At its core, The Ultraview Effect is about showing how space exploration, understood as both a physical and a mental pursuit, is above all, a human experience. It is constrained but also shaped and expressed by what it actually means to be human. One of the things I found myself thinking about is that the kinds of patterns we see across diverse human communities, especially those tied to living in a human body, don’t disappear in space. They can be found in spacecraft and on space stations just like on Earth. People still need to eat and sleep and eliminate and communicate, even in the most unfamiliar environments.

What we tend to underestimate, though, is the importance of spirituality or religious belief in human life. As an anthropologist of religion, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at how religion provides a lens for understanding everything from politics to food to gender roles to economics. Religion can heighten tension, but it can also reduce stress and create shared meaning. If religion is near universal, then it’s going to be part of the experience of space as well. And while many of us assume that space exploration is a purely scientific enterprise, it’s carried out by human beings who bring with them perspectives and approaches that evolved on Earth under very different conditions. It’s not something we should neglect when looking at what astronauts undergo while in orbit.

I also kept coming back to the idea that spiritual feeling is often tied to the environment. Mountains, for example, play powerful religious roles in many traditions. Think Olympus, Kilimanjaro, or the Himalayas. Space produces its own version of that. It creates intense feelings of awe and disorientation, and it asks astronauts to reconcile what they already believe with what they are suddenly seeing and feeling. That’s part of why I think we need to take space exploration seriously as a cultural experience, not just a technical one.

Ongoing Thread. More from Deana L. Weibel to follow