SEATTLE — On Wednesday (June 18), nearly 3,000 space enthusiasts gathered at Seattle’s McCaw Hall to watch the real-life Captain Kirk trade witty banter with one of America’s best-known science communicators.
Canadian actor William Shatner, famed for his portrayal of Captain James T. Kirk in Star Trek — and, in 2021, as the oldest person to travel to space at age 90 — teamed up with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson for an evening of cosmic zingers.
“It’s a conversation that explores life,” Tyson told Space.com ahead of the event. “The two of us together — we’re using this as an occasion to explore elements of who and what we are, and how we became who we are.”
The show, hosted by media company Future of Space and billed as a “one-night-only” event, originated from a spirited dialogue between Tyson and Shatner during a space-themed cruise to Antarctica last December.
“We were enjoying ourselves,” Tyson recalled in the pre-show interview. “Crowds gathered — they wanted to hear us banter, hear us engage. Then the organizer said the proverbial, ‘You guys should take this on the road.'”
“‘And off my ship,'” Shatner quipped. “So here we are, doing it again.”
As soon as the duo took the stage, the banter kicked into high gear. Seated in matching rocking chairs against a sweeping backdrop of the Milky Way, they entertained a near-capacity crowd for almost two hours with personal stories, comic jabs and moments of reflection.
Shatner, 94, recalled his early days as a struggling actor in Canada, “alone all the time, moving from city to city, and fetid bed from fetid bed.”
“Am I the only one who doesn’t know what ‘fetid’ means?” Tyson asked.
“Fetid means it didn’t smell good — and it wasn’t me,” Shatner replied, drawing laughter from the crowd.
Then, Tyson, 66, recounted his own climb from walking dogs in the Bronx for 50 cents to becoming a prominent astrophysicist and popularizer of science on TV and radio. He also chronicled his film cameos — from Neil deBuck Weasel in Ice Age: Collision Course to Merlin in The Last Sharknado: It’s About Time and the “astrofishicist” Neil DeBass Tyson in SpongeBob SquarePants.
“Can you believe that this highly educated Ph.D. has spent 15 minutes telling you about his bit parts in these incredibly bad movies?” Shatner asked the audience.
The show’s title — “The Universe Is Absurd” — served as a thematic throughline.
“The word ‘absurd,’ in our everyday language, is crazy, stupid,” Shatner said in the pre-show interview. “But absurd can also mean outlandishly true.”
“Actually, when you think about it,” Tyson added, “there are things we’ve discovered that it’s hard — if not impossible — to wrap our brains around. Yet the data tell us, nonetheless, that it’s true.”
Onstage, Tyson mentioned his first book, Merlin’s Tour of the Universe, published as a graduate student in 1997 and re-released in an updated edition last October.
“Is Pluto back?” Shatner asked.
“No! It’s not coming back,” Tyson replied.
Tyson, who oversaw the redesign of the Hayden Planetarium’s solar system exhibit in 2000, famously excluded Pluto from the planetary lineup, grouping it instead with icy Kuiper Belt objects. This decision, made years before the International Astronomical Union (IAU) officially reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet in 2006, sparked a deluge of criticism. Tyson has spoken and written extensively about the volume and intensity of the backlash, attributing some of the attachment to Pluto’s planethood to cultural factors, such as Pluto being the only planet discovered by an American astronomer (Clyde Tombaugh) and its namesake, Mickey Mouse’s dog. Though not involved in the IAU ruling, Tyson has remained an unapologetic defender of Pluto’s demotion, calling himself an “accessory” to the decision.
The distant orb remained a recurring punchline throughout the evening. When Tyson invited Shatner to pick any topic for a soundbite demo, an audience member shouted, “Pluto!”
“More than half of Pluto is made of ice,” Tyson said. “If it were where Earth is right now, heat from the sun would evaporate that ice and it would grow a tail. And that is no kind of behavior for a planet.” He mimed a mic drop to cheers and whistles.
Shatner recounted his suborbital mission with Blue Origin in 2021, echoing the emotional post-flight realization he’d had about Earth’s fragility.
“It’s a vulnerable, precious piece of rock that supplies us with life, and we have destroyed it,” he said. “I bawled my head off, and I realized I was in mourning for our Earth — and that’s what my flight did for me.”
“So what you’re saying is, we should take all the leaders of the world, send them into space,” Tyson quipped, prompting another round of applause.
Asked in the pre-show interview if he would return to space, Shatner said, “You know, I had such a meaningful experience. Maybe I tend to think of it like a love affair. Going back to that love affair? Maybe not. It was such a great moment.”
Tyson, when asked the same question, said he would go — but only if there’s a destination. “If I want to go into space, I want there to be a destination in mind, not just up and back,” he told Space.com. “Go to the moon, Mars and beyond. Bring the fam.”
“Would you really?” Shatner asked. “Bring the fam to the moon?”
“Yeah, why not?”
“Because you’ll be obliterated!”
Though promoted as a one-time-only show, talks of future appearances are already underway. When asked whether their “bromance” might continue, Tyson said, “No reason why it shouldn’t.”
“I’m feeling more passionately in love with him as we speak,” Shatner deadpanned.