Apple’s newest emoji is boldly going to go where no pixellated emotion has gone before. The newest betas of both Apple’s next OS X and iOS operating systems will include an emoji based on Spock of Star Trek‘s famous gesture, the ”Live Long and Prosper” salute.
Leonard Nimoy, the actor who portrayed Spock on TV and films for decades, passed away on Feb. 27. But his salute, which he adapted from his orthodox Jewish heritage, will live on in digital form. The Unicode Consortium—the group that oversees the coding standard for text on computers—approved the Spock sign as part of the last batch of new characters it added in 2014, but it’s up to individual tech companies whether they will support the updates.
Quartz has confirmed that the Spock symbol is indeed present in the most recent OS X beta that Apple publicly released, and has reached out to confirm whether it will be available on iOS devices. Quartz also asked Apple to confirm whether the emoji will appear in the emoji keyboard, as it currently does not.
Apple has been awkwardly adding diversity to its emoji recently, but the phasing in of Spock’s symbol will likely not stun many. As Spock himself said, though, “change is the essential process of all existence.” Fascinating.