#overview effect

Thank you Integrity <3

memento vivere means remember to live.

which is funny, because the phrase people usually say is memento mori, remember you must die. very dramatic, and honestly, for a long time, i might have been carrying that around.

i found memento vivere on tiktok a while ago. the fact that i found it on there is embarrassing - but also very on brand for me. but since then, it sat with me, and i only just realized, why. i have spent so much time being afraid of death that i forgot there was another half of the sentence. not just: you are going to die ‘memento mori’. but also: you are alive right now. 

right before artemis ii took off, my death anxiety had been sitting in my passenger seat, backseatdriving. not always loud, but always there. this constant little background process running in my body. like i had an expiration date, and the not-knowing was somehow worse than the knowing would have been.

but then the mission happened, which then made me watch interviews with the crew to escape the gaping whole the end of their journey left in me. something in the way Christina Koch talked about both her life and job as an astronaut and mission specialist, made the fear loosen its grip. i don’t think fear like that just evaporates. but it stopped being the whole room.

her saying life is long, and you need to do what fulfills you, gave me a sense that the whole point of life was not to conquer the unknown, but to remain curious inside it. to look at something enormous, that makes you feel small, and not immediately translate it into doom. to let awe be bigger than panic.

i think that changed me.

i still get scared. the universe is still fucking big. and death is still the ending of my part in it. the fact that we are all just little nervous mammals walking around on a rock, doom-scrolling on tiktok and wondering what everyone thinks of us, is still insane to me.

but lately, when i think about how small i am, it doesn’t only make me feel doomed. sometimes it makes me feel free. and that is something Christina Koch gave me.

my existence is so tiny in the big, impossible whole, so maybe i do not have to spend all of it bracing for impact. maybe i can use the time i have to look around. to learn things. to get the most out of what the world has to give me, as possible.

yesterday my mom said the infinite, unknowable part of the universe scared her. i understood that. of course i did. there is a kind of terror in not being able to explain everything. in knowing there are questions too large for your body to hold.

but in one of the interviews, one of the astronauts said something like that it is okay to be okay with knowing that not everything can be explained.

i keep thinking about that in relation to what my mom told me.

maybe that is what i am trying to practice - like finding the ability to stand in front of the enormous thing and not run away from it. but to accept that i will never now.

funnily enough, i told my mom that something that helps me with this fear, is thinking of life like minecraft, which sounds stupid, but bare with me. i think the reason i love that game is because the world is endless. you could walk in one direction forever and there would always be more. another biome. another cave. another weird little mountain. another place to build a house and fill it with torches so zombies wouldnt get in.

i think that is what i want life to feel like. i want to feel like an explorer, in a small way, by asking the right questions. questions that make it feel like i am always willing to have an ekstra look and investigate.

artemis II gave me that, i think. or reminded me that i used to have it. that childlike feeling of there being more. not just more to fear, but more to find. so maybe that is what the mission is for me now.

not something to defeat death anxiety with. or an allusion to be obsessed with some enlightened humble trailblazer-woman with nice biceps, who loves all tings that make her feel small (& looks really good in a backwards cap).

but a reminder to live.

to look up more often.

to let the unknown be a doorway sometimes.

to stop treating my life like evidence of an ending and start treating it like an invitation.

You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling ✨⁣ Observing Earth from space can alter an astronaut’s cosmic perspective, a mental shift known as the “Overview Effect.” First coined by space writer Frank White in 1987, the Overview Effect is described as a feeling of awe for our home planet and a sense of responsibility for taking care of it.⁣ The Overview Effect can create powerful shifts in the way you think about Earth and life. The words “beautiful” and “fragile” are often used by astronauts to describe the experience. As the International Space Station (@ISS) was soaring 262 miles (422 kilometers) above Western Australia, NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps captured this long-duration shot, or an image captured by camera set to a lower shutter speed.⁣

You and I, Stargazing

Rated E, no archive warnings apply. Chapter 29 is live!

(This is the last chapter aboard the ISS, and I'm crying a little as I post this! I had no idea I would feel so sad that this part of the fic is over.)

“Fine, fine. Are you ok?” Jon peered at Crowley, wiping his face with his arm.

“He’s fine. He just gets the zoomies when he’s tired,” Nina appeared with Maggie from the next module over.

“I do not–” Crowley started indignantly, but stopped when Maggie gently looped her arm under his.

“Hey, spaceman,” she said gently in his ear. “Ready to say goodbye?”

Watched 2001: A Space Odyssey last night and:

WOW WOW WOW THEY MADE THIS BEFORE THE MOON LANDING

This movie had men in space who felt some emotions, but it was not what I would call a "Men Having Emotions in Space" movie

What is a "Men Having Emotions in Space" movie (MHEIS)? It's a jokey term I came up with after watching Ad Astra and realizing that part of what appealed to me about it was that it spent so much time reflecting on the main character's loneliness and his desire to connect with his missing father, and used the expanse of space itself to make room for those feelings.

I've watched movies and shows that take place in space before--Firefly, Star Wars, Doctor Who, etc.--but there it felt like space was not much more than a way to have extra fun with setting and characters.

In Ad Astra, space is almost another character, but rather than actively engaging with McBride and others, it simply exists and the human characters have to react to it. They respond with fear, awe, depression. Space is so vast and so unfeeling that humans turn inward, and our focus turns to their inner lives because there is so little outward for them to really latch onto.

Another movie I'd classify as MHEIS is Sunshine, which a lot of people don't really like but which is one of my partner's favorite movies and which I really enjoyed too.

Sunshine shows a crew having to confront matters of spirituality, trust, the value of one life over many, all in a small group of people who live on a ship strapped to the back of a nuclear bomb meant to be fired into the center of the sun to revive it. Here, there's not just the emptiness of space that prompts these powerful reflections and feelings, but the sun itself becomes divine in the eyes of multiple characters. Being in the presence of even a tiny percentage of its rays about Mercury's distance away from it has profound effects on how those who experience it think about themselves and their fellow humans. This isn't because the sun magically speaks to them or anything; the simple exposure of the sun's light and heat prompts them to go inward and think on what something so intense means.

The movie has a weird structure because two thirds are this moody, slow-ish character study, and then the last third is kind of a slasher film until the last few minutes. What I like about the first part though is exactly the meditative pace, just like with Ad Astra, where you have time to really reflect on what it must be like to be in a small group (or even alone) in the vast emptiness of space, where the void really does gaze back into you and you're forced to confront things that lie deep within because space gives you nothing.

2001 also has a very slow meditative pace, but it's not so much to give space for these big reflections and emotions. The characters don't seem very interested in the vast void of space until they're directly vulnerable to it (hell, Dr. Floyd sleeps on his flight from Earth to a space station, even as "The Blue Danube" plays and we watch the station and other satellites dance above the world). The pace feels more in service of the audience directly, to appreciate the gorgeous design and to contemplate the themes of progress and violence. This, to me, means it's not MHEIS.

The "Men" in "Men Having Emotions in Space" is also important to me. In so many sci-fi stories, men predominantly take action and go on adventure and either save the day or fail. Maybe they have individual emotions--fear in 2001 when HAL goes rogue, fury and despair in The Empire Strikes Back when Luke learns his enemy is his father--but the movie doesn't give room for itself to be about the emotions of men. In a society where men aren't taught to identify their feelings and can easily live quite emotionally stunted lives, it's really meaningful to me to see movies where men have little to do but feel deeply.

Something that I haven't yet seen in MHEIS movies, but is hopefully out there, is what happens when one turns away from the great void of space and turns back toward Earth, toward home. Sunshine features a room on the ship that projects things like ocean waves and birdsong, to be used by crewmembers when they're overwhelmed and homesick, but we don't hear as much about how being in space changes their relationship with their planet. Ad Astra comes a bit closer, ending with McBride returning to Earth and starting to open his heart to human connection again after confronting his loneliness, but we really only see this in the very last moments of the film.

In real life, however, this seems to be a major part of the experience of being in space. Astronauts speak of what's called the "overview effect," the huge mental shift that occurs when you look down on the surface of Earth and realize you can't see borders, buildings, or people, but you can see both the tremendous beauty and the human-caused destruction of our home. They describe a deep sense of connectedness to all life on Earth and a desire to put aside conflicts in the name of protecting something so precious. It's a beautiful thing that we've only been able to really have in the last 60 years.

On the more bleak side, there's what's probably the most stark example MHEIS from real life, when William Shatner got to briefly go into space with Blue Origin:

I want more of this in movies. I want the men who go to space and have their Big Feelings about humanity and themselves get to be seen being changed by those feelings and coming home to live anew.