by Bill Nye
From there, I have no trouble imagining a world in which only a small number of people even bother to own cars. Automobile manufacturing will change completely. Instead of stylish new models arriving every year, long-lived robust body shapes, and spare parts for them, could become the norm. Most of the time, transportation will be a service that you activate as you need it, like cable TV or Internet access. You might still drive for pleasure now and again, but mostly you’ll be free to let transportation companies and municipalities deal with all the inconveniences of owning and maintaining cars. Through my engineer’s eyes, it makes a lot of sense. Changes in behavior will allow changes in infrastructure. For instance, we could rebuild the streets in dense urban centers so that narrower self-driving taxis (“taxipods”?) of the future can roll closer together than our extra-wide vehicles of today. Parking spaces could become new pedestrian or social areas. We can reclaim the domestic real estate currently devoted to garages and driveways. Many of today’s old assumptions may become part of tomorrow’s charming old anecdotes.
Some people wonder if the transportation world is ready for this kind of a nerd makeover. Personal car ownership is so deeply ingrained in Western culture—American culture especially—that changing it seems radical, maybe even unnerving. Then again, I work right now with several young people who don’t own cars. They take mobile phone–summoned livery service cars everywhere they go. To me, the current situation with automobiles is analogous to what happened with horseback riding a century ago. A small number of people love horses and still spend some of their time and income on riding and taking care of horses. But for most of us, horses are just not as comfortable or easy or capable as cars and subway trains.
Think of the productivity we will gain when we’re no longer spending hours per week manually navigating from place to place. Think also of the productivity we won’t lose. We will steer clear of untold pain and suffering, hospital visits, insurance costs, legal fees. I won’t have to drive around worrying about getting rear-ended, or smacking someone’s bumper, or watching my car get crumpled by a texting teenager. When we don’t have to pay attention behind the wheel, we will gain 45 minutes a day, on average, for every American adult. Lost time will become found time when we can engage our big brains in reading, writing, creating art, playing games, connecting with friends, doing all kinds of jobs that don’t require manual labor, and enjoying all kinds of modern forms of recreation. We’ll have more time for contemplation of everything all at once and the positive-feedback loop that comes with it: With contemplation comes the nerdy inspiration that will lead to the next automated systems to make our lives a little better still.
Now if you don’t like the idea of automated travel, I hope you’re sitting down, because I have some bad news: When you boarded the airplane, you trusted an automated system there, as well. Most of the time, the “pilot” in control of a modern airliner is the autopilot. Or autopilots, plural: There may be three autopilot systems that vote, in the electronic sense, and if they don’t agree, they beep (loudly) and the human pilot has to take over. Autopilots can keep a plane flying straight and level, from point to point, with no human involvement; they can carry out the approach and landing; and they can deal with emergencies through every phase of flight. These systems are based on even more capable versions developed for military planes. It reminds me of a joke the engineers used to tell at Boeing. “Have you heard about the B-3 bomber? It has a pilot and a pit bull. The pilot is there to watch the instruments. The dog is there to make sure the pilot doesn’t touch anything.” So far, there is no B-3 bomber with these features, but this joke is funny (to me) because it’s not that hard to imagine. Incidentally, I feel the same way about many of the leaders and officials with decision-making capacities on the big issues of our day. They may be the pilots, but we have to be the pit bulls.
I’m all for making our systems as automated as they can be, so long as we are the automators. If we let our machines become unsafe, it is not the fault of the machines—that one is on us. If we let our governments run amok, it is our fault there, too.
Judging from the public fascination with early self-driving-car experiments and their rapidly proliferating offspring, it won’t be long before we are all willing to let go of control on another level, far beyond trams and airplanes. Soon we’ll make peace with the idea of being hands-off passengers in our own automobiles, even when we are driving alone. Cars will be like airplanes in one way, but quite different in another. Right now, air traffic controllers (the folks working in those towers at the airports), and the systems they operate, direct and control airplane flights. They make sure the planes stay out of one another’s way; they set each plane in place for takeoff, and they line the planes up for landings while they’re in the sky. The air traffic control system is largely top-down: Air traffic is monitored and directed by centralized computer systems, and the planes are dispatched or held back according to a master plan.
Self-driving cars and trucks will almost certainly not work like that. Instead, people like you will get in their cars and command the cars where to take them. For the most part, we’re still very much in the design phase of imagining the world of self-driving cars, but it’s getting closer. We are improving our systems, nudging closer with every passing mile. As I write, Uber is already rolling out an experimental fleet of such self-driving cars in Pittsburgh. Many other similar taxi networks are coming soon, and those will be followed by self-driving vehicles sold to individual owners. There are still a lot of problems that need to be solved before we’re ready for that, but engineers around the world are hard at work identifying the constraints and finding ways to overcome them. Companies are working their way up the upside-down pyramid of design. In short, this will need an everything-all-at-once perspective. We will need to evaluate the designs critically at each stage and change our minds when we find that some approaches don’t live up to the hype. And generally, we will have to apply the rigorous standard that an autonomous car will have to do it better than you or I can . . . all the time, every time it takes you into traffic.
If you look back, you’ll realize these ideas aren’t exactly new. At the 1939 New York World’s Fair—a time when my parents, Ned and Jacquie, were a young college couple in love, and my existence was not even being considered—the Futurama exhibit featured autonomous, radio-guided electric cars. The only problem with the cars was that they weren’t real. They were an inspired vision from an industrial designer named Norman Bel Geddes, the mastermind of Futurama. The technology of the time was nowhere near what was needed to make such cars a practical reality; it took reality more than 70 years to catch up with the optimal solution (or at least a more-optimal solution) that nerds like Bel Geddes could see so tantalizingly in their imaginations. But you know what’s cool? Even though it took a few generations, we are catching up.
Whenever I look down from an airplane window or look out from an upper floor of a tall building, I am struck by the colossal waste that surrounds us. We’re using human brains, precious biological systems capable of closing keys on a clarinet or computing the curves of calculus, to accelerate and brake and steer our cars . . . on unguided roads, where a single twitch or a moment of inattention can be fatal. As an engineer, I’ve longed for something better than take-them-as-they-come solutions like bumpers and crumple zones. Now it’s really happening. Manual cars will vanish from day-to-day life because they are part of a system that we will soon recognize as almost comically dangerous and inefficient. We will embrace better design, as we have over and over again in the past.
The first self-driving cars will not be entirely autonomous, and their systems will be only as good as the humans who designed them, but, oh, what a start. They will improve, fast. It’s already happening. Then, after a few engineers crunch the problems tied to self-driving—self-navigation, self-collision-avoidance, and self-who-goes-first-at-the-intersection-agreement—the world will be easier on us. These cars will take a lot of the aggravatio
n out of our driving experiences in stop-and-go traffic or long, monotonous stretches of highway. They will greatly increase the mobility of people who are physically disabled or elderly. They will provide safe rides home to people who had too much to drink at dinner. Autonomous vehicles may still have a setting that lets you grab the wheel, but they probably won’t let you drive like a crazy person darting in and out of lanes to get where you’re going. There won’t be a need for RoboCops of the future; the system will have other vehicles box you in if you start driving wildly.
Getting used to the idea of self-driving cars will require a big shift in thinking for all of us drivers who are used to being in control of our cars, but we’ll be giving up that individual control for the greater good. And it’s a completely precedented move: We do it on planes, on subways, and every time we get in a car with another driver right now. It’s not a burden; it’ll be just how we roll. Put another way: Our technology is going to enforce a dose of nerd politeness and responsibility. It is going to make us all take better care of one another.
CHAPTER 24
Cold, Hard Facts of Ice
In the summer of 2016, I visited the East Greenland Ice-core Project (EGRIP), where a group of climate scientists are drilling far down into the Greenland ice sheet—a 400-kilometer (250-mile) wide book with pages made of snow.
My visit to Greenland was an emotional experience. Over the past 2 decades, I’ve reviewed the irrefutable evidence that humans are influencing the climate around the world. I’ve spoken out about the issue loudly on television, in public lectures, and in books. Still, like most people, I’ve found it hard to think about what is happening in an immediate, visceral way. The world is too big for most of us to think about every distinct ecosystem, and climate change is a complex, subtle process. Then there are the scales of time: hundreds of thousands of years. I mean, what was anyone, if there were any ones, doing a thousand centuries ago? It’s wonderful and baffling to contemplate. Our lives are so short in comparison. When you visit Greenland, most of those abstractions go away. The variability and sensitivity of the global environment is laid bare. There is no denying the possibility of sudden and catastrophic change. There is no question about the urgency of action. We can look deep into the past to anticipate the future, using the predictive power of science. That’s what the researchers are doing on the Greenland ice.
The evidence I saw is deeply troubling.
Greenland holds a comprehensive record of Earth’s ancient climate, because everything that happens there gets naturally stored; it’s literally a deep freeze, over a mile deep. The evidence here is so pure that scientists have to do very little filtering to grasp what’s going on. Although I visited in summer, the temperatures atop the middle of the ice sheet never rose above -5°C (23°F). During what would be night-time hours, it can get quite a bit colder, down to -20°C (-4°F). In this case, the word “night” refers only to the hours on a clock. For months around the summer solstice, the Sun never sets, and for months in the winter, it never rises. During my trip, I woke up around 3 a.m. and took some pictures because it’s almost as bright outdoors then as it is at 10 in the morning.
Each year, new snowy layers accumulate on top of the glaciers that cover Greenland, forming enormous 100-kilometer-long sheets of solid ice. The snows become a record of the atmospheric conditions of the time. Variations in temperature and humidity produce flakes of different sizes and thicknesses. Depending on the winds, there might be a dusting of soil blown in from another continent mixed in or on top of some of the snowfalls. Over the course of a season, the accumulated snow forms a record of what the environment was like during that season. Winter snows and summer snows have slightly different qualities. In Greenland, it has been snowing every season for hundreds of thousands of years, and the snow does not melt away, so we are talking about a lot of snow—piled up and up. The snowflakes in each layer get squeezed together by the weight of the additional snow above. The air between the snowflakes has nowhere to go, so it ends up in tiny bubbles of atmosphere that are trapped between the tines of the flakes. The Greenland ice sheet is composed of these compressed flakes: more than 100,000 piled-up seasons of snow preserved by the cold. That’s what ice researchers mean when they call it a book of snow. It is a natural ledger of the winter-summer cycle of seasons and of the ancient atmosphere and climatic conditions of Earth.
Over the last 40 years or so, engineers have developed specialized ice-coring tools to lift these pages of climate history to the surface so that we can read them. It is, as you’d imagine, hard work. The EGRIP work is sponsored by the University of Copenhagen, so the food there is prepared in the contemporary Danish style, which is to say, fantastic; that keeps everyone energized, and boy do they need to be. Everyone there—the drilling crew, paleoclimatologists, carpenter, electrician, doctor, and cook—is contributing to get the ice cores to the surface and to preserve them for study. The small drilling crew has an especially difficult job. To stay out of the wind and out of the sunshine, they carve out a hollow workspace for themselves using ski resort–style tracked vehicles. They dig trenches 30 meters (100 feet) long, 10 meters (30 feet) wide, and 10 meters deep. They inflate enormous hot dog–shaped balloons in the trenches. Then, using snow blowers, they create a roof by covering the top of the balloons with about 3 meters (10 feet) of the surrounding snow.
The result of all that work is an enormous ice cave. The finished under-snow hollow space looks like the lair of a comic-book villain. Down in the ice tunnels, you are protected from the elements, but it’s hardly cozy. I’m not kidding when I say it’s freezing. It’s actually colder down there than on the surface. Everyone has to move around cocooned in multiple layers: warm long underwear, thick insulated pants, massive insulated boots, and usually a very thick down jacket. Up top, you need to wear sunglasses to deal with the blinding light reflected off the ice. Studying climate change is no leisurely pastime. You have to really want the cold, hard facts to do this kind of research.
Out there on the vast frozen expanse, the EGRIP team used surface-penetrating radar to find where the ice sheet is thickest. It’s where they expected to find the most layers of ancient snow created by the most years of snowfall, and therefore the longest, oldest record of ancient climate. To get the best data, the researchers selected this particular location in the center of the East Greenland ice sheet. To get to the good stuff—the really old, deep stuff—they lower a remarkable custom-built drill-tube into the extremely solid ice. The tube is fitted with an electric motor, which drives sharp cutting bits. The crew lets the machine bore down, creating a long, thick cylinder of ice; the drill tube also has spring-loaded “dogs,” metallic paws that grab the end of a captured ice cylinder so that it can be winched up to the surface with its steel cable tether. In the cold work area around the drill, researchers carefully saw the extracted ice cores into standard 55-centimeter (22-inch) lengths, weigh each one, and note any obvious imperfections that might have been created by their coring system.
All the drilling, sawing, weighing, and measuring make up just the start of the process. Scientists examine the chemistry of the ice and the entrained air in great detail. We can know for certain how many years ago the snow fell and what the climate was like at the time. We can know what the atmosphere was made of back then and where the dust embedded in the ice came from. We can read the pages of the climate scientists’ history book. By tracing your finger along an EGRIP core, you can trace your way through a passage of ancient time. I did; it’s amazing. Perhaps because I can talk the engineering talk (and maybe just because I was there with a film crew—some disclosure), the EGRIP team let me handle several of those precious cores. These things are really hard to replace; they’re priceless, in their way. Each comes up as a cylinder of ice about 2 meters (6 feet) long. That much ice is quite heavy, but when I was down there handling these things, it was so exciting that I didn’t notice.
Whether in the very cold hollowed-out cave laboratory connected t
o the drilling area or back at a similarly cold lab in Copenhagen or Denver, climate scientists count the layers of snow ice. They do it just like you would count tree rings in a tree stump, and it tells the same basic story: Each layer or closely packed group of layers corresponds to 1 year (one season) of snowfall. If the separating layer between years is not optically obvious, the researchers examine the ice more thoroughly using a pair of electrical conductivity probes, which can detect subtle year-to-year differences in the composition of the snowfall. Not too far from the surface, where the old snow layers are less compressed, trapped air bubbles are readily visible. Deeper down, the layers corresponding to each snow season are squeezed thinner and thinner by the increasing weight of the snow above. The bubbles are still there, but they get compressed nearly down to invisibility. Deeper still, the bubbles are squeezed to such a degree that they disappear; they’ve dissolved completely into the solid ice.
