We’re always told to see The Big Picture, and few have seen it to the same extent as Ron Garan.
The author, astronaut, and humanitarian spent 178 days in orbit, travelling 71 million miles.
“I went to space and discovered a big lie,” he told Big Think, and it’s related to what researchers call the Overview Effect.
First coined in the 1980s, that phrase refers to the huge shift in thinking that happens to astronauts who witness the earth floating in darkness. Those of us earthbound tend to see things narrowly, with our own self-interest at the centre of every issue.
But Garan says the truth is that from space, Earth is a place where “borders are invisible; racial, religious, and economic strife are nowhere to be seen.”
“There is no Them. There’s only Us.”
From that planetary perspective, human squabbles seem petty, especially against a backdrop that makes it clear the entire earth is one interconnected, interdependent whole. And a fragile one, at that.
“When I looked out the window of the International Space Station,” says the astronaut, “I saw the unbelievable thinness of our planet’s atmosphere. In that moment, I was hit with the sobering realization that a paper-thin layer keeps every living thing alive.”
But Garan laments the way in which that fragility is threatened by small thinking that makes us put the economy first, people second, and the........