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presented at the 69th Annual Conference of the American Humanist Association in San Jose, California. You can read his acceptance speech right here: http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/10_nov_dec/Nye.htmlHis entire speech is full of great quotes (it IS Bill Nye, after all), but due to obvious reasons I can only post a few paragraphs. I'll pick a few in a haphazard fashion, but I'd really recommend reading the entire thing. The big unsatisfying thing for me is when you have a bumper sticker that says, “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.” It doesn’t settle it for me. I was giving a talk in Texas a couple of years ago—this still circulates on the web—at McLennan University, which is a very interesting college near Waco and Crawford. I’d pointed out that it seems reasonable to me that whoever wrote Genesis, as translated into English, where God made the sun to light the earth and the moon to light the night, probably didn’t have the whole story. Because, first of all, the moon doesn’t always light the night. And even ancient Greeks realized that the moon was an object that reflected sunlight. So this woman in the audience picked her kids up by the wrists and dragged them out of the room, shouting, “I believe in God! Bill Nye, you are evil!” That may be, but the moon doesn’t give off its own light. I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do there. And we all laugh at that, but what we have to do is find the story that is more compelling. And I think we can find that if, instead of focusing on the truth, we focus on the pursuit of it. We focus on the scientific method, the way to find the truth. And by the way, when you were in astronomy class with Carl Sagan, every day there was a story. Every day there was some process by which somebody or some group of individuals had made a discovery.
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Quite often, people pose a very reasonable question, “Well, how can you be exploring space when there’s so much to do here on Earth?” Well, my friends, think how the world would be if we thought the moon gave off its own light, if we thought Earth was the center of the solar system, if we thought that Earth was the only planet that had moons, had a satellite. How would the world be if we didn’t have that Apollo 17 picture from space? How would it be if we didn’t have a global positioning system? How would it be if we didn’t have the Internet? (By the stars, you can’t be serious!) It is also through such exploration that we have made what I think is the most important discovery facing humankind, and that’s climate change...... …on pursuing alternative energy:
With three or four thousand offshore oil rigs around the world and about 800,000 oil wells, many of my science colleagues say what we need to address climate change is nuclear power. And really, it seems like a reasonable idea. You dig up this nuclear material, you get some energy out of it, and then you put it back in the ground. But when we get to have 10,000 or 20,000 or 40,000 nuclear power plants, there are going to be accidents akin to this oil well explosion and the consequences are just huge. We really need to think about that. And I remind everybody, we have five times the energy in wind in North Dakota than we use in the United States. There’s still the problem of getting the energy from there to New York City or wherever. It’s not an easy thing, but it sure seems like an opportunity to pursue renewable energy much more aggressively.
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…when asked to give the president a recommendation for dealing with population control:
Make sure girls get a good education. Putting two rovers on Mars that can drive around six years past their warranty, making discoveries with a few dozen people working in Ithaca, New York, and a few dozen people working in Pasadena, California—that’s child’s play compared to, say, feeding people in Somalia. Raising women’s standard of living is the key to lowering Earth’s population. That is a difficult, difficult problem, but one that we should undertake.There's a bunch more at the link. Give it a read. Also, browse the rest of The Humanist. It's one of the few magazines that keep me sane. |
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