The most important quality of your best days on the internet is serendipity – a human connection that was unplanned but wonderful. This could apply to a moment when you stumbled across a new idea that took your breath away, or an encounter with someone who offered you a transformative perspective on the world.
Here’s the personal example I recall in the book. In February 2013, I found myself floating weightlessly inside the International Space Station with Commander Chris Hadfield, a charismatic Canadian astronaut who once performed David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’ while actually ‘sitting in a tin can’:
On that good day in 2013, Hadfield sent a tweet to me and his half a million other followers on Twitter:
If they know?
The words floated out of my phone with the glow of a cosmic inside joke. I thought of astronaut Bill Anders, credited with taking the first colour photo of Earth from moon orbit on Christmas Eve 1968. We had to go to the moon, he later said, to discover the Earth.
Astronaut Bill Anders’ first impression on seeing Earth from space was that our planet was ‘small, delicate and not the centre of the universe’. This is the glory each great human discovery. It makes us more humble. These historic humiliations have triggered the most liberating bursts in human development, such as the Enlightenment.
Astronauts often report a sense of transcendence when viewing Earth from space, a phenomenon known as the overview effect. For some it triggers a cognitive shift in awareness. Witnessing the fragility of life on our tiny planet inspires an enhanced feeling of global citizenship. From the Earth we see the heavens. From the heavens we see the Earth.
There’s a luminous passage in Samantha Harvey’s Booker Prize-winning novel Orbital which captures this feeling of re-enchantment. As astronauts and cosmonauts look down on Earth’s ‘burst of hopeful colour’ they think that maybe human beings have already died and are living in the after-life. ‘If we must go to an improbable, hard-to-believe-in place when we die,’ she writes, ‘that glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows could well be it.’
Every orbit is the morning of a brand new day. Enjoy this excerpt from Orbital, read by Will Poulter: