In an interview with the BBC, a fortnight before the UK was due to host the COP26 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Prince William – the second in line to the British throne – suggested that the world’s biggest billionaires should focus their efforts on trying to save our own planet rather than engaging in high-profile adventures in space tourism: “We need some of the world’s greatest brains and minds fixed on trying to repair this planet, not trying to find the next place to go and live.” The Prince was speaking ahead of the new ‘Earthshot’ awards ceremony, which took place last week, an event designed to promote the investment of as much effort into safeguarding the environment as President Kennedy's ‘moonshot’ programme put into space exploration in the 1960s.

The same day that Prince William spoke to the BBC, the veteran Canadian actor William Shatner attracted a huge amount of media interest when he became the oldest person to have travelled into outer space, taking a ten-minute trip to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere aboard Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket.

At the age of 90, Mr. Shatner has enjoyed a varied professional career; but he is, of course, best known for having played the iconic role of Captain James Tiberius Kirk of the Starship Enterprise in the phenomenally successful American television and movie franchise Star Trek. Shatner starred in the original TV series between 1966 and 1969, as well as an animated version in the early 1970s, before reprising his performance on the big screen in a sequence of seven cinema films between 1979 and 1994. Today the show remains in vibrant health more than half a century from its inception, with two new major series being trailed for imminent broadcast and a brand-new incarnation of the franchise – its seventh live-action TV spin-off – currently in production.

“Everybody in the world needs to do this,” Mr. Shatner declared shortly after having returned from his brief flight, tears welling up in his eyes. There are obvious enough economic and environmental reasons why the provision of mass access to his extraordinary experience simply wouldn’t be viable; one suspects that the actor (though he was clearly overcome with emotion) was very much aware of this. One imagines that, like the astronomically wealthy and privileged Prince William, this other William – William Shatner – knows all too well that the wealth and privilege that make sub-orbital space flight possible are gifted only to a vanishingly small proportion of the population of the planet.

In 1989, the popular British novelist Ben Elton published a book about a conspiracy of the world’s super-rich to flee the planet Earth, like Noah in his ark, in a bid to avoid the impacts of an inevitable environmental catastrophe. To give him his due, though, the world’s richest man Jeff Bezos has, in addition to his plans to escape into space, created the $10 billion Bezos Earth Fund in an attempt to find solutions to the global climate crisis for those still stuck back home on terra firma. In his best-selling science-fiction novel of 1980, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams described an alien civilization which had saved itself from socio-economic collapse by packing all of its useless middle-managers (not the productive workers, not the scientists and innovators, but all those whose occupations added little to their culture and society other than to drain their resources) into a giant space ark sent on a one-way trip to the end of the galaxy.

But is Adams’s satirical vision then the best benefit we can hope to gain from our travels outside our immediate biosphere: the banishing from society of management consultants, public relations professionals, and advertising account executives? In their 1990 study of The Genocidal Mentality, the psychologist Robert Jay Lifton and the sociologist Eric Markusen argued instead that the primary value of space exploration has been that it has allowed our species to see that the planet we inhabit is a small, lonely piece of cosmic real estate, isolated against the vast blankness of space, a tiny pinprick in an unimaginably expansive universe, fragile and irreplaceable, it’s worth utterly immeasurable as the only real chance for the endurance of humanity and all our civilizations. Lifton and Markusen thus supposed that the sight of the blue-green Earth from space (most famously captured in photographs taken by the Apollo astronauts in the late 1960s) should unite its peoples in that single common goal: our shared prosperity and survival.

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Yet, despite such impressive examples of international cooperation (at least between economic superpowers) as the collaborative success of the International Space Station, it may be that, in order to unite us in a single global vision, the world’s nations and transnational corporations don’t really need to go to all the effort and expense required to send people closer to the stars. At the same time as the Soviet Union and the United States were engaged in diverting stellar resources into the space race, one of the Cold War’s costlier competitive exercises in the accumulation of global prestige, the original series of Star Trek was being broadcast on American television. Indeed, the final episode of that franchise’s initial iteration was first transmitted just a month before Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.

But, despite its contemporary contexts, Star Trek was not simply a gung-ho, flag-waving paean to American cultural and technological dominance. Its creator Gene Roddenberry very clearly saw it as a vehicle for the propagation of his own socially progressive perspectives, a tool of soft political power. Roddenberry’s vision of the future of the human race, some three hundred years into the future, foregrounded the personal and professional relationships of a diverse group of colleagues and friends exploring the galaxy for (mainly) peaceful scientific purposes. People of different nationalities, ethnicities and planets-of-origin were depicted as working together in peace and harmony, whether American, African-American, Russian, Japanese, Scottish or Vulcan. The show was truly radical. It featured the first-ever interracial screen kiss seen on American network television. One of its stars, Nichelle Nichols, was commended by Martin Luther King, who saw her portrayal as Nyota Uhura as offering one of the most positive representations of women of colour on US TV. In more recent years, the franchise has attempted explorations of gender and sexual identity which have pioneered progressive developments in (and beyond) its genre.

Rather than in our overt, real-world political movements, it may be more often in our art and in our fictions that we are able most powerfully and most pertinently to speculate as to the possibilities of the human condition, to chart those strange new worlds of our potential futures, to dream of better ways of being. Perhaps we don’t in fact need to travel so far into outer space to envision the wonders of our planet and the extent of the cosmos. Many leading space scientists and technologists claim to have been inspired by the fantasies of science fiction (and of Star Trek in particular). Such fantasies may also inspire our social, cultural and political aspirations to build a better world.

William Shatner wasn’t the first member of Star Trek’s founding cast to travel into outer space, but he has been the first to do so whilst still alive. (Portions of the ashes of actor James Doohan – who had played the starship’s first chief engineer – have been sent into space on various occasions, and were even smuggled onboard the International Space Station via a NASA space shuttle by an astronaut and fan. The show’s creator Gene Roddenberry has also been similarly honoured.) But, as the foremost emissary of a cultural phenomenon which has for most of the last fifty-five years preached multicultural cooperation and celebrated ethnic difference, it seems fitting enough that Captain Kirk has, at last, had the opportunity to witness the final frontier with his own eyes, and that – just as we once followed his adventures and saw the universe through those eyes – so we have again been privileged to feel those wonders in his powerfully emotive response to his last great voyage, what he had called “the most profound experience” he could imagine. “Everybody in their lifetime needs to be reminded, you are important, you are beautiful, do something important today,” Shatner said, in response to Prince William’s remarks. “That’s what that trip did to me.”

And that’s why, if we might ever hope to share even the tiniest part of the meaningfulness of this unique and life-changing experience, it’s far better to send actors into space than billionaires. Which itself is why a Russian film crew spent twelve days earlier this month making a movie on the International Space Station, and why Tom Cruise (in collaboration with NASA and Elon Musk) is the movie star planning to go into space next.