The Overview Effect
Table of Contents:
The “Overview Effect”—
Four Pillars
The Void
Fragile Atmosphere
No Borders
A Unified Planetary Protection Society
Putting the OE Four Pillars & Morality Together
Text
Audio
Video
Websites & Groups
The Overview Effect—
Abstract: The overview effect is a cognitive shift experienced by astronauts while seeing Earth from outer space.
Let’s start with a quote from Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space & the first man to orbit the Earth, both in 1961.
"What beauty. I saw clouds and their light shadows on the distant dear earth...The water looked like darkish, slightly gleaming spots...When I watched the horizon, I saw the abrupt, contrasting transition from the earth's light-colored surface to the absolutely black sky. I enjoyed the rich color spectrum of the earth. It is surrounded by a light blue aureole that gradually darkens, becoming turquoise, dark blue, violet, and finally coal black."
The cosmonaut’s observation, “I saw the abrupt, contrasting transition from the earth's light-colored surface to the absolutely black sky…” jumps out to me as one of the first truths that any human has discovered or experienced from space. Satellite launches with camera equipment like that which produced the below image had occurred previously, but Gagarin going into space was grade-A information from a primary human source - and literally from out of this world.
With Gagarin’s 108-minute orbit of Earth, the Human Spaceflight Age had officially begun. Within 5 years we were able to upgrade the first picture of Earth from space (the one above) to the first picture of Earth from the Moon (the one below).
When Michael Collins (that Michael Collins who stayed in the Command Module as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first humans to step on the moon) saw the Earth floating in infinity he immediately linked the perspective with the possibility of a fundamental mass psychological change. He mentions that all other humans, and especially political leaders, are cursed by the availability heuristic of not knowing what the Earth looks like from space, or outside the membrane, or “god mode.”
“I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of, let's say 100,000 miles, their outlook would be fundamentally changed. The all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument suddenly silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified facade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogeneous treatment. The earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied.”
Gagarin and Collins sum up the enormity and sheer grandeur of our home planet in hinting at what has been called the Overview Effect. The term was coined in 1987 by space writer Frank White in his book called The Overview Effect - Space Exploration and Human Evolution. Basically it is a shift of awareness that happens when an astronaut looks at Earth from outer space. Wikipedia puts it as such:
“It is the experience of seeing firsthand the reality of the Earth in space, which is immediately understood to be a tiny, fragile ball of life, "hanging in the void," shielded and nourished by a paper-thin atmosphere. From space, national boundaries vanish, the conflicts that divide people become less important, and the need to create a planetary society with the united will to protect this "pale blue dot" becomes both obvious and imperative.”
From now on in this essay, the Overview Effect will be written as OE. There are many interpretations of the entire OE matrix of meaning, but a useful framework for this essay is breaking down OE into four pillars: The Void, Fragile Atmosphere, No Borders, and A Unified Planetary Protection Society.
To read the rest of the essay, go to either the Substack or Medium link.
Substack: https://eclecticspacewalk.substack.com/p/eclectic-spacewalk-1-the-overview
Medium: https://medium.com/eclectic-spacewalk/eclectic-spacewalk-1-the-overview-effect-6faea9c2e710