"Space Zen" -Will Humans' Brains Change During Space Travel?

[Liffrea]

In February, 1971, Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell experienced the little understood phenomenon sometimes called the “Overview Effect”. He describes being completely engulfed by a profound sense of universal connectedness. Without warning, he says, a feeing of bliss, timelessness, and connectedness began to overwhelm him. He describes becoming instantly and profoundly aware that each of his constituent atoms were connected to the fragile planet he saw in the window and to every other atom in the Universe. He described experiencing an intense awareness that Earth, with its humans, other animal species, and systems were all one synergistic whole. He says the feeling that rushed over him was a sense of interconnected euphoria. He was not the first—nor the last—to experience this strange “cosmic connection”.

Rusty Schweikart experienced it on March 6th 1969 during a spacewalk outside his Apollo 9 vehicle: “When you go around the Earth in an hour and a half, you begin to recognize that your identity is with that whole thing. That makes a change…it comes through to you so powerfully that you’re the sensing element for Man.” Schweikart, similar to what Mitchell experienced, describes intuitively sensing that everything is profoundly connected.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog...y-classic.html

[Odin]

[sean]

When astronauts in orbit or on the surface of the moon first see the Earth in its entirety, many report feeling a deep sense of scale and perspective that has come to be called the Overview Effect.

Astronauts have returned home with a renewed sense of the way we’re all connected, of the relative "meaninglessness" of cultural boundaries, and a desire to take care of the Earth’s environment.

However, of all the psychological effects ever named, observed, and studied, the overview effect has to be in the running for the least common, only 534 people have ever experienced the conditions that lead to it.

Personally, I don't think that being in outer space makes you more liberal per se, but it does remind us that our world is small, fragile and insignificant in the grand, cosmic scheme of things. However, this does not mean that things like borders and nationalism aren't important. They are important, but they are only important in our context.

Because it was only thanks to nationalism and secure borders that we were able to carry out these missions and venture out into space in the first place during the Cold War, setting the stepping stones for the future missions and ventures into space. We can't achieve anything in space if our countries are Islamised.

They like to keep the myth of the globe running because it makes normal man insignificant part of the cosmos, just a thistle in the waste of another stars and planets.