Fwiw I had something akin to the overview effect when I attended a full solar eclipse. I thought I was prepared. I had read up on what to expect because I wanted to make the most of the experience for the kids. I wanted to make sure we observed the "shadow bands" (snake like shadows traversing across single colored surfaces that aren't always visible).
Everything did proceed as I expected (including the shadow bands), but when the eclipse was full, the earth went quiet. All the animals stopped and wondered (including the younger children who were boisterously playing seconds before the full effect).
As I stared up into the heavens, I had this deeply profound realization that our planet is traveling through space like all the other planets. The observation and experience of an eclipse made the abstract concept of space a reality and brought it closer to me in a way that just thinking (a lot) about space has never done.
I had much the same feelings. It is very hard to describe to someone who hasn't witnessed it. In a moment, my perception of the earth-moon-sun system transformed into something much more tangible than it had been before. Sort of like a shift from a 2D image to a 3D model. The sense of scale also became more tangible for me.
I had this effect laying on a rooftop as a teenager watching a meteor storm. The meteors were streaking in straight lines across/through the sky. The illusion of the "dome" of the sky was broken, and my senses were directly telling me that Earth is hurtling through space, and these things are zipping by it. It was an almost physical sense of mind expansion.
I guess this cannot have the same effect as what you described, because at the end of the day it is „just a video“ — but this brilliantly, brilliantly done time lapse recording of the night sky, where it’s EARTH that moves, and not the stars in the sky like in all those other videos, really made something click for me: https://youtu.be/1zJ9FnQXmJI
> As I stared up into the heavens, I had this deeply profound realization that our planet is traveling through space like all the other planets.
I genuinely don't understand what would be sad about that. The possibility of the next generation being able to explore at least one of those planets is very real.
> It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.
Very well written. Conveys his feelings quite well I find.
Unfortunately sending every millionaire into space for them to realize this is an hostile environment is taking us closer to earth destruction. Sorry to be sour about this, but people could just teach themself astronomy and realize there is no place out there to welcome us when the earth will be on the verge to become unlivable. Even assuming a colony of a dozen women/men is ever established on the moon or Mars, they will die in a matter or months or years once the tether to earth is broken.
Reading this guy paid millions of $ to realize these basic facts fills me with overwhelming sadness too. Can his experience be of value for us? Given that he could have discovered what he just experienced by reading good books, I think this n+1 experience has zero value. Send human beings in space to perform scientific experiments. Period.
> I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely… all of that has thrilled me for years… but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.
this paragraph felt so profound, i sprang a few tears. hearing someone who has been through so much talk about death always gets to me.
At some point during the Covid years, I turned a mental page and decided that 'carpe diem' is my new motto.
Not in the traditional "bucket list" sense, until Covid I had a mental list of places I [thought I] wanted to go ... and experiences I [thought I] wanted to have. Daft stuff usually involving long-haul travel and/or hard to get to places.
I've ditched all of that.
Now it's about seeing people.
Mundane stuff (but not mundane during the Covid years!) such as taking our kids to see their grandparents. Taking time off work to visit my sister, who lives 1000mi away, and partially due to our rather complex relationship, I've not actually visited at any of her various homes for <hangs head in shame> just over 20 years. Encouraging/enabling my wife to make time to visit her parents, who also live a long way from us.
Life has a habit of sneaking up on you when you're not paying attention. Seize the day (while you can).
I like him, he seems to be a thoughtful person. I once listened to his album (which has a great cover of the song "Common People", that jokes about how rich people see the world [1]), in which he reflects on the death of his previous wife, who drowned in their pool, I found that quite touching as well
From an early age, My view of Shatner was heavily influenced by my mother's conviction that he murdered his wife. With the benefit of the internet since then, I've been able to investigate it further and found that the general consensus is that he wasn't present when she drowned in their pool and that the rumor that he killed her was started by a tabloid.
It's a little terrible, but it's still hard for me to escape that prejudice when watching him speak.
I don't know, I feel like I've read several "What celebrity is an asshole in real life" threads on Reddit and there seem to be plenty of stories about him being a complete alcoholic and asshole.
With all respect to Shatner (first canadian space tourist iirc) I dont take much from these narratives. A rich/famous/connected person does a thing that we all want to do but cannot afford, something that requires insane amounts of energy/pollution. Then they turn around and talk of the profound experience and how it has made them a better person. Big deal. The pubic good is limited to a few interviews and an article in variety. Next time go meditate at a monestary. These adventures require so much energy that they will only ever be availible to an elite nanopercent of the population. Enough with famous millionaires. They should have sent a poet.
Shatner is an actor famously known for staring in star trek which famously uses many of Shakespeare, the most well known bard, themes or outright plots. Further, he's stared in Shakespeare live productions. Even more, so he's made several spoken word lyrical albums.
Some of his words immediately after landing are poetic, “I hope I never recover, that I can maintain what I feel now.”
>>These adventures require so much energy that they will only ever be availible to an elite nanopercent of the population
The cost of launching to space has declined by orders of magnitude over the last 50 years and can be expected to decline by orders of magnitude more in the coming decades.
At one point, air travel was reserved for the richest of the rich, and today hundreds of millions of people fly every year. There's no reason the same couldn't happen with space flight.
But Shatner is an actor? I'm not sure I agree with the implication that one type of artist is better to send than another but I do agree that maybe we should consider the frivolous waste of sending people to space for joyrides when the cost is so high.
This was very well written, very insightful and humble. Considering he's usually an asshole to people IRL. But I guess he just comes off that way when he wants to convey his truth to people. Not completely foreign to myself, having discovered that I'm actually autistic in my late 30s. That explained a lot.
Anyways, this overview effect is something I always felt, even without going into space. I always felt we were wasting time with our squabbling over borders down here. I think most scifi geeks feel this way, and I don't mean star trek scifi, I mean Alastair Reynolds, Ian Banks and such.
But the problem is that the solution my mind always reaches for requires autocracy to fix the problems. So in a sense our problems are caused by our desire to be free.
Honestly I don't think most of us are more than trained apes, do we deserve to be free and pollute our earth? I don't want autocracy but I definitely want a lot stronger government to regulate our problems away. Globally.
I used to be in favor of a world government. But then I realized it could quite easily turn into an authoritarian system at some point, which due to the global scope would then be rather difficult to get out of.
in a sense our problems are caused by our desire to be free
this is an important point. and the next step is the realization that, therefore, the only way to make the world better is through education, and motivating people to strive to be better themselves, to think about our future, to contribute to the advancement of society.
>> my mind always reaches for requires autocracy to fix the problems
Maybe try reaching for something else (such as technological solutions). We are currently on the brink of armageddon due to an autocratic regime. Centralization IRL necessarily leads to corruption over time. It's efficient but not robust.
We absolute don't want a world government if its going to be the same ineffective and often harmful paradigm as one of the existing governments.
However, we also need to significantly revise the way that government and money work. They need to become high technologies. More than that, we need those technologies to be built around more encompassing and well-rounded ideologies.
These are huge challenges. But the alternative to working on them is to just accept the status quo.
> ...this overview effect is something I always felt, even without going into space.
Very interesting. Have you met anyone else IRL who shares the overview effect?
> ...autocracy to fix the problems.
Tchaikovsky's novel Children of Time explores how two different cultures try to tackle this problem. I won't spoil it for you. It's a notion I keep chewing on.
> Author Frank White first coined the term in 1987: “There are no borders or boundaries on our planet except those that we create in our minds or through human behaviors. All the ideas and concepts that divide us when we are on the surface begin to fade from orbit and the moon. The result is a shift in worldview, and in identity.”
This alone is already a really good reason to keep going into space IMO. Even though Shatner says it depressed him, this kind of awareness is really what we need as a species. It might be depressing but that might cause us to finally actually do something about the problems we're causing.
Of course the environmental impact of sending even a token percentage on a trip to space would make our problems a lot worse so it's not going to happen...
By the way Shatner keeps calling it "Orbit" but that is not what he was in. I'm surprised this was not explained to him.
“He’d captured strange and distant worlds in greater detail than ever before. They were beautiful, magnificent, full of awe and wonder. But beneath their sublime surfaces, there was nothing. No love or hate. No light or dark. He could only see what was not there, and miss what was right in front of him.”
Had the same feeling after toying with google earth for 30 mins in VR, jumping cities and what not, after that time, I began to zoom out, out and out... looked around, and its really hard to put in words, but WS puts it extremely well.
War and all the idiocy down here are so..... when you realize how lucky we are and how fragile all of this really is...
Hopefully with the event of space tourism this will be a common theme and the experience will serve to educate and raise the bar for humanity.
We should all be crying... Practically nothing has happened of any consequence, aside from this pandemic, to have any actual impact on climate change. We need a WW2 level of change in our lives.
We need better public transportation and trains to reduce use of cars and airplanes, build nuclear plants, eat less meat and dairy..
Shatner went to space and was profoundly changed.
What do we need to do for us all to be profoundly changed?
> I learned later that I was not alone in this feeling. It is called the “Overview Effect” and is not uncommon among astronauts, including Yuri Gagarin, Michael Collins, Sally Ride, and many others. Essentially, when someone travels to space and views Earth from orbit, a sense of the planet’s fragility takes hold in an ineffable, instinctive manner. Author Frank White first coined the term in 1987: “There are no borders or boundaries on our planet except those that we create in our minds or through human behaviors. All the ideas and concepts that divide us when we are on the surface begin to fade from orbit and the moon. The result is a shift in worldview, and in identity.”
> You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”
This make me wonder if flat-earth and other limiting cosmological views are mental shields against the realization that nothing matters except our peculiar existence.
There is a documentary about a female astronaut that experienced similar overwhelming emotions looking back at earth; the blue marble or the blue dot.
I don’t think her emotions were grief, but the overwhelming feeling for our species and that we’re all on this planet together. I remember it being beautifully filmed.
Seeing it from the outside let him apprehend what non-existence could be. He should reinterpret it not as a problem to be solved or exist relative to, but as a universal and existentially necessary mandate to thrive. There is no alternative.
You don't need to go to the moon to feel this way these days, although I'm sure the vantage point helps.
With the euphoria of the 60's now merely a tiny dot in our societal rear view mirror, crowded out by decades of bad news, I think people are on a certain level aware of this. We distract ourselves to avoid contemplating it too deeply.
With an abundance of such distractions, people don't take time to think about the future of our species and planet as we know it, decades and centuries from now. It's less painful to live in the moment and worry about small, human problems.
when I looked into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.
Increasingly I feel this way too. I, as a human, was built for this earth, of it. There's nothing good out there for me. This is my home.
Euphoria of the 60s? In the US at least, I’d suggest that too was a distraction from the horror of what was going on at that time. You know, your friends getting taken to a jungle halfway across the world to come back with no legs, broken psyches, and a society that had turned its back on them.
He has taken on the unbearable burden of humanity onto his shoulders. Existensial dread is real and nothing to mess around with. Sounds like he needs a psychologist ASAP. Not that he is wrong.
Expanding our species into space is a must. Our planet has a finite life span. The sooner we expand the sooner we can evolve and adapt to life in space. There are those against any shape or form of progress that say we should first solve every issue here on earth. One way to solve many issues is to go out there. Think resources, minerals, rare earths, and living space. No to mention the levels of economic development.
[+] [-] bkirkby|3 years ago|reply
Everything did proceed as I expected (including the shadow bands), but when the eclipse was full, the earth went quiet. All the animals stopped and wondered (including the younger children who were boisterously playing seconds before the full effect).
As I stared up into the heavens, I had this deeply profound realization that our planet is traveling through space like all the other planets. The observation and experience of an eclipse made the abstract concept of space a reality and brought it closer to me in a way that just thinking (a lot) about space has never done.
[+] [-] gwright|3 years ago|reply
I'm hoping to repeat this again in for 2024 eclipse crossing North America: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_eclipse_of_April_8,_2024
[+] [-] vlunkr|3 years ago|reply
https://genius.com/The-flaming-lips-do-you-realize-lyrics
[+] [-] scalablenotions|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ManuelKiessling|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gatsky|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phantom_of_cato|3 years ago|reply
I genuinely don't understand what would be sad about that. The possibility of the next generation being able to explore at least one of those planets is very real.
[+] [-] baxtr|3 years ago|reply
Very well written. Conveys his feelings quite well I find.
[+] [-] jerome-jh|3 years ago|reply
Reading this guy paid millions of $ to realize these basic facts fills me with overwhelming sadness too. Can his experience be of value for us? Given that he could have discovered what he just experienced by reading good books, I think this n+1 experience has zero value. Send human beings in space to perform scientific experiments. Period.
[+] [-] j3s|3 years ago|reply
this paragraph felt so profound, i sprang a few tears. hearing someone who has been through so much talk about death always gets to me.
[+] [-] logifail|3 years ago|reply
At some point during the Covid years, I turned a mental page and decided that 'carpe diem' is my new motto.
Not in the traditional "bucket list" sense, until Covid I had a mental list of places I [thought I] wanted to go ... and experiences I [thought I] wanted to have. Daft stuff usually involving long-haul travel and/or hard to get to places.
I've ditched all of that.
Now it's about seeing people.
Mundane stuff (but not mundane during the Covid years!) such as taking our kids to see their grandparents. Taking time off work to visit my sister, who lives 1000mi away, and partially due to our rather complex relationship, I've not actually visited at any of her various homes for <hangs head in shame> just over 20 years. Encouraging/enabling my wife to make time to visit her parents, who also live a long way from us.
Life has a habit of sneaking up on you when you're not paying attention. Seize the day (while you can).
[+] [-] ThePhysicist|3 years ago|reply
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ainyK6fXku0
[+] [-] extragood|3 years ago|reply
It's a little terrible, but it's still hard for me to escape that prejudice when watching him speak.
[+] [-] the_doctah|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sandworm101|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlwaysRock|3 years ago|reply
Some of his words immediately after landing are poetic, “I hope I never recover, that I can maintain what I feel now.”
They did send a poet.
[+] [-] ETH_start|3 years ago|reply
The cost of launching to space has declined by orders of magnitude over the last 50 years and can be expected to decline by orders of magnitude more in the coming decades.
At one point, air travel was reserved for the richest of the rich, and today hundreds of millions of people fly every year. There's no reason the same couldn't happen with space flight.
[+] [-] shadowfoxx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rockemsockem|3 years ago|reply
Fire != Pollution
[+] [-] 93po|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] INTPenis|3 years ago|reply
Anyways, this overview effect is something I always felt, even without going into space. I always felt we were wasting time with our squabbling over borders down here. I think most scifi geeks feel this way, and I don't mean star trek scifi, I mean Alastair Reynolds, Ian Banks and such.
But the problem is that the solution my mind always reaches for requires autocracy to fix the problems. So in a sense our problems are caused by our desire to be free.
Honestly I don't think most of us are more than trained apes, do we deserve to be free and pollute our earth? I don't want autocracy but I definitely want a lot stronger government to regulate our problems away. Globally.
[+] [-] layer8|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] em-bee|3 years ago|reply
this is an important point. and the next step is the realization that, therefore, the only way to make the world better is through education, and motivating people to strive to be better themselves, to think about our future, to contribute to the advancement of society.
[+] [-] osigurdson|3 years ago|reply
Maybe try reaching for something else (such as technological solutions). We are currently on the brink of armageddon due to an autocratic regime. Centralization IRL necessarily leads to corruption over time. It's efficient but not robust.
[+] [-] ilaksh|3 years ago|reply
However, we also need to significantly revise the way that government and money work. They need to become high technologies. More than that, we need those technologies to be built around more encompassing and well-rounded ideologies.
These are huge challenges. But the alternative to working on them is to just accept the status quo.
[+] [-] specialist|3 years ago|reply
Very interesting. Have you met anyone else IRL who shares the overview effect?
> ...autocracy to fix the problems.
Tchaikovsky's novel Children of Time explores how two different cultures try to tackle this problem. I won't spoil it for you. It's a notion I keep chewing on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Time_(novel)
[+] [-] theGnuMe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GekkePrutser|3 years ago|reply
This alone is already a really good reason to keep going into space IMO. Even though Shatner says it depressed him, this kind of awareness is really what we need as a species. It might be depressing but that might cause us to finally actually do something about the problems we're causing.
Of course the environmental impact of sending even a token percentage on a trip to space would make our problems a lot worse so it's not going to happen...
By the way Shatner keeps calling it "Orbit" but that is not what he was in. I'm surprised this was not explained to him.
[+] [-] brundolf|3 years ago|reply
— Roy McBride, Ad Astra
[+] [-] boboche|3 years ago|reply
War and all the idiocy down here are so..... when you realize how lucky we are and how fragile all of this really is...
Hopefully with the event of space tourism this will be a common theme and the experience will serve to educate and raise the bar for humanity.
[+] [-] jeff-davis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] osullip|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmos|3 years ago|reply
Shatner went to space and was profoundly changed. What do we need to do for us all to be profoundly changed?
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/3129/emission-reductions-from-...
[+] [-] shrthnd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] flobosg|3 years ago|reply
―Edgar D. Mitchell
[+] [-] lagrange77|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Piezoid|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forgingahead|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iJohnDoe|3 years ago|reply
I don’t think her emotions were grief, but the overwhelming feeling for our species and that we’re all on this planet together. I remember it being beautifully filmed.
I wish we could all experience these emotions.
[+] [-] esskay|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] motohagiography|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] purplerabbit|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nomagicbullet|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zfxfr|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superchroma|3 years ago|reply
With the euphoria of the 60's now merely a tiny dot in our societal rear view mirror, crowded out by decades of bad news, I think people are on a certain level aware of this. We distract ourselves to avoid contemplating it too deeply. With an abundance of such distractions, people don't take time to think about the future of our species and planet as we know it, decades and centuries from now. It's less painful to live in the moment and worry about small, human problems.
when I looked into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death. Increasingly I feel this way too. I, as a human, was built for this earth, of it. There's nothing good out there for me. This is my home.
[+] [-] ethanbond|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unixhero|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yrgulation|3 years ago|reply