WEBVTT

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[Oliver Jeffers]

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[An ode to living on Earth]

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Hello.

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I'm sure by the time
I get to end of this sentence,

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given how I talk,

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you'll all have figured out
that I'm from a place called

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planet Earth.

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Earth is pretty great.

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It's home to us.

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And germs.

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Those [blip] take a back seat
for the time being,

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because believe it or not,
they're not the only thing going on.

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This planet is also home
to cars, brussels sprouts;

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those weird fish things
that have their own headlights;

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art, fire,

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fire extinguishers,

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laws, pigeons, bottles of beer,

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lemons and light bulbs;

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Pinot noir and paracetamol;

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ghosts, mosquitoes, flamingos, flowers,

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the ukulele, elevators and cats,

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cat videos, the internet;

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iron beams, buildings and batteries,

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all ingenuity and bright ideas,
all known life ...

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and a whole bunch of other stuff.

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Pretty much everything we know
and ever heard of.

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It's my favorite place, actually.

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This small orb,

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floating in a cold and lonely
part of the cosmos.

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Oh, the accent is from Belfast,
by the way, which is ...

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here.

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Roughly.

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You may think you know this planet Earth,

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as you're from here.

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But chances are,

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you probably haven't thought
about the basics in a while.

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I thought I knew it.

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Thought I was an expert, even.

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Until, that is, I had to explain
the entire place,

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and how it's supposed to work,

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to someone who had never been here before.

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Not what you might think,

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although my dad always did say

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the sure sign of intelligent
life out there

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is that they haven't bothered
trying to contact us.

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It was actually my newborn son
I was trying to explain things to.

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We'd never been parents before,

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my wife and I,

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and so treated him like most guests
when he arrived home for the first time,

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by giving him the tour.

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This is where you live, son.

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This room is where we make food at.

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This is the room we keep
our collection of chairs, and so on.

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It's refreshing,

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explaining how our planet works
to a zero-year-old.

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But after the laughs,

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and once the magnitude that new humans
know absolutely nothing

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settles on you and how little
you know either,

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explaining the whole planet
becomes quite intimidating.

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But I tried anyway.

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As I walked around those first few weeks,

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narrating the world as I saw it,

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I began to take notes
of the ridiculous things I was saying.

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The notes slowly morphed into a letter

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intended for my son
once he learned to read.

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And that letter became a book

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about the basic principles
of what it is to be a human

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living on Earth in the 21st century.

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Some things are really obvious.

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Like, the planet is made of two parts:

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land and sea.

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Some less obvious
until you think about them.

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Like, time.

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Things can sometimes
move slowly here on Earth.

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But more often, they move quickly.

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So use your time well,
it will be gone before you know it.

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Or people.

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People come in all different
shapes, sizes and colors.

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We may all look different,

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act different and sound different,

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but don't be fooled.

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We are all people.

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It doesn't skip me that of all
the places in the universe,

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people only live on Earth,

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can only live on Earth.

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And even then,
only on some of the dry bits.

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There's only a very small
part of the surface of our planet

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that is actually habitable to human life,

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and squeezed in here
is where all of us live.

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It's easy to forget
when you're up close to the dirt,

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the rocks, the foliage,
the concrete of our lands,

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just how limited the room
for maneuvering is.

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From a set of eyes close to the ground,

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the horizon feels like it goes forever.

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After all, it's not an every-day ritual

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to consider where we are
on the ball of our planet

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and where that ball is in space.

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I didn't want to tell my son
the same story of countries

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that we were told where I was growing up
in Northern Ireland.

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That we were from just a small parish,

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which ignores life
outside its immediate concerns.

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I wanted to try to feel
what it was like to see our planet

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as one system, as a single object,

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hanging in space.

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To do this,

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I would need to switch
from flat drawings for books

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to 3D sculpture for the street,

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and I'd need almost 200 feet,

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a New York City block,

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to build a large-scale model of the moon,

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the Earth and us.

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This project managed to take place
on New York City's High Line park

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last winter,

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on the 50th anniversary
of Apollo 11's mission around the Moon.

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After its installation,

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I was able to put on
a space helmet with my son

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and launch, like Apollo 11 did
half a century ago,

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towards the Moon.

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We circled around

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and looked back at us.

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What I felt was

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how lonely it was there in the dark.

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And I was just pretending.

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The Moon is the only object

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even remotely close to us.

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And at the scale of this project,

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where our planet was 10 feet in diameter,

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Mars, the next planet,
will be the size of a yoga ball

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and a couple of miles away.

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Although borders
are not visible from space,

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on my sculpture,

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every single border was drawn in.

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But rather than writing the country names
on the carved-up land,

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I wrote over and over again,

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"people live here, people live here."

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"People live here."

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And off on the Moon, it was written,

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"No one lives here."

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Often, the obvious things

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aren't all that obvious
until you think about them.

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Seeing anything
from a vast enough distance

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changes everything,

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as many astronauts have experienced.

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And human eyes
have only ever seen our Earth

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from as far as the Moon, really.

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It's quite a ways further

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before we get to the edges
of our own Solar System.

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And even out to other stars,
to the constellations.

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There is actually only one point
in the entire cosmos

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that is present in all
constellations of stars,

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and that presence is

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here, planet Earth.

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Those pictures we have made up
for the clusters of stars

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only make sense from
this point of view down here.

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Their stories only make sense
here on Earth.

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And only something to us.

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To people.

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We are creatures of stories.

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We are the stories we tell,

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we're the stories we're told.

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Consider briefly the story
of human civilization on Earth.

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It tells of the ingenuity, elegance,

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generous and nurturing nature of a species

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that is also self-focused, vulnerable

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and defiantly protective.

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We, the people, shield
the flame of our existence

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from the raw, vast elements
outside our control,

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the great beyond.

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Yet it is always to the flame we look.

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"For all we know,"

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when said as a statement,

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it means the sum total of all knowledge.

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But when said another way,

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"for all we know,"

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it means that we do not know at all.

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This is the beautiful,
fragile drama of civilization.

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We are the actors and spectators
of a cosmic play

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that means the world to us here,

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but means nothing anywhere else.

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Possibly not even that much
down here, either.

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If we truly thought about
our relationship with our boat,

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with our Earth,

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it might be more of a story
of ignorance and greed.

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As is the case with Fausto,

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a man who believed he owned everything

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and set out to survey what was his.

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He easily claims ownership of a flower,

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a sheep, a tree and a field.

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The lake and the mountain
prove harder to conquer,

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but they, too, surrender.

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It is in trying to own the open sea

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where his greed proves his undoing,

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when, in a fit of arrogance,

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he climbs overboard
to show that sea who is boss.

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But he does not understand,

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slips beneath the waves,
sinks to the bottom.

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The sea was sad for him

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but carried on being the sea.

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As do all the other objects
of his ownership,

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for the fate of Fausto
does not matter to them.

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For all the importance in the cosmos
we believe we hold,

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we'd have nothing

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if not for this Earth.

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While it would keep happily spinning,

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obliviously without us.

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On this planet, there are people.

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We have gone about our days,

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sometimes we look up and out,

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mostly we look down and in.

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Looking up and by drawing lines
between the lights in the sky,

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we've attempted to make
sense out of chaos.

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Looking down, we've drawn lines
across the land to know where we belong

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and where we don't.

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We do mostly forget that these lines
that connect the stars

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and those lines that divide the land

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live only in our heads.

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They, too, are stories.

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We carry out our everyday
routines and rituals

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according to the stories
we most believe in,

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and these days, the story
is changing as we write it.

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There is a lot of fear
in this current story,

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and until recently,

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the stories that seemed
to have the most power

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are those of bitterness,

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of how it had all gone wrong for us
individually and collectively.

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It has been inspiring to watch
how the best comes from the worst.

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How people are waking up
in this time of global reckoning

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to the realization that our
connections with each other

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are some of the most
important things we have.

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But stepping back.

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For all we've had to lament,

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we spend very little time relishing
the single biggest thing

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that has ever gone right for us.

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That we are here in the first place,

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that we are alive at all.

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That we are still alive.

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A million and a half years
after finding a box of matches,

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we haven't totally burned the house down.

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Yet.

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The chances of being here
are infinitesimal.

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Yet here we are.

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Perils and all.

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There have never been
more people living on Earth.

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Using more stuff.

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And it's become obvious
that many of the old systems

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we invented for ourselves

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are obsolete.

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And we have to build new ones.

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If it wasn't germs,

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our collective fire
might suffocate us before long.

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As we watch the wheels
of industry grind to a halt,

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the machinery of progress become silent,

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we have the wildest of opportunities

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to hit the reset button.

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To take a different path.

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Here we are on Earth.

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And life on Earth is a wonderful thing.

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It looks big, this Earth,

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but there are lots of us on here.

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Seven and a half billion at last count,

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with more showing up every day.

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Even so,

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there is still enough for everyone,

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if we all share a little.

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So please,

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be kind.

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When you think of it another way,

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if Earth is the only place
where people live,

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it's actually the least
lonely place in the universe.

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There are plenty of people to be loved by

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and plenty of people to love.

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We need each other.

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We know that now, more than ever.

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Good night.