Hi, it's Meg Ryan here, guest hosting today.

If you want to learn how to take real, lasting climate action like I do, I want to invite you to join Countdown, Ted's new global initiative to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis.

Now here's a talk from the Countdown Global Launch event given by the philosopher Roman Krasnarek.

To hear more of these ideas and get involved, check out countdown. ted.com and subscribe to the

countdown podcast wherever you're listening to this.

It's time for humankind to recognize a disturbing truth. We have colonised the future.

In wealthy countries especially, we treat it like a distant colonial outpost where we can

freely dump ecological damage and technological risk as if there was nobody there. The tragedy

is that tomorrow's generations aren't here to challenge this pillaging of

their inheritance. They can't leap in front of the king's horse like a suffragette, or stage a

sit-in like a civil rights activist, or go an assault march to defy their colonial oppressors

like Mahatma Gandhi. They're granted no political rights or representation. They have no

influence in the marketplace.

The great silent majority of future generations is rendered powerless.

Now, it can be hard to grasp the scale of this injustice. So look at it this way. There are 7.7 billion people alive today.

That's just the tiny fraction of the estimated

100 billion people who have lived and died over the past 50,000 years. But both of these are

vastly outnumbered by the nearly 7 trillion people who will be born over the next 50,000

years as human current birth rate stabilise. In the next two centuries alone,

tens of billions of people will be born. Amongst them, all your grandchildren and their

grandchildren and the friends and communities on whom they'll depend. How will all these future

generations look back on us and the legacy we're leaving for them?

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