Hacker Cinema
Overview
2012 · Film · documentary · 19 min
Directed by Guy Reid
Astronauts who have seen the Earth from space have often described the 'Overview Effect', an experience that has transformed their perspective of the planet and mankind's place upon it, and enabled them to perceive it as our shared home, without boundaries between nations or species. 'Overview' is a short film that explores this perspective through interviews with astronauts who have experienced the Overview Effect. The film also features insights from commentators and thinkers on the wider implications and importance of this understanding for humanity as a whole, and especially its relevance to how we meet the tremendous challenges facing our planet at this time.
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> Can a Living Creature Be as Big as a Galaxy?
This can be followed up by an even "crazier" question: If so, is our Galaxy a living creature ?
Going in the other direction, are cells in our bodies "living creatures" ? They sure do exhibit all the qualities of the larger organisms. If that's true, then our body is a conglomerate of 100 trillion living beings locked together in a biological ecosystem, each individual cell or collection of cells having probably no concept of the larger system they are part of.
So then we (our bodies and other animals) could also be locked together in a biological ecosystem (The Earth) and we would be oblivious of the fact by default.
Is Earth a "living creature" ? The "overview effect" that astronauts report upon seeing the Earth from orbit seems to be related to exactly this realization - that the planet is one big living organism. There's a fantastic short documentary about this - https://vimeo.com/55073825
We are just beginning to see the complex interconnection of things and beings in the biosphere so there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that the planet might be a huge living organism - not quite fits in our definition of "organism", but then it might mean that our definition is a bit too narrow.
Ancient shamans and the modern day "psychonauts" repot the same "overview effect" after tripping on various psychedelic plants and fungi - that everything is alive, including the planet, the stars and so on.
The idea of a "soul" - as the differentiating property of living things - has been around since .. forever. And if we touch the idea of soul, then we're entering the realm of the Holy and the idea of God.
If all living beings have "souls" and if the Galaxy is a living being that it results that it too has soul. Interestingly that it's the "soul" that allows us to "grasp" the "being part of" thing.. So if cells have souls, they feel Us with it, if the Planet has soul, we feel it with our souls and so on...
Oh well, this is a infinitely long discussion, so I'll just pause here and contemplate on some C++ code :)