What does it mean to personally view the Earth from space? The space philosopher and author Frank White spent his career asking this question and coined "the overview effect" to describe it in his 1987 book of the same name. True, he has never been to space, but he did speak with twenty-nine astronauts to understand how they felt about first seeing the great blue orb of Earth floating in the void.

They describe a total cognitive shift: a deep sense of awe, interconnectedness and appreciation sets in. Astronauts see our planet’s fragility and feel connected to Earth like never before. Borders dissolve, and a deep appreciation for humanity and nature as a whole arrives, along with that big perennial question, Why can’t we all just get along?

The overview effect has been explored in great literary depth and detail since White’s book, most recently in the 2024 Booker prize-winning novel Orbital by English writer Samantha Harvey. A slim read, the book follows six astronauts on the international space station: one American, one Japanese, one British, one Italian and two Russians. Over the course of twenty-four hours they see sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets, witness a typhoon form over the Pacific that devastates the Phillipines, and experiment on mice to study the effects of weightlessness on their skinny little bodies. They gaze at Mother Earth, and choose to reject terrestrial politics by sharing their nationally assigned toilets with each other. Differences are transcended. Even at night, Harvey writes, “there’s only one man-made border in the whole of the world; a long trail of light between Pakistan and India. That’s all civilization has to show for its divisions, and by day even that has gone.”

You get the idea. From space, our various wars, genocides, internecine conflicts and disgraces—bar the partition of India—fade into insignificance. The overview takes hold. Many have suggested the world would be a better place if we sent politicians to space, and it’s true that most astronauts do become activists and humanitarians when they retire their spacesuits. They feel compelled to be this way, to work to solve global problems and become good stewards of the Earth. To this end, researchers and startups like SpaceVR are using virtual reality to try and simulate the kind of awe that the overview effect induces, and some hope VR will eventually be able to elicit it successfully. White himself believes that experiencing the overview effect is “a human right” that we should all be able to experience, but the tech isn’t there yet, and there’s no guarantee it ever will be. For now, it’s reserved for the astronauts and the super-rich.

This is the problem with the overview effect. As magical as it is, access to it is granted via professional space travel or space tourism—and both are funded by the kind of extractive exploitation of people and resources that is destroying our environment. Just one lift-off burns the fuel that over a million cars will use in a year. Its power to surface perspectives that might make us a better behaved species is compromised.

Despite the unattainability of the overview effect, our limited human minds can extrapolate some. In 2023 White wrote on the Human Space Program blog that, although he still doesn’t understand the effect completely, he can narrow it down to three words: truth, love and identity. Truth because our earth-bound senses don’t tell us we are living on a rock that’s moving through a boundless universe, love because of those overwhelming feelings of love towards mother earth, and identity because with this comes the realization that your true identity as a human isn’t with a home town or a city or country—it’s with the whole planet.

He claims that anyone who has experienced love, truth or identity can by virtue understand how the overview effect feels. But love, truth and identity are also things that cause conflict and separation. We fight over our identities, our loves and our versions of truth. Isn’t that what borders are about: competing truths about who a piece of land belongs to? Isn’t that why algorithms that make the truth so difficult to locate are so scary?

The missing ingredient is distance. On earth, and especially online, we don’t have the distance to see through the mess, the perspective that sees that our belonging to Earth trumps every other thing. We have bills to pay and battles to fight down here. So yes, I’m sure going to space does fundamentally change a person’s worldview. I’m sure that if all 8 billion of us went, or even if we just sent the billionaires, politicians and oil execs, we’d develop a deeper sense of planetary stewardship and take better care of our own as a species. As White puts it: “it’s a physical reality that leads to a philosophical reality.” But it’s simply not an option for us.

VR will always fall short because even if it feels real, we know it’s not. And while space tourism is booming for celebs and the stupidly rich (2025 was the year Katy Perry “put the ‘ass’ in astronaut,” remember?), it’s having a disproportionate effect on ozone erosion. Experts have suggested thirty years of ozone damage reduction could be undone with just ten years of a large space travel industry.

Do we need the overview effect? Plenty of us wield earth-saving mindsets without having ever gone to space, so there must be ways to deepen our love and respect for nature and humanity that don’t involve rocket fuel. Ego death is one way; reading great literature is another. Reading a good work of fiction equips you to better connect to other humans and the world at large, and I felt that way reading Orbital. But, alas, even literature lacks distance. On a video of Harvey’s Booker Prize acceptance speech, one comment reads: “I really like to read. But I don’t know if I will be able to read the book of this year’s winner because there is a war in my country.” For us humans, nothing exists in a vacuum—not even the view from space.