Now, who is from the space generation? Does anyone know? Here's what you have to do to be in the space generation. You have to be born after the 4th of October, 1957. Anyone? Yes, a few of us. This means you are born after Sputnik flew, and Sputnik was a big deal. I will tell everybody, if you weren't here, it was crazy! All the grown-ups were talking about it, it was turned up to 11. This is the first object humans put in space and people were, like, totally freaked! 

Because it meant then that humans had the ability to create satellites. And this changed the world, and it became quite commonplace. It became so commonplace, we all love, a big rocket, very cool. Here's the game "Rockets to the Moon." These are very common. If you're not familiar with the game, let me point out that despite its appearance it is a timely game. 
(laughter)

 And it is fun to play. 
(laughter)

Just want to point that out so everybody knows it's fun to play. 

So let me just review. There's been a lot going on here this week. Let me point this out. Let's say that this picture of the Sun represents the Sun. 
(laughter)

 Then the Earth is what we call 1 Astronomical Unit, the distance from the Sun to the Earth in round numbers, we call it 1. Mars is 2.5 times farther away. Mercury is not even half as close, and Venus, then, is 3/4 as far, 0.7, yeah. So you might expect, shooting from the hip, that Mercury would be hotter than Venus. If you stand closer to the fire, you expect it to be hotter. 

But no, my friends, just to review, this is not the case. Just to go back over it. This is too hot. This is way too hot. Mars is too cold, but the Earth is just right, and this is a good thing. And the reason all of this is, is because of the air on each place. It's the atmosphere. On Mars, they, if there are any of "them," have hardly any. On Venus they've got a lot more than we do, 90 times as much, Mercury, none. Not enough gravity, blew off, long gone. 

But this has made the world the way it is. With all this, all these atmospheres, I just want to remind everybody. You're in the space generation. You know space pictures. These are routine. This is a day at your space office. This is nothing. Cover of USA Today. Cover of... New York Times, whatever. 

You'll see this picture. But notice that the Earth's atmosphere is really very, very thin. Crazy thin. Thinner than most of us can imagine. And it is this thinness that has made the world, made us be alive at a time when our world is changing. Now there's probably a few people in here who still wonder whether or not our planet, the Earth, is going through climate change. If you are wondering, if you are concerned, you should do what I did. I went to the Ice Core Lab in Glendale, Colorado. Glendale, Colorado is quite different from Glendale, California, if you ever go. So in the Ice Core Lab in Colorado, it's 37 Celsius below zero. 

It's almost -40 Fahrenheit. And I said to Todd Hinkley, the guy who runs the Ice Core Lab, "Todd. Hinkley." 
(laughter)

 I probably said, "Dr. Hinkley. Why did you choose -37? Is that your tectic point for evaporation of certain isotopes of water and interaction with sulfur?" "No, no, we didn't pick it. We took the thermostat and turned it all the way down."
(laughter)

"It's as cold as it will go, dingbat." When you go in there, it is cold. Even by Wisconsin standards, I'm sorry. It is cold. So what we have done, people have gone all over the world, drilled a hollow drill bit pipe into the ice. In Siberia, in Greenland, in Antarctica, and you pull out these big tubes, these big cylinders of ice. And then you take them into the Warm Room, where it's only 27 below! Which in Fahrenheit's like 15, 17 below. And I will admit, it feels warm. 

You guys live in Wisconsin, what am I telling you? 
(laughter)

 Take off your fourth pair of mittens, wow, this is great! I see your face is exposed, my goodness, it must be very warm. Anyway, what happens there, if you don't know this, they look at the ice very closely. And I've seen it. You can count the layers of ice just like rings on a tree except it's quite a bit easier. The layers of ice are about this wide, 10cm, across the palm of your hand. And they are a result of the layers of snow that fall every year and then the tines of the snowflakes get smushed by snow that falls in later years and smushed and smushed and they break. And that mechanical breaking causes them to melt a little bit and, fabulous word, they re-gel. 

Regelation. Come on, that's a good word. 
(laughter)

 Regelation. And they turn almost clear. And then trapped between the tines of snowflakes are these tiny bubbles... 
(singing)

 § Of ancient atmosphere § trapped in these slices of ice. So I saw Don Ho, by the way, older reference. He died, he doesn't, as far as I know, he doesn't sing much anymore. 
(laughter)

 But he started that song, "Tiny Bubbles," which, for the young people, is about champagne and the bubbles that occur. They give off carbon dioxide, this gas we like. And he started singing that song and he said, "I've sung that song every night for 34 years... I hate that song." 
(laughter)

 He was very funny. He was very funny, he was a good guy. Big supporter of science education, by the way. Those little sand grains are Asian desert. 

They blew to Greenland from the Gobi, from the desert in China. And we can identify that by looking at them the way Jan and the guys do with their mass spectrometers, and we can determine exactly where the dust came from, very cool. So those of you who are unfamiliar with this, I look like nobody, but the other day I met Michael Mann, and he was one of the first guys to compile these kinds of graphs. And this is where you take, you look at the tiny bubbles trapped between the snowflakes and you can figure out very well how warm the world was. When it's warmer, more lightweight oxygen evaporates than heavy oxygen with an extra neutron. And you can figure out, they can compare how many neutrons you've got in your air with how many neutrons evaporate off the sea surface using fantastic data from crazy organizations like the British Navy, where even thermometers made in the 1700s are just dead-on accurate. They're just, craftsmen, made in the 1800s, really good thermometers. They can compare the recent data, the last few decades, with data from centuries ago. And they get the method working really well, they're really confident about it. So this, then, is where you see the Earth having

- the Earth's temperature's changing, but it's going along pretty constantly for a long time. The oldest ice cores go back over 100,000 years. But then when you get near where we are alive today, here's the year 2000, it goes way up. The temperature of the world goes way up. And this is what Michael Mann and those guys call the "hockey stick" graph, which in Wisconsin must be very clear to you. 
(laughter)

 So there's a hockey stick, that's what the graph looks like. So, for many, many of you in the audience today, you are not only members of the space generation, you are members of what I call... 
(deep voice)

 The climate generation! 

Dun-dun-dun! Now, to be a member of the climate generation, you know what you have to do. You have to be born, but there's a little more to it, there's a rule. You have to be born after the 23rd of June, 1988. Anyone? Yes, way to go. About half of us, right on. I'm not in that "us," sorry. I had nothing to do with it. Nobody asked me. 

I just showed up some time ago. Anyway, this was the day that Jim Hansen, James Hansen, who was Sanjay's thesis advisor, how about that? What was he? 
- Limaye: (inaudible)

- Nye: "Post-doctoral thesis advisor." For his, what, your fourth degree? Your fifth? 
(laughter)

 Anyway, he went before the US congress and said, "Hey, the world seems to be getting warmer, carbon dioxide seems to be a big part of this. And you know why I know that? 'Cause I've studied Venus." That's what he told congress. This would be 20-something years ago. And people thought he was crazy. But now everybody's in on it. Now, if you haven't seen these pictures, I'll refresh you. This is the Upsala glacier, these are famous types of pictures. Upsala glacier, 1928. 

This is in Patagonia in South America. And my old roommate's been climbing there, he says it's the most beautiful place. Anybody from there, been there? I've never been. A spectacular place, he says, and he's quite the outdoorsman. Anyway, this is that same area today, or a few years ago, and it's no longer an ice sheet. They call this, in mountain climbing, this is called an ice sheet because it's a sheet of ice. 
(laughter)

 Now there is no ice sheet. And these are infamous or notorious pictures taken from just about the same place and this huge amount of ice and snow has melted away. 

And this, I hope, gives you pause for thought. So here's me. Well, actually, it's a picture of me, I'm over here. 
(laughter)

 And this is at Mt. St. Helens, and Mt. St. Helens is in Washington state. We used to do the Science Guy show in Washington state. 

I lived in Seattle for a long time. I mean, it's not Wisconsin. It's all right, it's okay. It's no Wisconsin. But there we are on the rim of Mt. St. Helens. And you say, "Why are you lazy people lying down? What kind of climbing is that?" Because right there is about 500 meters. 

It's like almost 1500 feet straight down! And so you can be a hard dude, macho guy, "Oh yeah, I'm gonna stand right here." It's really hard, I'll tell ya. It's really hard, 'cause it's crumbly, you know. It's scree, it's gravel. Anyway, it's a volcano and volcanoes I found quite cool. This is another representation of the temperature of the Earth from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. This then, when things are cool, are blue. When things get warm, we go orange. 'Cause that's how we humans think, we're fire people. 

And so this is another, this is further evidence of climate change. So what we've got here

- oh boy, is it just washed out? Here we go. So when Krakatoa volcano blew up in 1880, the Earth cooled off a little bit. Although carbon dioxide was thrown into the air, a lot of carbon dioxide, all this dust, all these particles, and you saw at Mt. St. Helens, the particles are gray. It's ash, people use the word "ash," but it's just powdered rock. And the Earth cools off. 

Santa Maria, 1900s. People were alive. This is not ancient history. People recorded the volcano eruption. They estimated how much volume of stuff got tossed in the atmosphere. And this is another thing where scientists correlate, or connect, the eruption of volcanoes with the cooling of the Earth. Now, here's Mt. St. Helens. And it's just a tiny bit there, because Mt. 

St. Helens is not in the tropics. If you're a volcano and you want to cool the Earth off, you've got to be in the tropics. So I don't know what you're doing, I don't know if there are any volcanoes here, Wisconsin's not going to do it. If there were a volcano, we would notice, wouldn't we? I mean, I don't know about that guy who asked me why my name was Bill, but... 
(laughter)

 We would notice. Anyway, people project, and you've probably seen these, people project what will happen to the world's temperature if we don't do anything. It'll get warmer, warmer. 

If we do everything all at once, it'll stabilize. If we do somewhere in between, it'll do somewhere in between. And these are the kind of data that, if you're a scientist and build this computer model, as David referred to, and you get this result, where you're able to show that volcanoes in 1880, looking at, for example, ice cores, for example the amount of pollen of certain weeds that grow a lot when it's warm and not so much when it's cool. And the width of tree rings when it's a warm season or a cool season. When you're able to correlate all those data, and then you see this in the future, you get concerned. If you're like me, you get, if I may, like, totally freaked. It is really serious, serious business. And it seems impossible. It seems impossible to many people that I've met over the last few years. It just doesn't seem like humans could change the climate of a whole planet. 

I mean, my goodness. I ride my bicycle to campus, for crying out loud. How could I be changing the world? Well, from the same vantage point at Mt. St. Helens, this is the next year actually. That's Mt. Rainier, that you see off in the distance. Mt. Rainier is famous, a big mountain out there and it's on the license plate of Washington state and stuff. 

But this is not a problem with the camera. That's a layer of smog, and I've drawn it in a little bit. There's a layer of smog right there. And just to help you see it, I've put a line on it. But this is 80 nautical miles from Seattle. It's 30 nautical miles from Portland, Oregon. And the smog just sloshes in. And so the reason this is happening is, there are a lot of people in the world. I captured this from the web right before I left Los Angeles the day before yesterday. There are now 6.8 billion people on Earth. 

When I was young and I went to the World's Fair in New York in 1965... Yes, climate generation people, we had the Beatles. We did not have disco yet. We did not have New Wave. And we got, I mean, we got by, even though we didn't have Lady Gaga. 
(laughter)

 We managed. Hey, she's a musician. I'm a fan. I have no problem, she's good. 

Anyway, when I was at the World's Fair, I was very disappointed. I was with my dad and my family. We had missed this board depicting the world's population, changing from 2,999,999,999 people, changing to 3 billion. We missed that. My father and I went, "Doggone it!" That wasn't that long ago. The world's population has more than doubled, and that is how humans are changing the world. There are just a lot of us. And some of my best friends are humans. 
(laughter)

 I'm a fan of humans. But this is the problem. So people talk about, David made reference to the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. And if you've never done this, I encourage everybody to do this. I'd do it up here, but it's more compelling if it's big. So you can do this yourself. I have two containers of clear water and I put fountain pen ink in it. And this is blue ink, but after a few minutes it turns this amber color. In the year 1750, using the ice and other means, people agree that there were about 250 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere. A part per million doesn't sound like much, it's 0.025%. 

It's not even a tenth of a percent. Doesn't sound like much. But if it's ink in water, or if it's, pick your poison, arsenic in water, you would notice it. Now, sort of this spring, a lot of people agreed on 389 ppm. Almost 400 ppm of carbon dioxide. And you with your eye can tell, even though it's parts per million, which sounds like a tiny amount, it is enough to, dare I say it, change the world! Now, what I want you guys to do, the young people here, I want you to change the world and I want you to save it. Now, bear in mind, the world is going to be fine. Cockroaches, sea jellies, apparently there's some squid that eat each other, that just are going to do great. They're going to have a great time. 

What we want to do is save the world for me. For us! And so I want you to get on that. Here's an example. I was in New Orleans for the Science Teacher Convention last year. This was a gas station in New Orleans. It's not there right now, 'cause they had it wash away when this hurricane came. Oh, don't worry, we'll build a drugstore right across the street in the last four years. You guys, really? You've thought this through? 

So here's a house that's built on sticks, and this would be a great idea, and it's your buddy Brad Pitt. Way to go, very cool. It's for a Category 4 hurricane. This dyke, which is a little ways away, is for a Category 5. Now, I'm not a civil engineer or expert on water management. It's not that far. It's going to happen again, everybody. Come on, people. I want you to change the world. The water level here was Category 5, the house was Category 4. 

And so I asked the spiritual question, "Are we sure about this?" 
(laughter)

 And what I mean is, this is not rocket surgery. 
(laughter)

 This is just making decisions. This is being a voter and taxpayer, just thinking about things. Now, you may have noticed that it has been very warm this year. Well, let me tell you, the last ten years have been the warmest on record. The warmest anybody who's been keeping track has noticed. And furthermore, the year that we're in now, which is 2010 by the common reckoning, is on track to be yet warmer. 

So it will be at least as warm as 2005, which was very warm. These data from the Union of Concerned Scientists, this is from the Australian Ministry on Climate Change, and I can tell you that when we do the reckoning for 2010, it will be the warmest year on record. It will be the warmest year in the last 131 years, which is how long these particular records have been kept, since 1879. So if you like to worry about things, this is a good time. You're in the right place. So what I'm saying to the climate generation, it's about making decisions. It's about, if I may, keeping your head in the game. I know that this year was the first time NASCAR came to Wisconsin, in many, many years. Anybody go? Nobody? 
(laughter)

 It is very exciting, I mean, the cars go really fast. It's very exciting. However, for those of you race fans

- I thought there'd be a couple race fans. These cars get five miles to the gallon and they use leaded gas! People, it's the 21st century, for crying out loud. I have a Prius, okay? We could have a little contest. When I was young, by the way, car racing was where technology was developed, where new engines were created. 

Everybody who's got a fuel-injected car, it was all developed in auto racing. Well, this particular style of car operating is the celebration of the past. They have mechanical fuel pumps, which no car has, they've got a carburetor, which you can't even find. People can't even spell that word anymore, not that you need it. And let's have a contest. Me and four of you will get in my Prius, and we've changed one rule at NASCAR. We've changed one rule. You only get, let's pick a number, 50 gallons of gas to go 500 miles. We could win! 
(laughter)

 We would drive, we could stop and have pizza. 
(laughter)

 'Cause those guys couldn't finish! And it's not, people make a lot of cars. I'm a mechanical engineer, people think about cars a lot. And yet, we have this weird celebration of doing things the old way. People, we can change this. I am very excited about my next vehicle, which I'm pretty sure will be a blank slide. 
(laughter)

 No, just a second. 

Will be the Nissan Leaf. I got to drive it the other day, it's all electric. And those of you who have never driven an electric car, it's so cool. It's so much fun. You can hate cars and you can hate people, but like cars, you can hate everything. But this car, the Chevy Volt, is sexy. Okay, I'm sorry. It's just fun to drive. So these cars depend on their batteries. And if things go really well in a car like the Leaf, you'll go 150 km, you'll go 100 miles. 

Things go really well in the Volt, you'll go 40 miles. The key is the batteries. Right now, everybody, our batteries have electrons that jump between big molecules, like through this goo, the battery electrolyte. This is a fuel cell developed by Toshiba that will run a laptop like this for a couple of days. The trouble is, you can't move it. You can't shake it, it'll mess it up, so it's in development. But my friends, young people, climate generation people, if you could invent a better battery, whether in yuan, Euros, or dollars, you will get rich. 
(laughter)

 You will get crazy rich! You will be Richie Rich Rich! 
(laughter)

 You'll be head-of-IKEA rich! 
(laughter)

 You'll be, like, out of control. I want you to do this and change the world. Now, this is the Golden Gate Bridge. Well, it's a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge. If we had the Golden Gate Bridge here, I think you'd know right away. 
(laughter)

 There's no fooling you. 

This bridge is state of the art, and it's held up with steel. I had the great privilege of meeting a guy named Rick Smalley, who unlike many of us here, has a Nobel prize. And he got his Nobel prize with a couple other guys for discovering buckminsterfullerenes, and Buckminster Fuller was an architect who developed the geodesic dome, and he named this molecule after him. By the way, Rick Smalley was working in the astronomy department at Rice University. They were looking at molecules in space and couldn't figure out what they were. At the spectral light going through molecules in space. And he realized, he told this story, it was very compelling, very good, it was really good, on camera-- that he woke up at three in the morning and had figured it out. That it was this pattern on a conventional soccer ball, old-style soccer ball, football. Hexagon, pentagon, hexagon, pentagon, hexagon, pentagon. 

So if you could take these molecules and stretch them this way and allow more carbon to grow in between, you get material that is 10,000 times stronger than steel. "I'm sorry, Bill, I thought you said..." I did. I said "10,000." 10,000 times stronger than steel, and they would weigh about 1/6 as much as steel. This material only exists in 30 billionths of a meter lengths, 30 nanometers right now, 50 nanometers. But somebody in here, some climate generation person, could work this out and change the world! So Rick Smalley was the guy, he was very well-spoken, and he said, "What we have to do is not do less." See, traditional environmentalists like me and my neighbor Ed Begley, we were brought up, "You gotta do less." We want you to drive less, use less clean water, so wear dirty clothes. 
(laughter)

 And then really, if you can, just don't eat. 
(laughter)

 Because humans are bad, humans should not be here, just don't even eat. But that turns out, that's not very popular. People don't go for that. 
(laughter)

 And what we have to do, as Rick Smalley said, I call him Rick, we have to find ways to do more with less. My friends, if you can solve this problem, you will change the world. Meanwhile, the world is changing. 

If you told my father, this is a guy I knew pretty well. 
(laughter)

 If you told my father we could use unbelievably faint pulses of radio from outer space to plant seeds in a field so precisely we could spell words, he would think you were crazy. Well, in my case, he thought that anyway. 
(laughter)

 This is remarkable. This is done with global positioning satellites directing tractors on where to plant seeds to within considerably less than a meter. This is rye grass in a wheat field, which was done for a hilarious thing, and this work, you can do this. This is doing more with less, because you can grow more wheat, or more of anything, on the same amount of land more efficiently. Now, everybody. 

I just want you to think about this, climate generation people. I took these pictures here at a world-famous restaurant. Hamburgers are 49 cents US. A salad, which I admit has some protein in it, is $5, $4.99. Now, I think, you're in Wisconsin, you've seen farms. You don't have to know that much about it. Growing what it takes to make a salad has got to take less energy, less water, less everything than raising a cow, feeding a cow, getting water to a cow, killing the cow, cleaning it up, grinding it up, cooking it, putting it with a bun

- it's got to take less energy to make a salad than a hamburger! But what has happened, by the great accident of democracy, compromises have been made for well over a century into a thing we call the Farm Bill. And now beef production for the sake of hamburgers is now cheaper than making a salad. 

You've got to, it can't be that hard. That has to be a solvable problem. This is not really an engineering problem. It's not a science problem. It's a human interaction problem. It's your lawyers and such. So I want you guys to figure this out and change the world. Now, when you fertilize fields, you use fertilizer normally made by the Huber process. A guy in Germany figured this out at the turn of the last century. And this is an oil refinery where they also have a fertilizer plant. 

I like it because it's colorful, it's happy. 
(laughter)

 Now, you might be able to figure out that taking nitrogen, which in chemistry is written N2, right out of the air to make fertilizer takes a lot of energy. That's why they put the fertilizer plants by the oil refineries. But we have another source of nitrogen. These are pigs. And they make nitrogen fertilizer like crazy. 
(laughter)

 But we have gotten in a situation, largely by accident, really, by the evolution of our technology where we have made it about the same amount of money to make fertilizer through a hugely energy intensive process instead of taking it in the old fashioned way from pigs. So what we want to do is get you guys in the climate generation to move away from the old confined feeding operation, or CAFO, to what we like to call the smart pasture operation. 

The SPO! 
(laughter)

 And if you could do this, you would change the world, and if you did it right, you would also what? Get rich, that's right. 
(laughter)

'Cause fertilizer's almost free. This is a nuclear power plant. Well, once again, it's a picture of a nuclear power plant. And I took these from an airplane. Well, I was in the terminal in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which is where Three Mile Island is. 

And I am all for nuclear power as long as you guys figure out what to do with the waste. Just make sure you have that figured out. What went wrong, they had this idea, nuclear power was going to be too cheap to meter. But it got complicated, all the rubber gloves and coveralls and all the stuff you need to move radioactive material around has made this low-level, so called "low-level" radioactive waste that's made it really expensive. And of course, it's also dangerous and so on. But if you could figure that out, that would be really good. Now, around the world we have a lot of wind. This is a United Nations and departments of energy from around the world map, there's a lot going on. But you get the idea, especially when you're near the coast of many countries it's very windy where the wind comes off the flat ocean. There is so much wind in North Dakota, North Dakota alone could power all of the United States and most of Canada, if you could get it all. 

The other thing about wind that's charming is, it's free and it's not especially dangerous. I was out in Palm Springs, California, and here's a tower, one of the many wind turbine towers, they're all over the place, that fell down. It buckled. And that's bad, and if you're the guy or gal who owns that tower, you're not a fan. 
(laughter)

 That was unfortunate. But the thing is, it's not that big a deal. When something goes wrong with a nuclear power plant, it is a huge big deal. If we have, right now there are 432 nuclear power plants around the world. If we get that to be 4,320 or 14,320, there's going to be a mistake. 

Something's going to go wrong, in the same way something went wrong with that oil well. There's going to be a problem, and we've got to all decide if that's worth it. If you guys can figure that out, I am right there with you. But it's a complicated problem. When you're in China, in the cities, every house, every apartment building has a solar hot water system on top. Everybody does. And the reason they do this is not because they're a bunch of hippies that want to live off the grid. It's 'cause the heat is free. It snows in Beijing, and yet they've got these on every house. It's a very cool, high-technology idea. 

The heat comes down, it boils this refrigerant, or heat-ant, and it goes up to the top of this pipe, it gives up its heat to that scuba tank-y shaped thing, and then dribbles back down. No moving parts, all day, and everybody gets hot water. I want somebody out here to start a hot water company in the US and get rich. Would you get that done? Now I'm going to throw this in, okay, look. Those of you who don't want to acknowledge this, pretend this didn't happen. Suppose we did this, okay? Instead of spending tax dollars to make roads that are big and thick that can hold up big, heavy sport utility vehicles and stuff like this, and then you have to re-pave them every year 'cause of the snow. Instead, what we do is build bike-ways that are covered. And then we would hook up louvers, so whenever the wind blew everybody who went across this tunnel would have a tailwind, and that way we could use the tax dollars to get people moving around on bicycles rather than repairing roads. 

It's a crazy idea, I just threw it out, you can pretend it never happened. 
(laughter)

(cheers and applause)

 It's too crazy, it's too crazy, didn't even happen. All right, this is in the United States. This is my house in southern California. I have 4 kilowatts of solar panels and my electric bill, they just raised it, my electric bill is $10 a month. It used to be $7. That's The Man, that's The Man. 

And then in the foreground is my solar hot water system and then this is the sola-tube, that's a brand name, and it has grooves in it that make it a Fresnel lens, and you guys are familiar with them even if you don't use that word. Light comes in sideways and is directed down this tube. And it's much brighter than a skylight. Even now, four years later, I tried to turn off the lights in this room, it's so bright. And this is technology that we hardly use, but we could save a lot. It sounds silly, but we could save a lot of electricity. I want you to get into that business. Now then, the future could be the situation where all these buildings which have all this space are used for growing plants, and we could have little gardens all over the place. It sounds crazy unless you think of it ahead of time and you could maybe do that, right? Now, I hearkened to this, I talked about this earlier today. 

I grew up reading, delivering the newspaper and I remember in the Sunday paper they still have Ripley's Believe It or Not. You come to Los Angeles, you can go to the Believe It or Not Museum, still going. And I read over the years several times versions of this and I called them and they sent me copies of the cartoon. Anyway, "Insects which have been flying for 350 million years defy the laws of aerodynamics!" "The bumblebee, considering its size and shape and wingspan is an aerodynamic misfit and should be unable to fly!" Even as a little kid, I realized the problem was not with the bees. 
(laughter)

 The bees have it figured out. It's the theory that's screwed up. So there are dozens, dozens of dozens, hundreds of things in your everyday experience that we think we know, that we're sure of, and we're wrong. 

And I want you guys to discover those things and change the world. 'Cause in the future, a lot of crazy ideas are going to come up. Let's put reflectors in space. Let's throw baking soda in the air and soak up carbon dioxide. 
(laughter)

 Let's throw iron in the ocean and grow more algae and then that'll make more oxygen. More algae, what could go wrong? 
(laughter)

 What could happen? More zebra mussels, come on, it'll be great. 

I just want you to know that I, a week from tonight, will have a job. 
(laughter)

 Yeah, exactly. "You, Bill, a job? You can't be serious." And I'll be executive director of the Planetary Society and

- 
(cheers and applause)

Right on! We are going to launch a solar sail. 

Now, this is like science fiction. This thing, this is an artist's rendering and gorgeous, it'll look every bit this great, nothing will go wrong. 
(laughter)

 Pushed through space by photons. "Wait, Uncle Bill. Light has no mass, how can it have momentum? Have you taken leave of your senses?" Perhaps. 
(laughter)

 But this has been around a long time, since relativity was discovered, that light should have momentum. 

And indeed, certain spacecraft including the ones that go to Venus, interplanetary spacecraft, are tinily affected, but measurably affected by the momentum of light. So this thing is so low mass, how low mass is it? That we'll hope to get it in orbit around the Earth and get a picture of the Earth below with the spacecraft. Earlier this summer, Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, deployed the first successful solar sail. And it's on its way to Venus and they steer with it and they do cool things. And so we're hoping that this technology gets employed because it's ideal for keeping an eye on the Sun. You can have stationed keeping an orbit around the Sun, not have it fall into the Sun, with the solar sail. For years and years and years because the fuel is free. Very exciting. Now here's another crazy idea for you. 

It might be possible. Do you see how the bubbles in the wake of this boat reflect light? They're white almost. When you look at them closely they're tiny bubbles. 
(laughter)

 When you look at them closely, they reflect light in a way that you can't even see with your eye. If you have just 3% of the light being reflected, you kind of have to do so-called A-B. You have to look at the bubbled water and the un-bubbled water to even tell them apart. It may be possible to use the bubbles off the back of ships to reflect light into space and we could have the World Bubble Council maintaining the reflectivity of the Earth. Sounds crazy, but it might work. 

It especially might work to keep ponds and cooling ponds around power plants from evaporating too fast. Seems like a crazy idea, but I ran across this about a year ago and I keep throwing it out. Russell Seitz is the guy, he was at Harvard. I keep throwing his idea out. He told me, "Yeah, tell everybody." So I told you, too. And when you think about climate change, you can get daunted, I have to say. But my grandfather, and that was a long time ago, but, my fellow humans, that wasn't that long ago. My grandfather went into World War I on a horse. You'll be shocked to learn my grandfather was an organic chemist. 

And he put bleach or chlorine in the lister bags in the canteens, 'cause I guess fighting a war when you have diarrhea is really hard. So they didn't want to get dysentery, this miserable parasite. So they killed it with chlorine, so you'd drink a little chlorine so you wouldn't get sick. Wait... 
(laughter)

 And he put a gas mask on himself and a gas mask on his horse. And when there was a fire on Berkwood Place in Baltimore, Maryland, the fire truck showed up pulled by horses. But 20 years later, by the time World War II was fought, nobody did anything like that in a big city with horses. Everything changed. Everything changed in just 20 years. 

And so I submit to you, you guys, we can change the world. Those people back then, if you can believe it, didn't even have the internet! 
(laughter)

 What did they do all day? 
(laughter)

 David and I were in Cape Canaveral, you were there, yes, yes, for the launch of New Horizons, which is on its way to Pluto. Pluto, the last of the traditional planets, now the first of the Plutoids! I just love the word "Plutoid," I think it's fantastic. All right. This launched in 1996, pardon me, hold it, 2006. 

And it is the fastest object humans have ever launched. When the astronauts went to the moon, it took them three days, or two and a half, half a day to slow down. 'Cause you're going to the moon, you don't want to miss, it's bad. 
(laughter)

 This spacecraft went past the moon in nine hours. Going that fast, it will arrive in the vicinity of the Plutoid Pluto in 2015. So I just want you to think back. "I remember, I believe it was 2010 and Uncle Bill was here and he was talking about a bunch of technology, I don't know what it was, and he mentioned that Pluto thing." And just think about when the first spectacular pictures of Pluto come back, 2015, think about the world today and how it's changed in five years. Has anything changed? 

Have you been part of any change? Has climate change been more pronounced? Have you noticed it, have the years gotten even warmer since 2010? Because we need you to change the world. Now, this is a picture of Saturn taken by the Galileo spacecraft. No, the Cassini spacecraft. Spectacular picture where rocket scientists got the camera out beyond the orbit of Saturn pointed back at the Sun, but this is also a picture of the Earth. The Earth is right here. That's it, that's the Earth, which makes the picture for me even more astonishing. Now, if we could go camera right a few thousand kilometers and look back, that's the Earth. 

That's it. This is everybody. And as my old professor Carl Sagan used to say, that's everyone you've ever met. Everyone that's ever lived. Every oak tree, every sea jelly, every emperor, every couple in love, everybody who's ever lived is right there on what he called the "pale blue dot." So it's where we make our stand. There is no cavalry coming over the hill. If what happened on Venus happens here, we are in trouble. And so I used to go to the beach in Delaware. Like you guys watch "Jersey Shore" and stuff. 
(laughter)

 It's just south of that, where my family used to go to the shore. And as a little kid I stood there and thought, "Boy, I really don't amount to much." The ocean is trackless. If you've ever been out on the ocean, you can't find your way unless you're very, very careful. And so I remember thinking, "I am just insignificant." And Mrs. Cochran, my third grade teacher, had also been my brother's third grade teacher, told us that there were more stars in the sky than grains of sand on the beach. And I remember thinking, "Mrs. Cochran, are you high?" 
(laughter)

I mean, I couldn't express it, but... 
(laughter)

 "Mrs. Cochran, have you ever been to a beach? There's a lot of sand, lady!" You look left and right in Delaware, that's 1500 nautical miles of sand in either direction. The tide goes out a little bit and there's more sand! You shuffle your feet, there's sand! Sand, sand, sand! 

But apparently there are more stars than all of that. So I remember thinking, "I am nothing. I'm just a speck, standing on the Earth, which really in the cosmic scheme of things is another speck." And it's orbiting the Sun, which is in every way an unremarkable star. I am a speck on a speck orbiting a speck, in the middle of speck-less-ness! 
(laughter)

 I am nothing! 
(laughter)

 If you'll excuse me, I suck, I am nothing. But then with my brain, which is only this big

- in the case of my old boss, of course... 
(laughter)

But with that brain, you can imagine all of this. You can understand the science of climate change. You can do something about it and you can, my friends, dare I say it, change the world! Thank you all very much, thank you. 
(cheers and applause)

 Thank you, oh man. 
(cheers and applause)

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