Bill Nye Answers Science Questions From Twitter - Part 4 | Tech Support | WIRED

does artificial intelligence excite or scare you now of course they're great science fiction stories where the robots with their artificial intelligence take over the world oh ah still fresh for me every time greetings bill nye here answering your questions from twitter this is yet another science support [Music] at yes on 522 hand isn't 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 is does not refer to something that you just make up like an idea the word theory in science means something that with which you can make predictions countless predictions like covet 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 at steelhester ask this morning's group chat subject weight 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 look i'm fine they're firm but squishy they're squishy but firm here's a question from an at enterobang underscore two 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 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 [Music] except it'd be in space there wouldn't be any sound it would just be well that's 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 out of their and we just listen and go with it because they're scientists you know um at his milf 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 wrong 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's getting warmer and warmer but there you're really taking somebody's word for it but what we want this milf is for you to be able to evaluate the claims of the scientists and so this is why we want science education for everyone at tony basi4 will artificial intelligence have the capability of knowing it is a.i and was created by pound sign 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 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 buffy summer summer i'm not an astrology girly well we have that in common but every time weird hickory 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's 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 at alex g2 how does climate change cause pandemics do we globally come down with colds when it freezes in 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 at purple can i you know sometimes i wonder are humans still evolving or have we somehow halted 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 societies 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 well stay tuned over the next few centuries we'll see if that proves to be true it's a hypothesis you can evaluate it at crypto rises to moon asks how do 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've 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 in the geologic formation and you know that those plants and animals could only thrive when it was warm then you can infer that 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 at wild spartans why are hurricanes and typhoons called different things when they're basically the same thing they're coined by uh different people in different parts of the world speaking different languages you know what are you supposed to do you grew up speaking french you're gonna say one thing you grow up speaking tagalog you're going to 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 well 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 because it's just somehow the ideal material for reflecting infrared light chronically tired crees asks if space is expanding wtf is surrounding space for it to expand into you've hit upon a great and wonderful philosophical question space-time is like everything it doesn't expand to end 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 put it simply nobody knows but maybe you'll be the astronomer that figures it out so it's not expanding any into anything it is everything and it's all expanding whoa t partane 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 four billion years is going to swell up and 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 we'll see it sucks thanks for your question ben james genuine question as opposed to the questions that he might normally ask how do scientists tell the difference between covet 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 oh 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 going to be exciting jiggy summer asks how do scientists figure out where life can exist in the u and i don't think they mean the university because that's also a mystery we just launched the jwst james james webb space telescope one of the things we're going to 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've got to have a liquid that would dissolve chemicals move them around allow the chemicals to come back out of 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 atds 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 from 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 chicamic acid pathway oh yes by inhibiting the plant's ability to metabolize the chakimic 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 of what's happened in the great evolutionary arms race of life species of weed are emerging where the 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 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 they're almost 8 billion and that's because we found ways to feed them all and a lot of that has been genetic manipulation of crops good question dev does drawings 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 talk 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 cal 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 at therapy 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 at dear sarah how do volcanoes erupt after doing nothing for decades this is a real question like wtf caused an 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 at 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 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

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Length: 18min 38sec (1118 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 30 2022