It seems like, for about a decade or so, Bill Nye has been on a lonely crusade. I've seen him popping up in random places on TV like CNN and National Geographic, trying to maintain energy, patience, enthusiasm and thoughtfulness with an unmistakable undercurrent of exhaustion at the aggressive persistence of scientific illiteracy among the public and the powerful.
Like many people my age, I remember him initially as Bill Nye the Science Guy, a quirky bow-tied entertainer in the 1990s with an engineering background trying to make science fascinating and fun for then-young people like me. I was not an avid viewer of his show, I seem to remember an episode or two being shown in my high school science classes and finding them entertaining to the extent I could given that I was sitting in a high school science classroom.
Bill has been doing more or less the same thing for the last decade or so, except he is more serious, as the problems he is addressing are incredibly serious, and he is trying to reach a broader and different audience, though due to the passage of time that audience includes many of the same people that it did in the 90s: pretty much everyone with the right to vote, Americans in particular. Yet, while the problems are very serious, he knows that engaging the voting layperson to care about and understand it all is hard. He continues to use his skills as a scientist and entertainer/public figure to spread scientific literacy about controversial issues.
His newest effort states its intention plainly: Bill Nye Saves the World. It barrels on the scene via Netflix, the massively popular medium of streaming entertainment, delivering ~25-minute episodes devoted to the big public issues in modern science. Episode 1 comes right out swinging on the biggest issue: climate change. The show sets Herculean goals: distill confoundingly complex problems into digestible, entertaining bits that fairly reflect the state of modern science.
The show, its host and his guests and sidekicks are at turns or simultaneously thoughtful (as is his panel discussing GMOs), whimsical (as is the guest-appearance by Zach Braff in the first episode devoted to climate change), odd (as is the song about panspermia), funny (as is the show's writer who comes out to speak "to my fellow Asians" about their proclivity for promoting alternative medicine, and report filed by a correspondent who visits a looney-tunes "sound therapy" office in San Francisco), confusing (as are a lot of explanations about what exactly NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab is trying to do on Mars- especially when they try to explain what exactly it would mean to "find life" and what even might define "life"- and its connection to panspermia), profound (when discussing the possibility of finding life on other planets), illuminating (the whole episode on GMOs), impassioned (nearly everything Bill says), awkward (some of the attempts at humor), awe-inspiring (the expert panel discussing climate change and the solutions that exist right now), and more.
Coming out in the same year that a poster boy for scientific illiteracy has taken the oath of office for President of the United States and is naming like-minded illiterates to the highest posts in the land, we need all the help we can get- and Bill Nye and Co.'s latest effort is most heartily welcome.
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