#Overview effect skin#

The near-600 people who have flown into space as well are all real. “I will come home,” she tells the world, “when we have put an end to the project that is causing damage so great it’s visible from space.” When Frank Borman, the commander of the mission, first saw that sight, the cockpit voice recorder captured him exclaiming, “What a view!” When he spoke of the experience afterwards, he recalled that what he was really thinking was, “This must be what God sees.” In 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 became the first humans to orbit the moon and the first to move far enough away from Earth to be able to see it in full-a fragile, glassy sphere, hanging alone in black space. The further you get from the Earth, the more the Overview Effect asserts itself.

#Overview effect skin#

The atmosphere reveals itself to be what it is: an impossibly thin onion skin that protects us from the killing void of space and yet appears penetrable, destructible. The blue and green Earth appears alive, and yet denuded of people. Ever since Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space, 60 years ago this April, astronauts have come home to describe what they call the Overview Effect: the change that occurs when they see the world from above, as a place where borders are invisible, where racial, religious and economic strife are nowhere to be seen.

But for a tiny handful of us-fewer than 600 in all of human history-there’s been a way outside of all of that, and it’s by flying above all of that.