The Profound Experience of Seeing Earth From Space

How much difference is it perspective wise when you're in space and you're looking down on the earth? Like that has got to be the ultimate mind-fire. It's amazing. So this is what I'm trying to do in life, like a couple books I've written, some films I've done. Seeing the earth, I remember early in my first flight, it was like, okay, I'm in outer space and there's my planet over there. It was this profound thought that, wow, I'm not on the planet anymore. And over seven months in space, it never got old. It was always like, man, earth is beautiful. It is this incredible planet. We could talk for hours about this, but I think for me the biggest perspective change was I'm less of a black and white person now. Before I went into space, I knew right and wrong. When you're young, you're black and white. As you get older, you get wiser. Seeing the planet, it's like, yeah, this thing's been around for a long time and it's going to be around for a long time. So you probably don't need to get as uptight about the day-to-day stress of life. It just kind of put things in perspective. Don't get too excited about the Kardashians or whoever the latest political tweet was or whatever. Things are going to go on for a long time. It helps put that in perspective in a big way. It's interesting that an actual physical perspective change, just being in a different place where you're looking down on it from a different vantage point. All the astronauts seem to say that. It has this profound shift in how you think of earth and how you think of humanity in general. Yeah. You know one of the interesting things, I've been traveling since I was a kid. I did some exchange programs in Finland and France and in the Air Force. I lived all around the world. Whenever I would go to France or Korea or wherever, it was like, all right, I'm in Korea. Then I get back to the States. I'm like, all right, I'm back home in America or whatever. Now when I travel, and I've been traveling a lot the last couple years, I always feel like I'm home. It was weird. One time I landed in the Middle East and I remember thinking, I didn't think anything. That really struck me because it used to always be such a big deal wherever I landed. I feel like I'm home no matter where I'm at, which is interesting. That's from the space travel. It is, yeah. Wow. It wasn't conscious. I didn't expect it or whatever. I just realized that, hey, I don't ever feel like I'm not at home. My crewmate Samantha said something really profound. She said, you see earth and you can tell it's going around the sun. You can actually see the motion sometimes if you're watching stars and stuff. It's like we're on the spaceship together, so we ought to be crewmates and not just passengers. We all have to take care of the planet and ourselves, each other and stuff. Do you find that most of the or many of the astronauts share this similar perspective shift that once you go up, you do realize how weird it is that there are these tribal differences between us? You're like, what the hell are we doing? I got a story about that. But to be honest, we're probably not the best communicators of emotion. We're not necessarily all touchy-feely people, but some of my close friends that we talk about this, there's a very similar perspective of we're all here on the planet together. I was on my first flight on the shuttle and it was the fifth night there. I looked out, we were going on the Mediterranean at night and you could see there's this U shape where there's Egypt and the Nile, there's Israel and Syria and Lebanon are right there, and there's Turkey and Greece. It's this little area. Israel is this little thing that's surrounded by Jordan and Lebanon. They're all right there. I remember thinking, guys, what's the problem? You're literally living together on a postage stamp on this big planet. It wasn't anything about Israel or the Middle East specifically. It was more like, why can we not get along because we're all down here? The crazy thing is if you ask most people, their position is they'll never be peace in the Middle East. Which is crazy. One of the things, after my flight, they'd sent us to Congress and we talked to Congressmen and senators. I got to talk at the White House a couple years ago at the National Space Council. My message to them is always the same. For a space program, it's not about the rocket science, it's about the political science. We got to figure out politics to get things working well. Before I go to the American Congress, they're always like, you're right. It's exactly right. If it wasn't for those other fuckers on the other side, we could get this right. Republicans and Democrats all said that they all totally agreed with me and it was always the other guy's fault. There's definitely a problem that is going to be tough to overcome. How much benefit would there be in getting those people in space? People talk about that. If only that leaders could go into space. I think for some of them, it would make an impact and some of them, they wouldn't care. That's too thick. The goal of politics and power is just to keep yourself in power and get more stuff for yourself throughout human history. It's not normally altruistic democracies the way we run ourselves. We need to move in that direction because that's the way life gets better. I think some it would benefit and some it wouldn't. The thing is, no one really wants the job that is balanced and healthy and intelligent and has a good perspective for humanity. The people that want the job, they want to be the king poo-ba. They want to be the big dog. It's just a weird kind of person that wants that job in the first place. People are like, why don't you run for office? I always say, give me a fork. Do you have a fork because I want to stick that in my eye? That would be more fun than you try and do something nice and you're just getting non-stop hate mail. Yeah. It's a rough ... Girlfriends from high school. Just to testify before Congress. This thing that happened 30 years ago. Yeah, exactly. It's fascinating to me how many of the astronauts do have this incredibly profound experience. Again, just from the physical act of being above Earth and looking down on it where this perspective shift just kind of changes your overall thoughts about being in space, being a part of humanity on this organic spaceship in the universe rather than being locked down in Chicago, there's clouds above you so they don't even think about space. You're stuck in traffic on your way to work every day, same grind. You get stuck in this narrow-minded perspective. Almost every astronaut who discusses this says that it was a profound life-changing moment to look at Earth from above. Yeah, it was. I can close my eyes. If I'm in one of those shitty situations, you just close your eyes and it's like, right now the sun is rising somewhere. That's the most beautiful thing. You can't imagine it. I took a lot of pictures. I did movies. But unless you see it with your eyes, you can't imagine how awesome it is. That takes the edge off the traffic you're having to wait on. It does help, but the thing is taking that experience and sharing it with as many people as possible. Catch new episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience for free only on Spotify. Watch back catalog JRE videos on Spotify, including clips. Easily, seamlessly switch between video and audio experience. On Spotify, you can listen to the JRE in the background while using other apps and can download episodes to save on data costs all for free. Spotify is absolutely free. You don't have to have a premium account to watch new JRE episodes. 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