Live long and prosper!

Age is the final frontier. No, not space, no matter what you may have heard about the voyages of the Starship Enterprise.

Trekking boldly where no humans have trekked before, we find the proof in an episode entitled The Deadly Years, first screened aeons ago – all right, 1967 – in season 2 of the original series of Star Trek. Our intrepid crew, led by Captain Kirk and First Officer Spock, beam down to a planet called Gamma Hydra IV.

They are greeted at the research base by a frail-looking elderly couple, a man with an Einstein frizz and his stooping, bird-like wife.

“How old are you?” Kirk asks the man, suspecting something amiss. “You’ll have to speak louder,” he replies. Then he calculates: “I am 29.” And his wife? She’s 27.

Dr. McCoy conducts his investigations. He's baffled. For some reason, everyone in the colony has grown older. Much older. And they're growing older by the minute. Soon, the party from the Enterprise are suffering from the same mysterious malaise.

Captain Kirk, greying at the temples, keeps issuing orders that he’s already given. He clutches his aching back. He battles to flex his fingers. He falls asleep in his chair.

The verdict from the doc: “Captain Kirk is suffering from a peculiar physical degeneration…which strongly resembles ageing.”

After a hearing, the ailing captain, ageing at a rate of a decade a day, is relieved of his command. Happily, an antidote is discovered just in time (the cause turns out to have been radiation from a rogue comet), and the captain reverts to his fit and youthful 30s. But here's the great irony.

In real life, on his real home planet, William Shatner – famous for playing Captain Kirk – is looking a lot more hale and hearty than he did as an old man in that episode.

As of this stardate, Shatner is 94, part of a constellation of celebrity nonagenarians that includes Clint Eastwood, Joan Collins, David Attenborough, Willie Nelson, Judi Dench, Gary Player, Michael Caine, Julie Andrews, Yoko Ono, and Buzz Aldrin, the second human to set foot on the moon.

Shatner, too, has been to space, and not just on the set of Star Trek. In 2021, he crossed the Kármán line, the widely accepted boundary between our planet and outer space, aboard New Shephard, the suborbital rocket owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

As he emerged from the spacecraft on his return to Earth, Shatner was visibly overcome. Wiping tears from his eyes, he marvelled at the wonder of bursting through the thin layer of atmosphere that protects our planet.

“Suddenly you’re through the blue and you’re into black, and it’s mysterious, and it’s galaxies and things,” he said. “But what you see is black. And what you see down there is light, and that’s the difference.”

Perhaps that sense of wonder, that ability to look to the light, is the key to breaking the frontier of age.

But in his 2018 book, Live Long and … What I Learned Along the Way, he takes a somewhat more prosaic approach to longevity.

“I want to share with you, for the first time, my secret to live a good, long life,” he writes. “Don’t die.”

It was a cancer diagnosis in 2016 that concentrated Shatner’s attention on the looming prospect of his own mortality.

As the news of his prognosis leaked out, he noticed more and more people asking for his autograph during public appearances.

“I knew what that meant. They were expecting me to die soon and my autograph was suddenly going to become more valuable. Boy, I thought, am I going to fool them!”

When fans ask him for advice on how to live well into their nineties and beyond, his response is disarmingly blunt.

“Don’t follow my advice.”

For anyone to try to tell anyone else how to live their life is the ultimate in hubris, he argues. There is no one way, or right way, to do anything.

“Is there only one path up a mountain? Is there only one way to maintain your health? Is there one way to have a relationship?” He writes. “I don’t have those answers; maybe the holy men on the top of the mountain do. But they’re living on top of a mountain.”

On Gamma Hydra IV, Captain Kirk aged a decade every day. Here on Earth, we age one day at a time. There are no guarantees, no antidotes. But there is a benediction that can help.

It comes not from Captain Kirk, but from his half-human, half-Vulcan first officer.

“Live long,” said Mr Spock, “and prosper.”

And wherever the journey may take you, be sure to go boldly!