Kirk in Space

...LINK... 

and just ignore the Freudian implications behind the design of the rocket and the amourous Kirk.

Kirk, in StarTrek, is a character similar to Ulysses: who when given the choice between two bad alternatives, finds a third and wins in the end.

one is reminded of Tennysons's poem Ulysses:

       ...There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods....

Come, my friends,

'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

Although Wm Shatner is the first Trekkie to go into space, James Doohan, aka Scottie, had his ashes taken into space a couple years ago. 

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The impulse to seek newer lands out of curiosity, or because you want to find a newer better home for your family, or out of the desire to find wealth or to trade has a long history.

I am listening to this book via Scribd: and he notes the ten thousand years of traders

Something to remember when you read all the cancel culture against Columbus: 

One is not celebrating the fact that he was an SOB who was actually arrested by the Spanish government for some of his deeds, but because, after his voyage, he inspired others.

And this resulted in many changes, of peoples, of ideas, of plants and of animals, and of course of diseases. So the result was both good and bad: 

The Columbian exchange.

Historical evidence proves that there were interactions between Europe and the Americas before Christopher Columbus’s voyage in 1492. But Columbus’s contact precipitated a large, impactful, and lastingly significant transfer of animals, crops, people groups, cultural ideas, and microorganisms between the two worlds. In 1493, for example, on his second voyage, Columbus brought horses, dogs, pigs, cattle, chickens, sheep, and goats to the “new” world. Later in the 1530s, the Spanish conquistador and explorer Francisco Pizarro saw the potato in the Andes of South America and brought this crop to Europe. Bacteria and viruses, as well technological and cultural ideas, moved between the hemispheres, and Europeans forcibly transported enslaved people from Africa to the Americas to provide free labor. These transfers had a monumental impact on the development of our modern world.

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UPDATE: