The Overview Effect

On December 7th 1972, astronaut Harrison Schmitt looked out of the window of the Apollo 17 spacecraft and took a photo. It would later become one of the most shared photographs in all of human history: Earth fully illuminated by the Sun, surrounded by inhospitable darkness. The photograph captures how remote the planet is, something people can often find hard to communicate.

Astronauts who have been far enough to see Earth from the stars often come back expressing a very peculiar feeling… It has become such a phenomenon that it now has its own name: The Overview Effect.

The Overview Effect is said to change the way you understand Earth and humankind’s place on it after seeing it from afar. Some get a feeling of interconnectedness – a realisation that we’re all born of the same space dust – while others get a feeling of awe, like Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell. Michael Collins, aboard the first manned mission to the Moon, said Earth “projected an air of fragility” when he saw it from the lunar surface and International Space Station (ISS) astronaut Nicole Stott describes an overwhelming feeling of beauty.

Interestingly, nearly every person who’s been high enough to look down on the planet expresses the same feeling. Why does seeing Earth from above have this effect on people?

All solar system expeditions are ultimately a voyage of self-discovery and an attempt to understand our place in the universe a little bit better, so turning the lens on ourselves is often an afterthought, yet looking back and seeing home might be one of the most important lessons of any space trip.

Immediately, those who get the privilege of witnessing Earth from the stars realise how small the planet is and how everything we know, from microbes to mammals to mountain ranges, all originated on our “pale blue dot”.

Although nobody has since been far enough from Earth to take a photograph in person like the one from Apollo 17, recent advances in the world of space travel have allowed some people to experience their own version of the Overview Effect.

There could come a time where you get to experience the Overview Effect firsthand too. Can you imagine what effect seeing the whole Earth might have on you? What would it inspire you to do, try, or change?

Billionaire Sir Richard Branson described “looking down at our beautiful, beautiful Earth” on Virgin Galactic’s first flight in July and, in his speech seconds after leaving the mesosphere (the third layer of Earth’s atmosphere), he hinted at the future of commercial spaceflight, saying “if we can do this, just imagine what you can do”.

Blasting off from Earth might not be necessary though.

Bristol-based artist Luke Jerram has created a piece titled Gaia, named after the mythical Greek Goddess of the Earth. It’s a balloon seven metres wide that features detailed NASA imagery of the Earth’s surface. The artwork provides the opportunity to see Earth in 3D on a scale people normally wouldn’t.

For those more into Virtual Reality than art, the Spacebuzz project aims to get you understanding the Overview Effect by digitally catapulting you into the stratosphere (the second layer of Earth’s atmosphere) and NASA’s 2015 DSCOVR satellite (Deep Space Climate Observatory) is still beaming back colour photos of Earth every day via EPIC – the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera – that you can view online.

Given the ongoing environmental crisis, adopting a sense of the Overview Effect in our daily lives might be more important than ever. It leads to an understanding that everything on Earth is interconnected and that humankind’s very existence is dependent on a complex ecosystem that spans the world.

So, the next time you gaze up at the stars and picture the wonders of the universe or life on some far-flung and as-of-yet undiscovered planet, take a second to pause and ponder precisely how magnificent it is that through a chain of evolutionary flukes you are here and picture in your mind our own planet: Home.

Also

The first full-colour photo of a lit-up Earth was taken in 1967 by a satellite. The Blue Marble followed in 1972 but these weren’t the first ever photos of something out of this world. Another celestial body got its fifteen minutes of fame 132 years earlier…

An astronomer is a person who studies the stars. That’s what John William Draper was and using an old form of photography known as daguerreotypes, he managed to snap a pic of the moon on March 23rd 1840. Although not much by modern standards, the picture was the first detailed photo of the full Moon and shows craters, mountains and valleys.

The image still exists today because like all daguerreotypes it was printed on a silver plate, covered with chemicals that were sensitive to light. At the time he made the image, Draper wrote in his journal “this evening I exposed a prepared plate to the moonbeams” which is a very fancy way to say “I took a pic of the Moon!”

First published in The Week Junior Science+Nature, issue 42, December 2021.