Poetry and Music That Reaches Across the Digital Void | Elle Cordova | TED

Hey, everybody, I'm Elle. If I look familiar to you, it's probably because at some point, you scrolled across one of my many goofy videos about fonts or AI or the planets or whatever. One of the nerdy sundries I've put out there. I am a literature person by trade and by training, but I love to nerd out about science, and one of the questions that keeps me up at night is: What happened before the Big Bang? So I wrote a poem about it with an assist from science communicator Hank Green, who was talking about that very topic. And he sort of said in passing this line, which really struck me as simple but powerful. So I expanded it into this poem. Here it is. Before the Big Bang there was no up there was no down there was no side to side there was no light there was no dark nor shape of any kind there were no stars or planet Mars or protons to collide there was no up there was no down there was no side to side and furthermore, to underscore this total lacking state there was no here there was no there because there was no space and in this endless void which can’t be thought of as a place there was no time and so no passing minutes, hours, days of all the paradoxes that belabor common sense I think this one’s the greatest this time before events because how did we get from nothing to infinitely dense from immeasurably small to inconceivably immense? but before we get unmoored from the question at the start let's take a breath and marvel at when math becomes an art because we don't have to comprehend it to know there was a time when there was no up there was no down there was no side to side Thank you. (Applause) Well, I just have one other thing I want to share with you before I go. And I'm going to invite guitarist Toni Lindgren up here to join me for this. (Applause) This is a song I wrote about social media, where I spend so much of my time, and I think where so many of us spend maybe too much of our time. And I wrote this about kind of the endless scroll, and I think the conscious and unconscious desire that we all might have to reach out to other human beings and make connections in the digital void, even as we're sitting alone on our devices, in our homes. And I named the song "Carl Sagan" after the great astronomer and philosopher who saw the connections between ourselves and the billions and billions of stars in the night sky that are constantly sending out their light through the void to make contact. So this is "Carl Sagan." (Guitar music) Hey, how are you? Are you scrolling alone inside your room? Is your heart good? Or did something go and break it? In the words of Carl Sagan, we're all just stars and bacon. That's not quite what he said, but it's true. Hey, you still here? Are you like me on this app so you can be lost and numb in a warm bath made of content, watching brilliant bits of nonsense because it feels like making contact. Maybe that's just me. How are you? And we are billions and billions of lights reaching out through a satellite just to know that feeling that even

when we’re cold and on our own, we're not alone. We are billions and billions of lights reaching out through a satellite just to know that feeling that even when we're cold and on our own, we're not alone. And hey, are you all right? Are you scrolling alone again tonight? You'll be fine. Even if your heart is breaking. You got me and Carl Sagan and his famous postulation. That if we’re all alone in space, it’d be an awful waste. So I’m just signing in to say, how are you? (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)