As Above, So Below | How Seeing Earth From Space Changes You (with Astronaut Mark Kelly)

0:00Ryan Holiday: Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world.

0:14Ryan Holiday: As above, so below. From the window of an airplane, everything looks small. From the window of a spaceship, as two astronauts have told us on the Daily Stoic Podcast. You can check out our episode with Terry Verts and Mark Kelly. From the window of an airplane, borders and distinctions fall away. From the top of the Acropolis, where Marcus Aurelius once stood, you can see the rhythm and the interconnected of life. As he says, herds and armies, farms, weddings, divorces, births, deaths, noisy courtrooms, desert places, all the foreign peoples, holidays, days of mourning, market days, all mixed together, a harmony of opposites.

0:59Ryan Holiday: This is the power of perspective. Seeing from above, we're reminded of what matters, what's made up, what we look like. But this is not just a trick of the eye. It is a truth. From a distance, we can see more clearly than we can when we're caught up in it what's actually going on below. And that's why we need to take a step back from problems, arguments and frustrations, to look at the bigger picture, to escape the narrow lens through which we see when we're in the heat of the moment. We have to rise above it if we want to see clearly. And I seriously, I loved the interview with Terry Virts. I loved the interview with Mark Kelly.

1:40Ryan Holiday: I think both of them were really good. I'll link to those in today's show notes if you're looking for something more in-depth on stoicism. Mark Kelly actually kind of helped inspire this email because he pointed out that, you know, seeing things from a little bit of a view is only a fraction of what Marcus could even contemplate bird's eye view. He was saying, think of the view from the space shuttle. So that's what inspired this. And I think you'll really like both those episodes.

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4:05Ryan Holiday: And Quo integrates with the tools your team already uses hubspot zapier claude whatever it helps you save time stay organized and spend less effort chasing down information between systems because money is on the line always say hello with quo try quo today for free plus you get 25 off your first six months when you go to quo.com slash daily stoic q uo.com slash daily stoic one morning i went for a run we were in Greece and I got up sort of to the top of the Acropolis and I'm looking down and you go, this is probably what he's talking about. Like this, he's seeing so much of the civilized world.

4:46Is there any evidence of Marcus Aurelius actually going to Greece? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, there is.

4:50Ryan Holiday: Okay. And also traveled. Yeah, he traveled a lot. He dies in Vienna, he writes in Budapest. Spent a lot of time in Germany. It's crazy. Like when you realize how big the Roman Empire was, it sort of blows your mind that one human being was responsible for all this given the communication. And then he spent a lot of time outside of Rome. Yes. Like on the road. Yes. In camps and fighting wars. Almost all of it. Yes. And yeah, there's another line of meditation. It says life is warfare and a journey far from home. And I think he means that literally and figuratively. Yes. But yeah, you get the sense like that bird's eye view that he's taking.

5:30Ryan Holiday: I mean, how high up could he have really ever gotten? Like, not that high. I mean, probably some mountain near Vienna, right? Yeah. Yeah. What's now northern Italy, maybe in the Alps. Yeah. What the ancients would have, how much it would have blown their mind to see, like, the blue marble photograph. Or to know that a human was on the, like, taking that view out of space. He probably didn't, he probably thought the earth was flat. Maybe. Marcus Aurelius was almost certainly a flat earther.

6:06Certainly his son was. Yes.

6:09Ryan Holiday: He had some other problems. Yeah, he had a lot of problems. Yeah. So when, you know, I remember the first time I saw the earth as a big round ball. Yeah. Just floating there in this blackness. And the, you know, your initial reaction, I think, for most of us is like, holy shit. Yes. I mean, we live on an island in our solar system and there's like there's no place else to go. Yeah. You know, we're all not like, you know, moving to Mars someday. That's not like the reality for any of us. Yeah. Any of us that matters. And yeah, I know like Elon wants to put this like thinks, you know, civilization is going to human civilization is going to one day colonize Mars.

6:49You know, he said it was going to happen by 2022. That didn't happen. I think he said it was no question it would happen by then. Yes. Yeah, no question. We're going to have people living on Mars and they're going to stay and we're going to eventually have an atmosphere. We're going to blow up nuclear weapons in the Martian atmosphere. And by the way, we need this because a single planet species doesn't survive because that's the history of species on Earth. Well, also nobody else, no other species, dinosaurs were not engineering themselves out of a problem.

7:18Ryan Holiday: Yeah. What if we just didn't screw it up here? Yeah, just don't screw it up here. It's always going to be easier to survive on Earth, regardless of what happens, including the big rock or the worst pandemic. It's always going to be easier to survive on Earth. Mars is a shit planet. It is not a place that we want to move to. We want to go and explore. We want to come back. But you really do get this sense that kind of almost the insignificance of, you know, the universe is 13.9 billion years old, we think, by the way. We don't know for sure. May have been around a lot longer. We're figuring out more all the time about astrophysics, about the nature of existence.

8:07But my, you know, my four trips to space, I really, you know, kind of a deep seated view that we have to do a better job taking care of this place. There's no there's no other option. Yeah.

8:19Ryan Holiday: And it's interesting because he talks about this as the emperor of Rome, this idea that we're all sort of citizens of this larger thing. We're all citizens of this world and we have these obligations and responsibilities to each other. Now, of course, as the head of state of this thing, he has certain obligations and responsibilities and priorities. But you do get the sense that he's trying to, by zooming out, going like, these borders are made up. And again, you have a legal obligation to enforce them, but it doesn't mean that the person on the other side of that border doesn't exist or doesn't matter and isn't.

8:52Well, they might not have the same legal obligation either. Yeah. And by the way, you can't see any of those borders in space. Yes. With one exception. Great Wall? No. That's a whole... The Chinese like to say, it's the only thing you can see from space. What is it? That's bullshit. The only border you actually see that's not a river is the southern part of Israel. Because on one side, it's desert. The other side, you know, it's cultivated land. Right. So there's a straight line. And that's the only place I can think of, that you physically can see a border during the day. Yeah. And why I say during the day is because at night you sort of see - North and South Korea.

9:41Yes. And the United States and Canada. Sometimes when you're looking at the United States, you're like, I wonder if the Canadians need more electricity. But the reason it looks like that - Yeah. Is because most of the Canadian population live within 100 miles of the U.S. border. Right. Like all 20 million of them - Yeah. Basically live on the U.S. border.

10:00Ryan Holiday: Yeah, yeah. Canada goes way up. It does. And nobody's there. Nobody's there. Yeah. Canada and Australia are kind of like that. It's wild to look at at night. I mean, Pyongyang looks like an island in an ocean because there's nobody else that has lights in North Korea. And then, you know, you fly over places like Times Square, fly over New York City, the brightest spot on Earth. And I think second would probably be the Strip in Vegas. and then in the middle of Tokyo would probably be my top three bright spots on Earth.