Featured Image Credit: Erika Goldring/DrPixel/Getty Images
An astronaut who spent 178 days in space had a haunting realization after spotting a man-made structure on Earth.
Former NASA astronaut Ronald Garan came to a moving conclusion about humanity while watching our home planet from a distance.
The 62-year-old has come to the realization that we’re all living a lie and he might have a point.
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Now, before any Flat Earthers start - no, he didn’t look out and see a frisbee shaped planet staring back at him.
Instead, he experienced something that a lot of astronauts report when they get back to solid ground, and that’s the 'overview effect'.
The term refers to a phenomenon they face when looking at Earth from space, where they get an 'unexpected and overwhelming feeling of emotion'.
It was during a mission to the International Space Station, when Garan remembered looking down and seeing a long line of lights stretching across Asia.
After being puzzled at first, he realized that it was a man-made structure of the border between India and Pakistan.
In a TED talk from 2016, he said: “Initially, I wrote this off as a strange reflection of moonlight on a river.
“I was very intrigued. It turns out that this was not a natural reflection at all.
“I’ve always said that you can't see borders from space, apparently I was wrong.
“The Earth, when viewed from space, almost always looks beautiful and peaceful.
“But was this an example of man made changes to the landscape that was clearly visible from space.”
This has tied into his belief that humans are living a lie and have the wrong outlook on day-to-day life.
In an interview with Big Think, he explained: “We keep trying to deal with issues such as global warming, deforestation, biodiversity loss as stand alone issues when in reality they’re just symptoms of the underlying root problem and the problem is, that we don’t see ourselves as planetary.
“When I looked out of the window of the International Space Station, I saw the paparazzi-like flashes of lightning storms, I saw dancing curtains of auroras that seemed so close it was as if we could reach out and touch them and I saw the unbelievable thinness of our planet's atmosphere.
“In that moment I was hit by the sobering realization.”
Ronald came to the understanding that every living thing on Earth was being kept alive by a very thin layer and people don’t realize just how connected we all are.
“I saw an iridescent biosphere teaming with life, I didn't see an economy, but since our human-made systems treat everything including the very life-support systems of our planet as the [...] subsidiary of the global economy, it's obvious from the vanish point of space that we're living a lie,” he added.
Ronald has urged people to shift their thinking for the overall benefit of humanity and move from thinking “economy, society, planet to planet, society, economy”.
