Death Loses Its Terror

From 240,000 miles away, Edgar Mitchell watched Earth shrink to the size of a marble. In that moment, everything changed.

As the sixth human to walk on the lunar surface in 1971, Mitchell experienced what psychologists would later call "the Overview Effect." Our tiny blue planet, suspended in infinite darkness, made conventional boundaries and earthly concerns suddenly meaningless.

"You develop an instant global consciousness," Mitchell later explained, his voice still carrying the wonder decades later. "From the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, 'Look at that.'"