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blog.alexmaccaw.com

351 pointsolivercameron49 comments

Two nights ago while I slept, for the first time I had a dream about going into space on the shuttle. I have wanted to go into space since I was a child, so in my dream I was extremely excited about going into space.

I dreamt of the launch, the G-Forces, the adrenaline rush, and finally the sky turning from blue to black as we escaped the atmosphere.

Then the shuttle turned over so we could see the Earth. As the cockpit window rotated and Earth came into view, the feeling of _sheer terror_ washed over me as I saw how small the planet looked. I had a panic attack in my dream from looking back down at Earth. I woke up a few minutes later as if from a nightmare. It was the strangest experience, and the imagery and feelings are extremely vivid in my memory. I wonder if humans have an innate emotional response to this size perspective, but this seems somewhat related to the Overview Effect described in the article.

Wow, thats amazing. I've only ever had a couple space dreams but one of them was by far the scariest dream I've ever had. I was outside the shuttle doing some sort of maintenance or something when it slowly started to fly away for some reason. I was simply floating in a slow rotation there by myself, looking out on space and earth and realizing I was going to float there until I died. It was so real and so terrifying I remember I was shaken up for a few days afterward.

You might enjoy this recent podcast on radiolab. http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2012/oct/08/dark... amazing how humble and calm the guy comes across as

Seconded. I listened to that a few days ago and it's an incredible story.

You may enjoy http://kerbalspaceprogram.com/

Fascinating dream. Being in space must be a huge jolt to the psyche in the first place, let alone remotely viewing Earth. I sometimes experience anxiety just from looking at the sky on a particularly clear night and knowing how fucking enormous those little dots really are.

I breathed a sigh of relief when there wasn't some tie-in to startup culture or programming or social media at the end of the article. Excellent post.

Top ten signs you may need to stop spending so much time on HN and thinking about startups, number 9:

I started realizing that after I started appending hip hop quotations to all written communication after becoming an avid read of Ben Horowitz.

"I love bad bitches and that's my fuckin problem" -Two Chainz

Yep, big sign I spend too much time on a startup-centric news aggregation site when I understand that most of the articles are about startups. Nailed it, bud.

The point as I understood it is that if you were so glad to see that this article wasn't about a startup, maybe you'd do better getting your articles from a different source.

I suspect that the thoughts people have in space will be of the same order as those they have on the ground. Thus space tourism is unlikely to have much mind-expanding effect. We have profound quotes from astronauts because we don't send idiots into space. Yet.

Do you think that travelling to other countries -- "seeing the world" -- changes people? Gives them a new perspective? If that can, I think going into space can as well.

Regarding the pale blue dot.

Has the photo been enhanced so we can see the earth, or is that actually how it looks?

What are those color bands I'm seeing? Does the earth stay in it's orange color band, indicating they are orbital lines around the sun?

The Earth takes up much less than a pixel in the image, a combination of other factors cause it to be much more visible than it "should" be, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot

The colour bands are artifacts of the camera lenses and housing. From the wikipedia article[1]:

The result of the brightness is a bright burned-out image with multiple reflections from the optics in the camera. The rays around the sun are a diffraction pattern of the calibration lamp which is mounted in front of the wide-angle lens. [..] In the photograph, Earth lies in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image with a small angle between the Sun and the Earth

The following picture demonstrates the relative position of the sun and the Earth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solar_System_Portrait_-_V...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot#Camera

This is exactly what I was going to ask...it can't be that visible, right?...

When you live in one town all your life you get a better/different perspective when you travel to another city. The same goes for then visting other parts of your country and then inbetween countries and then continents. Each time the effect is more pronounced than before. You realize the insignificance of many of your "problems" when you met other people from very different socioeconomic backgrounds. I wonder if space is just the most absolute point of this effect.

Elegant blog post. If only because it didn't overcrowd us with thoughts but rather set the stage for pondering.

Good discussion about 'overview effect' http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/05/space-euphoria....

Also http://www.overviewinstitute.org/

"With more people viewing the Earth from afar, perhaps the world will gain a little more perspective, and a better sense of proportion."

Interestingly enough the reason we have the pictures of the earth from space is that Stewart Brand started a petition to get them declassified because he thought seeing the pictures would induce the same sort of experience (and pro-social behavioral shift) as LSD. Apparently he actually had the idea while on acid, while sitting on his roof in San Francisco.

...also the reason he named his projects "whole earth X"

Like the Whole Earth Catalog, mentioned at the end of Steve Jobs' graduation speech (the source of the "stay hungry, stay foolish" line).

Or the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link, better known as The WELL, one of the first "online" communities.

oops, I just connected the op back to startup culture and to social media :-/

Relevant: A fascinatingly disturbing thought by Dr. Neil deGrasse - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDRXn96HrtY

Many thanks for the share. Awesome watch.

I would have thought that you'd have to be a lot higher up than Felix to experience the overview effect. Its one thing being able to see the curvature of the earth... its another matter altogether to be be in orbit and see the whole planet in 90 minutes (or being able to blot out the entire planet with your thumb held at arm's distance, as was the case for the guys that made it to the moon).

> or being able to blot out the entire planet with your thumb held at arm's distance, as was the case for the guys that made it to the moon

At first I didn't believe you, but some quick math confirms this. The angular size of the Earth from the moon is 1.9 degrees, and the angular width of your thumb at arm's distance is about 2 degrees.

"It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small." - Neil Armstrong

Maybe a bit more with the spacesuit glove on!

Ha. Good point. But even without, the math checks out.

Oh, I'm sure. He most likely wrote that the night before the first launch attempt. :)

I'd like to believe that we all experience a weak Overview Effect from time to time. It's often a friend of existential nihilism.

But to have your entire life add up to a powerful case of that realization must be an extremely emotional experience.

hoepfully the rest of us can rediscover a less costly way to get that same perspective ... the fact that this author concludes with excitement at space tourism suggests to me they totally miss the message roaring from the blue dot.

Reminds me of the Total Perspective Vortex, a torture machine from Douglas Adams' sci-fi book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe.

For when you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says "You are here."

This, according to the book, completely annihilates your brain.

I grew up with enough of an interest in space that I heard and internalized a lot of this as a kid. I think some IMAX movies attempted to recreate this kind of experience.

I wonder now much more impactful the real thing would be in terms of altering a person's perspective.

To contrast, I absolutely love this video where Neil deGrasse Tyson provides an explanation as to why he doesn't feel small in the Universe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9D05ej8u-gU

although the first to do space tourism will be the rich.

They will hover over us and instead of thinking how small they are, will feel at peace having escaped the rest of us... who are now too small to see.

Matsch's Maxim: A fool in a high station is like a man on the top of a small mountain: everything appears small to him and he appears small to everybody.

http://www.quiltersbee.com/murphy.htm

Does a man drifting at sea feel like he has escaped humanity? Even a wealthy man?

Depends on if it's a cruise or not

Seven people have been to space as tourists, so far.

No signs of laser-armed sharks yet!

That could be because they are well camouflaged laser-armed sharks.

Here's Carl Sagan talking about the "Pale Blue Dot", it's definitely worth a watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g

http://www.unturf.com/post/24536592330/i-dont-care-if-you-ar...

Makes me want to start a small side project that routinely sends oppressors and other individuals with ambition of world domination on a free ride into the space.

Perspective is a powerful thing. How things looks depends a lot on where you sit.

Makes me wonder how this concept can be applied to more Earthly affairs.

Am I the only one who assumed the Baumgartner's remarks were rehearsed or otherwise prearranged?

This is the kind of article that I come to Hacker News for. :)

I was disappointed, a pretty inconsequential blog post reaching far for anything worth writing.

"So while the first astronauts to the moon went as technicians, they came back as humanitarians."

meh.

I wonder why you felt the need to leave this comment.

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