Out of this World: the mysterious mental side effects of traveling into space | co.exist | ideas + impact
Front page NY Times…..
- This is the Watching Section, a new NYT feature that highlights developing news from around the web…….
Fifty companies, several of them promising the space tourism opportunity of a lifetime, have joined the Commercial Spaceflight Federation since 2006, absorbing at least $2 billion in investments (but probably much more) from some of the tech world’s biggest venture capitalists.
But several of the biggest backers of the so-called "NewSpace" movement are investing in more than just physical space parts; they also proselytize about something that can happen to the human mind when it breaches near space. Believers call it the “overview effect.” Virgin Galactic CEO George Whitesides, private space pioneer Anousheh Ansari, and X Prize Foundation trustee Rick Tumlinson are a just handful of the entrepreneurs and ex-NASA luminaries who belong to the Overview Institute, a sort of informal think tank dedicated to the notion that seeing the earth from space delivers a kind of spiritual epiphany that changes your perspective on humanity forever……..
The overview effect—which in theory would rally all of humankind toward a space-oriented quest for survival—could help us get there……..The profound, almost religious experience of seeing the earth from space—at which point a person would see that our home planet is borderless, all of humanity is connected and destined for peace—should motivate us to colonize space and become "true citizens of the universe,"……….
Apollo astronauts, he later wrote, were cultural extensions of the knights of Camelot, and the overview effect the path on which humanity must seek the Holy Grail—in this case, the "unity of the planet."………….
Dr. Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman astronaut in space: "When I read The Overview Effect, people started talking about their hearts connected to this planet. But my response when I went into space is that I was connected to everything,"…… "I felt much more connected to everything else in the universe, and sometimes on Earth I felt much more separate from the rest of the universe. I felt like I had as much right to be in space or in this universe as any speck of stardust. I was as eternal as that."