The Underview Effect
Some people are seemingly immune to awe and expanded consciousness
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“A new life awaits you in the Off-world colonies! A chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!”
As you’re likely aware, a group of sleb women recently joined the frighteningly tightened ladyfriend of techbroligarch exploiter and dick-shaped rocket enthusiast Jezz Befos [typo stays] on a trip to ‘space’. It went something like this:
You could probably divide the world into two groups: people who would love to go to space and people who have less than no interest in going to space. You can definitely place me in the former camp, but I’m too fat, poor, and Botox-free ever to be invited or accepted on such a journey. I’ll just have to settle for knowing that my name has been on Mars since it arrived there on my birthday in November 2018. (The email from NASA that day was my best present ever).
Many who’ve returned from space report something having happened to them and their consciousness, which has become known as the Overview Effect. I highly recommend watching this if you haven’t already:
If you’re very lucky, you can experience the effect without ever leaving the ground. It happened to me when I was living in Chiang Mai in 2008. I was cycling to work along a lane on the edge of town, experiencing a series of smells – laundry soap, a charcoal brazier, flowers, grilled meat, motorbike exhaust, coconut – and somehow both watching for things to not run over while gazing up at a stunning early morning sky. It must have put me into a meditative state.
I suddenly felt my consciousness expand, and a sense of holy awe. Of deep, wide, timeless perspective. I had understood Earth and its position in the cosmos for most of my life but only, I now realised, at an intellectual level. On that bright morning, I finally, actually, got it. And the weirdness and wonderfulness of it.
Remember the stars at noon, I thought. You can’t see them, but they’re still there.
That’s when I truly fell in love with Carl Sagan.
It’s strange to me that our current location and speed and direction of travel in the larger sense are given so little attention. It should lead the news every single day, yet it’s like a dirty little secret no one talks about. But then I know people who don’t want space, the cosmos, the Universe, mentioned at all. They get quite uncomfortable and cross about it; prefer to stay focused right down here on DIY, diaries, dinner and vacation plans.
I still like to start my days by trying to reclaim that feeling. To remember this, not just intellectually but in that deep way, in order to give my tiny problems, dreams, and brevity of existence the proper perspective.
Or, to take it even further:
The trouble is, it’s quite difficult to recapture a feeling that big instead of flattening it into a mere thought. It doesn’t remain that expansive but has to be re-inflated with each attempt – and can’t always be. That’s my experience, anyway. But it appeared to me that, if you go up/out into the space we’re actually part of, the Overview Effect is much more lasting.
So I used to think that we could solve most human problems by firing everyone on Earth, bit by bit, into orbit. It’s said that the Saudi prince astronaut looked out/down at his planet for the first time and exclaimed that he could see his city. On the next orbit he saw his country.
After a few days, he just saw our Big Blue Marble, our Pale Blue Dot. Our only possible home. Blade Runner was off, being set in 2019 – we cannot, in fact, live Off-world. (And where the fuck is my flying car, by the way?!)
Yet I see no evidence of the Overview Effect having its wicked, wonderful way with the women who sorta did this for 11 minutes or whatever I dunno.
Is it because they were not, as they’ve termed themselves, astronauts, but passengers? (These are astronauts).
Is it because they only just sorta kinda went all the way to actual space?
Listening to how they talked about it afterwards, I’m going to have to put it down to them being so materialistic, out-of-touch, and self-involved that they’ve invented the Underview Effect.
Let’s focus on Oprah-adjacent … er, journalist? I think? Let’s say ‘commentator’ … Gayle King. (Rather than silly Katy Perry kissing Texas dirt after being flung in the air by the owner of some of the most climate-destroying enterprises on Earth). King’s main response to what’s a usually life-changing event seems to be outrage that some of her own friends and fellow slebs found the stunt wasteful, entitled, and an insult to Actual Grrl Power. Less Blue Origin, more Clueless Unoriginal.
However, King said her mind changed when she looked at “what Blue Origin does” and “what their intention is,” which she said is “to figure out a way to harness the waste here and put it in space to make the Earth a better place.” King noted that “we use space technology all the time” via GPS and satellites, and that “every time a flight goes up, they get some type of information that can be used for something else.”
She continued: “So I wish people would do more due diligence. And then my question is, have y’all been to space? Go to space or go to Blue Origin and see what they do and then come back and say, ‘This is a terrible thing.'”
Sooooo … Bezos is polluting space — which he is, so is Musk, and the atmosphere too — and that’s a good thing? Also, everyone should just ‘go to space’ so they can Get With Gayle? (She doesn’t mean that like I mean it). GURL.
It makes me sad that the hope I put into the Overview Effect was naively misplaced. If you fly on a cock-rocket to space and back as a vapid narcissist, guess what you’ll land as? It turns out that in addition to jet fuel and a techbroligarch daddykins to put you in Sleb Space, you need at least an atom of humility for the effect to take hold.
Wealth really is wasted on the wealthy.
But then maybe I’m the dimwit for being surprised. After all, it’s literally the plot engine of Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 that rich people cause climate collapse then escape to corporation-controlled ‘Off-world’, while the not-rich live with the consequences and engineered-to-be-pretty women advertise their shit.
Tyrell totally asked for it.
Is it too much to ask that sci-fi feminism looks more like this? *sigh*
