NASA Astronaut Who Spent 178 Days Watching Earth From Space Says Humanity Is ‘Living a Lie'

On July 12, 2011, astronaut Ron Garan floated outside the International Space Station (ISS)’s airlock to mark the last and the most historic spacewalk in NASA's 30-year space shuttle program. But in all those moments when he was inside the station, looking outside the window of his spacecraft, he couldn’t deny but become more and more fascinated at the surreal beauty he witnessed. After spending 178 days beholding the shimmer and sparkle of the celestial realm, when he finally returned home to Earth, he realized that something had changed forever, within him. In an interview with Big Think, Garan shared how living in space drastically shifted his perspective on life, the universe, and the world. “We’re living a lie,” he stated.

Garan is a former F-16 fighter pilot, a retired NASA astronaut, and the author of the book Floating in Darkness. With a panoply of honorable awards from NASA on his shelf, Garan has now moved on to deliver keynote speeches across the world to inspire humans to achieve their true potential and solve critical problems. But it all started while he was floating in the dark abyss of space. “When we see our planet from the perspective of space, certain things become undeniably clear,” he said in the interview. He explained that while humans are doing their best to wrangle with issues like global warming, deforestation, and biodiversity loss, they’re dealing with them erroneously. 

While scientists take these as “standalone issues,” they are, in actual, “symptoms of the underlying root problem,” the astronaut said and added, “And the problem is that we don’t see ourselves as ‘planetary.’” He recalled how he witnessed an “unbelievable beauty” and an “iridescent biosphere teeming with life” when he looked out of the window of the ISS. "I saw the paparazzi-like flashes of lightning storms, I saw dancing curtains of auroras that seemed so close, it was as if we could reach out and touch them. And I saw the unbelievable thinness of our planet’s atmosphere. At that moment, I was hit with the sobering realization that that paper-thin layer keeps every living thing on our planet alive," he noted

“I didn't see an economy, but since our human-made systems treat everything including the very life-support systems of our planet as the subsidiary of the global economy, it's obvious from the vantage point of space that we're living a lie,” Garan added. He asserted that humans need to start shifting their order of thinking in terms of “economy, society, planet” to “planet, society, economy.” Garan reflected that humans these days are swimming in a slew of darkness as they haven't grasped the “right perspective” to look at things. 

Taking the metaphor of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” he noted that humans don’t usually see the “whole picture,” which causes the entire civilization to “pay a high price.” What shifted his own perspective so dramatically was something called the “Overview Effect” that many astronauts experience when they return from space. This effect, he said, unfolds when an astronaut witnesses planet Earth "hanging in the blackness of space" and “there's this light bulb that pops up where they realize how interconnected and interdependent we all are.” 

One of the first examples of this effect was observed in a photograph called “Earthrise” in which astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission snapped in color. He also brought in the example of “dolly zoom,” a term he borrowed from cinematography. Dolly zoom is a technique wherein the camera is rolled back or “dollied back” at the same rate as the lens is zoomed in, to give altitude to a scene. While the foreground stays the same, the background stretches. The same idea, he said, applies to the challenges humans face on Earth. 

He explained that if “we zoom out to the widest geographical area we possibly can” while not zooming out on the important earthly details, it can lead humans into an incredibly powerful position to solve major problems. The astronaut mentioned that seeing life from an “orbital perspective” helped him realize that humans are inextricably linked to each other. “We are not from the universe. We are the universe becoming conscious of itself."