The Overview Effect

There are many things about our cosmic reality that we are not aware of on a day to day basis. Take for example the illusion that right now as you are reading this, perhaps sitting in an office chair or curled up on the sofa, that you are currently stationary. But of course, measurements of movement are relative — it’s all about your perspective.

If you were standing on the equator, you would actually be moving at 1670 km/h as a result of the Earth’s rotation. And beyond that, the Earth is orbiting the Sun at a speed of 30 km/s, which is in turn tearing through the Milky Way at a dizzying speed of 200 km/s. That’s before even factoring in the speed of our local group of galaxies, which are travelling at an incomprehensible 1000 kilometres per second. To be honest, speaking as someone who gets motion sickness ridiculously easily, I’m very grateful that we don’t have to experience the reality of this firsthand.

However, there is a different cosmic reality that I think we could all stand to be much more viscerally aware of: the fact that we are all residents of a tiny, fragile, blue speck of dust, floating in the midst of endless, black nothingness. Although we can understand this intellectually, our daily experiences on this planet allow us to mostly live in complete ignorance of this information. It’s just not part of our subjective experience of living.

However, there is one group of individuals for whom this is not the case. Upon returning from their adventures in space, astronauts have frequently reported a radical shift in their cosmic perspective, an experience labelled by author Frank White as the overview effect. In his book ‘The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution’, White documents a phenomenon experienced by 30 different astronauts who have seen the Earth from space.

Once they had experienced firsthand the visual spectacle of the planet below them, small and blue and visibly alive, many astronauts reported a transformation of their perspective of the planet and the role of mankind in protecting it, accompanied by an experience of awe, euphoria and a sense of connection and oneness with all of life on Earth.

As I approached the top of this arc, it was as if time stood still, and I was flooded with both emotion and awareness. But as I looked down at the Earth — this stunning, fragile oasis, this island that has been given to us, and that has protected all life from the harshness of space — a sadness came over me, and I was hit in the gut with an undeniable, sobering contradiction. In spite of the overwhelming beauty of this scene, serious inequity exists on the apparent paradise we have been given. I couldn’t help thinking of the nearly one billion people who don’t have clean water to drink, the countless number who go to bed hungry every night, the social injustice, conflicts, and poverty that remain pervasive across the planet. Seeing Earth from this vantage point gave me a unique perspective — something I’ve come to call the orbital perspective. Part of this is the realization that we are all traveling together on the planet and that if we all looked at the world from that perspective we would see that nothing is impossible. Ron Garan — The Orbital Perspective

As with so many technologies and avenues of science that have been byproducts of space exploration, from camera phones and memory foam, to improvements in artificial limbs and land mine detection, a renewed sense of connection with our home planet was not something we anticipated when sending astronauts further away from it. As philosopher David Loy notes, in a short film called ‘Overview’ by the Planetary Collective:

It was quite a shock, I don’t think any of us had any expectations about how it would give us such a different perspective. I think the focus had been, “We’re going to the stars, we’re going to other planets”… And suddenly we look back at ourselves and it seems to imply a new kind of self-awareness.

When watching ‘Overview’ and hearing these quotes, I was immediately reminded of Pale Blue Dot, a photograph of Earth taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 as it was leaving our solar system, from a distance of 6 billion kilometres. Voyager 1 was on a quest out into space beyond the solar system, and at the request of astronomer Carl Sagan, NASA got Voyager to turn its camera around and take one last photograph of Earth before it was no longer visible. The result is the photograph above. You can just about see it — that tiny speck of blue in a beam of sunlight. If you haven’t heard Carl Sagan’s speech ‘Pale Blue Dot’ then stop reading this article right this second and click here, because it’s so much better in his voice.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known. Carl Sagan — Pale Blue Dot

It also reminded me of photograph ‘The Day the Earth Smiled’, a more recent snapshot of Earth taken by the Cassini spacecraft in 2013, so called because it was the first time the inhabitants of Earth knew in advance that the photo was about to be taken. In the picture above, you can see Saturn and its beautiful ring system during an eclipse of the Sun, and Earth — a tiny white speck on the right hand side.