. Those people's papers from think tanks cant be referenced or cited as belonging to actual intelligence agencies after they retired. But if you say 'intelligence community', you can cite them all you want...
I never said it's either/or. Not sure where you're getting that impression.
No, IC refers to the actual agencies themselves. You're misinterpreting and then getting upset about your misinterpretation.
Then you have one of the most notorious units where individual torturers and tormentors identified by name, this unit gets decorated by Putin. At the same time you have Russian gov-controlled media openly calling for killing every Ukrainian and every commentary cheering them.
When all this happens and some people say "this is same lies as iraqi wmd". They are either trolls, shills or they live life so sheltered that they never had to discover what Russian soldiers do in areas they enter.
Here in Poland we had Russians here few times at war time and no one has to convince us what they do. I'm old enough to have had WW2 survives come to my primary school and give us first hand accounts. Back then those that escaped concentration camps and PL in general were telling people in the West what was going on. They too were disbelieved.
BTW, this is not the "first time in modern time" they do it. They did the same thing in Chechnya and Syria. The difference is that today everyone has a high quality video recorder in their pocket and communication with the entire world so all their atrocities are plain to see to everyone.
Here is a key difference between Russia and the US/Europe. When Iraq war is bad, thousands of people can march across American/European cities without a fear of getting jailed. People can run for elections hammering their opponents on voting for a monstrous war (Obama trounced Hillary and others) and win. And that makes a difference (Syria - US/Europe didn't go there; in fact, the world afterwards wished that the US had gone to fight against Assad to prevent further tragedies).
Vs what is happening in Russia? I heard demonstrators and political opponents are jailed. Even an old lady, who survived the siege of Leningrad and dared protest against Putin, was taken away by the police. That is what makes US regime much much better than Putin's.
The outsized attention given to "hippies" is that era's version of nutpicking. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=nutpicking
The dominate culture's reaction to "hippies" (pro civil rights, antiwar, nonconformism, antimaterialism) beget a hard turn to the right.
One cogent example is Reagan's meteoric political rise by demonizing a bunch of kids daring to exercise their right to free speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement#1966–1970
As with all protests, "hippie" culture was coopted and commercialized. Enabling another generation of conformists to LARP as rebels, for a price. This time via appropriated totems like blue jeans and stadium rock.
Another predictable backlash, where the agitators are mocked and while their cultural stylings are assimilated.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
From the top comment:
> It becomes that much worse when you remember that Shatner is a recovering alcoholic, and lost his wife to an alcohol related drowning incident.
Bezos is a real piece of shit.
Whether or not HN commenters owe superbillionaires better, they definitely owe this community better if they're participating in it.
If only people flagged this sort of thing consistently. So it goes.
Yeah. I'm squirming at the memory. Bezos says "I wanna hear this! ..." but then goes back to the party.
I don't think he really wanted to hear it.
Shatner, whose career & big personality I love, is probably used to being listened to. He's later-in-life than Bezos and from a career of storytelling & emotion. In that situation, I'd have rather heard Shatner's immediate thoughts, than the generic euphoria of one more successful mission.
But I still don't think Bezos wronged Shatner with his divided attention.
Bezos has already had the same experience. Bezos is at a earlier stage-of-life, & comes from a career of ruthless accounting & physics efficiencies. While most space-fans would be sufficiently star-struck to give Shatner the kind of focused attention that a celebrity usually gets, Bezos's own celebrity, fame, & space-experience – not to mention his personal & professional relationships to all the others there – put him far past that.
I think the analogy from NYT's David Streitfeld, that this was a "Kirk/Spock" moment, is closest to the fair truth: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/13/science/bezos-shatner-sta...
I suspect the deep philosophical discussion did happen, but perhaps at a more appropriate time.
This sounds more like a presumption taken on by an arrogant person. It's certainly not a given, as you suggest here.
The rest of the team had a sharp constrast to Shatner in their style of celebration, so which group wasn't following their leader's tone properly? And the group that was celebrating loudly was doing so independent of Bezos, but somehow required him to join in soon and give their tone his affirmation? It's an absurd idea. It makes no sense after just a bit of thought.
Yes. I reject that premise as well.
>> The rest of the team had a sharp constrast to Shatner in their style of celebration, so which group wasn't following their leader's tone properly? And the group that was celebrating loudly was doing so independent of Bezos, but somehow required him to join in soon and give their tone his affirmation? It's an absurd idea. It makes no sense after just a bit of thought.
I think that if Bezos would have settled into a lengthy quiet and introspective discussion with Shatner at the time, it would have changed the overall tone of the group (or at least could have). Of course, I don't know for sure, but I have observed human behaviour in the past.
Traveling to space isn't the same as canyon rafting or bungee jumping. It's not just "exciting", it elicits a wide range of profound experiences and deep emotions. And all of them are just as valid and should be affirmed. If you are organizing and leading people into space, you have to be fully aware as well as humble.
Over the past decades, Bezos spend mountains of energy expounding the importance of space travel, including its philosophical aspects. Bezos response to Shatner makes all of that questionable. It leaves one speculating whether or not he sees commercial space travel as anything else then another thrill ride that might add to the profit margins of his companies.
Maybe he did have a deeper discussion in private. But given Bezos' public image and demeanour, I wouldn't assume he fully understood the importance of that moment before the camera's in hindsight.
Shatner was on that trip as a prop. Most famous space captain going to space for real! Bezos had the opportunity to curb that, and let some humanity seep back into what was basically just a PR stunt.
More damning than that, Bezos was rude to an elderly man, which is rude full stop, no matter the setting.
If Bezos's staff really needed the celebration so much, have their boss come down to their level to do the hooting-and-hollering, and couldn't wait a whole two minutes, they are guilty for the same reasons that Bezos was.
This reflects on Bezos and the company that he kept -- either they are too shallow to understand the depth of what they had done, or too weak to make the uncomfortable choice of discussing it.
I don’t like Bezos, but I gotta call it like I see it
One has his identity shattered, other not trying to let it in of fear of going down the same path.
Both makes sense.
I'm waiting for the day the first psychedelic space flight retreat company gets off :)
Though no one notices, because they are revered for what often comes easy to them, accomplished actors are by and large humble even though the opposite is often believed. Besides inconceivable amounts of money, the one common defining quality among billionaires is narcissism, shorthand for lack of empathy, self-importance, entitlement, need for constant admiration, fear of criticism, etc.
In the end, the Bezo didn't do that poorly.
He was pouring his heart out to the man but you could tell that he just didn't want be there. The least he could've done is pretend to show an interest but he couldn't even do that.