WEBVTT

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I'd like you to imagine the world anew.

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I'd like to show you some maps

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which have been drawn by Ben Hennig

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of the planet in a way that most of you
will never have seen the planet

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depicted before.

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Here's an image that you're
very familiar with.

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I'm old enough that I was actually born
before we saw this image.

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Apparently some of my first words
words were "Moona, moona,"

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but I think that's my mom

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having a particular fantasy about

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what her baby boy could see
on the flickering black and white

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TV screen.

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It's only been a few centuries

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since we've actually, most of us,
thought of our planet as spherical.

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When we first saw these images
in the 1960s,

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the world was changing
at an incredible rate.

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In my own little discipline

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of human geography,

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a cartographer called Waldo Tobler

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was drawing new maps of the planet,

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and these maps have now spread,

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and I'm going to show you
one of them now.

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This map is a map of the world,

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but it's a map which looks to you

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a little bit strange.

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It's a map in which we stretched places

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so that those areas which contain
many people are drawn larger,

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and those areas, like the Sahara
and the Himalayas,

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in which there are few people,
have been shrunk away.

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Everybody on the planet is given
an equal amount of space.

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The cities are shown shining bright.

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The lines are showing you
submarine cables and trade routes.

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And there's one particular line
that goes from the Chinese port of Dalian

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through past Singapore,

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through the Suez Canal,

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through the Mediterranean,
and round to Rotterdam.

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And it's showing you the route

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of what was the world's largest ship
just a year ago,

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a ship which was taking

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so many containers of goods

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that when they were unloaded,

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if the lorries had all gone in convoy,
they would have been 100 kilometers long.

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This is how our world is now connected.

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This is the quantity of stuff
we are now moving around the world,

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just on one ship, on one voyage,

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in five weeks.

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We've lived in cities
for a very long time,

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but most of us didn't live in cities.

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This is Çatalhöyük, one of
the world's first cities.

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At its peak 9,000 years ago,

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people had to walk over the roofs

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of other's houses to get to their home.

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If you look carefully
of the map of the city,

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you'll see it has no streets,

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because streets are something we invented.

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The world changes.

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It changes by trial and error.

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We work out slowly and gradually

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how to live in better ways.

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And the world has changed
incredibly quickly most recently.

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It's only within the last six,
seven, or eight generations

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that we have actually realized
that we are a species.

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It's only within the last few decades

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that the map like this could be drawn.

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Again, the underlying map
is the map of world population,

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but over it, you're seeing arrows
showing how we spread out of Africa

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with dates showing you where
we think we arrived

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at particular times.

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I have to redraw this map
every few months,

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because somebody makes a discovery

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that a particular date was wrong.

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We are learning about ourselves
at an incredible speed.

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And we're changing.

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A lot of change is gradual.

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It's accretion.

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We don't notice the change

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because we only have short lives,

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70, 80, if you're lucky 90 years.

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This graph is showing you

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the annual rate of population
growth in the world.

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It was very low until around about 1850,

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and then the rate of population growth

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began to rise

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so that around the time I was born,

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when we first saw
those images from the Moon

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of our planet,

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our global population was growing
at two percent a year.

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If it had carried on growing
at two percent a year

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for just another couple of centuries,

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the entire planet would be covered

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with a seething mass of human bodies

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all touching each other.

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And people were scared.

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They were scared at population growth,

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and what they called
"the population bomb" in 1968.

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But then, if you look
at the end of the graph,

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the growth began to slow.

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The decade the '70s, the '80s, the '90s,
the naughties, and in this decade,

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even faster,

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our population growth is slowing.

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Our planet is stabilizing.

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We are heading towards nine, 10,
or 11 billion people

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by the end of the century.

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Within that change, you can see tumult.

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you can see the Second World War.

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You can see the pandemic
in 1918 from influenza.

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You can see the great Chinese famine.

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These are the events
we tend to concentrate on.

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We tend to concentrate
on the terrible events in the news.

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We don't tend to concentrate on
the gradual change

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and the good news stories.

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We worry about people.

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We worry about how many people there are.

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We worry about how you can
get away from people.

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But this is the map of the world
changed again to make area large,

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the further away people are
from each area.

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So if you want to know where to go
to get away from everybody,

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here's the best places to go.

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And every year, these areas get bigger,

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because every year, we are
coming off the land globally.

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We are moving into the cities.

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We are packing in more densely.

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There are wolves again in Europe,

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and the wolves are moving west

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across the continent.

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Our world is changing.

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You have worries.

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This is a map showing where
the water falls on our planet.

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We now know that.

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And you can look at where Çatalhöyük was,

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where three continents meet,
Africa, Asia, and Europe,

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and you can see there are
a large number of people living there

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in areas with very little water.

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And you can see areas in which
there is a great deal of rainfall as well.

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And we can get a bit more sophisticated.

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Instead of making
the map be shaped by people,

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we can shape the map by water,

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and then we can change it every month

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to show the amount of water

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falling on every small part of the globe.

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And you see the monsoons moving
around the planet,

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and the planet almost appears
to have a heartbeat.

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And all of this only became possible

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within my life,

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to see this is where we are living.

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We have enough water.

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This is a map of where we grow
our food in the world.

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This is the areas that we will rely on
most for rice and maize and corn.

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People worry that there won't
be enough food, but we know,

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if we just ate less meat and fed
less of the crops to animals,

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there is enough food for everybody

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as long as we think of ourselves
as one group of people.

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And we also know

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about what we do

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so terribly badly nowadays.

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You will have seen this map

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of the world before.

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This is the map

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produced by taking satellite images,

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if you remember those satellites
around the planet

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in the very first slide I showed,

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and producing an image of what
the Earth looks like at night.

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When you normally see that map,

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on a normal map, the kind of map

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that most of you will be used to,

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you think you are seeing

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a map of where people live.

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Where the lights are shining up
is where people live.

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But here, on this image of the world,

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remember we've stretched the map again.

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Everywhere has the same density
of people on this map.

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If an area doesn't have people,

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we've shrunk it away

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to make it disappear.

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So we're showing everybody

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with equal prominence.

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Now, the lights no longer show you
where people are,

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because people are everywhere.

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Now the lights on the map,

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the lights in London, the lights in Cairo,
the lights in Tokyo,

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the lights on the Eastern Seaboard
of the United States,

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the lights show you where people live

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who are so profligate with energy

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that they can afford

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to spend money

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powering lights to shine
up into the sky

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so satellites can draw an image like this.

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And the areas that are dark on the map

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are either areas where people
do not have access to that much energy,

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or areas where people do,

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but they have learned to stop
shining the light up into the sky.

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And if I could show you this map
animated over time,

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you would see that Tokyo
has actually become darker,

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because ever since the tsunami in Japan,

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Japan has had to rely
on a quarter less electricity

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because it turned
the nuclear power stations off.

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And the world didn't end.

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You just shown less light

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up into the sky.

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There are a huge number

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of good news stories in the world.

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Infant mortality is falling

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and has been falling
at an incredible rate.

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A few years ago,

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the number of babies
dying in their first year

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of life in the world

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fell by five percent in just one year.