The Overview Effect

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.

- Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell

What is the overview effect? Psychologists have described the overview effect as “a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus.”

But it’s so much more than that.

The overview effect is the sense of oneness astronauts feel when they marvel at Earth from space. It’s grasping the miraculous improbability of one’s existence. It’s seeing the world and its inhabitants unified and whole rather than wretched and divided. It’s the opposite of loneliness. It’s connectedness.

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Paradoxical, isn’t it? In the universe’s endless proportions, Earth is a deeply lonely planet. But strangely, looking at it doesn’t make us feel lonely. It’s quite the opposite: we transcend into communion with the cosmos. As astronaut Sam Durrence said: “You’re removed from the Earth, but at the same time you feel this incredible connection to the Earth like nothing I’d ever felt before.”

We were all born on this speckle of life within a dead universe. What a privilege.

Perhaps Carl Sagan said it best:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives … Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light ... There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.”

From an orbital viewpoint, all borders, norms, and egos disappear. What remains is a sense of transcendence, oneness, and awe. 

- More Here

To state the obvious; Max gave me the overview effect and much more.