We’re All Astronauts Now

How to experience the Overview Effect — without having to go to space.

I’ve been thinking a lot about astronauts lately.

Maybe it’s the way we’re all living, the semi-quarantine that keeps us as isolated as scientists circling the earth in a decaying orbit, pulled along by the gravity of events far bigger than us. Maybe it’s the enduring fascination of the void, the frontier that never stays still, that always lies beyond the next horizon, waiting to be explored.

Frank White published his book The Overview Effect in 1987. In it, he wrote about the psychological effects that come from the unique view of the world given only to the 500 or so people who have been to space. From far enough away, the world is not only ravishingly beautiful. It’s also incredibly fragile. National boundaries vanish. The thinness of the atmosphere that protects us from the exterminating void of space becomes visible.

Astronaut see time in a way that we don’t. They get to watch the light of the sun moving over the earth. From the International Space Station, the sun rises and sets on our planet within 90 minutes. Light and darkness chase one another over the living surface of the globe in a way most of us can imagine, but will never see for ourselves.

Additionally, the astronauts who see this are weightless. A frame of reference that they have relied on all their lives without realizing it is suddenly removed. In space, there is no up or down. No North or South. Everything is relative, and while imaginary constructs like longitude and latitude and the equator and the points of the compass help us to forget that dizzying fact on earth, none of it applies in space. Suddenly, there are no absolutes. Everything just floats.

All of this combines to produce the Overview Effect. In simple terms, it’s a realization of the fragility of the world we live in. The bright blue bauble on which all human history has taken place looks so vast and indestructible when you’re on its surface. But get away from it, even just a little, and you suddenly realize how tiny and fragile it really is.

Neil Armstrong spoke about standing on the surface of the moon and being able to cover the entire earth the tip of his thumb. “I didn’t feel like a giant,” said Armstrong. “I felt very, very small.”

He’s not the only one. When Mike Massimino saw the earth from space, he felt as though he should look away. He had the strange feeling that what he was seeing wasn’t meant to be seen, a secret that the cosmos should keep undefiled by human eyes.

Immanuel Kant wrote about the sublime.

It’s an experience of fear and ecstasy at the same time. According to Kant, the sublime is mathematical and dynamic. The mathematical side of it relates to infinity and vastness. The dizzying numbers that spiral out of our hands. The inconceivable distances and forces that exist in space, the terrifying network of mind-boggling numbers that make existence possible.

The other aspect of the sublime is the dynamic. The fear of extinction that comes when you find yourself at the mercy of vast forces. Kant imagined this as storms, avalanches, volcanoes. The unstoppable forces we are at the mercy of on Earth. But in space, everything is dynamic. Everything is a representation of a force beyond human comprehension.

Kant couldn’t have imagined when he wrote of the sublime that within seven generations, people would be having a direct experience of sublimity beyond anything he could’ve imagined. But they did. And the fact that we live in a world where people have experienced this kind of personal interaction with the underlying forces of the universe is in itself an invitation to experience the sublime.

I’m never going to go to space.

Most of us won’t. But that’s not the only way to get the overview effect, a sudden intuition of the beauty and fragility of the world. Frank White, who coined the term, has had the same experience in a milder form on a long flight. He also believes that meditation can work to slowly produce a similar overview effect.

Even simply moving, going to live in a country different from the one where you were raised, where all the rules of social interaction and language and culture are different, can offer a mild version of the same experience.

Lately, the SpaceBuzz project has been trying to replicate the overview effect through the use of virtual reality. Because one thing common to every astronaut who’s experienced the effect is the belief that the world would be a better place if everybody had the same encounter with the sublime. That once you’ve seen the world from enough of distance, it becomes impossible to get bogged down in petty hatreds, in tribalism, in selfishness.

But the overview effect is something any of us can have at any time.

Take a long flight. Head out on a boat. Put yourself at the mercy of forces bigger than yourself, and you’ll be standing right in the path of the Kantian sublime. The powerful forces that lift you out of yourself, that do more than simply remind you how small you are.

Instead, they put you in touch the fragility not of your own life, but of all life, and the ongoing unfolding miracle it is that anything is here at all. Instead of some radiation-blasted rock or gas like every other planet we’ve ever discovered.

And if the faint terror of space has anything to teach us, it’s this: that life is precious precisely because it’s rare. The stars don’t tell you that you don’t matter. They whisper that you matter as much as they do.