Nye - Unstoppable: Harnessing Science to Change the World

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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, wed 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 someones 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, its for a reason.

Science Guys 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.

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Revised: 920620/920622/920629/930504

If you like to worry about thingsand most people doyou 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.

Im sure youve 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. Its 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 hereon this 7,900-mile-wide (13,000-km) ball of rock, water, and airand we are responsible for its upkeep. Right now, we are doing a pretty bad job as caretakers. We dont seem to be paying anywhere near enough attention to the deteriorating conditions of our home.

Now that youre worrying even a little more than a moment ago, I hope, Im 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). Im 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 worldour homein better shape than it is now while raising the quality of life for people everywhere. This will not be easy. Weve 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 planets 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 theyve prepared almost 1 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 couldnt stop thinking about his fathers 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 desireto get more done with less effortmultiplied 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, were always wanting more: more electronics, more convenience, more luxury. Its 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. Id say its 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 Streams interaction with Greenlands ice sheets, are wildly complex. With that said, climate change and rocket science have major things in common: The basics are straightforward, and theyre 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 itit 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 weve already lit one end, and we know only too well where its pointed.

I admit that climate change on a global scale seems hard to believe at first. Its 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 its happening, and were 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 were the first organisms to develop photosynthesis, which filled the atmosphere with oxygen and changed the chemistry of everything you see, eat, and breathe. Today that seems great, but billions of years ago, oxygen outright killed things. It wiped out much of the life that could not tolerate oxygen. So yes, there is precedent; one species can change a world. Now were the ones causing the change, a change that could harm and kill a great many of us. So the question is: What are we going to do about it?