My Trip to Space Filled Me with Overwhelming Sadness • Hacker News Board

Re: My Trip to Space Filled Me with Overwhelming Sadness

#31

Post by perihelions » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 12:37 PM UTC

lagrange77 wrote: post #6

shrthnd wrote: post #2

> I learned later that I was not alone in this feeling. It is called the “Overview Effect” and is not uncommon among astronauts, including Yuri Gagarin, Michael Collins, Sally Ride, and many others. Essentially, when someone travels to space and views Earth from orbit, a sense of the planet’s fragility takes hold in an ineffable, instinctive manner. Author Frank White first coined the term in 1987: “There are no bord…

Back in the day, i was naively hoping, that the internet had a similar effect on man.

They're opposites: one's being far removed from humans, one's seeing too much of them at once. Try building a 50k-capacity orbital hotel for instagram tourists, and see what happens to this #OverviewEffect.

Re: My Trip to Space Filled Me with Overwhelming Sadness

#32

Post by bombcar » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 12:37 PM UTC

nequo wrote: post #26

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like things changed after... iraq, iraq 2, afghanistan, syria and many others... dead kids from all over US and europe losing their lives for some rich people to get richer. Somehow occupying sovereign countries and killing kids is a bad thing only when putin does it.

> It's not like things changed after... iraq, iraq 2, afghanistan, syria and many others... Conscription is a huge difference. Hundreds of thousands were sent to Vietnam against their will. > Somehow occupying sovereign countries and killing kids is a bad thing only when putin does it. Ugh this both sideism.

I see it as less “both sideism” and more “maybe we can be the baddies too”.

Re: My Trip to Space Filled Me with Overwhelming Sadness

#33

Post by moomin » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 12:39 PM UTC

ethanbond wrote: post #4

superchroma wrote: post #3

You don't need to go to the moon to feel this way these days, although I'm sure the vantage point helps. With the euphoria of the 60's now merely a tiny dot in our societal rear view mirror, crowded out by decades of bad news, I think people are on a certain level aware of this. We distract ourselves to avoid contemplating it too deeply. With an abundance of such distractions, people don't take time to think about th…

Euphoria of the 60s? In the US at least, I’d suggest that too was a distraction from the horror of what was going on at that time. You know, your friends getting taken to a jungle halfway across the world to come back with no legs, broken psyches, and a society that had turned its back on them.

This is the correct take. Hippies, Flower Power, Love-Ins and so on cannot be properly understood without the context of the Vietnam War and the draft.

Re: My Trip to Space Filled Me with Overwhelming Sadness

#34

Post by Piezoid » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 12:40 PM UTC

shrthnd wrote: post #2

> I learned later that I was not alone in this feeling. It is called the “Overview Effect” and is not uncommon among astronauts, including Yuri Gagarin, Michael Collins, Sally Ride, and many others. Essentially, when someone travels to space and views Earth from orbit, a sense of the planet’s fragility takes hold in an ineffable, instinctive manner. Author Frank White first coined the term in 1987: “There are no bord…

This make me wonder if flat-earth and other limiting cosmological views are mental shields against the realization that nothing matters except our peculiar existence.

Re: My Trip to Space Filled Me with Overwhelming Sadness

#35

Post by bombcar » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 12:41 PM UTC

forgingahead wrote: post #29

shrthnd wrote: post #2

> I learned later that I was not alone in this feeling. It is called the “Overview Effect” and is not uncommon among astronauts, including Yuri Gagarin, Michael Collins, Sally Ride, and many others. Essentially, when someone travels to space and views Earth from orbit, a sense of the planet’s fragility takes hold in an ineffable, instinctive manner. Author Frank White first coined the term in 1987: “There are no bord…

So we should send all journalists and foreign policy establishment "experts"?

You’d end up with them supporting exactly what they did before but with new reasons why.

Re: My Trip to Space Filled Me with Overwhelming Sadness

#36

Post by bboygravity » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 12:41 PM UTC

Theizestooke wrote: post #18

lagrange77 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the day, i was naively hoping, that the internet had a similar effect on man.

Social media has caused a lot of people to shift their world views, and re-examine their identities. Not necessarily in ways that benefit themselves or society.

The insinuation/assumption that social media somehow had an obvious negative effect on people's beliefs world wide compared to the past. A statement in the form of a post on HN social media and an often propagated popular opinion on other social media. An opinion thay I completely disagree with, discussed/questioned on this same social media. Freely.

How meta. How ironic.

Re: My Trip to Space Filled Me with Overwhelming Sadness

#37

Post by Kiro » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 12:42 PM UTC

MerelyMortal wrote: post #24

rapnie wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the profound positive impact on Amazon policy-making by Bezos after his trip is an indicator, then yes.

He basically went up an untethered elevator and saw a very limited view of Earth. He did not orbit Earth and did not see or experience the same things as the others.

Wasn't he in the same ship as Shatner?

Re: My Trip to Space Filled Me with Overwhelming Sadness

#38

Post by INTPenis » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 12:42 PM UTC

This was very well written, very insightful and humble. Considering he's usually an asshole to people IRL. But I guess he just comes off that way when he wants to convey his truth to people. Not completely foreign to myself, having discovered that I'm actually autistic in my late 30s. That explained a lot.

Anyways, this overview effect is something I always felt, even without going into space. I always felt we were wasting time with our squabbling over borders down here. I think most scifi geeks feel this way, and I don't mean star trek scifi, I mean Alastair Reynolds, Ian Banks and such.

But the problem is that the solution my mind always reaches for requires autocracy to fix the problems. So in a sense our problems are caused by our desire to be free.

Honestly I don't think most of us are more than trained apes, do we deserve to be free and pollute our earth? I don't want autocracy but I definitely want a lot stronger government to regulate our problems away. Globally.

Re: My Trip to Space Filled Me with Overwhelming Sadness

#39

Post by bombcar » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 12:42 PM UTC

ehnto wrote: post #28

rapnie wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the profound positive impact on Amazon policy-making by Bezos after his trip is an indicator, then yes.

Do you mind explaining what kind of policy making you are referring too? It's proving difficult to search for.

I assume it’s sarcasm, but personally I’m a bit disappointed he hasn’t gone complete Lex Luthor yet. If we’re going to have billionaires in space we might as well get an origin story out of it.

Re: My Trip to Space Filled Me with Overwhelming Sadness

#40

Post by ajsnigrutin » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 12:43 PM UTC

bombcar wrote: post #32

nequo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not like things changed after... iraq, iraq 2, afghanistan, syria and many others... Conscription is a huge difference. Hundreds of thousands were sent to Vietnam against their will. > Somehow occupying sovereign countries and killing kids is a bad thing only when putin does it. Ugh this both sideism.

I see it as less “both sideism” and more “maybe we can be the baddies too”.

We are the baddies. I live in a small EU country, and have soldiers in syria now.

We could atleast have pulled them back home, before pointing a finger at putin, but we didn't even do that (and they'd all fit in a minibus).

We're currently destroying our own economies because someone else is doing something that we've been doing for years now. Technically we deserve being cold and maybe some kind of a revolution, because we've deserved it for destroying countries all around the world, but I'd prefer things to stop and normalize before we all freeze to death here.