by Bill Nye
We often don’t trust people from another tribe because they may be unpredictable and potentially dangerous. They might try to steal from us. They might try to kill us. We don’t know who they are or what they want, so we have to prepare for the worst. Whatever bad experiences we’ve had before get projected onto the other tribe because we can’t be sure that isn’t exactly what they are out to do. It is another form of confirmation bias: We preferentially see trustworthy traits in people who are like us, and untrustworthy ones in those who are not. Nobody is completely immune to it. No, not even me. And not even you, if you are being nerdy-honest.
The us-versus-them mentality is inescapable, whether it is a world war or a family dispute over who gets to keep grandma’s quilt. It especially happens between nations, though it can occur at every political level. Be it land, clean water, or beaver pelts, countries always manage to find things to fight about. A popular point of contention is religion. There’s a widespread perception that if other people believe something even slightly different from what you believe, there’s something wrong with them. “Xenophobia,” the fear of outsiders, is from the Greek words for “stranger” and “fear”: “Keep all those other people out and then we’ll have no more trouble” is xenophobia at its powerful worst.
Let me remind us of something. We are all much more alike than we are different. From a biological point of view, we are all almost identical. We share at least 99.9 percent of the same DNA sequences. Within a typical geographic population (such as, say, North American First Nations tribes), the connection is closer to 99.994 percent. A visiting scientist from another star system could hardly tell any of us apart. With this nerdy knowledge, and with world travel becoming more accessible to more of us, the overall trend is that we are all becoming much more accepting of one another. Here’s to hoping that happens sooner rather than later.
Much as I love the idea of all the peoples of the world holding hands and singing kumbaya (hold on, that sounds absolutely ghastly, but you know what I mean), I acknowledge that there will always be a bit of tribalism. Boston Red Sox fans will always have issues with New York Yankee fans; as a native Washingtonian and baseball fan, I have issues with both those teams—big issues. One way of dealing with an imperfect world is allowing reasonable and healthy boundaries. We have the old saying “Good fences make good neighbors.” Fences mean that you don’t have to worry about the family next door—the other tribe—messing around in your lawn and borrowing anything from your garage without asking. Maybe your neighbor doesn’t want you to see her sunning herself naked. Maybe she wants to make sure she doesn’t see you sunning yourself naked. People need privacy. Nations and states need borders to define the scope of their laws.
Mind you, a voluntary boundary is not at all the same as a wall. Keeping to yourself is not the same thing has locking people out. A global lockout is an unworkable idea; even if it weren’t, it is backward and contrary to the science of our ancestry and to the concept of equal legal rights for everyone. As nerds, we have to keep our respect for others in play and our fears in check. It relates again to those four freedoms. We know from hard experience that separate-but-equal does not work. It leads to inequalities in wealth and rights, and then we are right back to fear and conflict. Rational thinking rejects a polemical, us-or-them worldview.
And as important as privacy is, it is only one component of freedom from fear. Actively isolating yourself is limiting. It goes against the open exchange of information and ideas that is the hallmark of everything-all-at-once thinking, and much of the modern progress it has produced. In isolation, you will or would miss opportunities for interaction, trade, and the exchange of ideas. I like to think there will come a day when countries do not need to have military forces at all, when warfare is obsolete. I don’t think I’ll live to see it. I admit, I have a hard time even imaging it. What I can imagine, though, are scientific and technological solutions that create safe barriers and feelings of security on much smaller and less aggressive scales than tanks, cluster bombs, and nuclear missiles. They would bring us just a little closer to President Roosevelt’s vision of a world without arms.
When I took over as the CEO of The Planetary Society, I had an opportunity to examine a far-out technology along those lines. I had been invited to speak at a formal dinner at the US Air Force Research Lab in Albuquerque, New Mexico. While I was there, inspecting a wonderful laser stitch-welding process that we use for the sail booms on our LightSail spacecraft, my hosts treated me to a demonstration of a new device they were experimenting with: the Active Denial System (ADS). This contraption, er . . . uh, system, drives people away without touching them, without even getting near them. I mean it really, really drives you away—more effectively than a close-talker person with halitosis at a wedding reception.
The ADS features a huge antenna, as large as a king-size bed mounted upright on a station wagon. When it’s pointed at you, it hits you with a beam of 95-gigahertz radio waves (that’s almost 1011 cycles per second and about 10 times the energy in a radar beam). It’s like a low-power microwave oven beamed at your entire body. In fact, the total energy in the beam is much lower than the energy in a microwave oven, but the waves are at a much higher frequency that really, uh, gets under your skin. It’s the quickness of the sensation that makes it especially, uh . . . effective. Yikes! That day, the ADS antenna was mounted on a Humvee, which made it look extra menacing. The Humvee’s diesel engine was driving a large electrical generator, which powered the crazy-powerful ADS setup. And, wow, is it powerful.
The vehicle was parked on a small hill about a kilometer away from where a few of us were standing. Down where I was, the airmen had marked off a rectangular test area, about 4 by 5 meters (13 by 16 feet), with orange traffic cones. They directed me to stand in this box. The instant they swung the antenna and aimed it at where I was standing, it felt like my skin was on fire. My immediate instinct was to run away, to get out of that box as fast as I could. The instant I jumped out of the box (out of the beam area, that is), the sensation was gone, just like that. The idea is to disperse crowds, or to drive people away from some significant place in a contested urban environment or on the battlefield. It’s amazing, and a little creepy, how well the ADS works. The truck is obvious to any observer or would-be troublemaker, and the generator is loud. But the beam itself is absolutely invisible.
I have mixed feelings about this particular technology. If armies or police use it in dangerous settings where they previously would have used guns, it would be a step forward. I just don’t want to see it being used to break up nonviolent protests and the like. Because this is, so far, military-only technology, there’s not a lot of public information available about where and how it has actually been tested. Apparently the military took it to Afghanistan but never used it in combat, maybe because the truck and the antenna are pretty vulnerable. Still, I could see it being more effective and less violent than tear gas and rubber bullets in certain types of conflict areas.
As creepy as it is, the ADS impressed me. It’s a product of nerds groping for calmer ways to address violent situations. It uses technology to deal with fear in a less lethal way, which qualifies as a baby step in the direction of easing tribal conflict. Researchers are helping us boost security in many other technological ways: weapons scanners at shipping ports, data systems for passport control, police body cameras and dash-cams, public surveillance networks. They have their own flaws, but at least they are not attack weapons of any form. They all promote freedom from fear, and by extension, they promote the possibility of more rational decision-making—but only in little ways.
I long for the day when all that rational decision-making will allow us to resolve our difficulties with one another for real. I mean, all the way at the source: us. As President Roosevelt laid out in his Four Freedoms, the way to get there isn’t by designing better weapons or even by getting rid of weapons entirely. We have to go after all four fears, which means working to reduce tribalism its
elf. A crisis mentality tends to push people more tightly into their tribal corners. One of the best ways to dial down tribalism and promote peace, then, is to reduce the sense of crisis. Uh . . . how hard can that be?
Oh, right—extremely hard. About the hardest thing there is. We are back to the idea of changing the world. But it’s what we are here to do. It’s what we are going to do.
I claim that there are opportunities for engineers, scientists, and policy wonks to use technology to make us largely free from fear on a global scale. As the type of person who buys my books (thank you!), you probably know this truth better than anyone: There are two ways to be rich. You can have more, or you can need less. The solution is to do both. Nerd thinking can yield radical improvements in efficiency, but it can also greatly increase the total supply of energy, food, medicine, and information. Perhaps I am being Bill the Wishful Thinker. I could be, in nerdlike fashion, presuming that every problem has, at its core, a technical solution, but I believe it.
Yes, I know tribes of people have been throwing stones and insults at each other for millennia. It’s not going to stop tomorrow. Nevertheless, we have to work at resolving conflicts every day. We know the goal, so let’s move toward it. I hope that along with our instinct to develop barbed wire, supermax prisons, and Active Denial Systems, we can develop technologies that enable not just tribal-style security but an entire system in which people can trust one another.
I’m thinking of high-efficiency thin-film photovoltaic solar panels, offshore wind turbines, and carbon nanotube power transmission lines so that we can have abundant power for everyone. I’m thinking of new techniques to purify water economically so we don’t have to fight over water resources even on a warmer planet. I’m thinking about an across-the-board assault on poverty and scarcity so that there can be radically more freedom and less us-versus-them tribalism all around the world. The correct mix of large-scale and small-scale technologies could seriously level the world’s playing field. And if a flat playing field does not satisfy you metaphorically—because our Earth is, after all, round—how about if we work to put all the world’s citizens on a sphere of economically equal radius. Is that image too nerdy for you? How about equal opportunity for all? We can do it. Let’s get started.
CHAPTER 27
Think Cosmically, Act Globally
I had just turned 13 years old in 1968 when astronaut Bill Anders, on the same Apollo 8 mission I mentioned back in Chapter 5, took a remarkable photograph of a gibbous Earth with the surface of the Moon in the foreground. That iconic image has come to be called “Earthrise.” It was the first time we humans saw our home planet from the vantage of another world. Living here on the Earth’s surface, most of us think of the Earth as a huge place with billions of inhabitants living in thousands of cities and millions of villages, but astronauts looking at that picture from far away above the lunar surface see our place in the cosmos differently: a small blue world hanging with no visible means of support—delicate, finite, unique. It is unlike any other planet we have found anywhere in the universe, and it is the only place where we know life can exist (so far).
No one anticipated the profound impact of that Earthrise photograph. Bill Anders looked out the window of his space capsule, saw something amazing, grabbed a camera, and took what he thought was a great-looking view of the Earth. He probably wasn’t trying to influence billions of people with a single snapshot. But he did.
As seen from the great height of cislunar space, it is obvious that the Earth is all one world. That alone fills nerds like me with optimism. Before I applied to follow in Anders’s footsteps and be a NASA astronaut (unsuccessfully, four times), I was drawn to space and to an optimistic view of the future, perhaps because I grew up with the original Star Trek, which aired—when TV was “on the air”—50 years ago. Every week, the starship Enterprise (the NCC-1701) sailed around the cosmos visiting or battling a different civilization. Each adventure took place not in a country as such, but on an entire world. Since the Earth-rise photo came to us, we, too, think of our entire Earth, with all its ecosystems and all its oceans, as one world, just as on that television show—only real. And that changes everything.
The everything-all-at-once nerd worldview is a lot like Star Trek’s. Both are rooted in the same philosophy: We are all in this together. The show and its characters have become a part of international culture, like Disney and Mickey Mouse. Everywhere on this planet, you will find Star Trek fans. Far more important, everywhere on this planet, you will meet people who were and are influenced by the show and its worldview—or rather, its cosmic view. The show was crafted by Gene Roddenberry, whose stories are based on an optimistic vision of the future in which society provides for everyone. There are no poor people in the United Federation of Planets. The people of the Trek universe must have accomplished everything all at once. In their future, every creature comfort is provided through technology. We do not encounter another starship that has run out of food or see a Federation planet where ordinary people are shivering or frozen dead because they lack electrical power. All the routine food, clothing, and shelter problems have been solved. We presume the advanced technology of the future does so much more than we can do now. We further presume that all this comfort is ultimately a product of nothing other than . . . science. After all, these starships have a “science officer.” They don’t have a “psychic officer,” an “alternative medicine doctor,” or a “let’s all pray harder officer.” They have replicators that can take care of practically any need and medical tricorders that can immediately assess any health problem. It’s all science all the time in this particular science fiction.
Just like the fictional planets visited by various Star Trek starships, Earth seen from the distance of the Moon has no political markings or borders. It also has no natural barriers that confine climate change to one part of the surface. And it is so small compared with the vastness of space. Earth’s atmosphere is so thin that if you could somehow drive your car straight up at freeway speeds, you’d be in outer space in less than an hour. The whole idea of “us versus them” looks absurd when you are aware that every person alive is gravitationally held on the same 12,742-kilometer-wide wet rock hurtling through space. There’s no option to go it alone. We are all on this ride together.
Unlike in the stories of Star Trek, here on our actual planetary ship, we have health problems on global scales. People go hungry. People can’t worship as they please. Wars persist, and people cannot live without fear. We have not yet managed to apply our scientific capabilities fully and fairly. We are still far, far from the flat-Earth of global equality as I described at the end of the last chapter. The global poverty rate has fallen by more than half over the past 2 decades, but almost 11 percent of the population (some 770 million people) is still living in a state of extreme poverty, according to the most recent study by the World Bank. The numbers in sub-Saharan Africa have barely dropped at all over that time. And just to be clear, extreme poverty really is “extreme.” It is defined as living on less than the equivalent of $1.90 a day. Even allowing for the vagaries of how purchasing power works in different parts of the world, that is a painfully meager existence.
We have to do better. We can do better, if we think big enough. Raising the standard of living for everyone, everywhere all at once, will improve our world and make all of us more secure. When people are able to work and earn a living income, they become productive rather than disenchanted and ready to fight. People raised from poverty contribute more to economic growth and to the expansion of human knowledge. Progress leads to more progress, and we all share in that.
A great many organizations and government agencies are chipping away at the problem of global poverty in nerdy, smart, data-driven ways. I’m a longtime member of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), whose mission statement declares it is “for a safer, healthier world.” For example, UCS has engineers who do analysis on vehicle emissions and costs. They make recommendations to the US
Congress about achievable fuel-efficiency standards based on their engineering analyses. The organization has experts in agronomy and nutrition, as well, who make recommendations for crop-yield improvement. UCS got its start by raising awareness and sounding alarms with regard to the development, deployment, and maintenance of nuclear weapons and nuclear materials. These are all very meaningful, practical ways to apply nerd thinking to make the world safer and healthier. And although UCS focuses mostly on the United States, it has been influential in protecting tropical rainforests while simultaneously encouraging sustainable development around the world, to make sure that conservation does not come at the cost of the local economy.
Global Citizen (formerly the Global Poverty Project) is an impressive organization that set a goal of ending extreme poverty in the world by 2030. I’m proud to be working with them. Theirs is a difficult goal, but they are going about it in a smart, well-designed way. Global Citizen raises money through high-profile concerts and events as well as through online, targeted fundraising campaigns. The group carefully redistributes those funds, investing broadly in sanitation, education, health care, and financing for small-scale innovations. The Global Citizen programs do not entail just handing out bags of food and then leaving. Experts have shown that such drop-and-run aid programs have a terrible track record. They solve the problem for a day, and then the next, they don’t; it’s the epitome of short-term action without longterm execution. In contrast, Global Citizen staffers work with local partners and develop long-term, go-the-distance strategies.
