Bill Nye Answers Science Questions From Twitter - Part 3

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Greetings, everyone.

Bill Nye here once again to answer your science questions.

This is Science Support part three.

[upbeat music]

James Revelle asks, How come we know more about space

than we do about our own ocean?

I heard that on a doc somewhere.

Well, if you heard it on a documentary, James,

I guess you're set.

No, okay, there's an old saying

that's it's easier to explore the moon

than the bottom of the ocean.

And that's true for three reasons.

The ocean is cold, it's crushing, and it's corrosive.

That's why.

It's easier with binoculars to explore the moon

than it is with a scuba mask from a department store

to observe the bottom of the ocean.

Carry on, James.

David Blanchflower BSc.

He asks, Now that tardigrades have settled on the moon,

I wonder what their future holds.

Will they successfully rehydrate?

Can they flourish?

In thousands of years will they build spaceships

and return to Earth?

Fascinating.

Oh, there's a picture, he's got a picture of a tardigrade.

Tardigrades are also called the water bear.

You can see 'em with your naked eye.

He said naked, oh my god!

The word settled.

I think crash landing in the harsh vacuum of space

on planetary body that has no atmosphere or liquid water,

I think that's not the same as settling.

I don't think they're gonna settle the moon, David.

Carry on.

Bill Nye, assuming a perfect scenario

where the general disasters don't occur,

if the earth stopped spinning, would we all feel dizzy?

I guess so [laughs].

Not a test you'll probably be able to run.

Toni Philips writes, A climate change question.

As it gets hotter, more air conditioning is used

heating up the air even more.

Is there a way to cool indoor spaces without heating up

the outdoors, especially in cities?

Well, Toni, probably not.

Because what is the one thing you can count on

in this universe?

That's right, Toni, the second law of thermodynamics.

Heat just spreads out, man.

So when you pump the heat out of this room or the room

you're sitting in, putting it outside,

the outside gets a little bit warmer.

But the scale of it, I hope, surprises you.

The amount of heat we pump out of buildings

ain't no nothing.

Compared with the amount of heat that we're holding in

by adding greenhouse gases to the earth's atmosphere.

The heat island effect of cities is more from

hardscape paved surfaces.

Buildings are not soil, for example.

And that's why cities are so hot.

The AC thing is a problem,

but it's just the hardscape that gets us,

and that flipping second law of thermodynamics.

I'm sorry, woman.

There's nothing we can do out there.

We gotta deal.

It's entropy, entropy killing us all.

[sighs]

hala writes, When will teleportation happen?

[laughs] I don't know.

Happens all the time in science fiction.

But that's fiction.

No, just the information problem alone

probably makes teleportation impossible.

Converting something like you into a beam

of electromagnetic signals, it's very, very unlikely.

Just taking you apart and putting you back together

would take extraordinary amounts of energy.

Alyssa asks, Honestly, I have a science degree

and a partially completed doctorate,

and I still have no idea what a neutron does.

Okay.

Neutrons give, make things massive, man.

And if you can fuse them together, you can release

a whole bunch of energy, which we hope is the future.

Liam asks, If the mantle is filled with lava,

why aren't the oceans boiling or at least

warmer than they are?

There's a couple of things.

First of all, that the oceans are not boiling

and the earth remains very warm inside

is evidence of an aphorism I hope you will embrace,

a saying, a way of looking at the world

that I hope you, Liam, will take to heart.

If things were any other way, things would be different.

And here's what we mean by that.

Indeed, the earth does radiate a large amount,

but relatively small amount of heat,

into the icy blackness of space.

The bottom of the ocean is the earth's crust.

You gotta go down another 10, 20, 30 kilometers most places

to get to the mantle.

Carry on, Liam.

Bill Nye, if aliens were to fly by light years away,

would they see the dinosaurs or the Trojan War

or something since light they see is so old?

Yes, they would, Spurkey.

Bill Nye, this is Drew asks, Bill Nye, why does the moon

reflect in one straight line when it hits the ocean?

It may interest you to know that it reflects

in all different directions when it hits the ocean.

Just you as the observer see a straight line.

If you don't believe me, get your friends to stand

in a line along the beach where you can call out

to each other and ask each other

if you each see a straight line.

And then ask yourself if they're parallel.

Or if you don't trust your friends,

and I don't blame you,

set up cameras.

Take pictures along a kilometer or two.

Carry on, Drew.

Andrew Ralston says, Okay,

okay, I'll say it!

I'll say it!

How do planes work?

And I presume by that, Andrew, you mean airplanes.

'Cause a carpenter's plane has a blade

and you push it along, the carpenter pushes it along

and it peels off the wood,

but an airplane works like a bird.

You get the momentum of air molecules going down

has it produces enough force to hold the wing up.

And the way you get air molecules going down

is get the wing going fast.

What about a helicopter?

A helicopter's wings that are spinning.

And the propeller blades, either the exposed ones

that you might see on what we would call

a propeller aircraft

or the turban blades inside the tubes

on a jet airplane, they're going around in a circle,

and they're pushing air molecules back so fast

that they push the airplane forward.

It's not magic, it's science!

Gojirasans asks.

I'm doing my best to pronounce your name, Gojirasans.

Bill Nye, if we took all the animals out of the ocean,

how much shallower do you think the oceans would get?

In other words, how much water

do you think animals displace?

I'll bet it's less than you think.

Animals like you and I are mostly water.

Animals that live in the ocean are almost all water.

I don't think it would change that much.

Since you asked how much do you think,

my answer is not much.

Carry on, Gojirasans.

Drew asks, Bill Nye, do you think aliens actually exist?

So you want to resist making a joke about my old boss.

[laughs] I don't know if he was an alien.

[clears throat]

There are 200 billion stars in our galaxy,

and there're at least that many galaxies.

When I was in school, it was speculated that there might be

a planet, a single planet around one in every 100 stars.

Now with observations from Hubble Space Telescope,

Kepler Space Telescope, other inferential methods,

people think there're probably about 10 planets

around every star.

So that's another factor of a 1,000.

That takes you into the two trillions in just our galaxy.

If you've got two trillion of anything,

you gotta figure something's gonna happen.

So there probably are aliens.

Do they sit around and do fabulous and important

Twitter-styled podcasts?

I don't know.

Maybe.

Carry on.

Eroic Enrique, 'cause he says the Hs,

or she says the H is silent.

Are you an alien, Bill, sent here to educate the human race

and save us from our own destruction?

Yes, I'm an alien.

I've been sent here like the landing party

that that one astronaut claims he believes in.

No, I'm not an, I'm one of you.

I'm one of us.

We're all in this together.

Linkshallkill89, Bill Nye, how does fusion work?

Do you think we'll be able to have fusion power plants

the way we use nuclear power plants before 2050?

Fusion works by overcoming what's called

the strong nuclear force or the strong nuclear interaction.

And I believe it is quite reasonable we will have fusion,

not by running a stream of protons into deuterium

or tritium, oh no,

but by running a stream neutrons into boron hydride gas.

Stay tuned.

KC Cooning writes, Bill Nye, I've been fascinated

and quite obsessed, parenthetically,

with the alternate parallel universe theory.

Oh, you know that theory,

that theory about the alternate parallel universe.

So my question is this.

If such a thing were to exist, would the laws of physics

necessarily have to apply to every single universe?

Well, so here's the thing, KC.

Let's just take history of physics, for example.

People got by.

They build pyramids.

They discovered round things roll, made wheels.

All kinds of agriculture was developed

without really formalizing the laws or rules

of physics or natural laws.

And so people presume that what we called

Newton's laws of motion were it for centuries.

And it was great.

We made all sorts of progress.

But then relativity was discovered,

then quantum electrodynamics,

and we refined the laws of physics.

People, when your sophomoric view of the world,

Isaac Newton was wrong.

Isaac was pretty flipping right.

But then as we made more discoveries

about the nature of mass and light

and quantum electrodynamics, we refined it.

So I presume if another universe exists

and it has what we might call different laws of physics,

it doesn't mean that our laws of physics

are necessarily wrong.

It just means they're incomplete.

Everyday we learn a little more.

Carry on, KC.

Brian Schmidt asks, Didn't I hear we could get to

the next habitable planet in a few years

with this space sail?

Just need a sail the size of Texas in order to do it?

Sail the size of Texas is not gonna take us

to another habitable planet in a few years,

but solar sails such as LightSail 2 may revolutionize

space exploration here in the solar system

because we can go to extraordinary speeds

with no rocket fuel.

There's certain missions that solar sails are ideal for.

Put a solar sails spacecraft at an inferior orbit

closer to the sun than the earth is,

and keep an eye out for asteroids,

or maybe more importantly, coronal mass ejections

from the sun which send a beam of charged particles

slashing through space toward the earth

which could disable many, many of our communication systems.

So there's certain missions that solar sails are ideal for,

but a Texas-sized one going to a nearby habitable planet

is probably not among 'em.

And I remind you that it's not the solar wind.

It's not particles streaming from the sun

that give a solar sail spacecraft a push.

It is the light itself, photons.

There's about 100 times more pressure from photons

than charged particles.

Fascinating, I hope.

Carry on, Brian.

Bill Nye, do insects feel gravity the same way we do?

Yes.

The Spiderman does whatever a spider can.

Of course, spiders aren't insects,

but he doesn't do it because his understanding

of gravity is different.

He does it because he's not real.

Thank you for your questions.

We'll be back with more Science Support

number four, coming soon.

And when it does, turn it up loud!