What's the biggest barrier to thriving? A philosopher and a space architect answer | Ariel Ekblaw and Meghan Sullivan

Elise Hu (0:04)

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu.

Our original series, TED Intersections, is back for a fourth season. The show features unscripted conversations between experts navigating ideas shaping our world. In this first episode, a space architect and a philosopher sit down and discover they've been circling the same questions all along, just from very different places. Ariel Ekblaw builds the architecture for how humans will one day live in space. Meghan Sullivan studies moral philosophy from Aristotle to the present. Put them in a room and what you get is a wide-ranging conversation about what we actually owe one another and what astronauts floating in orbit might teach us about being better humans here on the ground.

Meghan Sullivan (0:53)

What we owe another person is to be willing to look at them again. Oftentimes, we meet people and we form our assumptions and stereotypes about them. We put them in a little category in our brain and then we interact with them according to that category.

Elise Hu (1:06)

In this conversation, Ariel and Meghan trade ideas on the common good, on human thriving, and what it would take to design a better world from scratch. They keep landing in a surprising place that some of the same principles guiding a crew in cramped space habitats might be exactly what the rest of us need down here.

Ariel Ekblaw (1:26)

Before we go be a sci-fi spacefaring species, maybe we earn our right to go do that some day by showing that we can take really good care of our own planet first.

Elise Hu (1:35)

That's coming up right after a short break. And now, our TED Conversation of the day.

Meghan Sullivan (1:48)

It strikes me as somebody who's a huge space fangirl, is what I would say, is that having these really concrete and ambitious goals, like going to the moon or putting people on the space station, sometimes forces us to focus our attention on solving problems that then help us solve problems back here on Earth.

Ariel Ekblaw (2:06)

This is exactly what we want to do in space. What does the common good actually mean, and how do we build towards it?

Meghan Sullivan (2:35)

I think a lot of people assume that common good means finding the kind of least common denominator that we can agree in, like just splitting the difference, or kind of finding like going down to the basics. I think that is a huge mistake.

The philosophers that I study and love, the ancient Greeks like Aristotle, believe that the common good, the good itself is something that you're moving towards. It's a common goal and nobody is there yet. So when we talk about prioritizing the common good, I think we're not trying to figure out of all the things that we believe and care about now, how do we sort of settle?

Ariel Ekblaw (3:12)

And figure out what we already share.

Meghan Sullivan (3:14)

Exactly. Instead, we need to be having this conversation of where do we collectively want to move to, which presumably is very different from where we currently are, which is probably not that great.

Ariel Ekblaw (3:25)

I think this is really compelling. In our field for space, we think about the space commons and try to define what is public good in the context of a really broad geographical expanse, like the near-earth cocoon of space. And we don't have a real space commons yet. It does exist as a space, but we haven't defined all the norms yet. And so I love this. This is a way that we can think about moving together towards the definition of maybe a future goal, an aspirational version of humanities commons.

Meghan Sullivan (3:52)

Maybe trying to figure out what it means to be an interplanetary species. We might kind of exercise our imagination about how to be a better planetary species in the process.

Ariel Ekblaw (4:04)

Love that.

Meghan Sullivan (4:05)

What do we owe each other as humans?

Ariel Ekblaw (4:10)

I think we should owe each other the alternative to the Hobbesian view. The idea that human nature is fundamentally wrought at its base or somehow pegged to our lowest basis instinct. I think we should owe each other our highest version of ourselves or our more honorable version of ourselves.

Meghan Sullivan (4:31)

I like that. So you disagree with Hobbes. Life should be nasty, brutish and short. That's pretty depressing.

Ariel Ekblaw (4:38)

It should be elevated, delightful and long.

Meghan Sullivan (4:41)

One of my favorite 20th century philosophers is a philosopher named Iris Murdoch. And she has a good answer to this question. She says, what we owe another person is to be willing to look at them again.