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Bill Nye says science is why humanity has such a good quality of life, compared to the rest of its history.
“If you couldn’t pick where on earth you would be born, but you could pick when, this would be the time. As screwed up as things seem to be in so many ways it’s actually better for more people than ever, and that’s because of science.”
Nye, of course, is the science advocate and educator who first gained acclaim in the 1990s on public television as Bill Nye The Science Guy.
He was in town last week to deliver the keynote address at the 2019 SpaceCom Expo, an annual conference focused on the commercial space industry. These days he’s the CEO of The Planetary Society, an organization dedicated to advancing space science and exploration.
While in Houston, Nye told Houston Matters producer Joshua Zinn why he’s still a champion for science, saying society will need more critical thinkers in order to solve problems like climate change and feeding the planet’s ballooning population.
He also talked about what excites him about space exploration — namely finding life on another planet. Nye said he’d like to be alive if and when proof of alien life is found. It would change history.
“Everybody would feel differently about being a living thing in the cosmos,” he said. “It would be extraordinary. It would be like Copernicus or Galileo or one of these things. And that’s within our grasp — that sort of exploration — because we can build space craft, and we can land them on Mars.”
He says Mars is still a logical place to look for signs of ancient life. But organisms could still be living on Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, he says.
You can hear his full conversation on Houston Matters in the audio above.
