Captain James T. Kirk would be appalled at the rapid acceleration of climate change on Earth, says William Shatner, the Montreal-born actor who played the head of the USS Enterprise in the “Star Trek” franchise for decades.
“I think he would probably be as appalled as I am,” Shatner said during a recent video call from his home in Los Angeles.
The actor said he could imagine Kirk “skywriting” a message to his fellow Earthlings, urging them to take action.
“Education, education, read everything,” Shatner said. “Everybody should acquaint themselves with the problem, and make a decision.”
The 94-year-old actor will be in his hometown of Montreal later this week for the city’s Comiccon event. The three-day fan convention begins Friday at the Palais des congrès.
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Shatner is scheduled to make an appearance on the second and third days of the conference. Other scheduled guests include Wil Wheaton, who played Wesley Crusher in “Star Trek: The Next Generation.”
Shatner was born in Montreal’s Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood in 1931, and he still has a deep emotional connection to the city. “That’s my whole childhood,” he said, adding that he has a “vast” number of relatives living there, including a sister.
He began acting when he was a small child, and he continued even after graduating from McGill University in 1952 with a commerce degree. The school’s university centre is known to students as the Shatner Building, though the university confirmed it is not the building’s official name.
He first played Captain Kirk in the “Star Trek” TV show in 1966. His last appearance in the franchise was in the 1994 film “Star Trek Generations,” where Kirk is killed off.
He also starred in the shows “Boston Legal” and “T.J. Hooker.” He wrote several books, including “Star Trek” novels and a memoir about his friendship with the late actor Leonard Nimoy, who famously played Spock in the original series. And he recorded more than a dozen albums, from 1968’s “The Transformed Man,” a collection of dramatic readings of popular songs, to last year’s children’s album, “Where Will the Animals Sleep? Songs for Kids and Other Living Things.”
Last month, he was onstage in Seattle with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about space and life in a show they called “The Universe Is Absurd.”
He went to Antarctica last year, with deGrasse Tyson, and he went to space in 2021, aboard Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin shuttle.
Always curious and hungry for knowledge, Shatner said he is inspired and fascinated by the capabilities of artificial intelligence and applications such as ChatGPT.
“I was researching a speech I was making, and I could use ChatGPT immediately, (instead of) going down to the library, trying to find the book, read what the book says, come back home and realize I had a question I didn’t ask,” he said. “Artificial intelligence has been a revolution in mankind’s acquisition of knowledge.”
Even still, Shatner said he was frustrated by how little one man can ever really know.
“I’m going to die very unhappily because I don’t know anything,” he said. “There’s so much glorious information out there that it’s impossible to acquire. But what little bits and pieces the human brain can contain in a lifetime are fascinating.”
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