Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

326 Pages·2015·1.43 MB·English

by  Bill Nye

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To the Next Great Generation. Embrace science. Solve problems. Make things.
Change the world.
BILL NYE
Science Guy®
Bill Nye the Science Guy Show: “Rules”
OBJECTIVE: Change the world.
Produce a TV show that gets kids and adults excited about science, so that the United
States will again be the world leader in technology, innovation, and sound mangagement of
the environment.
For example, when our audience is of age, we’d like them to produce the best
transportation systems in the world, e.g. cars, electric cars, trains, and aircraft.
Rules of the Road
• The show is entertainment first; curriculum content and presentation of specific facts
come later. Ideally, school curricula will follow us.
• All the science we see has to be real science.
No fictional “molecular resynthesizer” machines that perform magic tricks, for example.
• The science being explored provides the drama. For example, there is no time spent
looking for someone’s stolen lab coat.
• Science Guy is always himself.
He could play another character as the Science Guy playing another character. He wears a
lab coat and safety glasses for a reason. If he takes them off, it’s for a reason.
• Science Guy’s reality is television. He can jump from place to place the way a viewer
would expect anyone on television to be able to do. There is no need for something like
the “Way-Back” machine or the “Transporter” or the “Door to Anywhere.” However, the
“monitor in the field” can show us supplementary video, e.g. condensation after the
walk-in freezer sequence in the pilot.
• Host interacts with guests, kids, other scientists, and celebrities, as peers: E.g. “Hi,
Joey; Hi, Michael; Hi, Cindy; Hi Hammer.” / “Hi, Bill.”
• Show takes place as much as possible in the field. The world is the laboratory.
920601
920601
Revised: 920620/920622/920629/930504
1
WE’VE GOT THE WHOLE
WORLD IN OUR HANDS
If you like to worry about things—and most people do—you are living at a great
time. Climate change is coming, and it is coming right at you. Regardless of
where you are on Earth, you will live to see your life or the lives of your kids
and their friends change due to the overall warming of the planet. Whether or not
those changes are manageable is up to us. It is up to anyone who is able to think
about what kind of future we want. It is up to you and me.
I’m sure you’ve heard people say, “Earth is our home.” You may even use
the expression yourself. But here is another thought, equally undeniable and
even more important: Earth is not just our home, it is also our house. It’s our
residence, and we are the owners. We are not renters passing through. We are
not tenants who can complain to the landlord and eventually move on to live
somewhere else. We live here—on this 7,900-mile-wide (13,000-km) ball of
rock, water, and air—and we are responsible for its upkeep. Right now, we are
doing a pretty bad job as caretakers. We don’t seem to be paying anywhere near
enough attention to the deteriorating conditions of our home.
Now that you’re worrying even a little more than a moment ago, I hope, I’m
going to ask you to stop, or at least to move past it. Worry is not going to save
us. Neither, by the way, is shooting the messenger (someone like me). I’m
asking you to get informed and help fight change with change: change in the
way we produce, move, store, and use energy. We can become a great
generation that leaves our world—our home—in better shape than it is now
while raising the quality of life for people everywhere. This will not be easy.
We’ve already loaded the atmosphere with enough heat-trapping gases of
various kinds to cause our planet to keep warming for many, many years to
come. But the situation is far from hopeless. Read on, and I will show you why
we need to act immediately, what we need to do, and how we can get it done.
There was a moment, a few years ago, when I was really struck by both the
true nature of climate change and by the strategy needed to deal with it. I was in
Beijing for a meeting of the International Astronautical Congress, a group of
rocket people. I observed firsthand a huge environmental upheaval, one of the
biggest in this planet’s history. Although I was looking right at it, I might have
looked right past it, without even recognizing what was happening.
Haosheng Cui, who was a young physics student and a member of The
Planetary Society, played tour guide and showed me around Beijing. We had
lunch at the famous Qianmen Quanjude Peking Duck restaurant, where an
electronic sign announces that they’ve prepared almost 1¼ billion servings of
Peking Duck (they still call it Peking Duck in Beijing). We rode bicycles for the
13-kilometer (8-mile) trip from the conference hotel downtown to the restaurant.
Bicycles are still a common way to travel in China, but they are becoming ever
less so. Haosheng had an extra bicycle available. It belonged to his father, and
his father hardly ever rode it anymore. Their family has become successful
enough to own a car.
I couldn’t stop thinking about his father’s decision to abandon his bike. In a
small way, it encapsulated a huge aspect of human nature. We are always
looking for ways to do more without having to work so hard. Why bike when
you can drive? Why weave by hand, when a machine can do it? Why fight heavy
weather and sail with the wind, when an engine can propel your ship? Why ride
horses, when a coal-or oil-burning locomotive can take you over a mile a
minute? Why travel by train, for that matter, when you can fly in a jet?
That desire—to get more done with less effort—multiplied by billions of
people who burn fossil fuels to satisfy that desire, is the root cause of climate
change. There are an ever-increasing number of humans on Earth, and every
single one of us wants to live a developed-world lifestyle. We want cars instead
of bikes. We want electricity that is available any time, day or night. And in the
developed world, we’re always wanting more: more electronics, more
convenience, more luxury. It’s an evolutionary impulse to want comfort, to
secure as many resources as you can for yourself and your relatives. But the
impulse is currently getting us into serious trouble.
Although it all starts with the familiar flames of oil, coal, and natural gas, the
details of global warming are complex. I’d say it’s like rocket science, but the
details of climate change are actually a great deal more complicated than rocket
science, by quite a margin. After all, much of our own planet is still a mystery.
More than five hundred people have flown in space and twelve people have
walked on the moon, but only three humans in history have been to the bottom
of the ocean. An orbit in space is clean and predictable, whereas key
environmental processes, like the Gulf Stream’s interaction with Greenland’s ice
sheets, are wildly complex. With that said, climate change and rocket science
have major things in common: The basics are straightforward, and they’re both
science. If you have a rocket, you know what to do: Light one end, and point the
other end where you want it to go. (Come to think of it—it might be better to
point that front end first, and then light the engine on the other end.) In climate
science, we can see that we’ve already lit one end, and we know only too well
where it’s pointed.
I admit that climate change on a global scale seems hard to believe at first.
It’s strange that one species out of the sixteen-million-plus on Earth (and a
latecomer in evolutionary terms at that) could alter the climate of a whole planet.
But it’s happening, and we’re in the middle of it. We know of only one other
species, or group of species, that has the power to change the climate of an entire
planet. That would be cyanobacteria, better known as blue-green algae. They