I was lucky to be able to attend this year’s TED Talks live. With ‘dreams’ being the main theme, I listened carefully.
First of all, 10-year-old writer Ishita Katyal came up on stage with a message for the next generation. She had an important message for adults. Mostly, adults underestimate their children and in that process, they bring fear into children’s lives. Katyal quotes, “Instead of asking children what they want to be when they grow up, you should ask them what they want to be right now.” With this ever-growing fear concerning children, Ishita Katyal’s dream for the future is that before raising school fees, declaring war against another country, wasting food and water, people should think about their actions and their impacts. It is also of great importance that their child’s innocence or their childhood shouldn’t go away.
Second up, was Astro Teller (head of X, formerly Google X) – talking about why we need moonshoots. He opens the talk by saying that “Great dreams aren’t just visions.” and further goes onto mentioning that they are visions that are grouped or paired with strategies to make them real. Astro Teller gives the viewers an insight into the ‘moonshot factory’ as it was called and there, him and his team tackle great problems with the help of messy experimentation and an attempt to break things. Further, Teller shows two X projects that have failed rather successfully, one of them being an automated vertical farming technique and the other, a variable buoyancy cargo ship that is lighter than air. Currently, Astro is excited for another one of his projects, called ‘Loon’ in which balloons are used to bring online the 4 billion people in the world who have poor or no internet connectivity. He has high hopes for Loon because “Enthusiastic skepticism isn’t the enemy of boundless optimism; it’s optimism’s perfect partner.”
Then, we had Riccardo Sabatini who talked about the code of life. With him, he invited Craig Venter, who was the first man to sequence human DNA. While he (Sabatini) was talking and later when he had finished his introduction, a group of five people join them on stage, wheeling with them library carts full of volumes and volumes of books.“Not the man in his flesh,” Sabatini says with a smile. “But, for the first time in history, this is the genome of a specific human, printed page by page, letter by letter — 262,000 pages of information.” As he mentioned the 175 books in those carts, Sabatini picked out one volume and read a sequence of eight letters (Venter’s eye colour) and then said that with two letters from this particular sequence were to be in a different order, it would mean that he had cystic fibrosis. Now with all of this advanced technology, Riccardo Sabatini and his lab can predict things like eye colour, height and even facial structure – all based on a person’s genome. He ends the talk by exclaiming that “This is the code of life. Whatever we want to do with it, whatever question we want to pose, now is the time to do it.”
During the whole time of this, I was amazed at what we as normal people can do and achieve. I have also come to a conclusion that no matter what dreams we may have, as long as we work towards them that is all that matters – even if we fail it is okay to admit it, accept it and never give up.
MEHAK IFTIKHAR 