William Shatner advocates for climate action during solar eclipse

Star Trek actor William Shatner told NBC News on Monday that there’s no point in going into space if we “can’t come back” to Earth due to the environment.

NBC‘s Maura Barrett pressed Shatner with a climate change question on Monday during a television interview about the solar eclipse.

Barrett asked Shatner about the concern of tackling climate change on Earth “rather than going out and exploring space.”

“Well, you can do both,” Shatner said to Barrett.

He continued, “I mean, there’s a — but you have to have a focus on the most important part, which is staying alive. I mean, what’s the point of going into space, you can’t come back and you are overcome by the fumes. No — we are in a dire situation.”

“We’ve got to do both. We’ve got to clean up the environment and our curiosity and our ambition,” the television star added in a sit-down interview.

Barrett closed her report on NBC with a mention of the solar eclipse.

“So, that’s just something to think about. We also talked about how this is going to be such an emotional, unifying experience as thousands of people all look up to the sky at the same time,” she said.

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The View’s Sunny Hostin also brought up climate change during a discussion about the solar eclipse in which she speculated that there was a relationship between the eclipse, cicadas, earthquakes, and the climate.

The solar eclipse is when the moon passes between Earth and the Sun in space as a regular natural occurrence that has been documented since ancient civilizations before the Industrial Revolution.