I'm sure by the time I get to end of this sentence,
you'll all have figured out that I'm from a place called
Those [blip] take a back seat 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;
laws, pigeons, bottles of beer,
ghosts, mosquitoes, flamingos, flowers,
the ukulele, elevators and cats,
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 favorite place, actually.
floating in a cold and lonely part of the cosmos.
Oh, the accent is from Belfast, by the way, which is ...
here.
You may think you know this planet Earth,
you probably haven't thought about the basics in a while.
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 had never been here before.
although my dad always did say
the sure 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,
and so treated him like most guests when he arrived home for the first time,
This room is where we make food at.
This is the room we keep our collection of chairs, and so on.
explaining how our planet works to a zero-year-old.
and once the magnitude that new humans know absolutely nothing
settles on you and how little you know either,
explaining the whole planet becomes quite intimidating.
As I walked around those first few weeks,
narrating the world as I saw it,
I began to take notes of the ridiculous things I was saying.
The notes slowly morphed into a letter
intended for my son once he learned to read.
about the basic principles of what it is to be a human
living on Earth in the 21st century.
Some things are really obvious.
Like, the planet is made of two parts:
Some less obvious until you think about them.
Things can sometimes move slowly here on Earth.
But more often, they move quickly.
So use your time well, it will be gone before you know it.
People come in all different shapes, sizes and colors.
act different and sound different,
It doesn't skip me that of all the places in the universe,
And even then, only on some of the dry bits.
There's only a very small part of the surface of our planet
that is actually habitable to human life,
and squeezed in here is where all of us live.
It's easy to forget when you're up close to the dirt,
the rocks, the foliage, the concrete of our lands,
just how limited the room for maneuvering is.
From a set of eyes close to the ground,
the horizon feels like it goes forever.
After all, it's not an every-day ritual
to consider where we are on the ball of our planet
and where that ball is in space.
I didn't want to tell my son the same story of countries
that we were told where I was growing up in Northern Ireland.
That we were from just a small parish,
which ignores life outside its immediate concerns.
I wanted to try to feel what it was like to see our planet
as one system, as a single object,
I would need to switch from flat drawings for books
to 3D sculpture for the street,
to build a large-scale model of the moon,
This project managed to take place on New York City's High Line park
on the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11's mission around the Moon.
I was able to put on a space helmet with my son
and launch, like Apollo 11 did half a century ago,
how lonely it was there in the dark.
And at the scale of this project,
where our planet was 10 feet in diameter,
Mars, the next planet, will be the size of a yoga ball
Although borders are not visible from space,
every single border was drawn in.
But rather than writing the country names on the carved-up land,
"people live here, people live here."
And off on the Moon, it was written,
aren't all that obvious until you think about them.
Seeing anything from a vast enough distance
as many astronauts have experienced.
And human eyes have only ever seen our Earth
from as far as the Moon, really.
before we get to the edges of our own Solar System.
And even out to other stars, to the constellations.
There is actually only one point in the entire cosmos
that is present in all constellations of stars,
Those pictures we have made up for the clusters of stars
only make sense from this point of view down here.
Their stories only make sense here on Earth.
Consider briefly the story of human civilization on Earth.
It tells of the ingenuity, elegance,
generous and nurturing nature of a species
that is also self-focused, vulnerable
We, the people, shield the flame of our existence
from the raw, vast elements outside our control,
Yet it is always to the flame we look.
it means the sum total of all knowledge.
it means that we do not know at all.
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,
it might be more of a story of ignorance and greed.
a man who believed he owned everything
and set out to survey what was his.
He easily claims ownership of a flower,
The lake and the mountain prove harder to conquer,
It is in trying to own the open sea
where his greed proves his undoing,
he climbs overboard to show that sea who is boss.
slips beneath the waves, sinks to the bottom.
As do all the other objects of his ownership,
for the fate of Fausto does not matter to them.
For all the importance in the cosmos we believe we hold,
While it would keep happily spinning,
On this planet, there are people.
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
We do mostly forget that these lines that connect the stars
and those lines that divide the land
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,
the stories that seemed to have the most power
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.
we spend very little time relishing the single biggest thing
that has ever gone right for us.
That we are here in the first place,
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.
There have never been more people living on Earth.
And it's become obvious that many of the old systems
And we have to build new ones.
our collective fire might suffocate us before long.
As we watch the wheels of industry grind to a halt,
the machinery of progress become silent,
we have the wildest of opportunities
And life on Earth is a wonderful thing.
but there are lots of us on here.
Seven and a half billion at last count,
with more showing up every day.
there is still enough for everyone,
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