This TED Talk features space strategy advisor Alex McDonald, recorded live at TEDx Auckland, 2017.

I want to tell you a story about stories.

I want to tell you this story because I think we need to remember that sometimes the stories we tell each other

are more than just tales or entertainment or narratives. There are also vehicles for sowing

inspiration and ideas across our societies and across time. The story I'm about to tell you is

about how one of the most advanced technological

achievements of the modern era has its roots in stories, and how some of the most important

transformations yet to come might also. The story begins over 300 years ago when Galileo

Galilei first learned of the recent Dutch invention that

took two pieces of shaped glass and put him in a long tube and thereby extended human sight

farther than ever before. When Galileo turned his new telescope to the heavens and to the moon in

particular, he discovered something incredible.

These are pages from Galileo's book Sidarius Nensius, published in 1610, and in them he

revealed to the world what he had discovered. What he discovered was that the moon was not just a

celestial object wandering across the night sky, but rather it was a world,

a world with high sunlit mountains and dark mare, the Latin word for seas. And once this

new world in the moon had been discovered, well, people immediately began to think about how to travel there.

And just as importantly, they began to write stories about how that might happen and what those

voyages might be like. One of the first people to do so was actually the Bishop of Hereford,

a man named Francis Godwin. And Godwin wrote a story about a Spanish explorer,

Domingo Gonzalez, who ended up marooned on the island of St. Helena in the middle of the Atlantic,

and there, in an effort to get home, developed a machine, an invention to harness the power

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