There's a distinct feeling I get from viewing footage of the Earth captured from low orbit, like from the International Space Station. It's difficult to explain—I don't believe there's a proper name for it. There's an element of awe to it, but awe or wonder is not the totality of it. There's a happiness to it, but by no means giddy or elated. It's sad, but if there are tears, it's not the sadness that brings them—its sadness is wholly of the type described by the term mono no aware.
Keats described a very similar sensation, I suppose, in his 'On First Looking into Chapman's Homer':
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men Look'd at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
I assume that had Keats lived to see footage from the International Space Station, he would've written similar lines upon first viewing.
A certain mysticism is bound up in the act of viewing such footage. Two-thirds of the screen are occupied by your home planet, on which every human in history was born and has lived. In fact, up until a little over 50 years ago, all history took place there. The other third of the screen is occupied by the inky blackness of infinite space, maybe punctuated by the light of some distant dead star.
The Earth overall looks blue from space. Blue of the sky, blue of the ocean. From these two things, we get the near-universal connotation of blue as the colour of infinity and divinity. The Theotokos clad in blue robes. The blue skin of gods in Hindu art. The Jewish custom of dying tallit with blue as a reminder of the covenant. Tengri, the eternal blue sky. The Epic of Gilgamesh mentions lapis lazuli—a stone renowned for its astonishing blue colour—many times. Derek Jarman's final film, Blue.
As you watch the whole planet go by, day becoming night at one end, night becoming day at the other, you get a strange sense of the place of humanity in all this. We're all down there, tiny little specks, none of us visible from this viewpoint. The vastness of the Earth, and the utter immensity of space beyond it, makes all of our concerns seem so trivial in comparison. Whole civilisations have risen and fallen, leaving behind artifacts and monuments that, from space, appear as so many little dustmotes.
Yet to view it all from this viewpoint makes me feel like we're special, too. The life of just one human affects all others by its participation in being. Each person contains patterns in their body and soul which reflect patterns of the whole world outside them.
R. Buckminster Fuller had a good name for this view—Spaceship Earth. Dr. Bronner was also very fond of this formulation, putting it on each one of his soap labels. We are, of necessity, stewards of this strange planet. It is our mothership, our home. Just as it has nurtured us, however harshly, we must take good care of it—'Then the Lord God took the man He formed and put him in the garden to tend and keep it.' (Genesis 2:15, OSB.)
There are some works which inspire a similar feeling in me. The two that come to mind are anime: Neon Genesis Evangelion and Puella Magi Madoka Magica. I do not know why they produce this feeling, but it is interesting to note that humanity and its relationship to the world are fundamental themes in both. In the latter in particular, a sort of ethical idea seems to be the primary theme: Always treat others as ends-in-themselves, never as mere means. Kyubey's character serves as the embodiment of this instrumental reason, seeing no value in humanity or the world, seeing them as mere means to some strange end. (I tend to err on the side of him lying about the whole entropy bit.) The other primary theme that I can discern is that most human of problems, trauma, as shown in a remarkably accurate way by the character of Homura Akemi.
Posttraumatic stress disorder, or rather its related illness, complex posttraumatic stress disorder, is of interest in any discussion about humanity due to the tricky fact that many if not all of its sufferers do not feel human. Many of us feel like some kind of inferior species, cut off from the rest of humanity as if by a curse. Our fundamental bonds with humanity, with our basic ideas of what it means to be a person, are shattered.
And yet our humanity remains a fact. We breathe, we bleed, we cry, we die. It is no surprise that my experiences have led to my concern with genocide prevention and with the abolition of prisons (those most inhuman institutions). Part of understanding humanity is understanding that even those who have done the most repulsive things, those who are fundamentally repulsive to us, are also human, and whatever else we do to rectify the wrongs they have committed, it would befit us to respect at least their humanity. Even if we do not owe it to them, we owe it to ourselves to see the potentials for good and evil in all of us.
One day we may exit this planet, finding new homes among the stars. Perhaps we will change ourselves and our world through scientific innovation—life extension, human enhancement, geoengineering, cybernetics. I hope we can achieve that. But that hope is contingent on our recognition that the Kingdom of God lies within humanity—not within one human, or one group of humans, but within all humanity—and that all creation has been sanctified.