by Bill Nye
What makes organizations like the Union of Concerned Scientists and Global Citizen work well is that they have clear missions that run through all the steps of the upside-down pyramid of design. Start with the idea that you want the world to be healthier. How would you do that? You want people breathing cleaner air and drinking cleaner water. How do you get those things? You can do it top-down or bottom-up. The Union of Concerned Scientists looks at everything all at once and filters for maximum impact. It takes a top-down approach, advocating for regulations that compel people to not pollute. It also takes a bottom-up approach, visiting citizens affected by tide surges and polluted air. Global Citizen solicits contributions from celebrities, corporations, foundations, and individual donors. The funds go to directed efforts such as polio eradication in India and sustainable farming in Africa, another clever mix of top-down and bottom-up.
I strongly believe that taking care of all the people on this planet requires three basic things: reliable and sustainable electricity, clean water, and access to the Internet. Electricity is key because it enables both electronic information flow and energy for water management. One of my favorite organizations leading the renewable-energy effort is the Solutions Project. It’s made up of a group of engineers who have done real analyses to demonstrate that renewable-energy sources—wind, sunshine, tides, and geothermal heat—could satisfy the world’s entire electricity needs by 2050. The Solutions Project was cofounded by Mark Jacobson, a civil engineer at Stanford University. It raises money to perform the requisite detailed analyses and to pay staffers who advocate for its data-driven proposals in local and national elections.
What makes the Solutions Project stand out is that its proposals are not based on unrealistic intuition, nor do they involve any technologies that do not yet exist. For instance, the Solutions Project engineers propose electrifying all ground transportation: All cars, trucks, and trains would run with batteries or under transmission lines. These technologies exist. I currently (ha?) drive a US-built Chevy Bolt all-electric vehicle. If we had millions of electric cars and trucks fitted with batteries, we could store energy for everyone, everywhere, all the time. I routinely ride between New York and Washington, DC, on the Acela, an all-electric Amtrak train. If the electricity were produced renewably, the trains would run clean. For those who doubt that ideas like this are achievable, please think again. The team at the Solutions Project has. All of its plans are methodically designed, balancing short-term and long-term goals, and based on careful review of the renewable-energy sources that are available near where electricity is needed. Until recently, nobody had done such a methodical analysis of renewable resources; fossil fuels are such a ubiquitous part of our energy infrastructure that it didn’t seem necessary. Now that the information and algorithms for updating that infrastructure exist, moving forward will be that much easier.
Over the next 3 decades, in the Solutions Project plan, we would shift from centralized power production to distributed production. It’s a big job, but it’s a small world. (You can experience both perceptions simultaneously when you contemplate the Earthrise image.) Remember, the energy technologies already exist. They can be shared and configured for local needs everywhere. The Solutions Project people believe we could do all this if we just decided to do it—if we as a society were to just get moving (pun intended). That’s why, along with technical work, they advocate for these renewable technologies with local and regional governments as well as with the governments of the United States and more than a hundred other countries. An expanded clean-energy supply will dramatically increase wealth while drastically reducing inequality, tribalism, conflict, and fear. It’s an optimistic view of the future through science. It’s like Star Trek beamed down here to Earth.
I’ve singled out the organizations that I know best and have worked with directly. I am confident that they do good work in helping to flatten our planet . . . or making it more evenly spherical. But there are many other worthy groups pitching in. With data about charities, as with all information, you want to filter your facts carefully. Look for organizations with relatively low overhead costs (the money they spend just to run their operations) and a proven track record, along with a well-designed mission and set of goals. Watchdog organizations like the BBB Wise Giving Alliance and CharityWatch can give you a quick reality check. They are easy to find online.
You may recall that Guadalajara, Mexico, is where the 2016 International Astronautical Congress (IAC) was held, and yes, I was there. It was a wild nerd festival, with vendors selling huge commercial rockets and small-scale student-built spacecraft all under one convention-center roof. It was also a fascinating case study of how the world is starting (but still struggling) to pull together as one. The IAC chose to meet in Guadalajara because it is becoming a leading technology incubator in Mexico. Businesses there have taken a cosmic perspective on the idea of progress. Guadalajara is a pretty well-developed modern town. The economy looks strong, and its facilities are good enough to support a major international conference. But I could see that there is still work to be done. Foreigners like me were strongly encouraged not to drink the water, because our gastric systems don’t carry the antibodies that natives have for any number of distress-inducing microbes that are common in Mexican tap water. Technological development has not trickled down to the level of the faucets and the drinking fountains.
This is a city-scale version of a much larger issue: The war on poverty must be waged at all scales, all at once. When you are aiming for the stars, you still need to pay attention to the gutters. I mean that literally. From time to time, a journalist will ask me what I think is the greatest invention by humankind so far. My sense is they’re expecting me to say the iPhone or maybe the light bulb. But, I always reply, “Sewers.” Without the means to remove human waste and all the sick-making microbes it carries, villages become growth media for all sorts of awful parasites. If the village water that everyone is drinking is contaminated, even slightly, people get sick often. Sick people, kids especially, are unproductive, and they require caretakers. Nearly 800 million people around the world lack clean drinking water, and 2.5 billion do not have access to modern sanitation. Sewers are ground zero if you are targeting clean water for the developing world and, by extension, a large-scale path out of poverty.
In the developed world, civil engineers and municipalities have effectively solved the problem of waste and disease. They provide clean water by use of sophisticated settling tanks, aeration equipment, flocculants (clumping agents), acidity control, and a tremendous system of plumbing. It’s so commonplace in Canada, the UK, Denmark, Japan, the United States, and other Western countries that most of us reading along here probably seldom give it a moment’s thought. On the other hand, if you grow up without sophisticated plumbing, you probably don’t think about it either—because you’ve never seen it with your own eyes. We in the developed world could fix this. I claim it is in our own best interest to introduce sewers and modern clean-water plants. The national/international service corps I mentioned earlier could be part of the process of making it happen.
Water and energy go hand in hand. Clean water supports a healthy population that can help adapt modern agricultural practices and build a new energy infrastructure. Energy supports the sanitation and purification technologies needed to keep the water clean. Together, they advance the broad cause of bringing more freedom and less fear to the whole world, and promote both fairness and our self-interest. With adequate clean energy and clean water, we can improve health. We can give people access to mobile phones and connections to the Internet. We can expand access to education and economic opportunity. Then we will have more productive populaces, and more productive people to do business with. In the long run, we’ll have more nations contributing to the global economy rather than languishing and hoping to receive aid.
As with so many investments, providing modern sanitation and renewable energy for the whole globe looks expensive until you look at the co
st of not doing it. Just think how much we lose—in productivity, economic growth, science, and technology—by taking so much of the world’s population out of the equation. We can all do more to set that right. You can do more. You can donate to the organizations I mentioned earlier, you can volunteer, or perhaps you will start an organization of your own to speed things up. Every nonprofit with a world-changing mission started with a single person. The next person could be you. The progressive goals espoused by the Founding Fathers, and the Four Freedoms articulated by Franklin Roosevelt, are still great templates for global progress and prosperity. When I get revved up, as I seem to be doing now, I feel that failing to embrace these challenges would be downright un-American. Certainly it would be un-nerdy.
Over the past 4 decades, Star Trek (along with other idealistic science fiction) has helped seed a vision of a future in which science has solved the world’s greatest problems. To pursue that vision, we have to follow the path of everything all at once. Star Trek also helped spread awareness—correct, in my humble opinion—that far-out ambitious projects like a space program are not wasteful luxuries, even for developing nations. All the benefits I’ve been talking (writing) about apply in those nations, as well, perhaps even more so. A space program sets aspirational goals that advance education, innovation, and critical thinking in ways that benefit a whole country, top to bottom, just as NASA’s explorations have hugely benefited the United States.
Today, there are fledging space programs all over the world. India put a probe called Mangalyaan (“Mars craft”) in orbit around Mars in 2014, and its space agency is enabling the private TeamIndus to land a rover on the Moon in 2018. Countries as varied as Malaysia, Brazil, Iran, Nigeria, and Vietnam have space programs of one sort or another. I’m especially attentive to the case of Mexico, a nation that has been on the sidelines of technological innovation even though it conducts a vast amount of trade with the United States. Mexico’s backwater reputation is part of what has made it a target for so many demagogues denouncing immigration and trade treaties. But the situation is changing. Mexico did more than just host a space conference; it has its very own space program now. Guadalajara is even being called (with a little hyperbole, granted) the Silicon Valley of Mexico.
I confess that space is in me, as well as me being part of the cosmos. Carl Sagan started The Planetary Society in 1980. I joined as a charter member. Now I’m the society’s CEO. I took the job because I strongly feel that space brings out the best in us. It engages people all over the world. I’ve argued before that space exploration cuts across political ideologies, but it also cuts across cultures and nations. It knows no tribe, and it is an icon of freedom and the possibility of progress regardless of who you are or where you live. No matter what other troubles humankind has to address, we all want to know where we came from and how we got here on Earth. Our mission at The Planetary Society is explicitly global: We empower the world’s citizens to know the cosmos and our place within it. People everywhere yearn to be part of something bigger than themselves.
There are plenty of skeptics who argue that supporting a LightSail spacecraft, building a machine to rove on the Moon, or sending a robot to Mars should take a backseat to ending poverty or making the world healthy and safe. They are missing a great big point: When we explore the universe, each of us feels more connected to our world, more fulfilled, and more productive. When Mangalyaan reached orbit successfully and began sending back its first pictures of Mars, all of India celebrated. It was a celebration of scientific expertise and good design. It was also a celebration of reason over superstition, collaboration over fear and division. There is not an either-or choice: end poverty or explore space. The two go hand in hand. Exploration and science are part of a larger human drive. I’m proud to be part of it.
I come back to that photograph of the Earth rising above the Moon, a glittering jewel suspended in the void. The impact of seeing our planet from a great distance is so powerful that it has a name: the overview effect. Astronauts who come back from space frequently describe this feeling—a wholesale erasure of the usual sense of boundaries between nations and tribes. We cannot all go into space (yet), but we can all try to internalize that effect and then spread it as widely as possible.
The process of building trust across nations will include sharing knowledge, technology, and the entire rational, nerdy process of problem solving. That is how you strike at the institutional roots of poverty. Those goals are broader than the core priorities of water, energy, and information. They will apply to any of our future needs, as well, and they affirm a commitment to basic human rights. We already have institutions that incorporate the overview effect: not just nonprofit groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Solutions Project, and Global Citizen, but also the United Nations, national service programs, and global businesses. Even the biggest top-down-managed institutions must recognize the need to work bottom-up at the same time, by helping develop local business and local markets.
The scope of the actions can seem daunting, but the overview effect can help us here. We are not all experts at doing these things, nor do we need to be. We just need to work together; we need to respect the principle that everybody knows something you don’t. Let’s seek out these formal and informal experts and get them on board, or get on board with them. Let’s apply the best design principles, testing out different approaches, building prototypes, and refining our solutions. Let’s break the bigger jobs into manageable component tasks. Let’s tackle poverty in the best, smartest, nerdiest way, doing our best to accomplish as much as possible—all at once.
Someday soon, I hope, we will see young Americans hard at work here and abroad building wind turbines, installing photovoltaic panels, and running efficient, perhaps revolutionary, transmission lines where they’re needed. The next time I visit Guadalajara, maybe Mexico will be launching its own constellation of Internet satellites and everyone from anywhere will be able to drink the tap water without consequence. The next time I look at one of those world-poverty graphs, I want to see all the lines headed down to zero. I dream of the day when we don’t need to have these conversations because all these things will really be happening. And I believe that, step by step, we can make that dream real.
CHAPTER 28
Humans Control the Earth; Nerds Should Guide the Humans
There’s a term I hear scientists throwing around a lot these days: the “Anthropocene.” The word comes from the Greek (it means “the human era”) and describes the current geologic era, in which our species dominates the natural processes of our planet. With 7.4 billion people here breathing and burning and dumping into the air, no wonder we are changing the climate. According to one major study, humans have altered 83 percent of Earth’s surface, including 98 percent of the areas that are suitable for farming. With our bulldozers, irrigation equipment, and explosives, humans push and shove nearly 100 billion tons of soil a year. We move more earth than the Earth itself does, faster than volcanoes, erosion, and tectonic plates—combined. We are relocating river channels, decapitating mountains, paving grounds and changing drainage patterns with roads, and reworking the composition of the land, sea, and air. We are changing the landscape of the planet at least 100,000 times faster than it could happen in nature. That’s how powerful we are.
To me, there’s a fascinating and unsettling question raised by the idea of the Anthropocene: When did it begin? I mean, when did humans start to exert a large-scale influence on the Earth? Some people set the date in the mid-20th century, when atomic bombs altered the radioactive composition of the planet’s surface. Others set it in the 19th century, with the introduction of chemical fertilizers for intensive farming. Or maybe it started in the 18th century with the Industrial Revolution or in the 16th century when European colonists started transporting species (including infectious diseases) between the Old and New Worlds? I could keep going. I could make a good case that we began throwing around our environmental weight 10,000 years ago wi
th the introduction of agriculture . . . or was it a million years ago with the introduction of fire? I guess I could continue further, but I won’t.
The boundary between natural and human influences on the world is a blurry one. We’ve been changing the Earth in meaningful ways for as long as we’ve been a technological species. We didn’t mean to do these things. Most of the time, we didn’t even know we were doing them. People sometimes look at all the modern ecological problems and ask me: How could we, as a species, allow all this to happen? What were we thinking? The fundamental answer is that we weren’t thinking; we were just doing. We were following our needs and our evolutionary instincts without acknowledging or anticipating consequences on this scale.
This insight could fill a fella with despair. Or . . . you could perform a U-turn and shift your perspective. If you didn’t believe me before when I said that we can change the world, maybe you do now, because we are doing it already. We cannot turn back the clock, even with the most diligent work by environmentalist do-gooders. We are not able to put removed mountaintops back where they were in West Virginia. We are not going to unbuild cities or uncultivate farms. And we cannot run human progress in reverse—nor should we. Nobody wants to give up comfort, convenience, connectivity, good health, and all the other wonderful things that have come with modern technology. Nobody wants to make the world poorer, less informed, and more tribal. Traditional ways of living are not possible with a modern population. Forward is the only option.
As caretakers of the Earth, we humans have to shape (or reshape) the world the way we want it to be. The only way we can look out for each other is if we also look out for the whole blue ball. We are living as we once imagined beings living in science fiction stories, as masters of our planet. The good news is, we know we have the ability. What we need now is the wisdom, the direction, and the execution to channel that ability in the most constructive ways. Humans are in control of the Earth, but we are not yet fully in charge of ourselves. We need more wisdom, and we need to apply the principles of good design on a global scale. We need experts who have a deep understanding of how our human population interacts with nature. We need to coordinate our actions on a scale never before attempted or even seriously envisioned.