Former NASA astronaut Ron Garan, who spent 178 days in space, has shared a profound experience he had while gazing at Earth from the International Space Station. This moment triggered what’s known as the ‘Overview Effect,’ a powerful realization that often hits astronauts when they see our planet from space.
Garan has travelled over 71 million miles in 2,842 orbits around Earth, but it was looking down at our planet that brought him a clear understanding of its fragility. In an interview with Big Think, he described how this perspective made ‘certain things become undeniably clear.’
“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,” Garan said.
He continued, “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 struck by the fact that our planet—and every living thing on it—is 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 added.
Reflecting on his experience, Garan noted, “It was like a light bulb that pops up” when he realized “how interconnected and interdependent we all are.” Since returning from his mission, he 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.”
Garan concludes, “We're not going to have peace on Earth until we recognize the basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.”
