There are no poets in space. Of the 600 or so humans who have gazed on the Earth from orbit, virtually all have been military personnel, engineers, doctors or scientists. All are highly trained and carefully selected to remain rational disciplined professionals under the most stressful conditions - essentially the least qualified cohort to indulge in the transcendental experience of seeing our home from space. However even the most hardened test pilots have been afflicted with an unexpected epiphany.
Edgar Mitchell was the sixth man to walk in the moon and was so moved by gazing at Earth on the way home that he resigned from NASA and founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences - a California retreat center “devoted to exploring psychic phenomena and the role of consciousness in the cosmos.” Their areas of interest include ESP, energy healing from a distance, psychokinesis and other freaky shit. It seems joining an ashram is an occupational hazard of space travel.
Mitchell was an unlikely pinko. A Navy pilot for fourteen years before joining NASA, he was a member of a heavy attack squadron flying fighter bombers from aircraft carriers during the Korean War. A career cold warrior like many of his colleagues, he earned a PhD from MIT, was awarded a distinguished service medal from the US Navy and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Standing on the moon in 1971 staring back at the vista of our fragile planet shattered whatever tribal jingoism he had left. “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 look 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'.”
March 6, 1969 was the day that Rusty Schweickart had his brain blown. The young Apollo 9 astronaut grew up on a small New Jersey farm and would spend hours watching planes from the local wartime air base roar overhead. He excelled at aeronautics at MIT and logged 4,000 flying hours in the US Air Force before being joining the space program.
Rusty was four days into his first spaceflight and was scheduled to test a new NASA spacesuit. This involved stepping outside the command module orbiting 17,000 miles per hour above the Earth. A spacewalk is the rarest of human experiences.
Of all the 108 billion people who ever lived, a mere 214 have ventured into the cosmic vacuum wearing nothing but a spacesuit. Normally these forays into the void are crammed with activities scheduled down to the second with little or no time to enjoy the view.
Schweickart’s lucky break came when a crewmember’s camera jammed and the mission commander ordered him to standby while they tried to fix it. For five precious minutes, he let go of the capsule and drifted by a tether in the utter silence 100 miles above Earth. With nothing to do he opened himself to an experience so profound it quickly turned a highly trained professional into a born-again Deadhead on acid:
“There are no limits to it. There are no frames. There are no boundaries. There is a silence the depth of which you’ve never experienced before. As you stare down at that magnificently beautiful Earth below your identity keeps expanding. Do you deserve this? Have you earned this in some way? Are you separated out to be touched by God, to have some special experience that others cannot have? And you know the answer to that is no. There’s nothing you’ve done that deserves this experience. It’s not a special thing just for you. And you know very well at that moment, for it comes through to you so powerfully, that you are the sensing element for all of humanity, you as an individual are experiencing this for everyone. You look down and see the surface of that globe you’ve lived on all this time, and you know all those people down there and they are like you, they are you – and somehow you represent them. You are up there as the sensing element, that point out on the end, and that’s a humbling feeling. It’s a feeling that says you have a responsibility. It’s not for yourself. The eye that doesn’t see doesn’t do justice to the body. That’s why it’s there. That’s why you are out there.”
Rusty Schweickart is not a professional poet (obviously). Yet in that brief poetic emergency his life changed forever, “I'm not the same man. None of us are.” He took up transcendental meditation after leaving NASA and co-founded the Association of Space Explorers – an organization of former astronauts and cosmonauts fighting for environmental protection and world peace.
Why do some of the most carefully selected and highly trained people in the world become all Kumbaya in orbit? The well documented overview effect is the temporary triumph of awe over obligation. NASA mission control typically allows for a few minutes of un-programmed euphoria when astronauts arrive in orbit because the experience is so overwhelming.
Human constructs, no matter how entrenched can quickly crumble in the face of new information or experience. Floating above the planet permanently altered Rusty and Edgar as their newly fragile worldview fell away. How can you be a patriot on the moon? This is not the first time that scientific discovery has scraped away closely held preconceptions.
Being alive is unnerving. Mythological and religious frames have always helped us make sense of existence. Many of these have also eroded with expanding knowledge. This more gradual philosophical transformation has profoundly altered our collective zeitgeist and individual umwelt, even though as always the present context seems "normal". Are we among the first generations alive to weather reality uncloaked in some manner of collective spiritual blanket? We find ourselves in a philosophical emergency and until we can fashion a metaphysical outlook able to withstand rational inquiry, it will be very hard to align human and AI values.