Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: What fundamental question does Oliver Jeffers pose about being human?
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You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. We are continuing to share a handful of talks, conversations, and podcast episodes from the TED Archive that we hope will spark some inspiration in all of us as we think about the end of the year and the resolutions and practices we hope to bring into our lives in 2026.
And on this final day of 2025, we bring you a beautiful talk that asks us to consider a fundamental question. If you had to explain to a newborn what it means to be a human living on Earth in the 21st century, what would you say? In this talk from 2020, visual artist Oliver Jeffers put his answer in a letter to his son, sharing pearls of wisdom on existence and the diversity of life.
He offers observations of the beautiful, fragile drama of human civilization and why we must go into every day, every month, every year with a profound sense of love for this planet, each other, and our collective future. And for those of you who can, I recommend heading to TED.com to watch this talk again after this to see it come to life with Oliver's original illustrations and animations.
Hello. I'm sure by the time I get to the end of this sentence, given how I talk, you'll all have figured out that I'm from a place called Planet Earth. Earth is pretty great. It's home to us. and germs. Those f***ing take a backseat for the time being because believe it or not, they're not the only thing going on.
This planet is also home to cars, brussels sprouts, those weird fish things that have their own headlights, art, fire, fire extinguishers, laws, pigeons, bottles of beer, lemons and light bulbs, pinot noir and paracetamol, ghosts, mosquitoes, flamingos, flowers, the ukulele, elevators and cats, cat videos, the internet, iron beams, buildings and batteries, all ingenuity and bright ideas, all known life,
and a whole bunch of other stuff. Pretty much everything we know and ever heard of. It's my favourite place, actually. This small orb floating in a cold and lonely part of the cosmos. Oh, the accent is from Belfast, by the way. You may think you know this planet Earth as you're from here, but chances are you probably haven't thought about the basics in a while. I thought I knew it.
Thought I was an expert even. Until that is, I had to explain the entire place and how it's supposed to work to someone who'd never been here before. Not what you might think, although my dad always did say the surest sign of intelligent life out there is that they haven't bothered trying to contact us. It was actually my newborn son I was trying to explain things to.
We'd never been parents before, my wife and I, and so treated him like most guests when he arrived home for the first time, by giving him the tour. This is where you live, son. This room is where we make food hot. This is the room we keep our collection of chairs, and so on. It's refreshing, explaining how our planet works to a zero-year-old.
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Chapter 3: How does Oliver Jeffers describe the beauty and fragility of human civilization?
This is the beautiful, fragile drama of civilization. We are the actors and spectators of a cosmic play that means the world to us here, but means nothing anywhere else. Possibly not even that much down here either. If we truly thought about our relationship with our boat, with our Earth, it might be more of a story of ignorance and greed.
As is the case with Fausto, a man who believed he owned everything and set out to survey what was his. He easily claims ownership of a flower, a sheep, a tree and a field. The lake and the mountain prove harder to conquer, but they too surrender. But it is in trying to own the open sea where his greed proves his undoing.
When, in a fit of arrogance, he climbs overboard to show that sea who is boss. But he does not understand. slips beneath the waves and sinks to the bottom. The sea was sad for him, but carried on being the sea, as do all the other objects of his ownership, but the fate of Fausto does not matter to them.
For all the importance in the cosmos we believe we hold, we'd have nothing if not for this earth, while it would keep happily spinning obliviously without us. On this planet, there are people, We've gone about our days. Sometimes we look up and out. Mostly we look down and in. Looking up and by drawing lines between the lights in the sky, we've attempted to make sense out of chaos.
Looking down, we've drawn lines across the land to know where we belong and where we don't. We do mostly forget that these lines that connect the stars and those lines that divide the land live only in our heads. They too are stories. We carry out our everyday routines and rituals according to the stories we most believe in, and these days, the story is changing as we write it.
There is a lot of fear in this current story, and until recently, the stories that seem to have the most part are those of bitterness of how it had all gone wrong for us individually and collectively. It has been inspiring to watch how the best comes from the worst, how people are waking up in this time of global reckoning to the realization that our connections with each other
are some of the most important things we have. But stepping back, for all we've had to lament, we spend very little time relishing on the single biggest thing that has ever gone right for us. That we are here in the first place. That we are alive at all. That we are still alive. A million and a half years after finding a box of matches, we haven't totally burned the house down. Yet.
The chances of being here are infinitesimal. Yet here we are, perils and all. There have never been more people living on Earth, using more stuff. And it's become obvious that many of the old systems we invented for ourselves are obsolete, and we have to build new ones. Here we are on Earth. And life on Earth is a wonderful thing. It looks big, this Earth, but there are lots of us on here.
Seven and a half billion at last count, with more showing up every day. Even so, there is still enough for everyone, if we all share a little. So please, be kind to us. When you think of it another way, if Earth is the only place where people live, it's actually the least lonely place in the universe. There are plenty of people to be loved by, and plenty of people to love. We need each other.
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