I'm Elise Hugh. You're listening to TED Talks Daily. Okay, 1971. That was 50 years ago. A lot of us weren't alive back then. But I do know Vietnam war protests were happening and D.B. Cooper jumped out of a plane. What will stand out to us 50 years in the future?

In his talk filmed for Ted Monterey, 2021, the acclaimed science fiction writer Kim

Stanley Robinson has this dispatch from the year 2071.

The 2020s were a crux in human history.

They began with the first pandemic, a slap to the face of everyone,

as they had to acknowledge that they were a single civilization on a single biosphere,

utterly dependent on science to keep them alive.

Civilization is a fragile thing.

And although people started the 20s hoping to ignore that profound truth,

even after the first pandemic,

the great heat waves of 2023 torched any such hope.

Humans cannot survive combinations of high heat and high humidity

that rise above an index temperature called wet bulb 35. And that year,

the wet bulb 36 events in India, in Southeast Asia, and in the American Midwest, killed so many

more people than the first pandemic that it was made clear to everyone, things simply had to change.

The arrival of the second pandemic put an exclamation mark on all that.

The question at that desperate point was, could things change?

Could humanity stop its destructive ways and restore balance to its relationship to its biosphere?

Crucially, could it lower the global average temperature of the Earth in time to avoid killing

millions more people, more animals, and indeed entire species?

Looking back from our perspective, 60 years later, this of course looks possible because they did

it.

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