Fwiw I had something akin to the overview effect when I attended a full solar eclipse. I thought I was prepared. I had read up on what to expect because I wanted to make the most of the experience for the kids. I wanted to make sure we observed the "shadow bands" (snake like shadows traversing across single colored surfaces that aren't always visible).
Everything did proceed as I expected (including the shadow bands), but when the eclipse was full, the earth went quiet. All the animals stopped and wondered (including the younger children who were boisterously playing seconds before the full effect).
As I stared up into the heavens, I had this deeply profound realization that our planet is traveling through space like all the other planets. The observation and experience of an eclipse made the abstract concept of space a reality and brought it closer to me in a way that just thinking (a lot) about space has never done.
I had much the same feelings. It is very hard to describe to someone who hasn't witnessed it. In a moment, my perception of the earth-moon-sun system transformed into something much more tangible than it had been before. Sort of like a shift from a 2D image to a 3D model. The sense of scale also became more tangible for me.
I had this effect laying on a rooftop as a teenager watching a meteor storm. The meteors were streaking in straight lines across/through the sky. The illusion of the "dome" of the sky was broken, and my senses were directly telling me that Earth is hurtling through space, and these things are zipping by it. It was an almost physical sense of mind expansion.
I guess this cannot have the same effect as what you described, because at the end of the day it is „just a video“ — but this brilliantly, brilliantly done time lapse recording of the night sky, where it’s EARTH that moves, and not the stars in the sky like in all those other videos, really made something click for me: https://youtu.be/1zJ9FnQXmJI
> As I stared up into the heavens, I had this deeply profound realization that our planet is traveling through space like all the other planets.
I genuinely don't understand what would be sad about that. The possibility of the next generation being able to explore at least one of those planets is very real.
i'm not sure i would call it _completely_ sad. i would say the sad was mixed in with awe. in an instant i felt both incredibly small and incredibly important. it was very surreal.
> It was among the strongest feelings of grief I have ever encountered. The contrast between the vicious coldness of space and the warm nurturing of Earth below filled me with overwhelming sadness. Every day, we are confronted with the knowledge of further destruction of Earth at our hands: the extinction of animal species, of flora and fauna . . . things that took five billion years to evolve, and suddenly we will never see them again because of the interference of mankind. It filled me with dread. My trip to space was supposed to be a celebration; instead, it felt like a funeral.
Very well written. Conveys his feelings quite well I find.
But he must also accept that life comes from death and the evolution (we should really call it a competition) he speaks off extinguished a large numbers of species. We might be one of them, and we're also victim of our own nature. We can try to resist it, but what will arise from our extinction ? Maybe something better, we have no special purpose nor duty.
No. We are the first species that can understand the consequences of our doings, and thus we are fully accountable. Saying that maybe something better will arise is wishful thinking.
I’d argue that people don’t actually comprehend consequence very well, and I sincerely doubt we do it much better than some other species. We have priorities which overwhelm our ability to reason well and self-serving tendencies which seem to exacerbate this problem.
We’re good at technology but woefully bad at many things.
I’m not aiming to argue here, especially not to suggest we shouldn’t be accountable. I suppose I think we give ourselves too much credit and other species not enough. We are objectively bad, especially collectively, at making good choices for the world we inhabit. It’s evidently a deficiency of our species.
Not really. As sentimental and time limited beings we don’t want to see things go extinct since we won’t be able to experience them again or be around to see what comes next. But in the larger picture we’re actually quite tame when it comes to extinction events. At least we are making an effort to limit the damage we’re doing. Space rocks and chemistry can’t do that. In the long run other species will evolve and maybe with luck we’ll have a hand in steering that evolution.
If we domesticate the majority of the planet nothing substantial will evolve without us controlling it. We have replaced a large percentage of wild organic biomass with us and our pets and cattle and farms.
'it's nothing compared to an asteroid impact' is just the elaboration of 'humans can't impact climate lol' or 'obviously you don't even care about the heat death of the universe'. While we shouldn't paralyse ourselves with existential guilt, evoking apocalyptic scenarios in a policy discussion is usually intended to derail discussion and prevent the emergence of consensus, ime.
Those are unscientific things. I didn't expect that what i said would be considered controversial. We live in extraordinary challenging times and people should steer away from sentimental fluff.
The fluff is the stuff only those who are aware of what's happening, of what happened (not just of the scientific things), can experience. Earth, we are trashing it, not up for debate, not anymore. Probably not trashing it as much as we could, but more than enough, which is obvious as a nose in a face. When confronted to the cold embrace of those who can't see and feel anything of the sort, some can only resort to their sentiments, the _sentimental stuff_ as you frame it, which can only follow the drama, never preceding it.
Just like arriving onto a crime scene and yelling at the crying survivors to shut up, without any consideration for the crime committed before, or any of its consequences.
To be human is to have emotions, being sentimental is one type of emotion you can feel. Especially if you feel like Earth is currently being overrun and destroyed by humanity at breakneck speeds. To feel emotional about this OK, as long as you also stay grounded and realistic.
But we should not hide our emotions, it's possible to be both emotional and rational.
Life isn't just about science, contrary to popular belief. In fact, you can do better science by making the mind-body connection to the unseen and unverified. Knowing that something exists outside of scientific understanding while grounding yourself to reality strengthens awareness and removes mental positions/projections which are barriers to real science.
That's technically wrong. Evolution is possible via expansion into new biomes, or by being able to use/exploit as-yet unmetabolized compounds, or through shifting inter-species relationships (e.g. entering (or leaving) symbiosis).
You could more generously interpret the comment as meaning "evolution would never have got us to where we are now - i.e. the existence of humanity - without there being substantial amounts of extinction along the way", which is harder to argue with.
The real question is whether there's a bright future for life on earth without our own species going extinct first, or even without being replaced by a species with a comparable level of cognitive ability and self-awareness (but hopefully better ability to avoid have such a devastating impact on so many other species).
Extinction is not limited to species. Species arent really a thing as one eventually transforms into another over near-infinite steps. Only genes/traits matter. Evolution is in fact impossible without the loss of traits between generations. Extinction of traits in favor of better ones is baked in to the very definition.
and yet almost every selection mechanism can only operate on phenotypic forms. The nature of a "species" is a shorthand for "sufficiently distinctive phenotype(s) that evolution will operate distinctly on this group of individuals", and in this sense, "species" do matter.
> Extinction of traits in favor of better ones is baked in to the very definition.
I don't know what definition you're talking about, but this also completely wrong. Evolution can generate new traits without old ones vanishing, and that can be true whether the new ones have higher or lower fitness than the old. Evolution is a change generation mechanism primarily; selection is a secondary mechanism and at various times and places, selection pressure can be extraordinarily weak, allowing a large diversity of traits to coexist.
Not sure why you're being so downvoted, must be people who haven't read Darwin or know about mass extinction from things like floods and meteorites - like that wiped out most dinosaurs.
If we don't get society under "control" - and not through the ideological-tyrannical effort underway globally currently - but through voluntarily taking action through adequate organization of listening to and following competent leadership (voting with our dollars, say by buying a Tesla vehicle, etc) - then we'll probably destroy most humans/life on Earth anyhow and whatever survives will be able to continue to evolve; and maybe, if any humans remain, they'll be wise enough to pass on and successfully counter tyrannical forces that exist within the human genome.
> voting with our dollars, say by buying a Tesla vehicle, etc
Buying a Tesla is not going to save the climate. Not even if everyone does it. We need transportation options that scale. That means density, bikes, buses, trains. It means anything except personal 2+ ton motor vehicles.
Your flippancy about mass extinction leads me to believe you aren't internalizing any of the suffering therein, or the loss.
Extinction happens, and, more broadly, death happens. However, we don't stand and deliver a eulogy composed of "idk, people die, no big deal" at a family member's funeral. Immense loss imparts grief.
What exactly did I say that made you think I don't take life seriously?
From all I can see is you incorrectly simplified what I said to a strawman argument of '"idk, people die, no big deal"'.
The reality is over the last 10+ years, without going into any details, I've been working towards and exponentially being closer and closer to helping humanity survive and change course as quickly and efficiently as possible; the current issue is a lack of adequate communication and organization, and properly designed tools, systems, and protocols - along with most major existing systems having been captured partly or fully by bad actors who seem hellbent on destabilizing society to prevent them from being held accountable, as well an attempt to gain full control over everything and everyone.
But being a realist is important if the odds are unknown, like how Elon is aiming for and where all signs point to him being successful creating a colony on Mars far sooner than later as a backup plan, backup site for humanity - when even 5 years ago that wasn't even on anyone's radar; seeing exponentials, as Elon has said, are very difficult for people to see - but that is where hope, along with automation and technology leveraged and utilized for good, in the right organization for the right purposes, is what can very quickly right the spaceship called Earth; unimaginably quickly - that even those who see and setup these systems following foundational principles will be surprised by their speed of development and uptake.
The post is about the experience of grief in response to internalizing the scale of earth and the negative human impact thereon. You responded to a post that implicitly shrugged off the negative impacts as inevitable or necessary with "I don't know why you're being downvoted," in essence, supporting the response.
I wasn't making a straw man, or simplifying, I was pointing out a lack of recognition that said grief is kind of the topic at hand.
Side note, saving humanity on Mars is cool and all, I'm totally for it, but in the event that actually happens, all of an entire planets lives and ecosystems will be destroyed. Exploration is aspirational, but, as a "backup plan," Mars is an incredibly bleak and sad future to rely on.
I gather that tyrannical forces are something our species will continue to deal with for our evolution.
I'd counter that tyrannical forces actually spurs humanity in the right direction. I say this because I have notice over the years that our species have been dealing with this problem since the birth of mankind. This is an observation, not a plug for tyranny.
Tyranny generally results in stagnation. It’s a bottleneck. All the power and decisions reduced to a single individual or group of individuals leaves no room for experimentation and growth. Progress becomes single threaded instead of parallel.
We've been in a yin-dark ages cycle, relatively slow moving, and will be moving into yang cycle - fast, exponential change. The technological innovation and distribution of technology via automation and capitalism has overlaid the relative stagnancy of this current cycle making it appear to not be a dark age, when clearly, with any critical analysis things are far worse than they could or should be.
Good thing then most of the riches in the near future available will be from space exploration and mining, that may then redirect the greedy to direct their resources to that endeavour?
Unfortunately sending every millionaire into space for them to realize this is an hostile environment is taking us closer to earth destruction. Sorry to be sour about this, but people could just teach themself astronomy and realize there is no place out there to welcome us when the earth will be on the verge to become unlivable. Even assuming a colony of a dozen women/men is ever established on the moon or Mars, they will die in a matter or months or years once the tether to earth is broken.
Reading this guy paid millions of $ to realize these basic facts fills me with overwhelming sadness too. Can his experience be of value for us? Given that he could have discovered what he just experienced by reading good books, I think this n+1 experience has zero value. Send human beings in space to perform scientific experiments. Period.
While I don’t disagree with your overall point, it’s worth noting that this essay is from the point of view of William Shatner, the actor who played the original Captain Kirk on the Star Trek TV series. I’m pretty sure he didn’t pay, and it sounds like he may have even been paid to go.
My impression is that Shatner’s participation was the classiest part of the trip, which is really saying something. The moment after the landing when Jeff Bezos popped a bottle of champagne in Shatner's face while he was trying to express his feelings about the experience really summed it all up for me.
There are about 608k UHNWI ($30+ million net worth) in the world, and I'm not sure if even $30 million is enough to have a space trip be a tourist trip that isn't too painful, and you have to be the kind of person that finds traveling to antartica appealing on top of that. So I'm not sure if many rich people could even afford or care to do this kind of thing anyway.
But on the other hand, the shit that most green types focus on like plastic straws & grocery bags, meat, low flow showers, space tourism and such is usually very small percentage of actual environmental damage, while paradoxically ignoring the actual big causes such as gasoline motors, industrial processes, coal power plants, high water crops such as almonds, water & $$$ subsidies for agriculture, non-regenerative agriculture and fighting great solutions like nuclear power and EV cars. An effective environmentalist would shame people for buying almonds and tell them to eat pistachios instead, take the train / bike everywhere and lobby to get more nuclear power plants installed.
I think it comes down to a combinations misplaced 'personal responsibility & morality' principle because you feel powerless, along with dislike of the rich wrapped in environmental concern, where people would cut off their nose to spite their face.
Setting aside the fact that this is William Shatner, and that he went for free- I would actually say millionaires/billionaires are probably the people who need to learn this lesson more than anybody.
> I love the mystery of the universe. I love all the questions that have come to us over thousands of years of exploration and hypotheses. Stars exploding years ago, their light traveling to us years later; black holes absorbing energy; satellites showing us entire galaxies in areas thought to be devoid of matter entirely… all of that has thrilled me for years… but when I looked in the opposite direction, into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.
this paragraph felt so profound, i sprang a few tears. hearing someone who has been through so much talk about death always gets to me.
At some point during the Covid years, I turned a mental page and decided that 'carpe diem' is my new motto.
Not in the traditional "bucket list" sense, until Covid I had a mental list of places I [thought I] wanted to go ... and experiences I [thought I] wanted to have. Daft stuff usually involving long-haul travel and/or hard to get to places.
I've ditched all of that.
Now it's about seeing people.
Mundane stuff (but not mundane during the Covid years!) such as taking our kids to see their grandparents. Taking time off work to visit my sister, who lives 1000mi away, and partially due to our rather complex relationship, I've not actually visited at any of her various homes for <hangs head in shame> just over 20 years. Encouraging/enabling my wife to make time to visit her parents, who also live a long way from us.
Life has a habit of sneaking up on you when you're not paying attention. Seize the day (while you can).
I like him, he seems to be a thoughtful person. I once listened to his album (which has a great cover of the song "Common People", that jokes about how rich people see the world [1]), in which he reflects on the death of his previous wife, who drowned in their pool, I found that quite touching as well
From an early age, My view of Shatner was heavily influenced by my mother's conviction that he murdered his wife. With the benefit of the internet since then, I've been able to investigate it further and found that the general consensus is that he wasn't present when she drowned in their pool and that the rumor that he killed her was started by a tabloid.
It's a little terrible, but it's still hard for me to escape that prejudice when watching him speak.
I don't know, I feel like I've read several "What celebrity is an asshole in real life" threads on Reddit and there seem to be plenty of stories about him being a complete alcoholic and asshole.
With all respect to Shatner (first canadian space tourist iirc) I dont take much from these narratives. A rich/famous/connected person does a thing that we all want to do but cannot afford, something that requires insane amounts of energy/pollution. Then they turn around and talk of the profound experience and how it has made them a better person. Big deal. The pubic good is limited to a few interviews and an article in variety. Next time go meditate at a monestary. These adventures require so much energy that they will only ever be availible to an elite nanopercent of the population. Enough with famous millionaires. They should have sent a poet.
Shatner is an actor famously known for staring in star trek which famously uses many of Shakespeare, the most well known bard, themes or outright plots. Further, he's stared in Shakespeare live productions. Even more, so he's made several spoken word lyrical albums.
Some of his words immediately after landing are poetic, “I hope I never recover, that I can maintain what I feel now.”
>>These adventures require so much energy that they will only ever be availible to an elite nanopercent of the population
The cost of launching to space has declined by orders of magnitude over the last 50 years and can be expected to decline by orders of magnitude more in the coming decades.
At one point, air travel was reserved for the richest of the rich, and today hundreds of millions of people fly every year. There's no reason the same couldn't happen with space flight.
One could say that air travel is much cheaper than it should be, if airlines or fossil fuel companies had to pull those greenhouse gases back out of the atmosphere. Getting to space is even more GHG-intensive, orders of magnitude more for orbital flight.
But Shatner is an actor? I'm not sure I agree with the implication that one type of artist is better to send than another but I do agree that maybe we should consider the frivolous waste of sending people to space for joyrides when the cost is so high.
> but I do agree that maybe we should consider the frivolous waste of sending people to space for joyrides when the cost is so high.
Commercial space operations are sending celebrities to space because its seen as a wothwhile promotional expense. “We“, except to the extent that refers to the owners of these operations, aren’t involved.
Have you looked i to how much government support is behind these projects? Setting aside any tax breaks, have you looked into the amount of restricted/classified tech involved? These ventures are not possible without massive government participation.
Where did the hydrogen come from? What powered the machine making the lox? Every watt of energy used by a tourist rocket could be better used reducing emissions elsewhere.
This was very well written, very insightful and humble. Considering he's usually an asshole to people IRL. But I guess he just comes off that way when he wants to convey his truth to people. Not completely foreign to myself, having discovered that I'm actually autistic in my late 30s. That explained a lot.
Anyways, this overview effect is something I always felt, even without going into space. I always felt we were wasting time with our squabbling over borders down here. I think most scifi geeks feel this way, and I don't mean star trek scifi, I mean Alastair Reynolds, Ian Banks and such.
But the problem is that the solution my mind always reaches for requires autocracy to fix the problems. So in a sense our problems are caused by our desire to be free.
Honestly I don't think most of us are more than trained apes, do we deserve to be free and pollute our earth? I don't want autocracy but I definitely want a lot stronger government to regulate our problems away. Globally.
I used to be in favor of a world government. But then I realized it could quite easily turn into an authoritarian system at some point, which due to the global scope would then be rather difficult to get out of.
I think this is a similar scenario that emerges in many aspects of life, and in nearly every aspect of life. It's also formalized in game theory.
In game theory there are exploitative solutions that focus on achieving the most optimal best case scenario (you picked rock 100 times in a row, I'm going to pick paper), and game theory optimal solutions that focus on achieving the least awful worst case scenario (you picked rock 100 times in a row, but I'm still going to pick my choice randomly because otherwise you could predict I'm going to pick paper, suddenly swap to scissors, and exploit me). When things are going optimally, the exploitative solution will dramatically outperform the optimal. But when things are going poorly, the optimal will even more dramatically outperform the exploitative.
So do you pick the scenario that will never do especially well but will also never do especially poorly? Or do you pick the one that can have extremes of achievement, but also extremes of failure? I suspect framed this way, few would ever pick the latter. But we humans have this annoying ability to convince ourselves of things like the failure scenario being impossible - even though history has endlessly repeated that not only is it possible, but it will happen, and generally far more quickly than one could ever imagine.
Government always turns into an authoritarian system when it is around long enough, and all major world governments are working toward a single Earth government. They will probably achieve it in the next 500 years if the trend of governmental consolidation continues as it has for the last thousand.
in a sense our problems are caused by our desire to be free
this is an important point. and the next step is the realization that, therefore, the only way to make the world better is through education, and motivating people to strive to be better themselves, to think about our future, to contribute to the advancement of society.
>> my mind always reaches for requires autocracy to fix the problems
Maybe try reaching for something else (such as technological solutions). We are currently on the brink of armageddon due to an autocratic regime. Centralization IRL necessarily leads to corruption over time. It's efficient but not robust.
It's a mistake to think technology just solves those problems. After all, it's only because of technology that a single autocratic regime can threaten everyone else with armageddon.
We absolute don't want a world government if its going to be the same ineffective and often harmful paradigm as one of the existing governments.
However, we also need to significantly revise the way that government and money work. They need to become high technologies. More than that, we need those technologies to be built around more encompassing and well-rounded ideologies.
These are huge challenges. But the alternative to working on them is to just accept the status quo.
> ...this overview effect is something I always felt, even without going into space.
Very interesting. Have you met anyone else IRL who shares the overview effect?
> ...autocracy to fix the problems.
Tchaikovsky's novel Children of Time explores how two different cultures try to tackle this problem. I won't spoil it for you. It's a notion I keep chewing on.
Not on a standard transatlantic flight. You are likely seeing the optical effect of the window on the horizon. Observing curvature of the earth at even 60,000 feet requires a very wide-angle view (the cabin), with a clear view of the sky. The earth is huge. https://simpleflying.com/concorde-earth-curvature/
Kerbal Space Program provided glimpses of this for me. Leaving the home planet and getting into orbit after hours of trial and error, then eventually heading towards the Mun and then other planets was a sort of virtual Overview Effect. I didn't have any attachment to the home planet (and the idea of much of the game is to leave in the first place) but leaving and then looking around while enjoying the first moment in orbit/arriving at a new planet was a big 'Woah!' in my gaming life.
> Author Frank White first coined the term in 1987: “There are no borders or boundaries on our planet except those that we create in our minds or through human behaviors. All the ideas and concepts that divide us when we are on the surface begin to fade from orbit and the moon. The result is a shift in worldview, and in identity.”
This alone is already a really good reason to keep going into space IMO. Even though Shatner says it depressed him, this kind of awareness is really what we need as a species. It might be depressing but that might cause us to finally actually do something about the problems we're causing.
Of course the environmental impact of sending even a token percentage on a trip to space would make our problems a lot worse so it's not going to happen...
By the way Shatner keeps calling it "Orbit" but that is not what he was in. I'm surprised this was not explained to him.
“He’d captured strange and distant worlds in greater detail than ever before. They were beautiful, magnificent, full of awe and wonder. But beneath their sublime surfaces, there was nothing. No love or hate. No light or dark. He could only see what was not there, and miss what was right in front of him.”
Had the same feeling after toying with google earth for 30 mins in VR, jumping cities and what not, after that time, I began to zoom out, out and out... looked around, and its really hard to put in words, but WS puts it extremely well.
War and all the idiocy down here are so..... when you realize how lucky we are and how fragile all of this really is...
Hopefully with the event of space tourism this will be a common theme and the experience will serve to educate and raise the bar for humanity.
We should all be crying... Practically nothing has happened of any consequence, aside from this pandemic, to have any actual impact on climate change. We need a WW2 level of change in our lives.
We need better public transportation and trains to reduce use of cars and airplanes, build nuclear plants, eat less meat and dairy..
Shatner went to space and was profoundly changed.
What do we need to do for us all to be profoundly changed?
> I learned later that I was not alone in this feeling. It is called the “Overview Effect” and is not uncommon among astronauts, including Yuri Gagarin, Michael Collins, Sally Ride, and many others. Essentially, when someone travels to space and views Earth from orbit, a sense of the planet’s fragility takes hold in an ineffable, instinctive manner. Author Frank White first coined the term in 1987: “There are no borders or boundaries on our planet except those that we create in our minds or through human behaviors. All the ideas and concepts that divide us when we are on the surface begin to fade from orbit and the moon. The result is a shift in worldview, and in identity.”
> You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”
I experienced this playing freeorion while listening to Carbon Based Lifeforms as a kid.
A few ambient tracks from CBL made me tear up: they used field recordings of the world (birds, children, trees, cities), woven through low frequency drones and rifts. It would sort of create a distance between the recording samples, and then, through sound, you zoom out, glide, become ephemeral in the face of the planet, like a cloud.
Freeorion primed my mind to think in some detail about a reduced form of state-level strategy (as 4x games tend to do). I realized that the first 10 rounds were highly predictive of success for the next 100 rounds, and so forth, so I understood that my actions could have the same non-linearity and influence (and the predictive power of that influence was based on my model of the world, which is easy in a 4x game but difficult in meatspace).
Combined, I saw in detail the cybernetic flows around the world… i was a world systems thinker. it’s taken some work not to pop my head out of frustration.
Now that part of me is applied to more localized systems and small things: seeds around me that grow via the world into things i may never witness directly, and putting out small fires around me that I hope to never witness as big fires. Memes, basically (or anti-memetic memes? Not so sure).
> [Zaphod] had seen the whole universe stretching to infinity around him—everything. And with it had come the clear and extraordinary knowledge that he was the most important thing in it.
Missing some important context on that one lol. The "real" version of that device drives people crazy with their insignificance. The one Zaphod goes into is in a simulation designed for him, where he really is the most important thing.
Ironically, this seems to mostly describe reality as I see it, with Blue Origin being part of a manufactured reality designed to appease the ego and manchild personality of Jeff Bezos.
Shatner is also rich and famous (and known for his arrogance) but not to the degree that he can make governments fight for his amusement the way Bezos can. Shatner is still grounded enough to be capable of seeing reality, and being transformed by it, whereas Jeff Bezos can only see the hall of mirrors he's constructed around himself.
Even then I never got the nagging feeling out of my head that Zaphod would have had the same reaction in the real device. That's why it was even remotely believable at all.
They're opposites: one's being far removed from humans, one's seeing too much of them at once. Try building a 50k-capacity orbital hotel for instagram tourists, and see what happens to this #OverviewEffect.
> They're opposites: one's being far removed from humans, one's seeing too much of them at once.
I get your point. What i meant was, the internet empowering mankind to communicate in 'real-time', transparent to man made concepts like borders and countries. I was hoping that this 'wormhole' would strengthen the sense of a global community.
Social media has caused a lot of people to shift their world views, and re-examine their identities. Not necessarily in ways that benefit themselves or society.
The insinuation/assumption that social media somehow had an obvious negative effect on people's beliefs world wide compared to the past. A statement in the form of a post on HN social media and an often propagated popular opinion on other social media. An opinion thay I completely disagree with, discussed/questioned on this same social media. Freely.
This make me wonder if flat-earth and other limiting cosmological views are mental shields against the realization that nothing matters except our peculiar existence.
generally limited world views regardless of the facts are a mental shield of people afraid of something. the problem is, the fear is so deep beneath the crust of hatred and other negative emotions that getting to it and working with it is often practically impossible
I assume it’s sarcasm, but personally I’m a bit disappointed he hasn’t gone complete Lex Luthor yet. If we’re going to have billionaires in space we might as well get an origin story out of it.
He basically went up an untethered elevator and saw a very limited view of Earth. He did not orbit Earth and did not see or experience the same things as the others.
Thank you for pointing that out. I still feel like it's not the same thing that people who orbit experience. Of course some people think differently, and I'm sure Bezos and Shatner think very differently. Of course who I am to speak; the highest I've been is in an airliner (so far).
There is a documentary about a female astronaut that experienced similar overwhelming emotions looking back at earth; the blue marble or the blue dot.
I don’t think her emotions were grief, but the overwhelming feeling for our species and that we’re all on this planet together. I remember it being beautifully filmed.
Seeing it from the outside let him apprehend what non-existence could be. He should reinterpret it not as a problem to be solved or exist relative to, but as a universal and existentially necessary mandate to thrive. There is no alternative.
You don't need to go to the moon to feel this way these days, although I'm sure the vantage point helps.
With the euphoria of the 60's now merely a tiny dot in our societal rear view mirror, crowded out by decades of bad news, I think people are on a certain level aware of this. We distract ourselves to avoid contemplating it too deeply.
With an abundance of such distractions, people don't take time to think about the future of our species and planet as we know it, decades and centuries from now. It's less painful to live in the moment and worry about small, human problems.
when I looked into space, there was no mystery, no majestic awe to behold . . . all I saw was death.
Increasingly I feel this way too. I, as a human, was built for this earth, of it. There's nothing good out there for me. This is my home.
Euphoria of the 60s? In the US at least, I’d suggest that too was a distraction from the horror of what was going on at that time. You know, your friends getting taken to a jungle halfway across the world to come back with no legs, broken psyches, and a society that had turned its back on them.
This is the correct take. Hippies, Flower Power, Love-Ins and so on cannot be properly understood without the context of the Vietnam War and the draft.
As with all protests, "hippie" culture was coopted and commercialized. Enabling another generation of conformists to LARP as rebels, for a price. This time via appropriated totems like blue jeans and stadium rock.
Another predictable backlash, where the agitators are mocked and while their cultural stylings are assimilated.
It's not like things changed after... iraq, iraq 2, afghanistan, syria and many others... dead kids from all over US and europe losing their lives for some rich people to get richer. Somehow occupying sovereign countries and killing kids is a bad thing only when putin does it.
And the ones sent to iraq wanted to be there... and die there? Or to afghanistan?
Can't afford US college? Go to army! Can't afford a doctor? Army will fix you up! Join, a few peaceful years at a few bases, you'll have a college degree, you'll make mama proud, just sign here, you're 18 already, you can't buy beer yet, but you can join the army!
Add some "fighting for US freedom" propaganda, and end up as a homeless disabled veteran after the war.
We are the baddies. I live in a small EU country, and have soldiers in syria now.
We could atleast have pulled them back home, before pointing a finger at putin, but we didn't even do that (and they'd all fit in a minibus).
We're currently destroying our own economies because someone else is doing something that we've been doing for years now. Technically we deserve being cold and maybe some kind of a revolution, because we've deserved it for destroying countries all around the world, but I'd prefer things to stop and normalize before we all freeze to death here.
Especially as someone from a small EU country, this seems completely different to me, unless living in a Putin puppet state is an acceptable alternative to you.
Invading other countries is bad (including when the EU does it).
Invading and massacring Ukraine is bad.
Both can be true at the same time. And only because we haven’t eliminated the first doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fight the second.
But we don't even plan to eliminate the first. How can we point the finger at putin, if we're doing the same as him? We're literally standing on a pile of middle-eastern bodies (let's not forget why the middle eastern crisis even started), and screaming "...but putin!".
Look at the french for example... they have literally their embassies burning now, because people want their army out of their sovereign country, and the media sits quiet, mentioning maybe "some protests". The EU is threathening Hungary for wanting to buy russian gas, while sitting quiet about France.
Why should putin have to stop, if we don't? And if we care for peoples lives and sovereign countries, why don't we care about the ones we're destroying right now?
>Somehow occupying sovereign countries and killing kids is a bad thing only when putin does it.
If you don't see a difference between a war where soldiers that rape and pillage are criminals in their own country, where questionable decisions that caused civilian suffering are widely condemned, a war that saw very large domestic movement against it as it unfolded and another one where rape, torture, slavery, ethnic genocide and killing/exploiting of innocent people is an openly admitted state policy with the worst offenders getting decorated for it, with the majority of the population not only in support, but craving blood, more torture and use of nuclear weapons. I have no words to convince you. I can only hope that you will reflect on this in future.
> If you don't see a difference between a war where soldiers that rape and pillage are criminals in their own country
All of those are claims that are made by the very ones who lied 8 years about nonexistent WMDs.
Moreover, the Ukrainian minister who made those lies up was fired by the Ukrainian government because even the govt. found it way too extreme. She is now busy backstabbing her former employers by saying that "They made me lie that way"...
> All of those are claims that are made by the very ones who lied 8 years about nonexistent WMDs.
Which individuals are those? Can you name them?
Re “the Ukrainian minister who made those lies up,” I’d also like a name for that. Russian atrocities have been reported broadly across many outlets, and even Russian media is clamoring that it’s not brutal enough.
All the mainstream media said iraq has WMDs... it was basically on every european and american tv channel in preparation for the war. Once before that, we heard that iraqi soldiers killed babies... that was a "fun" one too...
The same media also reported of the "Ghost of kiyev".. so yeah... surely we must believe them "now".
> Re “the Ukrainian minister who made those lies up,” I’d also like a name for that. Russian atrocities have been reported broadly across many outlets, and even Russian media is clamoring that it’s not brutal enough.
> Lawmaker Pavlo Frolov said Ms. Denisova was also accused of making insensitive and unverifiable statements about alleged Russian sex crimes and spending too much time in Western Europe during the invasion.
> “The unclear focus of the Ombudsman's media work on the numerous details of ‘sexual crimes committed in an unnatural way’ and ‘rape of children’ in the occupied territories that could not be confirmed by evidence, only harmed Ukraine,” Mr. Frolov said in a Facebook post.
Ah yes the spooky “mainstream media” which seems always to somehow say the opposite of what you believe. This is not an addressable concern to be honest. It’s like complaining about “the elites.” Just needs to be more specific.
Also your evidence of Ukraine lying about war crimes is the firing of a woman who lied about war crimes? Sure, people lie, but then that obviously prompts the question of why haven’t all the other people who have been discussing Russian crimes been fired as well (since, as you’re implying, the crimes are fake?)
> Ah yes the spooky “mainstream media” which seems always to somehow say the opposite of what you believe
That 'spooky' mainstream media lied about babies in incubators in Iraq, then nonexistent WMDs, then about freedom-loving Libyan rebels, then freedom-loving Syrian rebels, and now they are telling other things in the latest foreign policy project.
Why the hell are you people even giving them any credibility, leaving aside actually believing them? Where does the buck stop?
The corporate media not lying about matters that do not touch the economy, military or the foreign policy does NOT make them trustworthy in other matters.
> why haven’t all the other people who have been discussing Russian crimes
She was not fired for 'discussing'. She was fired for an outrageous lie that she produced as the person responsible for the official position of the government.
> Also your evidence of Ukraine lying about war crimes is the firing of a woman who lied about war crimes?
Amazing how you contort actual evidence of lying by an administration from the highest levels to a proof of it being honest.
Mental gymnastics. Apparently that's what enables you people to believe your establishments.
It's really silly to assume that everyone who disagrees with you is just suckling from "the mainstream media" while you are blessed with the special information sources that provide you The Truth. Who said I'm giving the media any credibility?
> She was not fired for...
This is a non sequitur so I don't really know what to say here. Try re-reading what I had said.
> Amazing how you contort...
Well it wasn't the highest levels lol. It was a few rungs down from the highest level, and the highest level then held that lower level responsible for its misbehavior. That's exactly what you'd expect to see from an institution holding itself to a high bar.
I'm saying that mainstream media has an agenda and is showing us propaganda.
The mainstream media told us about dead babies in iraq, told us about WMDs and told us about nazis in ukraine ( https://i.imgur.com/mRAaOo0.jpg ). Then the war started, and suddenly nazis are a conspiracy theory.
It's a war, shit happens, media focuses on every dead civilian who died because of russians, and ignores all the dead civilians killed by american bombs, even at weddings in countries US is not even at war with, and it ignores all the dead civilians killed by ukranians, and it ignores all the dead civilians killed by israelis, etc.
No one is saying the Nazis thing is “a conspiracy theory.” They’re saying they don’t care. There are neo-nazi elements in every country’s military, especially in Europe. That doesn’t mean Nazis are okay, nor does it mean all of those countries which have those elements are illegitimate and no longer have a right to self-defense.
This point is never raised as an effort to get said Nazis out of combat/prevalence (in which case, sure, let’s do it). It’s just used to suggest we shouldn’t be supporting a democratic ally who got invaded by an autocratic warlord with imperial motives.
There was a great article a few years ago about the huge Neo-Nazi element in the German military. It’s a huge problem. It’s bad. Does this mean we need to allow Russia to roll tanks into Berlin and put up a wall again? That’s why you’re getting dismissed so readily that you think it’s because people believe it’s a “conspiracy theory.” It’s a completely meaningless point. It has no bearing on the situation whatsoever.
> No one is saying the Nazis thing is “a conspiracy theory.” They’re saying they don’t care. There are neo-nazi elements in every country’s military, especially in Europe
These are not 'Neonazi elements'. They are actual Nazi brigades comprised of actual nazis who know their theory, who think that they are ubermensch and everyone else either should be enslaved or killed. They are not your average skinhead occasionally attacking immigrants.
And yeah, the media is now past saying that Nazis are a conspiracy theory - that was until a few months ago. Because the Nazis were unrepentant in their Nazism, now the media is whitewashing them.
Yes, they are neo-Nazi elements. Given that the Nazi political party no longer exists, anyone who adheres to their ideology is described as a neo-Nazi. It has nothing to do with whether they "know their theory," and I'm a bit confused as to what you think neo-Nazis believe if thinking you're ubermensch makes you an actual Nazi. All neo-Nazis believe those things - that's what it means to be a neo-Nazi!
I'd be curious for any source where any outlet with a readership above, say 1MM people, said that neo-Nazi battalions don't exist and that it's a conspiracy theory. Surely if "the mainstream media" was all about this position, you'll be able to find a source? I just looked and I couldn't find even one.
And before you go ahead and trick yourself in this search for sources: there are conspiracy theories that the upper echelons of Ukraine's national government is comprised of neo-Nazis. This is referred to as a conspiracy theory because it is.
Entire mainstream corporate media, foremost Angloamerican, current US State Dept., CIA, other 3-letter agency top officials, who were the mid-level foot soldiers implementing the lies, the ex top officials of those agencies, who are retired and who are now called 'the intelligence community' now, making 6 figures while working in private think tanks who manufacture and sell those lies, all the privately-owned satellite media with Angloamerican and local neoliberal shareholders, the entire 2003 shtick.
> Russian atrocities have been reported broadly across many outlets
They haven't been. BBC, Le Monde or Spiegel are not 'broad, different outlets'. They have been lying about everything along with their big daddy since a long time, including the nonexistent WMDs.
There isn't anything as such in Indian, Indonesian, South American, Vietnamese, Egyptian or South African media. That's broad. Not the outlets who are owned by the same lot.
The below article bluntly demonstrates the falsity of the existence of 'free media' in the capitalist West.
India at the UN condemned “war crimes in Bucha,” which they stopped short of accusing their strategic partner of, but obviously it wasn’t Ukrainian armed forces walking through Bucha executing civilians, right?
Seems odd to lament the lack of truly free media in the west and then believe even half a word out of Russia’s mouth.
Also FYI, “intelligence community” does not refer to retired government people on the media circuit. It refers to the actual intelligence agencies themselves.
Similar news were made, and similar condemnations were issued at the UN for a lot of other 'war crimes' that turned out to be nonexistent.
> then believe even half a word out of Russia’s mouth.
That's your own personal bias - 'either/or'. There are many other sources than 'Russia'. The world is not bipolar like in Anglosphere.
> Also FYI, “intelligence community” does not refer to retired government people on the media circuit
No. 'The intelligence community' as a term is used to include the retired personas now working in think tanks, in order to give them authority. Those people's papers from think tanks cant be referenced or cited as belonging to actual intelligence agencies after they retired. But if you say 'intelligence community', you can cite them all you want...
What claims? I'm in a country where 4 million refugees came(domestic population of 36mln). When they talk of the atrocities, when they show you videos of their own killed, raped/tortured neighbors they find in their homes, when they show you videos taken on their cellphones of piles of naked female bodies drenched in gas, with few tires thrown on top and lit on Russian forces escape routes literaly right after they left. Videos they took while in panic mode, fight g with themselves wanting to leave this horrible scenes ASAP, but they make those videos because they want the world to see the truth. Then when you see videos taken of things found by incoming soldiers. Holes in the ground with hundreds of civilian people with their hands tied and bullet in the back of their head. I work with AI I know how deep fakes look like. Those are not deep fakes. Those are all cellphone videos taken from hand, with audio, showing everything including the person taking it and local landmarks.
Then you have one of the most notorious units where individual torturers and tormentors identified by name, this unit gets decorated by Putin. At the same time you have Russian gov-controlled media openly calling for killing every Ukrainian and every commentary cheering them.
When all this happens and some people say "this is same lies as iraqi wmd". They are either trolls, shills or they live life so sheltered that they never had to discover what Russian soldiers do in areas they enter.
Here in Poland we had Russians here few times at war time and no one has to convince us what they do. I'm old enough to have had WW2 survives come to my primary school and give us first hand accounts. Back then those that escaped concentration camps and PL in general were telling people in the West what was going on. They too were disbelieved.
BTW, this is not the "first time in modern time" they do it. They did the same thing in Chechnya and Syria. The difference is that today everyone has a high quality video recorder in their pocket and communication with the entire world so all their atrocities are plain to see to everyone.
Here is a key difference between Russia and the US/Europe. When Iraq war is bad, thousands of people can march across American/European cities without a fear of getting jailed. People can run for elections hammering their opponents on voting for a monstrous war (Obama trounced Hillary and others) and win. And that makes a difference (Syria - US/Europe didn't go there; in fact, the world afterwards wished that the US had gone to fight against Assad to prevent further tragedies).
Vs what is happening in Russia? I heard demonstrators and political opponents are jailed. Even an old lady, who survived the siege of Leningrad and dared protest against Putin, was taken away by the police. That is what makes US regime much much better than Putin's.
Closing bank accounts is bad. Jailing an old woman in her 80's? That's whole another level. No government is perfect but there are shades of bad and you can see for yourself where a government falls on that spectrum.
He has taken on the unbearable burden of humanity onto his shoulders. Existensial dread is real and nothing to mess around with. Sounds like he needs a psychologist ASAP. Not that he is wrong.
Expanding our species into space is a must. Our planet has a finite life span. The sooner we expand the sooner we can evolve and adapt to life in space. There are those against any shape or form of progress that say we should first solve every issue here on earth. One way to solve many issues is to go out there. Think resources, minerals, rare earths, and living space. No to mention the levels of economic development.
I watched it live. It was uncomfortable and heartbreaking. William had a very profound experience and he wanted to explain it and thank Jeff. Jeff could not even focus long enough to let William get a few sentences out. Jeff’ s “team” (I think led by his significant other) was essentially throwing a frat party behind him - screaming ”whooo” and drinking/spraying champagne. It was sad.
I suspect Bezos did want to hear it, but the whole emotional-mix – dominated for Bezos by his other-associates hooting-and-hollering – limited his ability to do so in the moment.
Shatner, whose career & big personality I love, is probably used to being listened to. He's later-in-life than Bezos and from a career of storytelling & emotion. In that situation, I'd have rather heard Shatner's immediate thoughts, than the generic euphoria of one more successful mission.
But I still don't think Bezos wronged Shatner with his divided attention.
Bezos has already had the same experience. Bezos is at a earlier stage-of-life, & comes from a career of ruthless accounting & physics efficiencies. While most space-fans would be sufficiently star-struck to give Shatner the kind of focused attention that a celebrity usually gets, Bezos's own celebrity, fame, & space-experience – not to mention his personal & professional relationships to all the others there – put him far past that.
Imagine that you are in Bezos situation, you have 20 people super excited about what was just achieved (including yourself). You have one person that is reacting in a deeply philosophical way. Everyone knows that you are the leader and you set the tone. Do you want to change the tone at that moment to a deeply philosophical (and slightly non-positive) one? Being the leader is not as easy as many think.
I suspect the deep philosophical discussion did happen, but perhaps at a more appropriate time.
The answer is yes. Definitely yes. When you're the leader, it's not just about you and how you feel. It's about everyone. It's about fully understanding the gravity of the enterprise you're all pursuing and how the experience might affect participants in different ways.
Traveling to space isn't the same as canyon rafting or bungee jumping. It's not just "exciting", it elicits a wide range of profound experiences and deep emotions. And all of them are just as valid and should be affirmed. If you are organizing and leading people into space, you have to be fully aware as well as humble.
Over the past decades, Bezos spend mountains of energy expounding the importance of space travel, including its philosophical aspects. Bezos response to Shatner makes all of that questionable. It leaves one speculating whether or not he sees commercial space travel as anything else then another thrill ride that might add to the profit margins of his companies.
Maybe he did have a deeper discussion in private. But given Bezos' public image and demeanour, I wouldn't assume he fully understood the importance of that moment before the camera's in hindsight.
That's such a very narrow perspective, that Bezos was just modeling to be a great leader. Bezos showed himself to be a really poor leader in fact, modeling exactly the wrong behavior.
Shatner was on that trip as a prop. Most famous space captain going to space for real! Bezos had the opportunity to curb that, and let some humanity seep back into what was basically just a PR stunt.
More damning than that, Bezos was rude to an elderly man, which is rude full stop, no matter the setting.
If Bezos's staff really needed the celebration so much, have their boss come down to their level to do the hooting-and-hollering, and couldn't wait a whole two minutes, they are guilty for the same reasons that Bezos was.
That is a great perspective. I thought at the time that Shatner was being a bit of a drama queen for the cameras, making it about himself and his own experience. This piece made me realize I judged incorrectly. The others seemed genuinely happy, perhaps having processed the philosophical stuff more readily or perhaps it hadn't hit them yet. There in the middle was Bezos trying to keep things positive. Tough job when the eyes of the world are upon you.
It is more of an analysis of probabilities. I suspect that this was the case but of course I don't know. What probability would you assign to Bezos being seen as the leader/setting the tone in this situation?
I'm rejecting the premise indicated by your forward slash, that being a team leader and setting an emotional tone for everyone involved are synonymous.
The rest of the team had a sharp constrast to Shatner in their style of celebration, so which group wasn't following their leader's tone properly? And the group that was celebrating loudly was doing so independent of Bezos, but somehow required him to join in soon and give their tone his affirmation? It's an absurd idea. It makes no sense after just a bit of thought.
>> I'm rejecting the premise indicated by your forward slash, that being a team leader and setting an emotional tone for everyone involved are synonymous.
Yes. I reject that premise as well.
>> The rest of the team had a sharp constrast to Shatner in their style of celebration, so which group wasn't following their leader's tone properly? And the group that was celebrating loudly was doing so independent of Bezos, but somehow required him to join in soon and give their tone his affirmation? It's an absurd idea. It makes no sense after just a bit of thought.
I think that if Bezos would have settled into a lengthy quiet and introspective discussion with Shatner at the time, it would have changed the overall tone of the group (or at least could have). Of course, I don't know for sure, but I have observed human behaviour in the past.
> Everyone knows that you are the leader and you set the tone. Do you want to change the tone at that moment to a deeply philosophical (and slightly non-positive) one? Being the leader is not as easy as many think.
This reflects on Bezos and the company that he kept -- either they are too shallow to understand the depth of what they had done, or too weak to make the uncomfortable choice of discussing it.
Though no one notices, because they are revered for what often comes easy to them, accomplished actors are by and large humble even though the opposite is often believed. Besides inconceivable amounts of money, the one common defining quality among billionaires is narcissism, shorthand for lack of empathy, self-importance, entitlement, need for constant admiration, fear of criticism, etc.
Wow, at the beginning I was thinking 'you can't really tell if he's listening or not, looking at him through sunglasses, and to be fair I would struggle to hear/pay attention over all that in thale background' - but by the end... Yeah it's very clear where he wants to be!
I watched it live and remember distinctly how my mouth dropped to the floor.
He was pouring his heart out to the man but you could tell that he just didn't want be there. The least he could've done is pretend to show an interest but he couldn't even do that.
The only thing that sucks is that all this had to be videotaped. Has noone else been pulled in multiple directions at a party, its an uncomfortable situation kind of like having high-guy telling you all his mindblowing theories he just thought of and your like I'm not drunk yet.
Haha, it's a funny video in exactly the way you say: it's so Seinfeld-relatable. He's trying to make sure everyone is acknowledged and there's no way to do it in that instant comfortably. The best you can do is ack each thing and then come to it when you can come to it.
After reading the article, and understanding what he was trying to articulate this is even more uncomfortable. Shatner was dealing with his whole worldview changing.
Well, maybe he should have sponsored a loved one (or even just a random person) to go instead. Most people would probably be filled with wonder and joy.
Oh my God, reading this with the narrative interspersed with the recalled thoughts of this 90(?)-year-old traveling to space on essentially the world’s first tourist rocket was hilarious. If you’re like me and you often skip the link and go straight to the comments, you owe it to yourself to read the piece.
Everything did proceed as I expected (including the shadow bands), but when the eclipse was full, the earth went quiet. All the animals stopped and wondered (including the younger children who were boisterously playing seconds before the full effect).
As I stared up into the heavens, I had this deeply profound realization that our planet is traveling through space like all the other planets. The observation and experience of an eclipse made the abstract concept of space a reality and brought it closer to me in a way that just thinking (a lot) about space has never done.