Former NASA astronaut Ron Garan spent 178 days in space and has accumulated more than 71 million miles in 2,842 orbits of Earth. Basically, he’s spent a lot of time up in space, and has since spoken about one moment in particular, in which he looked down at our planet – which is known as the ‘Overview Effect’.
The ‘Overview Effect’ often takes place when astronauts go into space and look down and see Earth from that perspective for the first time. The experience ‘shift[s] […] the way astronauts view and think about our planet and life itself,’ NASA explains.
In an interview with Big Think, Garan explained: “We keep trying to deal with issues such as global warming, deforestation, biodiversity loss as stand alone issues when in reality they’re just symptoms of the underlying root problem and the problem is, that we don’t see ourselves as planetary.
“When I looked out of the window of the International Space Station, I saw the paparazzi like flashes of lightening storms, I saw dancing curtains of auroras that seemed so close it was as if we could reach out and touch them and I saw the unbelievable thinness of our planet’s atmosphere.
“In that moment I was hit by the sobering realization.”
Garan was hit by the realization that our planet – and every living thing on it – is being kept alive by a ‘paper thin layer’.
“I saw an iridescent biosphere teaming with life, I didn’t see an economy, but since our human-made systems treat everything including the very life-support systems of our planet as the […] subsidiary of the global economy, it’s obvious from the vanish point of space that we’re living a lie,” he continued.
The astronaut reflects on the moment as being a ‘light bulb that pops up’ when he realized ‘how interconnected and interdependent we all are’.
Since returning from his mission, Garan ‘continues to work towards a cleaner, safer and more peaceful planet,’ urging others: “We need to move from thinking, economy, society, planet to planet, society, economy. That’s when we’re going to continue our evolutionary process.
“[…] We’re not going to have peace on Earth until we recognize the basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.”
