TED20260101 An ode to living on Earth - Oliver Jeffers (re-release)

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 twenty twenty six. And on this final day of 2025 we bring you a beautiful talk that asks us to consider a fundamental question.

欢迎收听TED每日播客，我们每天为您带来激发好奇的新思想。我是主持人艾莉丝·胡。我们将继续从TED档案中分享一些演讲、对话和播客节目，希望在我们思考年终岁末以及希望在2026年带入生活的决心与习惯之际，能激发我们所有人的灵感。在2025年的最后一天，我们为您带来一场精彩的演讲，它邀请我们思考一个根本性问题。

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.

如果你必须向一个新生儿解释，在21世纪作为一个人类生活在地球上意味着什么，你会怎么说？在2020年的这场演讲中，视觉艺术家奥利弗·杰弗斯将他的答案写进了一封给儿子的信里。分享了关于存在和生命多样性的智慧箴言。他对人类文明那美丽而脆弱的戏剧性进行了观察，并阐释了我们为何必须以一种对地球、对彼此、对我们共同未来的深切爱意，去度过每一天、每一月、每一年。对于那些有条件的朋友，我推荐大家在收听之后前往ted.com再次观看这场演讲，配上奥利弗的原画插图和动画，让演讲栩栩如生。

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 on to us. And James, those take a backseat for the time being, cause believe it or not, they're not the only thing going on.

大家好。我相信等我这句话说完，凭我说话的方式，你们都已经猜到我是来自一个叫做地球的地方。地球非常棒。我们拥有它。还有那些，暂时先放一边吧，因为信不信由你，它们并不是唯一存在的事物。

This planet is also home to cars. Ah, Brussels sprouts, those weird fish things that have their own headlights. Art, fire, fire extinguishers, laws, pigeons, bottles of beer, lemons and light bulbs, peanut 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 favorite place actually, this small orb floating in a cold and lonely part of the cosmos.

这个星球也是汽车的家园。啊，抱子甘蓝，那些自己长着“头灯”的奇怪鱼类。艺术，火，灭火器，法律，鸽子，瓶装啤酒，柠檬和灯泡，黑花生酱和扑热息痛药，鬼魂，蚊子，火烈鸟，鲜花，尤克里里，电梯和猫，猫视频，互联网，钢梁，建筑和电池，所有的巧思和聪明主意，所有已知的生命。以及一大堆其他东西，几乎囊括了我们所知道和听说过的所有事物。实际上，这是我最喜欢的地方，这颗漂浮在宇宙寒冷孤独角落的小球体。

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. You know what? 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 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 you.

哦，顺便说一下，我的口音来自贝尔法斯特。你可能认为你了解这个地球，因为你来自这里，但很可能你还没思考过基本的东西。你知道吗？我曾以为我了解它，以为自己是专家。直到有一天，我必须向一个从未到过这里的人解释整个地方以及它应该如何运作，这对象并非你想的那样。虽然我爸爸总是说，外星存在智慧生命的确定迹象就是他们懒得联系我们。实际上，这个人是我刚出生的儿子。我当时正试图向他解释一切。

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. The kitchen is where we make food at. 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. But after a glass and once the magnitude that you humans know, absolutely nothing settles on you and how little you know either. Explaining the whole planet becomes quite intimidating, but I tried anyway 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.

我和我妻子以前从未当过父母，所以当他第一次回到家时，我们像对待大多数客人一样对待他。给他做了个导览。儿子，这是你住的地方。厨房是我们做饭的地方。这是我们放椅子收藏之类的房间。向一个零岁的孩子解释我们的星球如何运作，令人耳目一新。但几杯酒下肚，一旦意识到“你们人类其实一无所知”这个事实笼罩着你，以及你自己知道的又是如此之少，解释整个星球就变得相当令人生畏。但无论如何我还是尝试了。在最初几周里，我边走边讲述我所看到的世界，我开始记下我说的那些荒谬的话。

The notes slowly morphed into a letter intended for my son once he learned to read, and that letter became a book 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, land and sea. Some less obvious and so you think about them like time. Things can sometimes move slowly here on Earth.

这些笔记慢慢变成了一封信，打算等我儿子学会阅读后给他看。那封信后来成了一本书，讲述了在21世纪作为一个人类生活在地球上的基本原则。有些事情非常明显。比如这个星球由两部分构成，陆地和海洋。有些则不那么明显，因此你需要思考它们，比如时间。地球上的事物有时进展缓慢。

But more often, they move quickly. So use your time well. It'll be gone before you know it. Or people. People come in all different shapes, sizes and colors. We may all look different, act different and sound different. But don't be fooled, we are all people.

但更多时候，它们进展迅速。所以要善用你的时间。它会在你意识到之前就消逝了。或者，人。人有各种不同的形状、尺寸和颜色。我们可能看起来不同，行为不同，听起来也不同。但别被迷惑了，我们都是人。

It doesn't escape me that of all the places in the universe, people only live on Earth, can only live on Earth, 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.

我清楚地知道，在宇宙的所有地方中，人类只生活在地球上，也只能生活在地球上，即便如此，也仅生活在某些干燥的区域。我们星球表面实际上只有非常小的一部分适合人类居住，而我们所有人都挤在这里生活。当你贴近我们土地上的泥土、岩石、植物、混凝土时，很容易忘记我们的活动空间是多么有限。

From a set of eyes close to the ground, the horizon feels like it goes forever. After all, it's not an every day Rachel, 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.

从贴近地面的一双眼睛看出去，地评*线仿佛绵延无尽。毕竟，这并不是每天都会有的思考，去考虑我们在星球这颗球体上的位置，以及这颗球在太空中的位置。我不想告诉我儿子我成长于北爱尔兰时被灌输的那种关于国家的故事，即我们只是来自一个小教区，这种故事忽略了其直接关切之外的生命。

I wanted to try to feel what it was like to see our planet as one system, as a single object hanging in space. To do this, I would need to switch from flat drawings or books to the three-D sculpture for the street, and I'd need almost 200 feet, a New York City block to build a large scale model of the moon, the Earth and us.

我想要尝试感受将我们的星球视为一个系统、视为悬挂在太空中的一个单一物体是什么感觉。为此，我需要从评*面的绘画或书籍转向为街道创作三维雕塑，我几乎需要200英尺，一个纽约市的街区，来建造一个大规模的月亮、地球和我们自己的模型。

This project managed to take place on New York City's High Line park last winter on the 50th anniversary of Apollo eleven's mission around the moon. After its installation, I was able to put on a space helmet with my son and launch like Apollo 11 a day and a half century ago towards the moon. We circled around and looked b*ack at us. What I felt was how lonely it was there in the dark and I was just pretending.

这个项目得以在去年冬天在纽约市高线公园实现，时值阿波罗十一号绕月任务五十周年纪念。安装完成后，我得以和儿子戴上一顶太空头盔，像半个世纪零一天前的阿波罗11号一样向月球发射。我们环绕飞行，回头看向我们（地球）。我感到那里（太空）是多么孤独，而我只是在假装。

The moon is the only object even remotely close to us, 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 a couple of miles away. Although borders are not visible from space, on my sculpture every single border was drawn in, but rather than writing the country names in the carved up land, I wrote over and over again, "People live here. People live here. People live here." And on the moon, it was written, "No one lives here."

月球是唯一还算接近我们的天体。在这个项目中，我们星球的直径是10英尺，那么下一个行星火星就像一个瑜伽球大小，远在几英里之外。尽管从太空看不到国界，但在我的雕塑上每一条边界都被画了出来，不过我没有在被分割的土地上写上国家名称，而是反复写着：“人们生活在这里。人们生活在这里。人们生活在这里。”而在月亮上，则写着：“无人居住于此。”

Often, the obvious things aren't all that obvious until you think about them. Seeing anything from a vast enough distance changes everything, as many astronauts have experienced, and human eyes have only ever seen our Earth from as far as the moon, really. It's quite a ways further before we get to the edges of our own solar system and even out to other stars, to the constellations.

通常，显而易见的事物在你思考它们之前并非那么明显。从足够远的距离看任何东西都会改变一切，许多宇航员都经历过，而人类的肉眼确实只从远至月球的距离看过我们的地球。要到达我们太阳系的边缘，甚至到达其他恒星，到那些星座，还有相当长的路要走。

There is actually only one point in the entire cosmos that is present in all constellations of stars, and that presence is... here. Planet Earth. 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 and only to something to us. To people.

实际上，在整个宇宙中，只有一个点存在于所有星群（星座）之中，而这个存在就是……这里。地球。我们为那些星群编造出的图案，只有从我们这里的这个视角看才有意义。它们的故事只有在地球这里才有意义，并且只对我们有意义。对人类。

We are creatures of stories. We are the stories we tell, where the stories were told. 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 and defiantly protective. We the people, shield the flame of our existence from the raw and vast elements outside our control, the great beyond.

我们是故事的生物。我们是讲述的故事，也是故事被讲述的地方。简要思考一下地球上的人类文明故事。它讲述了一个物种的聪慧、优雅、慷慨和滋养的天性，这个物种同时也以自我为中心、脆弱且具有强烈的保护性。我们人类，为我们存在的火焰筑起屏障，以抵御我们无法控制的原始而广袤的元素，那浩瀚的未知。

Yet it is always to the flame we look. For all we know, when said is a statement, it means the sum total of all knowledge. But when said another way, "For all we know..." It means that we do not know it 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.

然而，我们总是注视着那火焰。我们所知的一切，当作为一个陈述句时，意味着所有知识的总和。但换一种说法，“就我们所知……”意味着我们并非全知。这就是文明美丽而脆弱的戏剧。我们是一场宇宙戏剧的演员和观众，这场戏对我们这里意味着整个世界，但在任何其他地方都毫无意义。

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 proved harder to conquer, but they, too, surrender.

也许即使在这里，如果我们真正思考我们与我们的方舟、与我们的地球的关系，其意义可能也并没有那么大。这或许更像是一个关于无知和贪婪的故事。就像浮士德一样，一个相信自己拥有一切并开始清点他财产的人。他轻易地宣示对一朵花、一只羊、一棵树和一片田野的所有权。湖泊和山脉证明更难征服，但它们也投降了。

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 him.

但正是在试图拥有公海时，他的贪婪导致了他的毁灭，一时狂妄之下，他爬出船舷向大海示威谁才是主宰，但他不明白，随后滑入浪涛之下，沉入海底。大海为他感到悲伤，但是……继续做大海。他所有的其他占有物也是如此，但浮士德的命运对它们（大海、花、羊等）并不重要。

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 have gone about our days. Sometimes we look up and out, mostly we look down and in.

尽管我们相信自己拥有宇宙间的一切重要性，但若非地球，我们将一无所有，而地球没有我们，也会毫不在意地快乐旋转。在这个星球上，有人。我们度过我们的日子。有时我们向上向外看，多数时候我们向下向内看。

Looking up and by drawing lines between the lights in the sky, we've attempted to make sense out of chaos. Looking down, we draw 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.

仰望天空，通过在光点之间画线，我们试图从混沌中寻找意义。俯瞰大地，我们划下线条以区分归属与不属之地。我们大多忘记了，这些连接星星的线和那些分割土地的线只存在于我们的脑海中。它们，也是故事。

We carry out our everyday routines and rituals according to the stories we most believe in. These days, the story is changing as we write it. There's 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.

我们根据我们最相信的故事来执行我们的日常惯例和仪式。如今，故事正随着我们的书写而改变。当前的故事中有很多恐惧，并且直到最近，似乎占主导地位的故事是那些苦涩的故事，关于一切对我们个人和集体而言是如何出错的。看到最坏的情况中诞生出最好的东西，令人振奋。

Our 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.

在这个全球反思的时刻，我们的人民正在觉醒，意识到我们彼此之间的联系是我们所拥有的最重要的东西之一。但退一步看，尽管我们有那么多需要哀叹，我们却很少花时间去品味那件对我们而言最正确不过的单一最大幸事：我们最初就在这里，我们竟然活着，在发现一盒火柴一百五十万年后我们仍然活着。我们还没有把房子完全烧掉。

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.

能够在此存在的几率微乎其微。然而我们就在这里，危险与一切并存。居住在地球上并使用更多资源的人从未如此之多，我们为自己发明的许多旧系统显然已经过时，我们必须建立新的系统。

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, 7 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 it. So please, be kind.

我们在地球上，地球上的生命是美妙的事物。地球看起来很大，但我们这里有太多人，上次统计是七十五亿，而且每天都有更多到来。即便如此，如果我们都分享，仍然足够每个人使用。所以，请保持善良。

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. We know that now more than ever.

换个角度想，如果地球是唯一有人居住的地方，那么它实际上是宇宙中最不孤独的地方。有很多人可以爱我们，也有很多我们可以爱的人。我们需要彼此。我们现在比以往任何时候都更明白这一点。

Goodnight.

晚安。

That was Oliver Jeffers speaking at TED 2020.

以上是奥利弗·杰弗斯在TED 2020的演讲。