by Bill Nye
These days it is all too easy to become isolated within a community of like-minded people, be it at a Reason Rally or political rally. We read each other’s Facebook pages, watch the same shows on HBO and Netflix, live in the same types of neighborhoods, visit the same kind of cafés. The technology that we hoped would break down barriers has, in some cases, merely erected new ones. It’s in our nature to surround ourselves with like-minded family, friends, and strangers. But we cannot lose perspective of the diversity of opinions, backgrounds, and concerns of those whose lives are unfamiliar. We cannot lose the ability to communicate with those who disagree with us, and we cannot lose our perspective or the ability to identify our common goals.
That is one of our most challenging acts of critical thinking. I will leave it here as a lifelong exercise for the reader. It’s a task with many components. Practice at challenging your own reflexive beliefs. Allow yourself to hear opposing arguments honestly and openly. Apply the standard of “prove it” consistently. Respond without snark. Participate in causes where you can work with people united by purpose, not by ideology. We need to be nerds and rally for reason, but outside of the rally, we need to show why we rally for reason. Check to see if what you are doing is helping to bring walls down or build them up. Think about what would make a better world. A lot is riding on you.
CHAPTER 30
Design for a Better Future
When I’m in a contemplative frame of mind, I often think about the number 30,000. That is the number of days in a generous human life span: 82 years and 7 weeks, 30,000 shadows circling around a sundial. You probably encounter bigger numbers than that every day. Picture a classic football stadium like the Rose Bowl. If you sat in a different seat every day, you’d only make it a third of the way around. That’s what you’ve got to work with, if you’re lucky. It’s not a lot of time. When I compare it with the age of the cosmos, the modest span of a human lifetime makes me feel pretty insignificant. The number also reminds me, though, of how much can happen in 30,000 days. Think about how much information and experience you can accumulate, how many people you can learn from and influence, and especially how many actions you can take. When you look at it that way, you have a lot of opportunity to make a big mark on our small planet.
My dad always said he wanted to impart two things to his family: Everyone is responsible for his or her own actions, and you’ve got to leave the world better than you found it. The first idea is fairly straightforward. No one else is going to take responsibility for what you do or what you fail to do. If you cheat, it’s on you. If you help out, though, you own that, too. The second idea is more complicated. You have to do a lot of work merely to come up with a convincing answer of what “better” really means. You need to filter information, think critically, consider a lot of different viewpoints with honesty and generosity. You need to pay close attention to the design and execution of any projects you undertake. And even then, you cannot be sure about your legacy.
Who hasn’t had a desire to peek into the future to see how things turn out? Who hasn’t wondered if your life really did make a difference in the world? I think this is what makes time travel such a staple of science fiction, going back at least to H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine from 1895. It drives the plot of the Back to the Future and The Terminator movies. As I write, there are four new shows on TV about time travel. Everybody craves a sneak preview of what the rest of our 30,000 days will look like . . . and then the days after those. The disappointing answer from physics is that time travel is impossible. We remember the past, not the future. Information flows one way only. It sucks, I know, but that’s the way it is.
We are prisoners of the so-called arrow of time, which seems to be related to one of nature’s unbreakable rules: the steady increase of entropy, which physicists define as the amount of randomness in a system. Left on their own, large groups of objects (such as the air molecules in a room) naturally progress from a state of order to disorder. Try this little example: You have a cup of hot tea and a cold ice cube sitting on a saucer. They are separate, nominal objects, not part of the rest of the room. They each hold a different amount of (heat) energy. They are in a state of high order, with all the high-energy molecules tucked in the teacup and the low-energy molecules huddled together in the ice cube. Put them together and their heat energy spreads out into a less independent, intermediate state of lukewarm. If you don’t put them together, you still end up with the exact same result. The tea cools to room temperature; the ice melts and warms to room temperature, too. Everything tends toward an in-between, scrambled sameness of energy. The Earth would be run-down if not for the steady flow of energy from the Sun.
Everything we do in trying to change the world is, ultimately, about managing energy and fighting against the tendency toward disorder. That tendency is entropy, and it seems to be a consequence of the nature of time. Or maybe, according to some theorists, the arrow of time is a consequence of entropy. As far as we can tell, the difference doesn’t matter to us mortal Earthlings. The bottom line is that we call the direction of time “forward,” because as appealing as it would be to be able to turn around, to go back in time and set things right, or set them better, we just cannot. If you feel as though you are constantly struggling against chaos, it’s because you are. Entropy is part of what you have to take into account in order to make change happen.
Your body’s metabolism is a lifelong battle against entropy. Every cell in your body is doing the same thing you are, trying to influence the future. Your whole existence, everything you do, is a battle against entropy, to make order out of disorder, to make a person out of some chemical compounds. Entropy is not evil, any more than gravity is. The world would not work without entropy. Time would not move without it. We run our planes, trains, automobiles, and electrical grids by means of our understanding of entropy. The famous second law of thermodynamics describes mathematically how entropy works; it also tells us how energy will move through an engine, a chemical reaction, a collapsing magnetic field, or an insulated home. We understand this natural law so well that we are able to mass-produce plastics and effective drugs by means of exquisitely subtle, energy-manipulating chemistry. Through the scientific process, nerdy thinkers have figured out nature’s rules and found ways to use them for our benefit.
So entropy not only makes things slow to a stop. It makes us go; I mean it drives us. Consider what your life would be like if somehow you could defeat entropy, if you could reverse that tendency for energy to spread and dissipate. You’d be beating the laws of thermodynamics, and time itself. Ultimately, you could know the future. What would you do differently if someone told you the exact time and circumstances of your death? You couldn’t do anything to change that death or else knowledge of the future would not be meaningful. Either you are stuck with a certain fate or the future is not knowable after all. Free will and rational action are unbreakably chained to the unknowable nature of the future. The open-ended possibility of our future days is what sets us free, as analytical nerds and simply as human beings. It’s what enables us to be optimistic, to achieve things, to leave the world better than we found it.
Over the years, I’ve come to realize that most of the time you don’t regret what you do; you regret what you don’t do. How often have you said to yourself, “You know, what I should have done was . . .”? Thinking about the things you’d regret if you didn’t do them is a great filtering technique. It helps you think clearly about what you plan to accomplish. That is what made me quit my job at Sundstrand Data Control on a memorable day back in 1986. What are you doing with your freedom? And more to the point, what are you not doing with your freedom that you should be doing? We can’t know the future, but we can make the future.
It’s this reconciliation with the nature of time and our place on Earth, orbiting a midsize star on the edge of a standard-issue kind of galaxy, that gets me excited about taking my dad’s advice. As far as we can tell, humans are the only species on this planet
(or in the known universe, for that matter) that can study cause and effect, figure out how to have the most impact, and follow a deliberate strategy to bend the world to our will. We can only play the hand we’re dealt. But look! But appreciate it! We can play the hand we’re dealt. We can all do something with our time here. Every day offers a new possibility of action; every moment is precious. We don’t fantasize that some deity is in charge, nor do we despair that we are powerless. We know that we can all work together and make change happen. How much more exciting could it possibly be?
Back in the early 1980s, when I worked for a Seattle oil-slick-skimmer company in the oil fields of Texas and New Mexico, I remember the intense, penetrating smell—oil. The petroleum odor would be in your clothes pretty much forever. My coveralls, my socks, even my underwear smelled like oil. You wash ’em, but the smell stays there all the time. You end up with a set of work clothes that cannot be worn anywhere or anytime else. I still have my old coveralls and, all these years later, you can still smell that crude. It is the smell of one kind of future, a stay-the-course approach in which we keep draining Earth’s limited fossil fuels and ratcheting up the amount of carbon dioxide in the air.
Recently I returned to Midland, Texas, for a talk at Midland College, in the heart of the oil patch. There, towering above the iconic, nodding grasshopper oil pumps, were wind turbines, enormous freakin’ propellers in the sky. People who think as I do decided to steer Texas (pun intended) toward a different future, one of renewable clean energy. Those turbines and many others like them are now producing 10 percent of the state’s electricity. They are beautiful as they spin slowly and powerfully—and there’s no smell. The turbines I saw that afternoon are just 20 miles from where I, as a young engineer, programmed oilfield valve controllers 3 decades earlier. In the next 3 decades, oil pumps may be dragged off for scrap steel, melted down, and rebuilt as turbine stanchions. I can’t know for sure that’s what the future will look like, but I (and you) can help make it, or something very much akin to it, happen.
Everything-all-at-once thinking gives us the tools to identify problems and work out solutions in the most honest, effective way we can. But it lets us do more: Scientific knowledge allows us to make informed projections, so we can anticipate what becomes of those problems and our solutions. This is another way we can fight back against the unknowability of the future. We can come up with very good approximations that let us head off the arrow of time. It is a valuable result of centuries of data collection, critical thinking, and testing of hypotheses using the scientific method: We don’t need to blunder all the way into a crisis to know that a crisis is coming.
Now we know, with troubling confidence, that the world is headed for serious problems if we don’t address climate change. There’s no need to guess about which is better for the planet, more oil pumps or more wind turbines. Greenland ice cores, supercomputer models, satellite observations of Earth, and studies of Venus and other planets all tell the same story. This is a place where we all need to contribute our efforts to make the most of our 30,000 (or more, we may hope) days.
The predictive power of science just astonishes me sometimes. I attended the launch of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft I mentioned earlier. It is traveling to the asteroid Bennu, where it will brush up a sample of 4.6-billion-year-old asteroid dust, tuck the sample into a canister, and fly the canister back to Earth for analysis. The probe launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral on September 8, 2016. After traveling hundreds of millions of kilometers, it will parachute down at the Utah Test and Training Range, 130 kilometers (80 miles) west of Salt Lake City, on September 24, 2023. That is some precision flying.
The launch itself was spectacular and inspiring. The Sun was low in the sky, so when the spacecraft ascended, the smoke trail was beautifully lit. It changed color and character when the solid fuel in the booster rocket was expended. Then there was a spooky shadow from the smoke trail hanging against the darkening blue evening sky. Wow. All that energy, flawlessly harnessed by the scientists and engineers who planned the mission. The technologies developed for OSIRIS-REx could someday make it possible to mine resources from asteroids and do manufacturing in space. We are confined to our one planet now, but that may not always be the case. During its encounter with Bennu, the spacecraft will also collect the kind of data we need to know if we ever have to deflect a collision-course asteroid. We may not go the way of the ancient dinosaurs, done in by a flying rock. It is another example of taking fate into our own hands.
And yet there are people—nerdy people, even—who seem a bit uncomfortable with this much free will. When I speak on college campuses these days, students sometimes ask about the “singularity,” the supposed moment when computers will be more capable than human brains and the two will merge into some new form of intelligence. An inventor named Ray Kurzweil is the leading proponent of the idea, and it has gained a sizable following, especially around Silicon Valley and the university-rich Boston area. Kurzweil is trying to come up with his own vision of the future, I suppose, but I am disheartened by his notion that people should eagerly await a day when we can surrender control to our devices. It is entirely too mystical and passive for my taste.
More recently, a number of philosophers and computer scientists have been promoting the idea that we are all living in a giant computer simulation. This idea was proposed by an Oxford University philosopher named Nick Bostrom, and even my friend Neil deGrasse Tyson takes it seriously. Um, guys? If some programmer created this world, is it really our fault if it’s all falling apart? If we will soon merge with computers that far outclass us in computing power, can’t we just let them run the show? When I let myself muse in that direction, I want to stamp my feet and turn around. I hope you do, too. This is dangerously close to the kind of magical thinking that scientists have worked so hard to break away from over the past, oh, 5 centuries.
I encourage people to engage with the world. Join and support organizations that you feel are carrying humankind to a better place. Work together to accomplish great things. Start a movement. Take honest, aware, and fair actions every day.
We have to fight entropy, not just in the chemical reactions that make us living animals on this planet but also in the recurring human impulse to find some way, any way, to shed the feeling of responsibility. Here’s where Ned Nye’s first piece of wisdom comes into play. We are responsible. It’s on us to create a better, fairer, healthier world, one in which everyone has access to those three fundamental engineering goals: clean water, renewably produced electricity, and access to the global web of information. We nerds are the right people for this job—rather, these jobs. We’re essential. Yes, we’re going to do them all, and we’re going to do them all at once.
Being a nerd is not easy. It is not just a life of the mind. It offers no escape from the rough, ugly, often unforgiving problems out there. Sometimes those problems are other people who are not interested in facts and are not focused on the greater good. No matter, we still are going to steer into the best future we can envision, guided by the best insights we can glean from the past and from one another.
Each of us carries a unique cache of experience and knowledge with new bits adding on every one of our 30,000ish days. I’ve shared some of my most memorable experiences with you. I managed to steer the canoe around the rock and haul the “drowning” camp counselor to the dock. I met the creationists head-on and challenged climate-change deniers. I worked over a drawing board, and I resonated in front of a camera. I conceived a cereal-powered car and helped shepherd a LightSail into space. I’ve done my best to learn from every one of these episodes. You have had life experiences every bit as powerful and illuminating as I have had; I’m sure of it. Your nerd duty is to review them. Filter. Look for cause and effect. Keep searching for your own next best steps into the future. Then extrapolate, and expand your views and your reach.
A lot of what I’ve written about in this book is intended to make a seemingly unmanageable job plausi
bly manageable. That is a challenge that scientifically minded people have wrestled with for as long as there has been anything that could remotely be called science. We learn about the reality around us by taking in information and by testing ideas. The whole concept of everything all at once is to do that on the largest possible scale and then filter your results with the greatest possible rigor. Without the filtering, the job is beyond human. Even with the filtering, it pushes the limits of our abilities. Critical thinking, open listening, and rigorous honesty are not natural instincts for any of us, at least not in the beginning. They are skills that have to be learned, repeated, and ingrained until they are instincts. Until you steer around magical thinking and tribal impulses as reflexively as I steered around that rock. That’s your responsibility.
Then there is the parallel challenge of putting ideas into action. You do not get any points for thinking bold thoughts alone in your room. We all have to be politically engaged. Pay attention to the news and our leaders’ views. Find like-minded people; work with them. Find people you disagree with and work to understand them. They know some things that you don’t. Reject tribalism. Volunteer for projects and causes you believe in. Entropy constrains our time here on Earth, so find inspiration in that constraint. Nerds need to guide our planet. That’s your role in making things better.
There’s a third piece of life advice I got from my dad, one that he didn’t spell out as clearly as the first two but that has informed my life just as deeply: Treat others with respect. It’s the golden rule, for cryin’ out loud. This simple principle clarifies the purpose of all the other things we do. It defines the “better” in “make things better.” It is what the whole everything-all-at-once technique adds up to. Knowledge has a goal. Scientific theories have an ultimate goal, to explain all of nature. Engineering has a big goal. It all leads to the idea of improving people’s lives. Freedom, equality, opportunity, health, peace—they are all facets of the gemstone of human kindness.
