Transcript
minus
Robyn Williams: Zofia ended her review with the image of two observers, here and way out there, looking at our respective heavenly homes. Those observers have emotions as well as calculators, and the feeling you get when observing the Earth can best be conjured by remembering that picture of Earth-rise as taken by Apollo 8, or the Pale Blue Dot as described by Carl Sagan a generation ago. But what does this mean? Here s Yasmin Haskell at the University of Western Australia.
Yasmin Haskell: Remember astronaut Ron Garan s description of what he called the orbital perspective? From a distance of 71 million miles, Garan was moved by and anxious about our planet s fragility, and also inspired by a feeling of connectedness to the human species, a sense of our potential if we could all pull together. Garan was just one of many astronauts and cosmonauts to report an experience what is now more generally known as the overview effect. Wikipedia will tell you that it s not