 Coming up next you know who it is Bill Nye, Bill Nye. Yes, awesome. Bill Nye who is just Yeah, he's just everything that we're trying to be. It was funny. Bill Nye apparently met Dr. Carl for the first time and Dr. Carl said I'm the Bill Nye of Australia and Bill Nye said that's funny because I'm the Dr. Carl of America Classy guy. Here is his. We're gonna be setting just one second. Oh, yeah This is Melissa by the way who's kicking ass the entire weekend. She is awesome She's the one that fixes the stuff that explodes and she's just awesome. So Bill Nye. All right, here we go Here's his limerick. Now. Just keep it cool. Really try don't lose it and go all awry But as a fan, I'm shaking think of the effort it's taking to not just shout out Ladies and gentlemen, Bill Nye Thank you, George. Thank you. Thank you carry on. Wow. I love you guys greetings Wow Thank you so much It's so good to see you all It is an honor to be here I'll just start with this a Rabbi a Catholic priest and an ayatollah go into a bar and The bartender says what is this a joke? Funny funny to me. Sorry You guys it's great to see you all I I don't know if you guys heard about this but earlier this year. I did a debate Thank you And Congratulations to Jeannie. She if you will save my life I thought at first I was overconfident. I thought I can handle this and then I got to thinking about it and I realized It's gonna end my career and then And then I went to the National Center for Science Education went to NCSE Jeannie and Josh spent a lot of time with me And it came you know it came out if I may all right Now well, thank you But listen carefully everybody because there's a substantial fraction of you who thought This is the worst thing you could possibly do This is the worst approach you could ever take you should never go into the Lions Den with a creationist. They're going to do the Gish Gallop They'll make you look like a fool and indeed your career will be over and here's what I would say to you You may be right You may be right time will tell So I started out by reminding everybody there are billions Billions of people around the world who are deeply religious Who do not think the earth is six thousand years old and they conduct their lives and it's okay I mean there they are enriched by their communities and if I may who am I the judge? Well, that's I'll tell you who we are But this kind of started many years ago in 2006 I was at MacLennan Community College because of the rich tradition in South Texas of Scottish Ancestry But there is and the MacLennans are there and if you recall I pointed out that the the first in least in the American English version of the Bible it says that the God made the Sun to light the day and the moon to light tonight And I pointed out it's not clear that the author of that really got really understood that the moon reflects light It doesn't make its own life and at that point a woman grabbed her kids literally by the wrists Took a pulled them out and explained that she couldn't sit there because she believes in God and So then the moon does make its own light or something And This was sort of if SSO often the case not really an off an off-handed remark, but a heartfelt one and So one thing has led to another and I sat on the plane today with an elvangelical woman Who asked me over and over again? Well, what if somebody could come back from the dead and so on and just I mentioned this because I showed her this On my laptop right as we were landing. I said, how do you account for all these skulls found all over the world? Does everybody know where we are? We are right there and This one that's that's my old boss. I think I think he's still using it But that's representative and Then because you guys I'm just starting out briefly talking about me So this all started a couple years ago almost when I was in New York talking about Something entirely different the flipped classroom. I don't feel familiar with this idea It is getting some traction some studies have been done where you you watch some lecture at home The night before that's part of your homework on your your laptop your tablet your smartphone would have you then when you go to school The teacher has more time to spend with you the student because he or she you watch the lecture before it's good for about a Minute a grade So if you're in second grade you can watch about two minutes before you start to like totally freak And then if you're a senior in high school, you can watch about 15 minutes, but after that it's not effective Anyway, then this big think company asked me About creationism and I said well, it wouldn't matter as you may know It wouldn't matter except for the kids. We can't raise a generation of science students who scientifically illiterate and This remark led to one thing after another if you look down there I circled it said six and a half million views as of this morning and Once again heartfelt remark, but somewhat off-handed and one thing led to another and our good friends that answers in Genesis Pursued me wrote a letter. I wrote back wrote a letter went around for almost a year and then eventually I Got to thinking about it and I agreed to do it and this is a picture of me on stage with our good friend Ken Ham and as of this morning this had over three million views and so the The question if you remember was does the Kent does the Ken Ham's creation model hold up Is it viable and for me? This was really an important negotiating point because It was about then Ken Ham's model. It wasn't about The Bible it has no Connection at all at least for me with the New Testament. It was about this particular brand of creationism And look everybody. He's not messing around the earth's not 10,000 years old Okay, anybody could do that. No, it's six Okay, I mean cutting it in half again like it's like very aggressive and if you recall Noah's Ark was just 4,000 years ago, which is Mr. Ham really dude Really and so don't worry he was surrounded by you know a lot of believers in his ministry and stuff But the if you're not familiar with it. It's a new tactic at least for me now I know Jeannie and Josh and you all might be really familiar with this approach, but I had never heard of it Ken Ham has kind of a double-speak or Orwellian Approach he has this thing he calls historical science Versus observational science So if you didn't see it It didn't happen And this is an extraordinary point of view and make no Don't don't kid yourself Their ministry is out to indoctrinate young people in fact Mr. Ham Covetches online if you watch any of his videos about how young people are not Participating in his ministry the way they used to and what can we do about it and of course not of course, but not surprisingly perhaps the approach has been to just work harder at it just to indoctrinate these guys harder at it and I said what would you be doing if you weren't here in? That time Petersburg, Kentucky That's right. You'd be watching Petersburg CSI. That's right Is there Las Vegas CSI there is right? Yeah, yeah, and is there sparks? Spark is there a Virginia City CSI Virginia City? These are towns in Nevada so I Made the point that our whole society relies on science the body of knowledge and especially the process of science and What surprised me at that thing as you may know They're about two dozen people Who were strangely on my side Like whoa, how did you guys get tickets the tickets sold up? They sold out in two minutes. It was really something and If you don't mind and if you do start texting or whatever tweeting whatever the kids do You know, I see many of you with the electric computer machines I'll just go over a couple things that were not only to me important, but they were also kind of fun Here's the famous painting of Noah's Ark where the animals are With great discipline lining up. Sure. There's a lamb eating some grass But the premise of the bit as we say in comedy is that you'd have a 500 foot boat You'd have eight zookeepers 14,000 individuals the animals and then every plant on earth would be underwater For a year And I don't know how much you do how much gardening you mess with That's really a long time and so I Pointed this out to the audience, but you know if you're a believer this doesn't mean much but This was another fun one It's been 4,000 years since Ken Ham's flood and So they're 7,000 kinds and now this is something that Genie and Josh and you guys who are into this are all very familiar with but I Hadn't spent that much time with it. I had to do had to catch up quickly And you build when are you gonna catch up? No, I'm still working on it But what he's got is 7,000 kinds and this is somehow inferred from the Bible as written in English today in America in US and The 7,000 kinds then have led to the 16 million species we have today Now I chose 16 million Because I felt that it's a memorable number and it's based on a little algebra I did but you guys when we start counting all the viruses that are at sea and Just the Beatles that we haven't found 16 million is very conservative. I mean it's certainly 50 million it might even if you start counting viruses and phages and so on it might be much closer to a hundred million so If you have 15 million and then I subtracted the 7,000 They're fun. I Mean, I don't know if you're into significant digits. It was fun I Subtracted the 7,000 and then you get 4,000 years and 365 and a quarter. It's not quite a quarter There's 11 minutes on accounted for deal Then you'd need 11 new species every day Not okay, not 11 new animals or plants that you notice every 11 new species every day, I mean Wouldn't that you know local paper mention this like Hey today and For reasons that have largely to do with my older brother and learning the alphabet and I love them But the word art bark to me is just charming so I put an art bark in there and The red snouted taper that's a little tip of the hat to 2001 space odyssey and The naked mole rat is a reference to the science guy show The great tufted snipe if anybody was a boy scout and went on a snipe hunt and then I just slipped in if I made Dawkins macaque just for fun and I point out that I made it or I sought to make it fun for me Because this thing took tremendous concentration everybody. I mean many of you wrote to me and I appreciate it But there's this thing. There's this time over and over again where you're just like whoa You they trust you to drive I mean, I mean he's from Mr. Ham is from Australia where they drive on the other side But some of these extraordinary things that this Ministry embraces really troubling and then I hope Somebody went to see it. It was a little weird The film came out. Did anybody see it? Anyway, if you didn't see it, there's they have these magic trees that stripped the branches off of Magic tree ghosts that stripped the branches off of they make lumber and then The eight unskilled family members could build an art It wasn't it's just a new part a new feature then You may if you've never been to the creation museum And I got to say I'm I've worked for a long time in children's museums and the science centers I've never I've never seen a museum that was all that had no artifacts You know, I'm not kidding. He Along with this idea of historical science and observational science to sort of double-speak terms He uses the term museum for a place that has nothing from the past They're all animatronic dinosaurs and stuff and Eve is an Adam's very good-looking young man and Eve's kind of hot And they're there they're robot guys and It is a charming turn of events Don Prothrow. I must thank him. He's probably here. I love you man Don Prothrow and Michael Schermer really helped me out. They really coached me Don. He was quite the geologist and he Well, hey, you know mammoth caves in Kentucky Bill, dude So mammoth caves layers and layers and layers of limestone and the building is made largely of limestone And I pulled over on the side of the road Route 69 in interstate and picked up three rocks where they some our Highway employees had done some blasting and I picked up three pretty good-sized piece of limestone There were some Shelley fossils right there. I mean there was they're not hidden They're just every piece of rock you pick up in Kentucky as a fossil. No, really And it's not it's quite an irony and so that those guys Build this building and live their lives without any acknowledgment of it. It's really I Mean it's it's laughable and it's anane or silly, but it's also a little creepy, you know where you have raising a Generation of science students without any knowledge of their homeland Then it was fun for me to talk about the top minnows and if you guys don't know top minnows who doesn't They're very cool, and there was a fabulous study done by Bob Brinnick, I'm not I don't speak Dutch Brinn who Who found that when the certain populations are isolated and they don't have enough Reproductive or don't have as much reproductive opportunity as they might otherwise They start reproducing asexually and then when they get some variety back in the mix They go back to producing sexually and if you're not hip. This is the theory of the red queen Where Alice is it is in? In through the looking glass She's not in Alice in Wonderland and she meets the red queen of the mid queen and no I'm not an expert on I'm not a biographer of Lewis Carroll, but apparently he'd smoked dope And stuff I mean And so she's some sort of red a chess piece queen person thing And when you're with her she's sliding the whole world is sliding along and you have to run To keep up with her Otherwise you fall off and Alice says you know where I come from if you run all day you you end up somewhere else And the queen the red queen says that seems very very slow sort of country But that apparently is how evolution is if you if you don't continually come up with a new mixture of genes You'll fall off the treadmill and the treadmill of life and your enemy is not as you might think Lions and tigers and bears Which are yes Which are troublesome? At best They'll kill you, but your real enemy is germs and parasites and that's where the the the top minnows really revealed this with the cysts that Bob Rinhook Wasn't even sure of the genus. They're so the cyst is so common and then I pointed out to people in the audience that There's a lot of talk in creationism about gaps and Whenever there's a gap and we or scientists fill the gap What then you've done is create two more gaps on either side of the thing you filled and I talked about tiktolic who is this fabulous Fish lizard guy or gal that lived in what's now Canada. It was a different government. I think 350 million years ago during 25 million years ago and these Researchers went figured this animal must have existed They found this Devonian swamp fossilized in Northern Canada and they went there and they found the fossil I mean that is just just cool. That is just a yes applaud. Yes. It's just cool And I Just I just mentioned the word audience everybody I strongly believed That my audience was not mr. Ham It was not his ministry except to a limited extent. There were some young people there from his ministry But my audience was everybody online. I I gotta tell you I cannot get over how many people have come up to me I was in the airport today. I was on the plane today. I was Everywhere people who watched that debate. It's just a striking thing and I guess the reason is this Issue of whether or not evolution is as true as gravity is still in doubt in people's minds and so this I claim that Doing this debate going into the lion's den is raising awareness and I hope soon we will reach a tipping point on science literacy And then well, thank you. I Love you guys No, it's so nice. So this map is from the answers in Genesis website But I embellished it I don't know if you how much you know about the biblical story but this boat supposed to have run aground at Mount Ararat and Then kangaroos and all the marsupials of that kind who survived the year at sea with no zookeepers or food Or a place to put the poop Then ran or got a hopped From Mount Ararat to Australia across a land bridge, which isn't there and So there's no kangaroo fossils anywhere here now This to me would kind of do it. Yeah, we wouldn't have to go any farther But no, they keep going. I lived in Seattle for many years. I was a young guy in Seattle, yeah And Phil Haldeman of the Northwest skeptics really got me involved long ago and thank you Phil out there It got me involved in skeptical thinking but when you're a young guy you live in Seattle I went mountain climbing quite a bit or hiking and on steep snow And I don't know what you know about Mount Ararat. I mean it is serious business If you're a kangaroo, you don't get off a boat on the top of this thing Go running down these hikers are on an expedition. It's penguin tours. It's penguin travel. It's very cool I've thought about doing it. It looks like seriously you guys pretty straightforward climbing, but it's a long day I mean it's a long day on snow and then steep snow and so Just this alone would kind of make me stroke my chin. Yeah, but no they press on then I brought up from my little world of the planetary society and Astronomy my father was quite the amateur astronomer, but If you we find stars Significantly farther away than 6,000 light years. I mean Millions of light years away and if that were true How do we see all this starlight then ha and less light traveled faster than the speed of light and I got to tell you I could see it that line of reasoning was too much for him. I What do you mean? No, you see if a star is Millions of light years away, and it's only been 6,000 years the light wouldn't be here yet you know it's a science fiction thing and so It was really that was quite a moment for me on stage. I could tell this was a little beyond a lot of people and my sister Went to college in Danville, Virginia and Danville. I don't know if you know anything about it It's where Dan River fabrics used to be and it's one of America's live most livable cities And she's never left and just a few blocks from her house is a church with Marquis or Marker Yeah, Marquis a signboard signage and it's hard to read because I took this picture with my phone at night Sorry big bang theory. You've got to be kidding me God Why would he kid about something like that? Or she Why? Why would some entity make all this stuff up just because it's beyond what you might think at first? Like the 6,000 year star light thing doesn't mean it didn't happen. And so I presented I interviewed Bob Wilson Who was one of the discoverers of the microwave background radiation? This is really quite a thing everybody You know people did these astrophysicists did these calculations Predicting that if there had been a big bang Except it's an outer space. It just goes in fact. It's not even space. I don't know what it does So There would be this hiss this microwave background hiss and these are the two guys who had the horn And now a historic national historic site in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, and they found the hiss Trying to listen to other radio signals in our solar system And it was really quite a thing that I included this graph without any information But the dots line up with the red line Which is my way of showing that the it matched the predictions exactly to extraordinary accuracy And this sort of thing is just not much Ken Ham is not much for this. So at the end I said it's Ken Ham's model model creation model viable and I you know this animation is on keynote no But when it really came down everybody it was something If I may Why didn't I think of that? Someone in the audience and she wrote me and I wrote back is really nice somebody in the audience submitted this question card and She checked for mr. Ham mr. Ham, but it could have been either one What if anything would ever change your mind? And that really is the essence of this problem What would change your mind? I don't want to shock you But mr. Ham said I can't prove it, but basically God Jesus the Bible is the word of God Nothing would change his mind nothing nothing. Can you imagine if this guy was on a jury and You were on trial or his congregation or ministry. No, they've made up their mind. Cool great Me can imagine are they qualified? I mean, it's really an amazing thing and these people have drivers licenses They pay taxes there presumed they're allowed to vote It's really quite a point of view and so don't worry I went on about if we just had one piece of evidence If we had the fossil that caught drowning between layers in the Grand Canyon If we had some way to get the speed of light to overcome and get that light from distant stars here If we had some way that somebody built a wooden boat longer than any ever in history with just eight people who were skilled or some way to keep 14,000 animals alive for a year on a boat or some way to keep trees That are 6,500 years old Okay, wait if the trees are 6,500 years old Keep them alive under water for a year. So it was really and then a lot of cartoons were thrown around These aren't our words literally But the idea was about the same and I If you don't know I was on John Oliver show I love you guys And it was the same premise that here's 97 climate scientists versus you three and Here's scientific evidence, and you have this book as translated in American English. Okay, so and so What really kicked it in though for me a lot of people said bill, you know if you go down there bills my name if you go down there If you go to Kentucky that part of Kentucky people are gonna be very critical of you You know you're gonna get a lot of heat you better watch out and so we My agent insisted that we have metal detectors like at a rock concert But would really kind of kicked it in this was all over the internet the next day Bill and I the science lie You laugh, but you know this shows you the antagonism somehow by By discrediting me The earth will be 6,000 years old And science won't be true and so on it's really easy to get carried away with this and it wouldn't matter I Mean it's just a niche It's just a few thousand people with if I may a few millions of dollars building this eccentric facility in this beautiful part of the US Right across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, you know, it's a it's a pastoral. It's a horse racing. It's lovely It's Kentucky bluegrass. It's great It wouldn't matter they would be isolated and we'd worry about the science students and so on but it gets more serious than that Ken Ham on answers in Genesis whimsically provides videos which he I'm sorry whimsically calls answers with Ken Ham and he says I Don't believe in climate change. The earth is now cooling again And this is where he crossed the line for me Sorry climate change is very very serious business and if you're going to indoctrinate Ministry or congregation and especially the young people that it's somehow okay To deny the overall warming evidence for climate change. That's when you That's when that's what I'm rolling up my sleeves And so I don't know how into this you are but in the United States We have this unique position of an extraordinary number of prominent people Who deny climate change? now You guys you'll hear people say we've got to save the earth Well as if you just stop and think for a moment the earth's going to be fine The earth is going to be here no matter what we do. No, I want to save the earth for me The human all right I Mean look some of my best friends are humans My parents were my old boss, of course He's never sure And I'll just tell you guys I go way back with this. This is my first kid's book in 1993 I did a demonstration about climate change. I did it on a show in 1994 I did it on stuff happens in 2005. I'd go on the air all the time like with John Oliver talking about Climate change and so to have these guys running around saying That it's not happening is not in anyone's best interests Then there was a moment that means something to me He's not on the air anymore, but Pierce Morgan said to mr. Ham right after the debate It's true. You don't believe in climate change and then Ken Ham said roughly I'd never said that and I said actually you did You say it all the time actually and I caught him and there's the same hand motion there proof and I Remind everybody Mr. Ham is not from the US and I know many of you are not from the US welcome. I love you all we're humans But when you grow up in the US, you don't know any better You we grow up Thinking we could be president We think cool the US is great and so in the US Constitution is The oh shoot heavens in the US Constitution is the charge for our Congress To promote the progress of science and the useful arts When we go to the voting booth, that's what we think we're promoting. That's what we believe we're doing The only thing that keeps the United States in the game economically everybody is innovation The United States doesn't make that much stuff on our own soil anymore my clothes very few of them are made in the US and We wear them and it's okay because we hire that out If I can speak we broadly we as a mechanical engineer who grew up in the United States And by the way 45th anniversary of the moon landing next week. Don't miss it celebrate This This is what keeps us viable in the world economy is our ability to innovate so if we raise a generation of Kentucky Southern Ohio Tennessee Oklahoma Texas kids who are not scientifically literate that is a formula for disaster Now, thank you. Thank you. I'm not trying to wear you out It's really nice But when you look at a picture like this, which is taken with spaceships everybody No, we look it's common now, right? I mean how much if your cell phone doesn't tell you which side of the street you're on you're like, what's going on? What's wrong with this thing? Information comes largely not directly but largely from outer space the towers for your cell phone are put there with global positioning to within a few centimeters Anyway, when you look at a picture like this it looks like the earth is out of focus Now to be sure I've stretched it the clouds are distorted a little bit. It's not out of focus It's that the atmosphere is so extraordinarily thin if we had an Extraordinary car that we could put on an extraordinary road and drive straight up for an hour Well The way people drive in Nevada that 45 minutes 45 minutes. We'd be in outer space like that When I went to the World's Fair in 1965 There were three billion people in the world. They had a total board that showed three billion people Today there are over seven billion people in my lifetime. It's more than double That combined with this thin atmosphere is what is allowing our species to Accidentally change the climate of a whole planet So this debate was such a big deal, and I'm sorry you guys just go on and on I mean I didn't expect it to be such a big deal. I was writing a book about Energy with st. Martin's press and you meet a lot of people who don't I I don't want to trouble anybody But watts are metric units Volts and amps are metric units The last country in the world that doesn't use kilometers We're sitting in it, and so I was writing a book about stuff like that after the debate st. Martin's press No, no, no you got to change you got to change. We want you to write a book about evolution and Since I'm a one of the world's foremost at what? So I've been hustling you guys and this is the cover of the book that's supposed to come out the first week in November Thank you. Wow. Thank you guys Undeniable and then the featured words evolution science the the science of creation because once again once you appreciate What I like to call our place in space Once you appreciate what an extraordinary Set of events have led to you and me It really I hope is humbling and it frankly fills me with reverence and I I just consider every minute every moment that I have on the earth to be precious and I do my best to live my life that we all do as as best we can so I really appreciate all your support now with that said Through a remarkable set of circumstances. I have not been killed in a plane crash but people have and I want to just talk to you briefly as a former aerospace engineer who still has a license about Flight Malaysia air flight three seven Okay, there are 17 conspiracy theories as of this morning as of this morning or I guess it was last night I captured this image. Maybe there's another one now To those of you who have a conspiracy theory about flight 370 I will say as I said earlier You may be right You may be right But I don't think so. I think it's much more likely That it was just a series of screw-ups and I mentioned this because I understand this will be on the web I may be wrong. You may be right, but I just want to consider the following Boeing 777s had some windshield problems about 10 years ago There's a heater To keep the windshield from icing and there was some wiring trouble and they issue something called an airworthiness directive And I'll tell you I worked at Boeing when there's an AD as it's called everybody the phone start ringing Everybody's running in circles. My boss kept a luggage by his desk packed ready to go to any crash When I worked on 7 7 7 4 7 Anyway, this was a serious thing and it got addressed But that the what looks like lightning in the upper right is actually the sparks from one of the failures That the guys in the cockpit took with I believe my understanding was just with their Smartphone and it was a serious thing and it got addressed. It's possible. I'm not saying that's what happened It's possible that the maintenance on MH 370 wasn't done all the way up to snuff or maybe things wear out Now this was the same crew that let Passengers in the cockpit first to admit these passengers have a certain look They this guy routinely let passengers in the cockpit, which is not permitted and you're supposed to be watching the instruments and so on Now let's say Hypothetically the maintenance wasn't done quite so well Or the guy, you know when you when there's a mechanic on an airplane. There's another guy that watches him That's all the other guy does it's like you talk making jokes about unions and stuff but when these so-called dual load path or flight critical or Safety of flight issues. There's a guy that watches the people work to make sure they're doing it properly Maybe that wasn't done right maybe he signed off the clipboard without really looking at it Then maybe this crew let people in the cockpit while one of them was in the lavatory So it was only one guy and then there was a leak and then the guy in the cockpit got asphyxiated and then in the electronics bay the avionics bay back in my day The limitation of aircraft electronics was how hot Especially the chips the integrated circuits could get and there were only certain integrated circuits that were literally more spread out on their substrate That were qualified for flight But computer science moves some computer engineering move so much quit more quickly than the avionics industry a new approach was taken 20 years ago 25 years ago to make the cooling system especially redundant to make sure the avionics stayed especially cool no matter what went wrong and It's a strange thing at this high altitude when it's very cold outside You don't get much cooling because you don't have enough molecules of air to pump through the thing So if there isn't a catastrophic failure things could hypothetically I'm not saying that's what happened. You may be right Hypothetically things could overheat and then the transponder would stop spawning All right, and then This flight is the people are looking for it now in the middle of the Indian Ocean Now if you've ever been out there, it is the trackless ocean you look any direction any time it all looks the same I mean to find something in this In this environment is extraordinarily difficult if you had a needle in a haystack You could use a magnet Okay, but out there. It's just enormous Areas that are impossible are very difficult to search it with any speed takes a long time so This is of one of the many websites describing that it's a news story where the plane Where is apparently had deliberate action? Deliberate motions to avoid Indonesian airspace You may be right But let me disemphasize there's a thing there according to some reports which to Jeanne's point is Some unconfirmed reports it may be nothing So I propose to you guys that it wasn't maybe not my scenario But something a series of things that went wrong and what goes wrong with a modern airliner in my experience as a young engineer Reading accident reports is maintenance. It's when the maintenance isn't done properly That's the only thing that goes wrong with a modern airplane And so of course, that's a writ large. That's what usually goes wrong So I submit that it could be just a series of things that went wrong but maybe Maybe there will be a conspiracy a conspiracy or maybe there will be evidence of foul play sometime in the meantime as you may know I Went to Cornell University and Right on go big red and I'm pretty confident that it was a series of clerical errors I mean the people I went to school with they're so freaking smart, but Through that process through the sort of I guess the university's got a lot to do I stayed in and I ended up in Carl Sagan's class in the back of the room and He talked at length about the Tunguska event which was This crash of something in Siberia if you are here in Las Vegas, and you have time I Encourage you to go to Flagstaff or Phoenix and drive to Meteor Crater, Arizona if you've never been it is amazing It's a it's amazing. Excuse me. Oh, by the way, don't worry. There's a subway sandwich shop Right there you park your car You go up this thing you go through the subway sandwich shop and there's a museum They have some meteorites very cool some explanations of Cosmic collisions and things and then there are these doors and you go through these doors and there's this hole There's this huge hole like whoa It's a mile wide over a kilometer and kilometer and a half wide and it's about as tall as the Washington Monument And so this is evidence of a meteor Hitting the earth and so I had Carl Sagan for astronomy. He talked about this and then his kids Sasha and Sam watched the science guy show. I got invited to his house After he died and I was I spoke at his memorial service It's very moving and I think it then I got asked to be on on the board of directors of the Planetary Society and And that was cool. Then I was vice president and then four years ago you know, I'll met you know Neil Tyson's on the board and So it's a danger assing. These guys are really into wine No, they're collectors, you know, and so something happened I left the room and now I'm the CEO I don't know what happened So I this is now my thing the meteor crater Arizona is really something about 25,000 years ago the Tunguska event in Siberia was Photographed a year over a year after it occurred and in my day It was called the event now everybody calls it an air burst So, you know this story like if you jump off the Golden Gate Bridge Do and you hit the water. It's like concrete and it will kill you Well, that apparently is true I've never tried it but Apparently, it's quite traumatic and if you're a rock or a piece of ice coming into the Earth's atmosphere It's the same deal the air can't get out of the way fast enough and you explode and you may recall Just a little over a year ago a year ago in Chelyabinsk, Russia We had a bolide a bull eyes of fabulous Greek word. It means a meteor in the daytime It's that's I don't know why we have a whole nother word for it, but it's fabulous and There's so much insurance fraud In so in Russia how much insurance fraud is there's there's so much That there's all these dashboard cameras captured this thing and so then people go up to the windows Wow, look at the streak of the bull light in the sky and then the sonic boom arrived Less just a little under three minutes later two minutes 50 seconds or so blew the glass into so many people's faces there are all these lacerations and stuff and We if I may dodged a bullet or a bull eyed We got lucky and the Planetary Society for many years has been funding The search for these objects near earth objects neos and that same 24-hour period an asteroid that had been identified in 2012 2012 DA 14 and DA is this fabulous system where they take the first two weeks of every month and give it a letter And with that was another meteor cloud another object very very large would have been what have we called What I like to say there's city killers countercounty killers Country killers and incontinent killers. This was somewhere between county and country and it missed so we at the Planetary Society Advocate developing the means to deflect one of these things And this would be an extraordinary effort taking people around the world to do this and I was at Ted You know Ted the right on Ted technology entertainment design and I said, yeah planetary side We work to deflect asteroids No, no kidding When I was in Well, I guess it was second grade I had the same teacher for first and second grade Ms. McGonagall and she read from a book. I did she read from a book the ancient dinosaurs were killed because they had small brains and The mammals took all their food and they died and even she knew that was just lame. I mean I'm a Tyrannosaurus. You are a rabbit So there was a lot of trouble, you know in geology there the these formations these volcanic formations in India and They look like stair steps and the Scandinavian word for step is trap So the Deccan traps in the Deccan the Deccan stair steps of India with this big volcanism Atmosphere was troublesome ancient dinosaurs having trouble, but then the meteor That was in the earth And so it made a big noise and that was trouble, but Now We have a pretty good idea of what finished off the ancient dinosaurs and I don't want to go that way It's just not my thing. I don't want the earth to get hit with an asteroid and End everybody's life. It sounds like a drag Red hot rocks the ejecta from the thing was bigger than the diameter of the earth and Dust went halfway to the moon. I mean, that's a big thing and it wasn't an especially big rock So what would we do about it? Let me just start by saying you don't send Bruce Willis It's not them. He's a fine guy very accomplished actor. It's just that that's not you don't want to blow it up Because you'll probably end up something going wrong some piece of it will still be headed the wrong way And you can't guarantee you're gonna blow enough of it up and so on so we don't want to blow it up instead We want to give it a nudge just a little pooshy thing Nudge if an asteroid's going typically 20 kilometers a second Not a mile an hour a sec 20 kilometers a second You want to deflect it about two millimeters about a 10 millionth of its Momentum so people have talked about we'll lend a rocket on there and we'll turn on the motor Except shoot. It's an outer space. It's just yeah, sorry But would it have enough change in velocity change in direction and speed to do it probably not you probably can't carry enough fuel people have talked about building a Spaceship so massive how massive would it be that it would have its mutual gravity would just tug the asteroid off course But even that scheme needs a huge amount of fuel I mean it would take a great deal just to move anything so we at the Planetary Society are sponsoring this research where we're zapping asteroid simulancy rocks with lasers and it's in a vacuum and so The ejecta the stuff thrown off the rock has enough more has a little more than we at first expected To give the rock a nudge so what we would do is have these laser bees the swarm of spacecraft Out there that would take sunlight in solar panels and drive lasers and And if all these objects are rotating or tumbling a little bit, you know, they're the primordial Anger momentum if I may there's no things just don't come together evenly I mean we're on a planet that spins for crying out loud and so If there was a pockmark or something that would mess up the laser you just turn it off so things turning It's cool. It's a cool idea. So I mentioned this because If as CEO of the Planetary Society if I could get the world to embrace this problem and Do something maybe not the laser bees but do something about it. I mean that would be pretty cool the other thing I want to do as CEO is Send a mission to Enceladus Hold it. Enceladus would be cool But what I meant to say and I've done this many times I meant to say Europa Enceladus is not in this view. I apologize Just up here. So worked up man. I also want to send a mission to Enceladus But Europa is the moon of Jupiter that has more seawater than the earth Has about twice as much seawater as the earth and the water is kept liquid by the Gravitational interaction of Europa and Jupiter. It's like squeezing a rubber ball. It gets warm And so there's a layer of ice and these geysers or plumes of ice crystals come squirting out of the Fishers in the ice What if there's something alive under the ocean under the ice rather in the ocean and we would fly through there and Like look at the bugs on the windshield The I mentioned this because people who've talked about Europa have talked about About the problem of having to land on the surface and Then have a thermal drill and drill through 20 or 50 kilometers of ice to get to the but no You could just fly past it 60 orbits 30 orbits, you know Pick up and what if we found evidence of life For two billion dollars. I mean it would change the world. It would change the world and so yes, I Don't know who you are, but it would change the world Yes, yes, I love you man or woman. I can't see When I was seven years old I was a paper boy for the wash and post and I contacted Ripley's believe it or not and they're very nice And they said yeah, we run this story once in a while insects which have been flying for some 350 million years Defy the laws of aerodynamics The bumblebee considering its size and shape is an aerodynamic misfit and should be unable to fly And so I'm a little kid and I read this and you know, it's grown-ups telling you stuff And I went outside the azalea bushes. My mom was very fond of the azalea bushes and The bees fly fine No, our problem is with the theory. Yeah, and so I mentioned this because there are Gotta be a hundred things a thousand things that each of us is certain of that are wrong and We just got to be open-minded of this and we have to say to the other guy. Well, you may be right and So I hope that we can get people excited About the process of science so that we can Change the world Now this is a picture of the first 707 when it was still called the dash 80 every time you're on a de Havill and dash 8 It's kind of a tip of the hat to the dash 80 and if you look at this picture closely, there's an extraordinary feature of it I wrote this upside down because the pictures upside down. It's actually like this Now, I don't know how many airliners you all have flown on But they very seldom do a barrel roll with them But this guy Tex Johnston in 1954 Did a barrel roll with a 707? And he lands and the bosses at Boeing say I paraphrase Excuse me, mr. Johnson The first thing he said was I'm selling airplanes and he affected that down-hauer Chuck Yeager right stuff thing He was World War two veteran. I'm selling airplanes and then he said One test is worth a thousand expert opinions and my friends those are words to live by Those words. Thank you. Those words could dare I say it Change the world I had the great privilege of meeting Rick Smalley Now this is the Golden Gate Bridge. Oh, it's a it's a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. I Don't you know, I tell you I don't think it would even fit in this room because it is anyway, it's made of steel and Rick Smalley was one of the guys who discovered Buck Minster full arenas the bucky balls and his dream was to take These spheres and stretch them indefinitely where you make tubes that are 10,000 times stronger than steel Weighing a sixth as much and His said the key to the future Is not to do less which is what I was brought up on Earth Day Do less drive less drink less clean water wear dirty clothes Don't eat the key to the future is to do more with less and I submit that if we pursue science if we pursue innovation, especially what I always like to say engineering We will change the world and we will improve the quality of life for everyone. There is more wind in North Dakota The energy in the wind of North Dakota is enough to power North America five times over There's more Sunlight in the Four Corners region of us Then we would need in North America If we just had a way to get it from there to where everybody needed it if we just had a way to store it Now for several years. I've been in the electric vehicle community. I had the EV one the electric vehicle one I had the mini Cooper electric. I was a test driver on the bolt the Chevy bolt I had the Nissan Leaf for three years. That is a great car And I know I know a guy who has a Tesla I know a guy. I know a guy We could know a guy went to college with a right One of the smart guys and so if we could store energy in everybody's car, you know The same way we know how many toilets flush at halftime. We know where everybody's car is We could move energy around in this crazy efficient way and People especially it in Massachusetts into technology are pursuing liquid metal batteries These would be batteries that you let be hot on purpose the limitation of electric vehicles is the batteries They get warm and they lose their capacity can't hold as much oomph But these batteries are molten metal There's a layer of molten magnesium a layer of molten table salt and then a layer of antimony or antimony It's next to tin on the periodic table and you could store energy You wouldn't put it in cars liquid metal and cars not your first choice But you'd have it maybe in the basement of every building in Las Vegas and we'd store the energy there Then we'd have a smart electrical grid that the kids with their electric computer machines are going to figure out and then we would send it around the world on carbon nanotubes and This is where Rick Smalley said it's like the electric the electron Has a dream at one end of the tube travels through and Wakes up at the other side with no electrical resistance If that were to come true you guys we could change the world. I was at at the ceremony at at the Library of Congress Where Carl Sagan's papers were put into the archives and at the same time Carolyn Porco who's a Chief and a principal investigator on the Cassini mission to Saturn submitted this picture This is a picture of the rings of Saturn as seen from the south if you will from below by human standards from below them and It's a striking picture. The rings are extraordinarily thin. They have these wonderful colors. They're patterns They're gaps in the rings that obey Strict fabulous mathematics eigenvalues and so on but it's also if you're not familiar with it a picture of the earth The earth is right there And that's it The earth is that dot that pinprick If we could go up this way a hundred thousand kilometers or so The same view looks like this And there's the earth right there. So when I think about this I cannot help but reflect on my third grade teacher Mrs. Cochran Who told us there are more stars in the sky than there are grains of sand on the beach And I just remember thinking Mrs. Cochran have you have you been to a beach? I mean, I wouldn't have expressed it I wouldn't have said it this way, but Mrs. Cochran are you high? Like there's no way lady. There's when you're at a beach there's sand everywhere you look this way I grew up back east you would go to Delaware. You look this way 1500 nautical miles 15. There's just sand You look behind you. There's sand you shuffle your feet there's some of the tide goes out even a little bit There's more sand But there are apparently about a hundred times more stars than all of that all over the world combined And I remember thinking looking at the night sky on the same trip At all the stars and thinking you know, I am not that different from a grain of sand really I mean if you're looking at me from out there, you can't see me. I'm just a dot a speck Standing on the sand which is a bunch of specks I'm just a speck standing on a speck The bunch of other specks the earth is a speck right Just a speck orbiting the sun completely unremarkable star Nothing special about it. I'm a speck Standing on a speck with a bunch of other specks orbiting a speck With other specks in the middle of specklessness I suck But my brain Which is only this big I can use that to imagine all of this my old boss His brain But with my brain I can come to understand all of that That's what we're here to celebrate is the process and the body of knowledge of science The way that we reason That's what makes us different from so much of what's around us That is how you and I working together with an optimistic view of the future. Can dare I say it? Change the world Thank you all very much Thank you Oh, I love you guys Thank you. Oh, thanks you guys Thank you. Wow, don't I don't I don't I Bill nine Nice suit. Thank you. Wow. Thanks man Thank you guys Wow Everybody's got to get to dinner right we're busy important Let me if I may leave you with this Almost everyone who ever gambles loses That's how it works It is sobering to think That when you look at this room in this hotel and the strip and everything There are a few ten thousand dollar poker games, right? But most of it was just 25 cents at a time Yes 25 cents at a time and then I'll buy a lottery ticket The chances are only turned 30 million to one So imagine a gun an extraordinary revolver with 230 million chambers it would have 229,000,999 999 bullets in it and just one empty slot Would you hold it to your head for a buck? I don't think so. Thanks you guys. Thank you Bill nine