Captain Kirk cries in space

As most people know, actor William Shatner rode a rocket not long ago, thanks to Jeff Bezos. Today’s gazillionaires can have their own spacecraft. When I was a kid, only Bond villains did. Anyway, NPR’s piece on his new memoir, Boldly Go, focuses on his surprise that the overwhelming emotional reaction he had to being up there turned out to be grief; he was weeping, because he was walloped with an instant awareness of the beautiful isolated fragility of the Earth, and as soon as that linked up with what he already knew about what we humans were and are doing to the planet and to each other, he was overwhelmed by that. The piece goes on to cite the work of Frank White, who first publicized the term “overview effect” in a 1987 book. White has interviewed “more than 40 astronauts” on the subject, and found that Shatner’s reaction is typical. Astronauts don’t just intellectually know about the existential threats that all of us who don’t live under rocks know about; they know it experientially, just from looking down at the Earth from the blackness outside it. As Shatner put it, the Earth was life, shining and colorful, and space was death. Stark and clear.

Astronauts, I’ve long thought, really do form the most exclusive human club on the planet (and I think moonwalkers are an even more exclusive sub-club—with only four left). They have a perspective only they can have. There is an analog, though, shot through human history: the mariner. (It’s obvious why so many spacecraft and space programs—the eponymous Mariner, Magellan—are named for mariners.) I learned, too many years ago to remember the original source, that what we traditionally call the “voyages of exploration” cost more, relatively speaking, than the space program did. They presented technological, logistical, and physical challenges to human beings that certainly rivaled, for their time, those presented to the industrial powers of the twentieth centuries. (This is true whether we are talking about voyages undertaken by Polynesians, the Chinese, or Europeans.)

Traditional human agricultural societies kept their members in one place, not just for life, but for generations. Cultures were homogenous, inward-looking, deeply conservative (still are), with all the complacent certainties and prejudices that go with that. Traders and explorers, though, had no choice but to recognize, experientially, that Group A who thought they had everything figured out, couldn’t be completely right unless Group B was completely wrong. They were forced to reckon with this, simply because they had put themselves among both groups. The farther they traveled, the starker the divergences between different groups of humans they encountered. The most drastic differences of all were on the other sides of great bodies of open water.

Unlike space, the open sea provides oxygen to breathe, but it offers little else that will keep groups of humans alive for any length of time. The literature I’ve read is replete with the theme of the transformative experience of the ocean voyage, even for passengers crossing the Atlantic on what had become routine passages—for the professional mariners, anyway. Many of those passengers, particularly those with a stronger religious bent, likened the experience to a rebirth—and, like actual birth, it was traumatic. Some of the most fervent prayers ever offered up were uttered in the heaving holds of ships or at the first sight of land on the horizon.

The story of humans crossing the seas is, of course, about much more than transcending provincialism. It is also about spreading accidentally-genocidal plagues, the enslavement of millions of people and their descendants, the slaughter of some groups of people by others, and the extirpation of their cultures. Seafaring connects us, yes—for better or for worse. Yet, humans are never going to just stay put. Some of us are perfectly content to do so; others of us cannot abide it and will do, and risk, anything to find out what is over the horizon. Like any urge, energy, or power, that one is something we have to learn to channel in positive directions.

My original intellectual specialty—maritime history—is now focusing more of its time and energy on the oceans themselves, as ecosystems rather than passive backdrops for human activities. The shift goes hand-in-hand with increasing awareness of the current plight of our oceans; as largely-unregulated spaces, they have long been subject to a human free-for-all, more or less; the floating islands of plastic trash and the fishing-out of entire species are the results of it. Our hope is that we can heighten awareness of, and encourage commitment to, the importance of the oceans to all life on Earth. We’re now in a position to connect with each other across the globe through the oceans in a different way than we have in the past, by appreciating them for what they are, rather than only as something to get across or exploit. The oceans are not space. They’re not death, and they’re certainly not empty. Long may it be so.

William Shatner is 91. He has lived long, and he has prospered. He seems desperately to want his grandchildren to have a livable life on this planet. He knows that his own success, fame, and wealth cannot come close to clinching that desire for him. He knows that Star Trek will remain fiction unless we will it to be otherwise. Only the combined efforts, talents, and ingenuity of collective humanity can fulfill his wish. Effective action starts with accurate understanding, which leads to sufficient appreciation. Getting out of the house, pushing off the shore, riding the rocket—gaining perspective on the wider world—is how we do that, and always have.

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While this will only interest a fraction of you, I should nevertheless announce here the publication of Nick Burningham’s and my contribution to a discussion begun in the inaugural issues of the Mariner’s Mirror over a century ago; we present what we consider convincing evidence on the development of common sailing rigs of the eighteenth-century Atlantic, and argue for a link between technological choice in naval and merchant vessels based on merchants’ perceptions of security and prestige. If you want to read it, you can try this link; we have a limited number of “passes through the paywall” from the publisher. If this doesn’t work, and you still want to read it, let me know and I will get on it.

Related to this piece:

NPR story: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/23/1130482740/william-shatner-jeff-bezos-space-travel-overview-effect

William Shatner with Joshua Brandon, Boldly Go: Reflections on a Life of Awe and Wonder (Simon & Schuster, 2022)

Frank White, The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution, Second Edition (AIAA, 1998)

If you’re interested in the human experience of crossing the Atlantic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Stephen R. Berry, A Path in the Mighty Waters: Shipboard Life and Atlantic Crossings to the New World (Yale, 2015)

The experiences of enslaved prisoners shackled belowdecks were, of course, starkly different. My go-to suggestions for getting into that horror story are:

Emma Christopher, Slave Ship Sailors and Their Captive Cargoes, 1730—1807 (Cambridge, 2006)

Robert Harms, The Diligent: A Voyage Through the Worlds of the Slave Trade (Basic Books, 2002)

Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (Penguin, 2008)

(There’s much more, most of which I am ignorant of, but these are still important contributions.)

As for the Polynesians and the Chinese, specific works lie outside my area of expertise, but a good place to get both, in wide perspective (with plenty of bibliographical references for further reading) would be David Abulafia’s The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans (Oxford, 2019), from which anyone will learn as much as you’d expect in a book that’s over 1,000 pages long. (It’s worth it.)