On his way out to the Moon, there simply wasn’t time for Edgar Mitchell to contemplate the universe. The schedule was jam-packed, and the pressure was on. Mitchell, who had been part of the team that worked feverishly to bring Apollo 13 back home safely, was piloting Apollo 14’s lunar module to the surface of the moon when he encountered two failures, one after the next. (Quick thinking saved the mission—Mitchell had to manually punch in 80 lines of code into an on-board computer with only minutes to spare.) And while Mitchell and crewmate Alan Shepard would have more time than anyone else to amble across the lunar surface, nine hours, the schedule remained tight, and there was important work to do in the name of politics (a flag to raise) but also of science (craters to find, rocks to collect, and for the first time, scientific experiments to set up).
On the way back, however, things were more relaxed, quieter. Mitchell took time to look out the window, and was transfixed by the sight of the largest thing he’d ever seen, the largest thing he’d ever known, floating in the dark. The moment would change his life, giving him a glimpse of a deeper, hidden nature.
"All of us had the experience—let's call it the overview effect or the big picture effect—of seeing Earth in its setting rather than as the end all and be all of living systems," Mitchell told me in 2012 (you can listen to some of our conversation on this episode of Radio Motherboard). "My own experience was a very powerful one—on the way back after my work was done... From looking at Earth from space you come up with the question, who are we, how did we get here and where's all this going? And that's an ancient, ancient question that humans have asked for a long time."
"My experience was to realize that perhaps our science is wrong at answering these questions and perhaps our religious cosmologies are archaic and flawed. And given that now we are an extraterrestrial civilization ourselves, we need to re-ask these questions, and do a lot more work to find the answers."
To read more and view the video, click here.