Bill Nye challenges University of Arkansas audience to ‘change the world’

He had not yet even spoke and already the crowd was on their feet Friday night (Sept. 19) with a sustained applause that lasted so long, Bill Nye "The Science Guy" took out his smart phone and began to record the moment at Barnhill Arena.

Based on the crowd reaction to Nye and several interruptions of his speech for applause, it could be safe to say the University of Arkansas is in love with the man who brought science to life for a generation of children in the 1990s.

Nye, an Ivy League-educated mechanical engineer by trade and the CEO of the Planetary Society, brought a message that pushed the ideals of innovation, exploration and prevention in the rapidly changing world of science.

The former PBS host's speech as part of the university's Distinguished Lecture Series was wide ranging, but touched on the issues he said could make today's generation of students from primary to secondary levels the one that could "change the world.” According to Nye, for American students to have a chance to change the world, the United States must be the leader in innovation.

"I think if the U.S. were taking actions, if the U.S. were more engaged and involved in making changes, then everybody in the world would be too," he said. "And I further claim that if we address climate change with public policies, that's one thing. But if we address it with innovation and conventions, techniques, doing more with less as I like to say, everyone else will want to follow the United States as people around the world have done the last couple hundred years.”

Nye pointed out that innovation keeps America "in the game" in an increasingly global economy, where the U.S. depends largely upon imports of clothes, household and manufactured goods.

A large part of Nye's program focused on exploration through the space program and spoke of how exploration can lead to innovation. He pointed to the Mars rovers, which were not expected to be exploring for more than three months before losing battery life. Years later, he said some of the machines like the Curiosity Rover are still exploring the far-away planet more than a decade later and literally providing a view of the Martian landscape that at one time was inconceivable.

"Can you imagine buying a car with a three year warrantee and no oil changes, no brake pad changes, no greasing the door hinges and still running 120 years later? That's pretty good, right?”

Nye quoted the Copyright Clause in the Constitution that promotes the "progress of science and useful arts" when discussing what can truly set today's generation of students apart and how funding from Congress could impact the future of the human race in ways that private funding could not.

The engineer also touched on prevention, noting numerous incidents in which asteroids have either hit the earth or come dangerously close, even within the last year in Russia. He cited the widely accepted theory that dinosaurs were made extinct due to a hit from an asteroid off Mexico and said such an event could wipe out much of the world's population. Even without a mass killing of the human race, he said it would at the very least cause severe economic disruption.

"So I want you guys to deflect an asteroid. You are the first generation of people who can do something about this. This is the only preventable natural disaster. And I'm not kidding," he said.

The way to do this, Nye said, could be either sending a rocket to space to push asteroids nearing earth off track or creating a space exploration machine large enough to have its own gravitational pull to nudge the astroid onto a different path. The most logical solution, he said, was a series of lasers on small crafts that could be solar powered and used to push an asteroid onto a different path. It is a plan being explored by the Planetary Society lead by Nye.

And while he said this generation of humans is the first able to prevent at least one type of natural disaster, he noted with humor that the "Armageddon" plot that saw Bruce Willis' character traveling to an asteroid to blow it up was not realistic.

"You don't want to just send Bruce Willis. He's an actor, for one. The other thing is you don't want to just blow it up because you may mess up and some pieces may come down even faster and make it worse. What you want to do it just give it a little nudge."

Nye dove into the climate change debate and told the crowd that climate change is real and is happening at an escalating rate due to a thin atmosphere coupled with a world population approaching 7.2 billion people, more than doubling in Nye's lifetime. He said the second big area where prevention could come into play is by addressing climate change in a meaningful way, noting that renewable energy is already a reality and available in areas like the four corners region, where a year's worth of sunlight over could produce enough electricity for the entire U.S. three times over or North Dakota, where wind energy in the state could provide the country a year's worth of electricity five times over.

Nye said the key in today's generation is finding a way to get the grid to be "smart," moving electricity to areas in a responsible manner.

"All of these technologies are just out of our reach, but the stuff that we have now is a huge start. We have the ability to do so much more with less.”

And that, he said, was "key" for a generation that has the ability to "change the world.”