“What struck me wasn’t necessarily just Earth, it was all the blackness around it. Earth was just this lifeboat hanging in the universe,” Koch said, fighting back tears. “Planet Earth: you are a crew.”

What Koch experienced has a name: the Overview Effect. It is one of the most consistently reported phenomena in the history of space travel – a profound shift in how astronauts perceive themselves and their relationship to everything else. From that distance, the borders that organise our world disappear. The divisions between nations, between peoples, even between self and others, no longer hold up against the reality of what is actually there: one fragile sphere, wrapped in a paper-thin atmosphere, suspended in an indifferent universe.

What returns with astronauts is not just a memory of a beautiful view. It is a different sense of self. A collapse of the illusion of separateness. A visceral understanding of shared fate – that what happens to the whole happens to each of us, and that the boundary between “I” and “we” was always more fiction than fact.

Researchers describe it as a self-transcendent experience: a state of awe so complete that it temporarily dissolves the ego’s insistence on its own centrality. People come back changed – prioritising differently, caring more widely, feeling responsible for something larger than themselves.

This is exactly the kind of shift our world most needs right now.

And yet we rarely ask why it remains so rare. Enormous effort goes into changing behaviour – policies, frameworks, awareness campaigns, sustainability commitments. Yet progress remains slower than the urgency demands. The reason, we would argue, is this: we are asking people to care differently, without helping them perceive differently. We are trying to solve systemic challenges from within the same mental frame that created them.

The Overview Effect works not because it provides new information, but because it changes how that information is experienced. Without that shift, transformation remains largely cognitive – and therefore limited.

Which raises a question worth sitting with: what would change if more people could experience this – not in space, but here on Earth?

A Doorway, Not a Tool

We cannot send everyone into space. But the Overview Effect is not, at its core, about altitude. It is about a particular quality of experience – one that interrupts the ordinary sense of separateness and replaces it, however briefly, with something more true.

Nature is one of the few environments capable of producing something genuinely analogous.

Not because nature is pleasant, or restorative – though research confirms both. But because immersion in the natural world produces a quality that urban, screen-mediated, task-oriented environments almost never do: it makes us feel small in the right way. It situates us within something larger than ourselves. It dissolves, at least temporarily, the sense that we are separate agents – and replaces it with participation, belonging, shared fate.

Science helps explain why. In a landmark study of more than 2000 people, participants who stood in a grove of trees showed measurably greater generosity, stronger ethical decision-making, and reduced entitlement – effects explained by what researchers call the “small self”: a dissolution of self-concern that expands awareness toward the collective.

Large-scale awe research shows that nature-induced awe drives stronger pro-environmental behaviour – not through moral instruction, but because awe reactivates an evolved sense of being part of an ecosystem. Nature connectedness research consistently finds that people genuinely embedded in the natural world experience lower loneliness and stronger motivation to act for the collective good.

This is not the Overview Effect. But it is in the same family – awe at human scale accessible, repeatable, and available to almost everyone.

What Shifts When Perception Shifts

When this shift takes hold inside organisations, the consequences are not marginal. Short-term thinking loosens its grip. Sustainability moves from compliance to identity. Leadership shifts from control toward stewardship. These are the foundations of organisations capable of navigating complexity – and they come not from better frameworks, but from changed perception.

These are not soft outcomes. They are the foundations of organisations capable of navigating the complexity ahead.

But the more important question is what this shift could mean not just inside organisations, but across a society.

Luxembourg, with the Ardennes, the Mullerthal, the Moselle valley, the wooded hills surrounding the capital – is ready for meaningful encounters with awe to happen. The Overview Effect may have required a rocket. What Luxembourg offers requires only presence.

What Koch saw from space – and what research studies are now confirming from the ground – is that the boundary between self and world, between I and we, is far more permeable than we habitually assume. That feeling of shared fate, of belonging to something larger is not reserved for astronauts. It is available here, to anyone willing to step into it.

The Overview Effect begins with a view. But it ends with a question about how we choose to live together.

Luxembourg, we are a crew too. The only question is whether we act like it.

This article was written for the June 2026 issue of Paperjam magazine, published on 20 May. The content is produced exclusively for the magazine. It is published on the website to contribute to Paperjam’s comprehensive archive. Click on this link to subscribe to the magazine.

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