In Esquisse d’un programme, Grothendieck made the fascinating suggestion that the absolute Galois group of the rationals could be understood via its action on certain geometric objects, the (profinite) mapping class groups of surfaces of all genera. The collection of these objects, and the natural relations between them, he called the "Teichmuller tower”.

In this talk, I plan to describe a genus zero analogue of this story from the point of view of operad theory. The result is that the group of automorphisms of the (profinite) genus zero Teichmuller tower agrees with the Grothendieck-Teichmuller group, an object which is closely related to the absolute Galois group of the rationals. This is joint work with Geoffroy Horel and Marcy Robertson.