There is a moment, astronauts say, when something inside them quietly rearranges itself.
It usually happens a few minutes after launch, once the rocket’s noise has faded and the window fills with the curve of the Earth. Suddenly, home is not a country, a city, or a garden. It is a single, luminous sphere, wrapped in a paper-thin atmosphere, hanging in absolute silence and absolute dark. There are no borders up there. No visible flags. Just one shared, to us fragile planet.
Scientists and philosophers have a name for this experience: the Overview effect.
