Bill Nye Answers Science Questions From Twitter - Part 4

Does artificial intelligence excite or scare you?

Now, of course, there are great science fiction stories

where the robots with their artificial intelligence

take over the world.

Mwah ha ha!

Oh. Ah.

Still fresh for me every time.

Greetings, Bill Nye here,

answering your questions from Twitter.

This is yet another Science Support.

[upbeat music]

@Yeson522Hen.

Isn't an evolution just a theory that remains unproven?

No!

Evolution is a theory that has been proven over and over.

And I remind you, the word theory in science

does not refer to something that you just make up,

like an idea.

The word theory in science means something

with which you can make predictions.

Countless predictions.

Like COVID-19 mutating into all these variants.

Countless predictions have been made

with the theory of evolution.

Evolution is the fact of life,

and it's why you and I are here.

But it is my wish that you will think about that.

Evolution is what makes the whole thing go.

@SteelHester asked:

This morning's group chat subject:

wait, comma, what do brains actually feel like?

Well, if you go into medicine,

they'll let you squeeze a brain.

I've squeezed a few brains.

And look, I'm fine.

They're firm, but squishy.

They're squishy, but firm.

Here's a question from @interrobang_2.

Will humanity ever leave the solar system?

Probably not.

But some future species, maybe,

you know, humanity may evolve and change

where we couldn't breed with ourselves.

That species may leave the solar system.

Not sure where they would go or what they'd do,

but we might send an instrument,

a spacecraft to another star system.

I could imagine that easily.

We'd use a solar sail,

and we'd give it a push with a laser.

Be cool. Bzz.

Except it'd be in space,

there wouldn't be any sound.

It would just be.

@Ihhsmilf.

Oh, that that's quite an assertion.

I don't know if it's I in there.

But here we go. Question.

How do scientists just figure things out?

And who is to say what they found is right?

What if scientists are just saying [beep]

out of their [beep],

and we just listen and go with it

'cause they're scientists?

You know, @Ihhsmilf,

you're asking a wonderful and important question.

This deal of who is the authority,

when it comes to something like the world is round,

you, at first, certainly are taking somebody's word for it.

The world is round.

Because you go outside, you look around,

the world looks flat.

But you can show with a little diligence

that the world is round,

and you and I are living at a time

when we can look at pictures from spacecraft.

When it comes to climate change, that's a lot harder.

You're taking the word of climate scientists largely,

albeit until recently,

when the fires are getting worse and worse,

and everything is getting warmer and warmer,

but there you're really taking somebody's word for it.

But what we want, Ihhsmilf,

is for you to be able to evaluate

the claims of the scientists.

And so this is why we want science education for everyone.

@TonyBassi4.

Will artificial intelligence have the capability

of knowing it is AI and was created by #humans?

Do we know whether we are an advanced bio AI?

Think about it.

We're probably not an advanced AI.

You know, in science you're not allowed to have

what's called an unfalsifiable hypothesis.

That's not useful in science.

So if you have a hypothesis

that we are part of a video game

or an artificial intelligence system,

and we can't know it, that's not a useful hypothesis.

You can't know it

because the artificial intelligence programmed it

so you can't know it.

Well, what if I found a way to find the artificial...

Well, they programmed it so you would think you found it,

but you didn't really find.

It's just, it's a circle.

You'll never get there from here.

Good question though. Excellent question.

Buffysummere. Summere.

I'm not an astrology girlie.

Well, we have that in common.

But every time weird [beep] is going on in my life

it's Mercury retrograde.

Can science explain that?

Yes. Now, here's what's happening.

The orbit of Mercury is only 88 earth days.

So the Earth is going around,

Mercury is going around,

and so as observed from Earth.

Mercury appears to move backwards

in the astronomical night sky.

But it happens all the time.

With a period of only 88 days,

it's just the chances of you looking at Mercury

when it happens to be appearing to be going backwards

relative to fixed stars is so often,

you're just conflating or mixing cause and effect.

Stop attributing anything in your life to astrology.

It is utter bunk.

As my mother always said,

Common sense is not that common.

@AlixG_2.

How does climate change cause pandemics?

Do we globally come down with colds when it freezes

and night sweats when it thaws?

If you're a human,

what is the most dangerous animal out to get you?

It is not as you might expect,

as Dorothy expected, lions and tigers and bears.

Oh, no.

Mosquitoes are the most dangerous animal for humans.

So as we enable tropical organisms

to live farther and farther from the equator,

the chances of us getting infected are higher and higher.

Then with our technological success

that has enabled us to have airplanes

that fly all over the place,

we have now transmitted diseases

from one person to another much more readily

than was possible 200 years ago.

And so this is a drag.

But it's also an opportunity

because we understand what's happening.

@PurpleKunai.

You know, sometimes I wonder are humans still evolving

or have we somehow halted

and/or altered nature's process of natural selection?

No, we're still evolving, man.

The mate you select is based on evolution.

If germs and parasites can kill you,

then you don't live as long

and you're much less likely to pass your genes on.

But then it gets into this other bigger thing.

Is it not just the individual,

but is it the society or culture that produces them?

Uncle Bill predicts,

as women and girls become more enabled in our society,

as they're able to live longer, get jobs,

have their own credit cards,

then they're waiting longer to have kids.

And so I think we are very subtly selecting,

at least in the developed world,

for women who are able more successfully

to have babies later.

We'll stay tuned over the next few centuries.

We'll see if that proves to be true.

It's a hypothesis you can evaluate it.

@CryptoRise2Moon asks:

how does scientists determine temps,

I guess that's temperatures, from thousands of years ago?

Serious question.

Well, of course it's a serious question.

So geologists look at the minerals that form.

So if you got lava, you have molten rock,

and it cools off,

it'll trap certain minerals,

certain patterns of atoms and molecules.

By melting lava in the laboratory,

they can determine what minerals form

and then work backwards from there.

And then the other thing,

if you find plants and animals in a geologic formation,

and you know that those plants and animals

could only thrive when it was warm,

then you can infer that layer of rock formed

when it was warm.

And you go to Antarctica,

and there's fossil dinosaurs down there,

because they were able to wander around

not when it was covered with ice,

but when it was covered with lush things to eat.

You know, dinosaur salad.

And I hope it was fun for them.

@WildSpartanz.

Why are hurricanes and typhoons called different things

when they're basically the same thing?

Ahh!

They were coined by different people

in different parts of the world,

speaking different languages.

You know, what are we supposed to do?

You grew up speaking French,

you're gonna say one thing.

You grew up speaking Tagalog,

you're gonna say another thing.

In general, hurricanes occur in the northern hemisphere

so they're spinning counterclockwise.

Many, many typhoons occur in the southern hemisphere,

and they'll be spinning clockwise.

Here's a question from bananalyze split.

How does the James Webb Space Telescope different

from Hubble?

JWST, as we like to call it, is bigger and more powerful.

And it works in the infrared.

The light it reflects and gathers is in the infrared.

And that's why the mirrors are covered with gold.

Real gold.

'Cause it's just somehow the ideal material

for reflecting infrared light.

Chronically Tired Kreez asks:

if space is expanding, WTF is surrounding space

for it to expand into?

You've hit upon a great and wonderful

philosophical question.

Spacetime is like everything.

It doesn't expand into anything.

Everything is just spreading apart.

And what keeps it from spreading apart,

near as we can tell,

are sources of gravity, like stars and planets.

Like, where's it all going into?

What does this even mean?

To put it simply, nobody knows.

But maybe you'll be the astronomer that figures it out.

So it's not expanding into anything.

It is everything, and it's all expanding.

Whoa.

T Partain.

How do scientists determine when existence will end?

Well, I guess it depends, Partain,

what you mean by existence.

The solar system, you know,

the sun 4 billion years is gonna swell up

and, whew, incinerate the earth.

Except, as I say, it'll be in space.

There's no sound.

It'll just be.

Yours and my existence will end a lot sooner than that,

which kind of sucks,

but that's the way it is.

When will there be the end of time?

Nobody knows.

But the universe is expanding,

and no one really knows why that is.

And so since it had a beginning, will it have an end?

Yeah. So we'll see.

No, we won't see, neither you nor I will see.

It sucks.

Thanks for your question.

Ben James.

Genuine question.

As opposed to the questions that he might normally ask.

How does scientists tell the difference

between COVID variants?

What makes them different from each other

other than the effects of humans?

I'd love to know the answer.

It doesn't appear there is any type

of universal rules or standards.

Au contraire, Ben James, we have developed techniques

for determining the sequence of amino acids on DNA.

And they can tell when the sequence changes.

So that's where the word variant comes from.

Now, evolution is this process

by which living things make replicas of themselves.

And so when they make copies,

there are little changes introduced.

And because there's so many millions of us infected

with so many billions of these viruses,

these changes are emerging naturally

especially fast.

Stay tuned, there will be new variants this fall.

Coach BJ Thompson, bj116.

Does artificial intelligence excite or scare you?

It excites me.

Artificial intelligence is just the next thing in computing.

You make software that uses what it did before

to make a better version of itself.

And this gets into an old thing called feedback and control

at some level.

You know, you have a thermostat.

You introduce changes based on what happened before.

People are opening the doors and letting the heat out

or the air conditioned air out

at certain times of day.

The thermostat will compensate for that.

And bear in mind, humans design all this stuff.

This doesn't come out of the sky.

These are people designing systems.

And so if we make a system

that gets out of hand and crashes, well, that's bad,

so we'll have to change it so it doesn't do that.

It's gonna be exciting.

@jiggy_summer asks,

how does scientists figure out where life can exist

in the U?

And I don't think they mean the university,

'cause that's also a mystery. [laughs]

We just launched the JWST, James Webb Space Telescope.

One of the things we're gonna try to do with this gizmo

is look for methane

in atmospheres of distant, distant, distant planets.

So there are non-organism ways to make methane,

but most here on earth comes from living things,

from bacteria that give it off.

When cows are burping, those are bacteria

in their tummies that are producing this stuff.

And so if we see methane

in the atmosphere of a distant planet,

one might infer that there's something alive over there.

And then the big, other big thing is,

as near as anybody can tell,

to have living things you need

a way to move chemicals around.

You gotta have a liquid that would dissolve chemicals,

move 'em around,

allow the chemicals to come back out a solution

and be used by this living thing.

The overwhelming likely candidate is water.

And there is water all over our solar system.

On icy asteroids and other planets.

And so we figure there must be water out there.

And if there's water out there,

and it is also a solvent for other living things,

then perhaps very reasonably

there are other living things.

Note well that is very reasonable that you

and maybe even I will be alive

when life is discovered on another world.

And when that happens, it will change this world.

All of us will feel differently about being a living thing

in the cosmos.

@deadteez asks:

why is genetic engineering so complicated?

Mush brain not understand.

Genetic engineering is either simple or really complicated.

So guys like George Washington,

Thomas Jefferson take the pollen

from one wheat plant and shake it onto the ova,

the eggs, of another wheat plant to hybridize them.

So that was genetic modification by traditional farming.

Farmers have been messing with plants,

and crops, and domesticated animals for centuries.

10,000 years, at least.

But doing it in much more subtle, quicker,

more effective ways requires understanding

the genome of corn or whatever you're trying to mess with.

And then understanding a mechanism that keeps

the corn borer, this is an insect,

from eating it,

then had to put that gene into corn.

Not so easy, but it was done.

And by the way, that whole genetic modification thing

started with cotton.

And then the other famous, famous thing

is this business with glyphosate.

The big brand name you hear about is Roundup.

They figured out there's this shikimic acid pathway.

Oh yes.

By inhibiting the plant's ability to metabolize

this shikimic acid,

they could put this material on the crops, on the ground.

Weeds couldn't grow.

Things that grow fast couldn't grow.

But then, what's happened

in the great evolutionary arms race of life,

species of weed are emerging where the shikimic acid pathway

is not inhibited and they grow anyway.

It's us versus them.

And I remind us, farming is not natural.

If you stop farming, the land goes back

to a prairie, or a forest, or a meadow, whatever it was.

It's humans doing this stuff that enables us to eat.

When I was young, there were fewer

than 3 billion people in the world.

Now, there are almost 8 billion.

And that's 'cause we found ways to feed 'em all.

And a lot of that has been genetic manipulation of crops.

Good question.

DevDoesDrawings wants to know why does CO2

get all the hate when it's methane that causes more damage

to global warming?

Why is no one talking about cutting those emissions?

People are talking about methane all the time.

People are very, very concerned about methane.

Methane leaks at oil wells and oil production.

Methane leaks is a huge problem.

Cow burps, cow burps are a huge problem.

But the reason you hear so much about CO2

is because there's so much more of it.

The effect of CO2 is bigger than the effect of methane.

Both enormous problems for us humans.

@theropay.

How do droughts work?

Like does the rain cycle just decide to stop working?

Let us keep in mind,

the rain cycle does not, as we say, have agency.

I don't think it makes any decisions.

Just as we make the ocean out here warmer,

the air coming ashore is drier.

As this gets drier, everything gets drier.

More droughts are making things drier

which causes more droughts.

@dearsarahh.

How do volcanoes erupt after doing nothing for decades?

This is a real question.

Like WTF causes eruption to happen?

The movement of tectonic plates

happen over tens of thousands

or hundreds of thousands of years.

So 10 years in the volcanic tectonic scheme of things

is a tiny, tiny fraction.

So these little shifts in the tectonic plates

cause volcanoes to happen.

And on human time scales, they seem far apart,

but on geologic time scales,

they're just happening all the time.

@Devon04522082 asks,

how many millions of gallons of water can a hurricane drop?

I think it's closer to billions.

So we've done calculations on Katrina,

and then there are category six hurricanes.

So far they've only happened at sea,

but they drop millions and millions of tons of water.

So if this desk were full of water,

two of these desks were full of water,

it would weigh about a ton.

Millions of tons of water, billions of gallons. Whew.

So those are all the questions for today.

Thanks for watching Science Support.

This has been part four,

and I hope you felt that your science was supported.

Thanks for watching.

Let's change the world.