Bill Nye Quotes

I've got no problem with anybody's religion. But if you go claiming the Earth is only 10,000 years old, that's just wrong.

I've always loved airplanes and flight. The space program was really important to me as a kid. I still have a photo of Armstrong and Aldrin on the moon in my living room.

You and I are made of stardust. We are the stuff of exploded stars. We are therefore, at least 1 way that the Universe knows itself. That, to me, is astonishing.

Intuitively you want some place [such as your phone] to store phone numbers, so you have that part of your brain to do other tasks.

The thing about a theory in science is it allows you make predictions. Evolutionary theory allows us to predict what apples will taste good next harvest.

Recommending or insisting on abstinence has been completely ineffective.

The natural world is a package deal; you don't get to select which facts you like and which you don't.

If you just take a single human and put him or her in the forest he or she might not do very well without some sort of education which he got or she got from some tribe.

I stand by my assertions that although you can know what happens to any individual species that you modify, you cannot be certain what will happen to the ecosystem. Also, we have a strange situation where we have malnourished fat people. It's not that we need more food. It's that we need to manage our food system better.

Teaching creationism in science class as an alternative to evolution is inappropriate.

The world's going to change climatically. We just want to control the change. We want to have a high quality of life for billions of people as we pass through this era.

Our goal in science is to discover universal laws of nature. That pursuit fills me with wonder.

But investment in space stimulates society, it stimulates it economically, it stimulates it intellectually, and it gives us all passion.

Incidentally, the creationists that I've encountered diligently deny that our Earth's climate is being altered by people. This point of view and teaching is in absolutely no one's best interest. Here's hoping we can work together and preserve the Earth, for us - us humans.

If you decide to become a dancer on Broadway, never say who your favorite dance partner is, because members of the media will presume you never want to dance with anybody else.

If NASA is to reach beyond the Moon and someday reach Mars, it must be relieved of the burden of launching people and cargo to low earth orbit. To do that, we must invest more in commercial spaceflight.

Some of the most wonderful aspects and consequences of evolution have been discovered only recently. This is in stark contrast to creationism, which offers a static view of the world, one that cannot be challenged or tested with reason. And because it cannot make predictions, it cannot lead to new discoveries, new medicines, or new ways to feed all of us.

If you meet somebody who says he or she has never dreamed of flying, I don't believe you. I mean, they're lying.

I say to the grownups, if you want to deny evolution and live in your world, that's completely inconsistent with the world we observe, that's fine. But don't make your kids do it. Because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future. We need engineers that can build stuff and solve problems.

Science is the best thing humans beings have ever come up with. And if it isn't, science will fix it.

That's what makes a human a human, if we store information outside our bodies.

Religion is a completely different thing from the claim that the Earth is six thousand years old. That's just crazy.

We are special in the sense that we can know our place in the cosmos. We can know our place in space. We are at least one of the cosmos's ways of knowing itself. That fills me with reverence and joy. Another insight I really want people to consider is this: everyone has gotten this far. Everyone you meet has made it this far. Nobody is superior to anyone else from an evolutionary standpoint.

I often reflect on what an extraordinary time (pun intended) it is to be alive here in the beginning of the twenty-first century. It took life billions of years to get to this point. It took humans thousands of years to piece together a meaningful understanding of our cosmos, our planet and ourselves. Think how fortunate we are to know this much. But think also of all that's yet to be discovered. Here's hoping the deep answers to the deep questions-from the nature of consciousness to the origin of life-will be found in not too much more time.

When we see the shadow on our images, are we seeing the time 11 minutes ago on Mars? Or are we seeing the time on Mars as observed from Earth now? It's like time travel problems in science fiction. When is now; when was then?

Burning carbon-based substances like oil, gas, and especially coal, produces billions of tons of extra carbon dioxide each year. Methane gas from cows and pigs and other animals on our large farms ends up in the atmosphere as well, trapping more of the sun's energy as heat.

There is no debate in the scientific community...We need [Congress] to change things, not to deny what's happening.

There are two ways to be rich: to have more or need less. It's estimated that we squander about 30 percent of our energy leaving the lights on, the refrigerator door open, and so on. Then there is the enormous amount of food that we expend huge amounts of energy to raise and then throw away.

To leave the world better than you found it, sometimes you have to pick up other people's trash.

People confuse the word cynicism with the word skepticism. One is “you’re not gonna pay attention to anything, think everything’s screwed up, nothing’s ever gonna work out right”, that’s cynicism. But skepticism is, “you’re presented with evidence and you do your best to draw conclusions based on that”. So, as the saying goes, Bill Nye, do you believe in ghosts? No. However, I would love to see one. Bring it on. I’m open minded to the idea, but the more I look into it in a skeptical frame of thinking, the less likely it seems.

Speaking of human computers, there is a guy named Art Benjamin, he's a human calculator. He says it's a skill he learned as a kid. Now he's a math professor at Harvey Mudd. He can find the square root of a six digit number in a few seconds. Practice.

If the Earth gets hit by an asteroid, it's game over. It's control-alt-delete for civilization.

The information you get from social media is not a substitute for academic discipline at all.

For me, the meaning of life is pretty clear: Living things strive to pass their genes into the future.

The strange thing about grinding that might surprise many people is that you can grind things and shape them using materials that are generally somewhat softer than the thing you're grinding and shaping.

If you memorize the periodic table it will speed you up if you're a chemist, but by and large, the reason you have a periodic table is so that you can store that information outside of your body. That way it frees up some part of your brain to do something else...