If you've watched the news or followed politics chances are you've heard the term Orwellian thrown around in one context or another.
But have you ever stopped to think about what it really means, or why it's used so often?
The term was named after British author Eric Blair known by his pen name George Orwell.
Because his most famous work, the novel "1984," depicts an oppressive society under a totalitarian government, "Orwellian" is often used simply to mean authoritarian.
But using the term in this way not only fails to fully convey Orwell's message, it actually risks doing precisely what he tried to warn against.
Orwell was indeed opposed to all forms of tyranny, spending much of his life fighting against anti-democratic forces of both the left-wing and the right.
But he was also deeply concerned with how such ideologies proliferate.
And one of his most profound insights was the importance that language plays in shaping our thoughts and opinions.
The government of "1984"'s Oceania controls its people's actions and speech in some ways that are obvious.
Their every move and word is watched and heard, and the threat of what happens to those who step out of line is always looming overhead.
Other forms of control are not so obvious.
The population is inundated with a constant barrage of propaganda made up of historical facts and statistics manufactured in the Ministry of Truth.
The Ministry of Peace is the military.
Labor camps are called "Joycamps."
Political prisoners are detained and tortured in the Ministry of Love.
This deliberate irony is an example of doublespeak, when words are used not to convey meaning but to undermine it, corrupting the very ideas they refer to.
The regime's control of language goes even further, eliminating words from the English language to create the official dialect of Newspeak, a crudely limited collection of acronyms and simple concrete nouns lacking any words complex enough to encourage nuanced or critical thought.
This has an effect on the psyche Orwell calls, "Doublethink," a hypnotic state of cognitive dissonance in which one is compelled to disregard their own perception in place of the officially dictated version of events, leaving the individual completely dependent on the State's definition of reality itself.
The result is a world in which even the privacy of one's own thought process is violated, where one may be found guilty of thoughtcrime by talking in their sleep, and keeping a diary or having a love affair equals a subversive act of rebellion.
This might sound like something that can only happen in totalitarian regimes, but Orwell was warning us about the potential for this occurring even in democratic societies.
And this is why "authoritarian" alone does not "Orwellian" make.
In his essay, "Politics and the English Language," he described techniques like using pretentious words to project authority, or making atrocities sound acceptable by burying them in euphemisms and convoluted sentence structures.
But even more mundane abuses of language can affect the way we think about things.
The words you see and hear in everyday advertising have been crafted to appeal to you and affect your behavior, as have the soundbites and talking points of political campaigns which rarely present the most nuanced perspective on the issues.
And the way that we use ready-made phrases and responses gleaned from media reports or copied from the Internet makes it easy to get away with not thinking too deeply or questioning your assumptions.
So the next time you hear someone use the word Orwellian, pay close attention.
If they're talking about the deceptive and manipulative use of language, they're on the right track.
If they're talking about mass surveillance and intrusive government, they're describing something authoritarian but not necessarily Orwellian.
And if they use it as an all-purpose word for any ideas they dislike, it's possible their statements are more Orwellian than whatever it is they're criticizing.
Words have the power to shape thought.
Language is the currency of politics, forming the basis of society from the most common, everyday interactions to the highest ideals.
Orwell urged us to protect our language because ultimately our ability to think and communicate clearly is what stands between us and a world where war is peace and freedom is slavery.
So, I don't like to boast, but I am very good at finding things to be annoyed about.
It is a real specialty of mine.
I can hear 100 compliments and a single insult, and what do I remember?
The insult.
And according to the research, I'm not alone.
Unfortunately, the human brain is wired to focus on the negative.
Now, this might have been helpful when we were cave people, trying to avoid predators, but now it's a terrible way to go through life.
It is a real major component of anxiety and depression.
So how can we fight the brain's negative bias?
According to a lot of research, one of the best weapons is gratitude.
So knowing this, I started a new tradition in our house a couple of years ago.
Before a meal with my wife and kids, I would say a prayer of thanksgiving.
Prayer is not quite the right word.
I'm agnostic, so instead of thanking God, I would thank some of the people who helped make my food a reality.
I'd say, "I'd like to thank the farmer who grew these tomatoes, and the trucker who drove these tomatoes to the store, and the cashier who rang these tomatoes up."
And I thought it was going pretty well, this tradition.
Then one day, my 10-year-old son said, "You know, Dad, those people aren't in our apartment.
They can't hear you.
If you really cared, you would go and thank them in person."
And I thought, "Hmm.
That's an interesting idea."
(Laughter) Now I'm a writer, and for my books I like to go on adventures.
Go on quests.
So I decided I'm going to take my son up on his challenge.
It seemed simple enough.
And to make it even simpler, I decided to focus on just one item.
An item I can't live without: my morning cup of coffee.
Well, it turned out to be not so cwalker@example.org.
(Laughter) This quest took me months.
It took me around the world.
Because I discovered that my coffee would not be possible without hundreds of people I take for granted.
So I would thank the trucker who drove the coffee beans to the coffee shop.
But he couldn't have done his job without the road.
So I would thank the people who paved the road.
(Laughter) And then I would thank the people who made the asphalt for the pavement.
And I came to realize that my coffee, like so much else in the world, requires the combined work of a shocking number of people from all walks of life.
Architects, biologists, designers, miners, goat herds, you name it.
I decided to call my project "Thanks a Thousand."
Because I ended up thanking over a thousand people.
And it was overwhelming, but it was also wonderful.
Because it allowed me to focus on the hundreds of things that go right every day, as opposed to the three or four that go wrong.
And it reminded me of the astounding interconnectedness or our world.
I learned dozens of lessons during this project, but let me just focus on five today.
The first is: look up.
I started my trail of gratitude by thanking the barista at my local coffee shop, Joe Coffee in New York.
Her name is Chung, and Chung is one of the most upbeat people you will ever meet.
Big smiler, enthusiastic hugger.
But even for Chung, being a barista is hard.
And that's because you are encountering people in a very dangerous state.
(Laughter) You know what it is -- precaffeination.
(Laughter) So, Chung has had people yell at her until she cried, including a nine-year-old girl, who didn't like the whipped cream design that Chung did on her hot chocolate.
So I thanked Chung, and she thanked me for thanking her.
I cut it off there.
I didn't want to go into an infinite thanking loop.
(Laughter) But Chung said that the hardest part is when people don't even treat her like a human being.
They treat her like a vending machine.
So, they'll hand her their credit card without even looking up from their phone.
And while she's saying this, I'm realizing I've done that.
I've been that a-hole.
And at that moment, I pledged: when dealing with people, I'm going to take those two seconds and look at them, make eye contact.
Because it reminds you, you're dealing with a human being who has family and aspirations and embarrassing high school memories.
And that little moment of connection is so important to both people's humanity and happiness.
Alright, second lesson was: smell the roses.
And the dirt.
And the fertilizer.
After Chung, I thanked this man.
This is Ed Kaufmann.
And Ed is the one who chooses which coffee they serve at my local coffee shop.
He goes around the world, to South America, to Africa, finding the best coffee beans.
So I thanked Ed.
And in return, Ed showed me how to taste coffee like a pro.
And it is quite a ritual.
You take your spoon and you dip it in the coffee and then you take a big, loud slurp.
Almost cartoonishly loud.
This is because you want to spray the coffee all over your mouth.
You have taste buds in the side of your cheeks, in the roof of your mouth, you've got to get them all.
So Ed would do this and he would -- his face would light up and he would say, "This coffee tastes of Honeycrisp apple and notes of soil and maple syrup."
And I would take a sip and I'd say, "I'm picking up coffee.
(Laughter) It tastes to me like coffee."
(Laughter) But inspired by Ed, I decided to really let the coffee sit on my tongue for five seconds -- we're all busy, but I could spare five seconds, and really think about the texture and the acidity and the sweetness.
And I started to do it with other foods.
And this idea of savoring is so important to gratitude.
Psychologists talk about how gratitude is about taking a moment and holding on to it as long as possible.
And slowing down time.
So that life doesn't go by in one big blur, as it often does.
Number three is: find the hidden masterpieces all around you.
Now, one of my favorite conversations during this year was with the guy who invented my coffee cup lid.
And until this point, I had given approximately zero thought to coffee cup lids.
But I loved talking to this inventor, Doug Fleming, because he was so passionate.
And the blood and sweat and tears he put into this lid, and that I had never even considered.
He says a bad lid can ruin your coffee.
That it can block the aroma, which is so important to the experience.
So he -- he's very innovative.
He's like the Elon Musk of coffee lids.
(Laughter) So he designed this lid that's got an upside-down hexagon so you can get your nose right in there and get maximum aroma.
And so I was delighted talking to him, and it made me realize there are hundreds of masterpieces all around us that we totally take for granted.
Like the on-off switch on my desk lamp has a little indentation for my thumb that perfectly fits my thumb.
And when something is done well, the process behind it is largely invisible.
But paying attention to it can tap into that sense of wonder and enrich our lives.
Number four is: fake it till you feel it.
By the end of the project, I was just in a thanking frenzy.
So I was -- I would get up and spend a couple hours, I'd write emails, send notes, make phone calls, visit people to thank them for their role in my coffee.
And some of them, quite honestly -- not that into it.
They would be like, "What is this?
Is this a pyramid scheme, what do you want, what are you selling?"
But most people were surprisingly moved.
I remember, I called the woman who does the pest control for the warehouse where my coffee is served -- I'm sorry -- where my coffee is stored.
And I said, "This may sound strange, but I want to thank you for keeping the bugs out of my coffee."
And she said, "Well, that does sound strange, but you just made my day."
And it was like an anti-crank phone call.
And it didn't just affect her, it affected me.
Because I would wake up every morning in my default mood, which is grumpiness, but I would force myself to write a thank-you note and then another and then another.
And what I found was that if you act as if you're grateful, you eventually become grateful for real.
The power of our actions to change our mind is astounding.
So, often we think that thought changes behavior, but behavior very often changes our thought.
And finally, the last lesson I want to tell you about is: practice six degrees of gratitude.
And every place, every stop on this gratitude trail would give birth to 100 other people that I could thank.
So I went down to Colombia to thank the farmers who grow my coffee beans.
And it was in a small mountain town, and I was driven there along these curvy, cliffside roads.
And every time we went around a hairpin turn the driver would do the sign of the cross.
And I was like, "Thank you for that.
(Laughter) But can you do that while keeping your hands on the wheel?
Because I am terrified."
But we made it.
And I met the farmers, the Guarnizo brothers.
It's a small farm, they make great coffee, they're paid above fair-trade prices for it.
And they showed me how the coffee is grown.
The bean is actually inside this fruit called the coffee cherry.
And I thanked them.
And they said, "Well, we couldn't do our job without 100 other people."
The machine that depulps the fruit is made in Brazil, and the pickup truck they drive around the farm, that is made from parts from all over the world.
In fact, the US exports steel to Colombia.
So I went to Indiana, and I thanked the steel makers.
And it just drove home that it doesn't take a village to make a cup of coffee.
It takes the world to make a cup of coffee.
And this global economy, this globalization, it does have downsides.
But I believe the long-term upsides are far greater, that progress is real.
We have made improvements in the last 50 years, poverty worldwide has gone down.
And that we should resist the temptation to retreat into our silos.
And we should resist this upsurge in isolationism and jingoism.
Which brings me to my final point.
Which is my hope that we use gratitude as a spark to action.
Some people worry that gratitude has a downside.
That we'll be so grateful, that we'll be complacent.
We'll be so, "Oh, everything's wonderful, I'm so grateful."
Well, it turns out, the opposite is true.
The research shows that the more grateful you are, the more likely you are to help others.
When you're in a bad state, you're often more focused on your own needs.
But gratitude makes you want to pay it forward.
And I experienced this personally.
I mean, I'm not Mother Teresa, I'm still a selfish bastard a huge amount of the time.
But I'm better than I was before this project.
And that's because it made me aware of the exploitation on the supply chain.
It reminded me that what I take for granted is not available to millions of people around the world.
Like water.
Coffee is 98.8 percent water.
So I figured I should go and thank the people at the New York reservoir, hundreds of them, who provide me water, and this miracle that I can turn a lever and get safe water.
And that millions of people around the world don't have this luxury and have to walk hours to get safe water.
It inspired me to see what I could do to help people get more access, and I did research and found a wonderful group called Dispensers for Safe Water.
And I got involved.
And I'm not expecting the Nobel Prize committee to knock down my door, but it's a baby step, it's a little something.
And it's all because of gratitude.
And it's why I encourage people, friends, family, to follow gratitude trails of their own.
Because it's a life-transforming experience.
And it doesn't have to be coffee.
It could be anything.
It could be a pair of socks, it could be a light bulb.
And you don't have to go around the world, you can just do a little gesture, like make eye contact or send a note to the designer of a logo you love.
It's more about a mindset.
Being aware of the thousands of people involved in every little thing we do.
Remembering that there's someone in a factory who made the fabric for the chairs you're sitting in right now.
That someone went into a mine and got the copper for this microphone so that I could say my final thank you, which is to thank you.
Thank you a thousand for listening to my story.
(Applause) (Cheering)
So, my question: are we alone?
The story of humans is the story of ideas -- scientific ideas that shine light into dark corners, ideas that we embrace rationally and irrationally, ideas for which we've lived and died and killed and been killed, ideas that have vanished in history, and ideas that have been set in dogma.
It's a story of nations, of ideologies, of territories, and of conflicts among them.
But, every moment of human history, from the Stone Age to the Information Age, from Sumer and Babylon to the iPod and celebrity gossip, they've all been carried out -- every book that you've read, every poem, every laugh, every tear -- they've all happened here.
Here.
Here.
Here.
(Laughter) Perspective is a very powerful thing.
Perspectives can change.
Perspectives can be altered.
From my perspective, we live on a fragile island of life, in a universe of possibilities.
For many millennia, humans have been on a journey to find answers, answers to questions about naturalism and transcendence, about who we are and why we are, and of course, who else might be out there.
Is it really just us?
Are we alone in this vast universe of energy and matter and chemistry and physics?
Well, if we are, it's an awful waste of space.
(Laughter) But, what if we're not?
What if, out there, others are asking and answering similar questions?
What if they look up at the night sky, at the same stars, but from the opposite side?
Would the discovery of an older cultural civilization out there inspire us to find ways to survive our increasingly uncertain technological adolescence?
Might it be the discovery of a distant civilization and our common cosmic origins that finally drives home the message of the bond among all humans?
Whether we're born in San Francisco, or Sudan, or close to the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, we are the products of a billion-year lineage of wandering stardust.
We, all of us, are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from.
Fifty years ago, the journey to find answers took a different path and SETI, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, began.
So, what exactly is SETI?
Well, SETI uses the tools of astronomy to try and find evidence of someone else's technology out there.
Our own technologies are visible over interstellar distances, and theirs might be as well.
It might be that some massive network of communications, or some shield against asteroidal impact, or some huge astro-engineering project that we can't even begin to conceive of, could generate signals at radio or optical frequencies that a determined program of searching might detect.
For millennia, we've actually turned to the priests and the philosophers for guidance and instruction on this question of whether there's intelligent life out there.
Now, we can use the tools of the 21st century to try and observe what is, rather than ask what should be, believed.
SETI doesn't presume the existence of extra terrestrial intelligence; it merely notes the possibility, if not the probability in this vast universe, which seems fairly uniform.
The numbers suggest a universe of possibilities.
Our sun is one of 400 billion stars in our galaxy, and we know that many other stars have planetary systems.
We've discovered over 350 in the last 14 years, including the small planet, announced earlier this week, which has a radius just twice the size of the Earth.
And, if even all of the planetary systems in our galaxy were devoid of life, there are still 100 billion other galaxies out there, altogether 10^22 stars.
Now, I'm going to try a trick, and recreate an experiment from this morning.
Remember, one billion?
But, this time not one billion dollars, one billion stars.
Alright, one billion stars.
Now, up there, 20 feet above the stage, that's 10 trillion.
Well, what about 10^22?
Where's the line that marks that?
That line would have to be 3.8 million miles above this stage.
(Laughter) 16 times farther away than the moon, or four percent of the distance to the sun.
So, there are many possibilities.
(Laughter) And much of this vast universe, much more may be habitable than we once thought, as we study extremophiles on Earth -- organisms that can live in conditions totally inhospitable for us, in the hot, high pressure thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, frozen in ice, in boiling battery acid, in the cooling waters of nuclear reactors.
These extremophiles tell us that life may exist in many other environments.
But those environments are going to be widely spaced in this universe.
Even our nearest star, the Sun -- its emissions suffer the tyranny of light speed.
It takes a full eight minutes for its radiation to reach us.
And the nearest star is 4.2 light years away, which means its light takes 4.2 years to get here.
And the edge of our galaxy is 75,000 light years away, and the nearest galaxy to us, 2.5 million light years.
That means any signal we detect would have started its journey a long time ago.
And a signal would give us a glimpse of their past, not their present.
Which is why Phil Morrison calls SETI, "the archaeology of the future."
It tells us about their past, but detection of a signal tells us it's possible for us to have a long future.
I think this is what David Deutsch meant in 2005, when he ended his Oxford TEDTalk by saying he had two principles he'd like to share for living, and he would like to carve them on stone tablets.
The first is that problems are inevitable.
The second is that problems are soluble.
So, ultimately what's going to determine the success or failure of SETI is the longevity of technologies, and the mean distance between technologies in the cosmos -- distance over space and distance over time.
If technologies don't last and persist, we will not succeed.
And we're a very young technology in an old galaxy, and we don't yet know whether it's possible for technologies to persist.
So, up until now I've been talking to you about really large numbers.
Let me talk about a relatively small number.
And that's the length of time that the Earth was lifeless.
Zircons that are mined in the Jack Hills of western Australia, zircons taken from the Jack Hills of western Australia tell us that within a few hundred million years of the origin of the planet there was abundant water and perhaps even life.
So, our planet has spent the vast majority of its 4.56 billion year history developing life, not anticipating its emergence.
Life happened very quickly, and that bodes well for the potential of life elsewhere in the cosmos.
And the other thing that one should take away from this chart is the very narrow range of time over which humans can claim to be the dominant intelligence on the planet.
It's only the last few hundred thousand years modern humans have been pursuing technology and civilization.
So, one needs a very deep appreciation of the diversity and incredible scale of life on this planet as the first step in preparing to make contact with life elsewhere in the cosmos.
We are not the pinnacle of evolution.
We are not the determined product of billions of years of evolutionary plotting and planning.
We are one outcome of a continuing adaptational process.
We are residents of one small planet in a corner of the Milky Way galaxy.
And Homo sapiens are one small leaf on a very extensive Tree of Life, which is densely populated by organisms that have been honed for survival over millions of years.
We misuse language, and talk about the "ascent" of man.
We understand the scientific basis for the interrelatedness of life but our ego hasn't caught up yet.
So this "ascent" of man, pinnacle of evolution, has got to go.
It's a sense of privilege that the natural universe doesn't share.
Loren Eiseley has said, "One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human."
One day that eye may be that of an intelligent alien, and the sooner we eschew our narrow view of evolution the sooner we can truly explore our ultimate origins and destinations.
We are a small part of the story of cosmic evolution, and we are going to be responsible for our continued participation in that story, and perhaps SETI will help as well.
Occasionally, throughout history, this concept of this very large cosmic perspective comes to the surface, and as a result we see transformative and profound discoveries.
So in 1543, Nicholas Copernicus published "The Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres," and by taking the Earth out of the center, and putting the sun in the center of the solar system, he opened our eyes to a much larger universe, of which we are just a small part.
And that Copernican revolution continues today to influence science and philosophy and technology and theology.
So, in 1959, Giuseppe Coccone and Philip Morrison published the first SETI article in a refereed journal, and brought SETI into the scientific mainstream.
And in 1960, Frank Drake conducted the first SETI observation looking at two stars, Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani, for about 150 hours.
Now Drake did not discover extraterrestrial intelligence, but he learned a very valuable lesson from a passing aircraft, and that's that terrestrial technology can interfere with the search for extraterrestrial technology.
We've been searching ever since, but it's impossible to overstate the magnitude of the search that remains.
All of the concerted SETI efforts, over the last 40-some years, are equivalent to scooping a single glass of water from the oceans.
And no one would decide that the ocean was without fish on the basis of one glass of water.
The 21st century now allows us to build bigger glasses -- much bigger glasses.
In Northern California, we're beginning to take observations with the first 42 telescopes of the Allen Telescope Array -- and I've got to take a moment right now to publicly thank Paul Allen and Nathan Myhrvold and all the TeamSETI members in the TED community who have so generously supported this research.
(Applause) The ATA is the first telescope built from a large number of small dishes, and hooked together with computers.
It's making silicon as important as aluminum, and we'll grow it in the future by adding more antennas to reach 350 for more sensitivity and leveraging Moore's law for more processing capability.
Today, our signal detection algorithms can find very simple artifacts and noise.
If you look very hard here you can see the signal from the Voyager 1 spacecraft, the most distant human object in the universe, 106 times as far away from us as the sun is.
And over those long distances, its signal is very faint when it reaches us.
It may be hard for your eye to see it, but it's easily found with our efficient algorithms.
But this is a simple signal, and tomorrow we want to be able to find more complex signals.
This is a very good year.
2009 is the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first use of the telescope, Darwin's 200th birthday, the 150th anniversary of the publication of "On the Origin of Species," the 50th anniversary of SETI as a science, the 25th anniversary of the incorporation of the SETI Institute as a non-profit, and of course, the 25th anniversary of TED.
And next month, the Kepler Spacecraft will launch and will begin to tell us just how frequent Earth-like planets are, the targets for SETI's searches.
In 2009, the U.N. has declared it to be the International Year of Astronomy, a global festival to help us residents of Earth rediscover our cosmic origins and our place in the universe.
And in 2009, change has come to Washington, with a promise to put science in its rightful position.
(Applause) So, what would change everything?
Well, this is the question the Edge foundation asked this year, and four of the respondents said, "SETI."
Why?
Well, to quote: "The discovery of intelligent life beyond Earth would eradicate the loneliness and solipsism that has plagued our species since its inception.
And it wouldn't simply change everything, it would change everything cwalker@example.org."
So, if that's right, why did we only capture four out of those 151 minds?
I think it's a problem of completion and delivery, because the fine print said, "What game-changing ideas and scientific developments would you expect to live to see?"
So, we have a fulfillment problem.
We need bigger glasses and more hands in the water, and then working together, maybe we can all live to see the detection of the first extraterrestrial signal.
That brings me to my wish.
I wish that you would empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company.
The first step would be to tap into the global brain trust, to build an environment where raw data could be stored, and where it could be accessed and manipulated, where new algorithms could be developed and old algorithms made more efficient.
And this is a technically creative challenge, and it would change the perspective of people who worked on it.
And then, we'd like to augment the automated search with human insight.
We'd like to use the pattern recognition capability of the human eye to find faint, complex signals that our current algorithms miss.
And, of course, we'd like to inspire and engage the next generation.
We'd like to take the materials that we have built for education, and get them out to students everywhere, students that can't come and visit us at the ATA.
We'd like to tell our story better, and engage young people, and thereby change their perspective.
I'm sorry Seth Godin, but over the millennia, we've seen where tribalism leads.
We've seen what happens when we divide an already small planet into smaller islands.
And, ultimately, we actually all belong to only one tribe, to Earthlings.
And SETI is a mirror -- a mirror that can show us ourselves from an extraordinary perspective, and can help to trivialize the differences among us.
If SETI does nothing but change the perspective of humans on this planet, then it will be one of the most profound endeavors in history.
So, in the opening days of 2009, a visionary president stood on the steps of the U.S. Capitol and said, "We cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass, that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve, that, as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself."
So, I look forward to working with the TED community to hear about your ideas about how to fulfill this wish, and in collaborating with you, hasten the day that that visionary statement can become a reality.
Thank you.
(Applause)