My paradigm shift is the clear change in human civilization, and specifically, how our governments and civilizations are organized. This shift is very clear because over time humans have consolidated their power and moved their governments from the Ancient random collection of city-states into massive nations that span entire continents. The ancient model of city-states and a plethora of small nations would not work in modern day society for a multitude of different reasons.
There are a variety of different points that can be made to help prove this and I could go a multitude of different ways on this TED talk. One direction that can be taken is that the worlds population is far to high to be able to sustain that lifestyle. There would have to be entire nations devoted only to farming or tourism or lumber because that is all they would be able to produce with the limited amount of land that they possessed. Another would be the ways that certain nations throughout history were normally collection of smaller nations or of city states, and they almost all crumbled or eventually combined into a larger one, and also how strongly unified nations usually were the most powerful. Another would be how as technology advanced and we began to live in massive metropolis’ we needed more room to produce the necessary food yields in order to sustain our rapidly growing global populations.
There are a couple different ways I could open this, I could do something along the lines of “Aren’t projects/problems so much better when you have a group of people with you to help tackle it” and make reference to how the nations got more productive and were allowed to grow and become more advanced once they became nation states and not just a collection of smaller nations.
These are just a couple examples of the images that I could use in my TED Talk.
I find your paradigm shift really interesting! I think it is a great topic to discuss in this day in age because like you said our population on this Earth is becoming increasingly large and, as a result, things like our supply of resources are being effected by it. In this post you listed several topics that you could possiby cover in your TED talk and personally I think you could incorporate them all. Although it might seem like a lot to cover in such a short amount of time, all the points you discussed are intertwined with one another that it would actually be more beneficial to include them all. You could begin talking about how the smaller nations or city states almost crumbled and evolved into a larger one to survive. Then through that change, nations began producing resources such as food to accomadate their larger population, which is becoming a problem now with the strain on these resources.