Former Nasa astronaut shares heartbreaking 'realisation' after seeing Earth from space

Many of us have probably wondered what it must be like to look out of a window and see the Earth spinning below, but for one former Nasa astronaut, doing just that caused him to experience the ‘overview effect’ which led to him having a “sobering realisation”.

The name probably gives you some idea as to exactly what the ‘overview effect’ is, but Nasa themselves arguably put it best when they say it’s the “impact of looking down at the Earth from above, and how it can create a shift in the way astronauts view and think about our planet and life itself”.

Ron Garan is the astronaut in question, and speaking to Big Think, he said he realised that “we’re living a lie”.

He explained: “We keep trying to deal with issues such as global warming, deforestation [and] 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 is also an author, and unsurprisingly, he gave a pretty stunning description of what he saw when he peered out of the International Space Station.

He said: “I saw the paparazzi-like flashes of lightning storms, I saw dancing curtains of auroras that seemed so close it was if we could reach out and touch them and I saw the unbelievable thinness of our planet’s atmosphere.”

The aforementioned “sobering realisation” that he was hit with as a result was that Earth is being kept alive – or spinning - by a “paper-thin layer”.

“I saw an iridescent biosphere teaming with life; I didn’t see an economy.

“We need to move from thinking ‘economy, society, planet’, to ‘planet, society, economy’. That’s when we’re going to continue our evolutionary process.”

Now if you’ll excuse us, we’re off to have an existential crisis.

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