An Incredibly Weird Time to Be Alive
Seeing the Earth from space will change you so profoundly that there’s a term for it: the overview effect. The extreme minority who have had the privilege describe it similarly. You see something that you were never meant to see, namely the Earth just sitting there, with the entire universe surrounding it. Gazing upon the blue marble, surrounded by its oh-so-thin green layer of atmosphere, the auroras flickering on the fringes, is not merely awe-inspiring but something of a factory reset for one’s sense of self. Almost everyone tears up at the sight.
“You don’t see borders, you don’t see religious lines, you don’t see political boundaries. All you see is Earth, and you see that we are way more alike than we are different,” Christina Koch, one of the four astronauts on the Artemis II mission, told NASA recently. Jim Lovell, describing the view on Apollo 8 from the dark side of the moon back in the late 1960s, told Chicago magazine that he could put his thumb up to the window, and in that moment, “everything I ever knew was behind it. Billions of people. Oceans. Mountains. Deserts. And I began to wonder, where do I fit into what I see?”
Where some see immeasurable beauty, others see fragility. Marina Koren previously reported in this magazine that, upon seeing the Earth from space, one astronaut “became absolutely convinced we would kill ourselves off between 500 and 1,000 years from now.” Famously, the actor William Shatner has written that his brief experience looking at the Earth produced a profound sadness. “What I was feeling was grief, and the grief was for the Earth,” he told Koren in 2022.
I’ve never been to space, but for the past few days, I’ve oscillated between these emotions—awe and despair—as NASA has continued to post photos of the Earth and moon from Artemis II. Yesterday, the Integrity spacecraft came within 4,067 miles of the moon during its lunar flyby. For 40 minutes, it lost all contact with humanity. At one point they were 252,756 miles away from Earth—the farthest from the planet anyone has ever traveled. For seven hours, the astronauts—Koch, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Jeremy Hansen—were able to gaze upon a part of the lunar surface previously unseen by human eyes. According to NASA, the astronauts took roughly 10,000 photos, which feels perfectly proportional for such an occasion.
A few of these photos—some taken before the lunar pass—have messed me up pretty good. A photo of the Earth appearing to set behind the moon. A picture, taken through a window of the Orion spacecraft, revealing the tiniest crescent Earth growing smaller as the capsule heads toward the moon. As one caption on the photo notes, “the Earth is illuminated by the blackness of space.” I’ve experienced these photos the way I experience most media: through the puny screen of my phone, with the awesome, life-affirming images sandwiched between updates about a golf tournament, oil prices, the MLB’s new automated ball-strike system, and reports of the U.S. president threatening the civilizational destruction of Iran.
On a good, calm day it is hard to know what to make of photos that show, in no uncertain terms, that every single thing you will ever and could ever know is simultaneously galactically insignificant and unspeakably beautiful and precious. Today, the world held its breath waiting for the 8 p.m. eastern deadline Trump set for Iran to agree to a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. If his terms weren’t met, he posted this morning, “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
Trump’s threats triggered denouncements from Democratic lawmakers as well as the podcasters Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, and incited no small amount of panic from people who have interpreted Trump’s post as a suggestion of nuclear warfare. Then, this evening, an hour before the deadline, Trump announced a two-week cease-fire deal, which Pakistan helped broker.
Trump’s bluster, no matter how serious, has always been impossible to parse. (He’s famous for chickening out, backpedaling, or pretending like he never said what he said.) Yet one way to view our current age is as a series of existential reminders, be they nuclear proliferation, climate change, or pandemics. In Silicon Valley over the past half decade, civilizational extinction at the hands of hypothetical technological advances has moved from the realm of pure science fiction to a marketing tactic to an immediate concern for a subset of true believers. Humans may not want to die, but as a species we seem eager to invent and tout new ways to threaten our existence.
And yet at the very same moment, four flesh-and-blood human beings are hundreds of thousands of miles away taking pictures of our delicate little world. Their mission and their photos remind us of something else entirely—of a yearning to learn, to explore, and to band together to become something greater than the sum of our parts. If Trump’s claims of mass destruction represent humanity at its smallest, weakest, and most cowardly, then those who are gazing upon our planet right now from afar represent the best of what we have to offer. How else to hear these words from Koch:
We will explore. We will build. We will build ships. We will visit again. We will construct science outposts. We will drive rovers. We will do radio astronomy. We will found companies. We will bolster industry. We will inspire. But ultimately, we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other.
As Lovell looked down at the Earth in 1968, an old saying popped into his head: I hope to go to heaven when I die. Then he realized, “I actually went to heaven when I was born.”
There is something disorienting, horrible, and somehow fitting in the timing of all of this. That one man with the means to do it would threaten destruction of a part of our planet at the same moment its beauty and fragility are on full display. We are, in this tense moment, living with our own overview effect. Four are watching from afar. But the rest of us are watching too—left to reckon with our own place on the pale blue dot, reminded of all the ways we might die, and all the reasons for which to live.
*Sources: NASA; Space Frontiers / Getty; Chip Somodevilla / Getty.