Can we have it here on Earth? What is your opinion there?

Yeah.

Well, I like to make a distinction between the overview and the effect.

Uh, so the full overview effect, the, the, uh, phenomenon that I documented many years ago, I really believe you need to be weightless.

You need to be, um, in, probably in orbit or at least on a suborbital hop for a while in order to experience the whole, um, the whole thing.

There is something else, though, which is everyone who goes far enough will experience the overview.

They'll see the Earth from a distance, right? And I do think, or, you know, reduced gravity, let's call it, 'cause it's not really, you're not really totally weightless, but that reduced gravity affects the brain, and I think that has an effect on the view.

Yeah.

Do you feel like there have been other periods in human spaceflight that are equivalent to that? Are we now in a period that's equivalent to that? Did 2021 with the opening of commercial space, is that like a similar part of our history? Or what's your take on that as someone who's been around?

Yeah, I think there have been these milestone moments.

Certainly 1957 with Sputnik.

1961 with Yuri Gagarin's flight, then 68 and 69, Apollo 8 and 11.

And then from there, I think there was a lot happening.

There was Apollo-Soyuz in 1975, you know, beginning of cooperation.

And then from there, you know, we've had a period of Being in outer space as a habitat, we've had more than 25 years on the ISS, which has been terrific.

I guess it started from a place of competition with Russia, and you've written about this before, but what do you think the purpose of human space exploration is? The initial purpose was, I think, to prove we could do it, but now what's your answer after thinking about it for decades?

They talked about the Artemis II mission and what happens when people see the Earth from space.

Something happened in 1961 that was tremendously important in terms of space.

Of, of course, that was Yuri Gagarin's flight.

Something important happened in 2021 when we had the first commercial spaceflight, civilian spaceflight.

What it means is everybody here could actually fly without being a NASA astronaut.

We are the new astronaut corps, every one of us, right? There was a contest called Inspiration4.

The current NASA administrator put that together, funded it, ran it.

Yeah.