Far Out and Close In
Thoughts on the Overview Effect, the power of stories, and the value of a single life.
I was going to write yesterday on my usual Sunday interval, but first I was working and then I got sleepy from eating too much cheese. (No one ever mentions cheese as a cause of creative fails, so I will.) Labor Day seems like a good day to try to weave together the week’s threads—not to spec or by outline but organically.
Last week I stayed doggedly on topic while writing a model research paper on the future of space tourism, but all the while, I kept thinking about this NPR article I’d stumbled across. It describes William Shatner’s experience of flying into space on a Blue Origin capsule two years ago. At age 90, after playing a starship captain for decades and thinking about space travel for 60 years, he was thrilled to be one of the privileged few to take a suborbital joy ride. But when the capsule tore through Earth’s thin atmosphere and then he saw our shimmering blue planet against the darkness, he found himself in tears.
I didn't know what I was crying about. I had to go off some place and sit down and think, what's the matter with me? And I realized I was in grief. —William Shatner in NPR interview
He saw in an instant that Earth was life—vulnerable, irreplaceable life—and all around it was death: the airless, black void of space.
Here is a video of Shatner trying to describe his experience right after landing from the 10-minute ride1. Shaken, he says, “I hope I never recover from this.” He also says everyone should get to experience it. (This video is especially poignant to me because Shatner, whose Jewish grandparents came from Central Europe like mine, reminds me of my dad.)
What Shatner experienced was the Overview Effect, a term coined by space philosopher Frank White in the 1980s. Each space traveler experiences it differently, but they all experience it. And like Shatner, they all lack words to describe it and struggle to express how it changed them. Some, like Nicole Stott and Alan Bean, turned to painting. Some have devoted themselves to philanthropic work. Edgar Mitchell, pilot of Apollo 14, founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences to explore “the intersection of science and profound human experience.”
The Overview Effect is particularly powerful from the moon because Earth is no longer one’s point of reference.
There is the raw, ineffable experience, and then there are the conclusions people draw from it and the paths they take as a result. White has never experienced the Overview Effect himself but has interviewed many astronauts who did.
And again, for most astronauts, the feeling that the Earth itself is a whole system, and we’re just a part of it. We need to think of ourselves as part of this organic system, if you will. And then there are other things that come out of it…one of them is that we are really all in this together. Our fate is bound up with people that we may think are really different…ultimately, we are connected. Totally connected. And not only with people, but with life. We’re totally connected with life. And everything relates to everything else. And out of that, also, is the realization again. You could know that, too. I mean, you could say, I know that. I know we’re all connected. I know our differences don’t matter that much. But again, it’s knowing it with the brain and not the heart. —Frank White, The Overview Effect episode of NASA’s Houston We Have a Podcast
Stories and images are another way that we know with the heart. Instead of zooming us out to the universal, a story zooms us into one life that starts out as “other” but then becomes a part of us, threading itself through our being.
The other thing I can’t stop thinking about is the death of Hersh Goldberg-Polin and the constellation of grief around him.
Hersh, an American, was at the Nova music festival with a friend to celebrate his 23rd birthday. They and other young people hid in a tiny bomb shelter, into which Hamas terrorists lobbed grenades. Hersh’s friend stood in the doorway catching and throwing out the grenades until one finally detonated and killed him. Hersh had half his arm blown off. The gunmen took him hostage and held him for 332 days—almost a whole revolution around the sun—during which his parents worked tirelessly to bring him home and, at the same time, called for a ceasefire to stop the devastation. For those extraordinarily strong and deep hearted people, it was never either their son or the people of Gaza; it was always both.
We’re also profoundly thankful to you, the millions of people in the United States and all over the world who have been sending love, support, and strength to the hostage families. You’ve kept us breathing in a world without air. —Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s father, two weeks before his son’s death
The photos of Hersh remind me a little of my nephew, who is half Filipino and doesn’t identify as Jewish at all. I think it’s the cheerful openness of his face, the “let’s all just get along and have fun” face of a young man who does not yet know how terrible the world can be to him personally.
On a hostage video about 200 days later, Hersh looked like a different person, traumatized and haunted. He told his parents to stay strong.
Hamas soldiers killed him and five other hostages shortly before Israeli soldiers arrived to rescue them.
But what about the other threads, I imagine a voice shouting. Yes, I know the others, too—so many of them—in both head and heart. I’ve seen a young Gazan’s face, too, transform from joy to trauma and grief.
But today, THIS life. This grief. Just this.
People bring many lessons back from space, but they never come back saying that a single life doesn’t matter. It’s always, always the opposite.
What would it look like from space, the thousands of Israelis gathered to demand a hostage deal and ceasefire? Would the crowd’s lights merge into a single, tiny flare?
Shatner is talking to Jeff Bezos, billionaire owner of Blue Origin, Amazon, and The Washington Post. Notably, when Bezos went up into space, a petition garnered thousands of signatures to request that he not come back.
I'm so glad I got to start my morning by reading this.