World News Korner

Bill Nye is dedicated to fighting to improve science standards in this country and fighting asteroids. That's right, asteroids.

Courtesy of Mother Jones:

In recent years, Nye has undergone something of a career and image renaissance. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society, the world's largest nongovernmental space interest group. He has a YouTube series with NASA. He was on Dancing with the Stars this year, his highest profile foray into dance since he finished fourth at a Cornell talent show where he did a jitterbug routine choreographed to "Runaround Sue." He organized the "Save Our Science" campaign, which has pushed Congress and the White House to provide at least $1.5 billion annually for planetary science and exploration.

"He's been instrumental in helping advance some of the president's key initiatives to make sure we can out-educate, out-innovate, and out-compete the world," an Obama administration official tells me. "The president lights up when he sees Bill," another official says. (That's not to say Nye is never at odds with the president; in early December, he issued an open letter on YouTube to Obama asking him ensure more funding for planetary exploration—something that has endured some rough budgetary hits during the Obama years.)

But of his new endeavors, he's likely best known for his politically tinged, no-bullshit talk about science education in America. Over the past few years, he's gained wide attention on social media, the lecture circuit, and television (he's appeared on CNN's Piers Morgan Live and HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, among others) for countering creationist drivel, conservative politicians' claims, and climate change denial.

"I fight this fight out of patriotism," Nye says.

"We have a problem," he continues. "We can't have economic growth without basic investment in science and research. And we can't have irresponsible school board members in Texas teaching that the earth is 10,000 years old. We can't have us embracing scientific illiteracy."

When I ask Nye about what he considers his current top-three political passions, he responds: "Climate change, raise the standard of women around the world through education, asteroids."

Yes, Nye is really into asteroids—specifically, fighting the ones that may imperil human civilization.

"Sooner or later we're going to have to deflect an asteroid," Nye says. "And we're the first generation that can do something about it." As the head of the Planetary Society, Nye and his team published a plan for using solar-paneled-fitted "Laser Bee" spacecraft to evaporate or volatize parts of an asteroid threatening earth. The parts that burn off have momentum, and that momentum is hopefully enough to "nudge" the asteroid. "It's a matter of life or death for people...It's ironic that people are running around worried about Obamacare while this other troubling thing looms."

You know on second thought perhaps this is the perfect man to debate Creationist and intellectual child abuser Ken Ham.

After all he is intelligent, gregarious, dedicated, extremely likeable and the man wants to take on projectiles from space. On the other hand Ken Ham is an intellectual light weight who uses the trust of small children to poison their minds and cripple their cognitive abilities.

If Bill Nye were a different kind of man it would be a slaughter. As it is it just might be yet another opportunity for Nye to teach good science, to those who so desperately need to learn.

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