James T. Kirk is Officially a Badass and Could Totally Crush the GenX Version's Bald British Guy, Whatshisname...

So, William Shatner has announced that, at 88 years of age, he intends to go to space.

I mean, think about how cool this is...

The Russians put a guy in outer space in April of 1961 and inspire all their kids to be scientists and engineers and pilots.

A month and a half later, Kennedy says "Err uh, OK, you wicked smaht sonsabitches. We're gonna plant our flag on the moon." and everybody goes, "Oh... shit. That's a pretty tall order, Jack."

And so they pay these guys to do a live-air TV space show that has the simple basic assumption that we actually did it. And it airs in September of 1966 and Everybody watches it and people start going, "Yeah. You know what? Maybe we can do this thing!" and kids start watching and thinking about computers and fabricators and ubiquitous wireless handhelds without pullup antennae. And nobody even stops to wonder why, 300 years in the future, anyone would still be wearing thigh-high leather boots in a spaceship which, at one point, gets to the edge of the Milky Way, so, at least 25000 light-years away from Earth and Earth cows. They're all just that freaking excited!

And then on my birthday in 1969 we launch Apollo 11 with three absolute badasses to the moon and five days later (five freaking days!) they land on the moon in a spaceship that looks like it's made out of garbage and they plant that flag and come home and we keep sending badasses up there and 3 years later, Alan Shepherd gets out of the garbage ship and hits some fucking golfballs because that's what Americans do on the moon, by God!

And they might not have gotten there as quickly if not for that show egging people on. And now everybody is watching that show, and I mean everybody everywhere! I'm living in Germany with a black and white sony 10 inch portable TV in 1969 and there are 3 things in English on TV that I'm aware of: Lost in Space, Star Trek, and, for about 2 weeks, continuous (meaning 17 hours a day) coverage of the moon landing.

And the first really massive wave of coders and scientists and engineers grows up watching that show and, really, because of it. And dreamers and artists, too, start mixing art with some of the gear that the tech geeks are churning out and they remember the show so in May of 1975 get those guys and they say, "Hey brothers and sisters, that show was super bad (which at the time meant "really dope") and we see you got these sweet convention gigs and all, but we were wondering if maybe you might want to do, you know, like a movie, you dig?" and so they make a movie that comes out in 1979. And that movie looks beaucoups better than the show ever did because of all the cool stuff the artists and dreamers can do with the stuff the show inspired the nerds to make.

And a whole 'nuther massive wave of nerds is birthed from the movie(s), and those coders and scientists and engineers and dreamers and artists think about what's outside our solar system and they don't even care that Pluto isn't a real planet. They just want to know what it tastes like. And they go back and watch the show and the movies and they make spinoffs and more movies (don't even get me started on the reboot and Star Fleet Academy timeline that reminds me of the Muppet Babies cartoon) that go farther and dream up more cool stuff and the old show stuff doesn't seem so far out any more. And the nerds put their heads together and say, "Of course we should be able to talk to our computers and of course we should be able to talk to anyone, anywhere without wires and of COURSE we should all have flying cars!"

And two out of three ain't bad.

And about that time, two fans of the show drop out of Harvard and make a computer you can carry into your home and use for less than the price of a (terrestrial) car. And a lot of Star Trek fans get them and start sharing ideas. Some of them make insane amounts of money and they start to think "I've got more money than the space program. I bet I could put some dudes on the moon, maybe even Mars!" and so they start building their own spaceships, because that's what tech billionaires do, by God.

And so, of COURSE, this man, this pioneer, this indisputable badass should go up into space when he's almost 90 years old, and it's amazing and cool that he can afford to, because if he didn't make that show, I think I would never have gone to engineering school, and maybe I wouldn't have met my wife or made my amazing kids and turned them all into nerds. I think we might not have a lot of the cool stuff we have now, and we might never have seen a dude hit a 6 iron over 200 yards on the moon.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7853659/Star-Trek-legend-William-Shatner-planning-trip-SPACE-age-88.html?fbclid=IwAR2GcmxyVmnR5gsb97JzQUzsZm32X-EBFI6wQol39XZneGR8kqM8I8zG_FY