2min chapter

At a Distance cover image

Marina Koren on Rethinking the “Overview Effect”

At a Distance

CHAPTER

The Overview Effect, the Cultural and the Celestial

The way that people react to the site really depends on their background. They're training if you're looking at NASA astronauts. These people who go to space are products of their place and time. And so, for example, Haley Arsenault is a physician's assistant who went to space a couple years ago on SpaceX. She spent a few days in orbit and when she booked outside of the capsule down at Earth, she saw a borderless world.

00:00
Speaker 2
And you describe it as this cultural and celestial phenomenon. Could you speak to both of these aspects of it, the cultural and the celestial? Yeah.
Speaker 1
So there is a great space historian at the University of Chicago, Jordan Bim, who has written perhaps the only critique of the overview effect, which just goes to show how ingrained this idea is, I think, in our culture. And he and I have talked about this a lot. He sparked the idea for this piece in the magazine about how the way that we sometimes talk about the overview effect, it almost sounds like it's this gift that the universe bestows on people who happen to reach orbit as if it's a natural just side effect of being in space. But Jordan Bim argues that that's not the case. It's the way that people react to that site really depends on their background. They're training if you're looking at NASA astronauts. These people who go to space are products of their place and time. And so the reactions that they might have, while there are potentially some common themes, and of course it's difficult not to be wowed by the site, but when you get into more of the details of people's response, those are really informed by their life experience. And so, for example, Haley Arsenault is a physician's assistant who went to space a couple years ago on SpaceX and she spent a few days in orbit and when she booked outside of the capsule down at Earth, she saw a borderless world and there was a sense of unity and connectedness with humankind that a lot of people have talked about. But because of her experience in healthcare, she was really struck by just healthcare disparities across the world. And like for her seeing Earth as it truly is, beautiful, gleaming blue, like brought that out because of her personal experience. I haven't found an account from like an Apollo astronaut that's like, oh, healthcare, we really got to crack down on that flawed system.

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