overview effect Quotes

I saw for the first time the earth's shape. I could easily see the shores of continents, islands, great rivers, folds of the terrain, large bodies of water. The horizon is dark blue, smoothly turning to black. . . the feelings which filled me I can express with one word-joy.

Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, once the sheer isolation of the Earth becomes known, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.

The view of earth is absolutely spectacular, and the feeling of looking back and seeing your planet as a planet is just an amazing feeling. It's a totally different perspective, and it makes you appreciate, actually, how fragile our existence is.

See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.

If you look at Earth from space you see a dot, that's here. That's home. That's us. It underscores the responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

I think the more people that can go up to space and look back is great, but it's not just this overview and look back effect. There's also a lot of concrete gains from getting more people up in space.

I call it "the big picture effect." Getting to see earth as a small planet and to see it in that perspective, seeing it in the heavens as a planet as opposed to being down here among it, most of the people, in fact, I guess all of the people who have had that experience, shift their thinking.

You get this overview effect where you realize how small we are and how fragile our planet is and how we're really all in it together. You don't see borders from space, you don't see diversity and differences in people on Earth.

As we got further and further away, it [the Earth] dimished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man.

What you aren't ready for being the first time in space - on an emotional and intellectual level - is how looking down at Earth will profoundly affect you. Over the long term, it has changed the way I think about planet Earth. When you go around the planet and look down, you think about the fact that this is the cradle of humanity, that this is a place where seven billion people, 200 countries, live side by side, that we share this place and there's nowhere else to go.

Our focus is to get citizen astronauts to experience the 'overview effect,' return to Earth, and then impact their communities.

See what the world looks like from orbit. Well, in that way, at least, there was profit to be had. Nobody could look down at the planet, green and blue, with no borders in evidence and no sign of human habitation, and not get his perspective forever altered.

It's been written about as "the overview effect." All I can give you is my perspective, but most all of the people who have been in space start to see the world without boundaries. You start to think about how we can keep doing these things we're doing that are destructive of the environment and destructive of the planet. It causes you to start to think things in a quite different way than we had before.

The image of Earth from space transformed our view of ourselves. It is maybe the most important image that exists - because we can see ourselves in context in a way that otherwise would be really hard to explain. It should inspire us to wonder about it, to want to know everything we can about it and do everything we can to take care of it.