https://www.inverse.com/article/6301-seeing-earth-from-space-will-force-rich-space-tourists-to-save-the-planet

Seeing Earth From Space Will Force Rich Space Tourists to Save the Planet

The Overview Effect, a little known psychological phenomenon, alters how those who leave the planet think about it when they return.

Ben Guarino December 18, 2015

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“It was like being in a movie where they will show the actor in a hallway, and they dilate the camera back but they’ll zoom the lens in so it looks like a hallway is collapsing around the actor even though the actor doesn’t change size,” he says. “That was exactly the physical reaction I had.”

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Garriott was experiencing a cosmonautic phenomenon called “The Overview Effect,” a profound sense of kinship and magnanimity astronauts have been talking about since Apollo 8’s Earthrise. Garriott changed. When he got back to Earth, he sold his SUVs, bought solar panels, and ended up getting himself inducted into Austin’s Environmental Hall of Fame.

With the age of space tourism on the horizon and the age of income inequality already in full swing, the Overview Effect has never been more relevant or held more promise. Garriott thinks looking down changed him and that it will change others. He’s not alone. A vanguard of top-down thinkers are banking that the next populist movement may head in a surprising direction: straight up.

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Using new tools to put the Overview Effect on the clinical side of the scientific-spiritual divide is a key mission of the Overview Institute, a seven-year-old organization that now counts both Whitesides and Garriott as members. It hasn’t been easy, largely because of the pre-packaged narratives about space travel. A few of the first astronauts to describe the Overview Effect framed it in terms of a metaphysical epiphany. “These guys were having some kind of profound experience,” says David Beaver, a founding member of the Overview Institute. Those pull quotes became color for journalists eager to treat American astronauts as relatable heroes and less eager to address the fact that they were, on some level, lab rats. As for the astronauts, they were coming out of the military or MIT or both. They weren’t adept at talking about their feelings.

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White believes that zero-gravity plays a role in the euphoric feelings of the Overview Effect. And the thing about Garriott’s world-shifting view of Texas was that it came in planet-sized context. “The problem with the Overview Effect is you need all those pieces,” Garriott says, referring to the context that served as a preamble to his vision of Austin. You need to see the quilts of farmland, the jungles slashed and burned, humanity stamped across the face of the world as if stuck by an all-powerful philatelist. In that view, suborbital flights — which offer weightlessness but don’t give you the same vantage as the ISS — could only work in tandem with VR and vice versa.

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