-All of us are wired to appreciate natural beauty.
At any time in history, in any culture, if you look at an ocean, a mountain or a beautiful
forest scene, everyone appreciates that.
It hits us fairly deep, we're wired that way.
And when you see your planet that way, in its sum total from space, all those senses
get overwhelmed.
- I first saw planet Earth from space still during the launch, outside the atmosphere
of Earth and we were over the Pacific Ocean, and just looking at that gorgeous blue, dotted
with white clouds and the black of space.
-This impossibly blue planet in this impossibly black sky just hanging out there.
It is really breathtaking.
-Even though you've seen the Earth through movies, pictures, when you look at the Earth
with your own eyes, changing very fast at the speed of 8km per second, what you see
is beautiful.
you have tears in your eyes.
Even if you are a tough person you can't avoid becoming a child again.
We wish all human kind could epxperience this view of Earth.
-It is this perpetual dynamic picture show that you never get tired of.
Even 6 months into the flight, if you pass by a window, it's like a magnet that draws
you to it, you want to pick up a camera and take pictures of it.
-As we fly around the Earth, every 92 minutes the Earth has twisted around by about 13 degrees
underneath us, so the next time you fly another orbit the Earth has moved round again so you
get yet another view, which is one of the reasons why it's so beautiful.
It's entrancing.
This constantly moving Earth is something that nobody ever gets tired of looking at.
-You could spend hours a day for months looking out the window, and never get tired of it.
You could never learn all of the Earth and it's very dynamic.
Things change with seasons.
There are always lightning storms going on somewhere on Earth at night, and you can never
fail to see these lightning flashes.
-It lights up a whole circle of clouds around it, and that seems to set off another flash
a few hundred miles away somewhere else, so you get this dudududuh, of lightning, then
another bit somewhere else: dudududuh.
-You can see the Northern Lights like you've never seen them before, which is just unbelievable
from space because you're looking at a huge spectrum of the geomagnetic field that produces
the aurora.
The other big feature is city lights.
You see the distribution of people on the planet based on the lights of the cities.
It's really striking.
-We're only a couple hundred miles away.
We're circling the planet.
But just that change in perception, you're ability to step back that far, prioritizes
how you feel about the planet.
-You believe that Earth is a spaceship.
You can't avoid the comparison between Earth, looking like a finite object in front of your
eyes, and your own spaceship which is closed with limited resources.
All humankind being part of the same unique crew.
-Certainly you know that there's conflict down there.
Certainly you know that there's pain and suffering and injustice, all these things that you certainly
feel strongly when you're on the Earth, and you know that they're still there.
But that's replaced for a moment by how beautiful it is.
I remember thinking, 'I wish everyone could experience this view of their home planet
so that maybe it would reprioritise what's important to them, and make them less angry
t their neighbours and more concerned about doing what they can so that we preserve the
beautiful planet we live on.
-You look at that vastness of infinite stars, and that's when you start to realise how insignificant
not just you as an individual are, but how insignificant the Earth is.
how insignificant the whole human race actually is.
Great to think about our place in that, but then beyond: what does that mean, when you
go further and further?
We like to wonder what our boundaries really are, and I'd like to think we don't really
have any boundaries.