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Bill Nyeis totally open to traveling into outer space, so long as he has a guaranteed return ticket.
While chatting with PEOPLE about partnering withCoca-Colato create ananimated, stop-motion short filmbreaking down theplastic recycling process, theBill Nye the Science Guystar, 66, also opens up about what he would do if he was given the chance to travel outside Earth.
Noting that he “applied to be an astronaut four times,” Nye says the NASA teams who go to space “are just amazing,” but that following mishaps like the Space ShuttleChallenger explosion, “nobody was going to let some yahoo like me fly around.”
His options are greater now, what with the privatization of space exploration leading to successful launches fromElon Musk’sSpaceX,Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin andRichard Branson’sVirgin Galactic— and Nye is game to give it a shot.
“I’d go in a heartbeat, as long as I can come back,” he says.
“There are people that say they want to go live on Mars, but I’m not that guy,” Nye adds. “I would love to visit Antarctica, I visited Greenland on the ice sheet for a couple weeks — that was cool — but I came home, which appealed to me.”
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So just what would Nye like to experience when he leaves the planet he’s taught so many about?
“There are no political boundaries, you can see evidence of human activity, and you can also see the scale and beauty of nature that we land-born animals don’t see,” he adds. “Everybody says that.”
Nye is keen to incorporate anything he’d learn in space into his message.
“If I were able to go, I could use that as a platform to promote the importance of addressing climate change, the importance of recycling … and I would be all over that,” Nye says. “I think that would be great.”
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For Nye, expressing the importance of science is what drives him daily, and is exactly what he wants his legacy to be when he is gone.
“With those three things,” Nye continues, “you could do this mythic, giant, huge goal of raising the standard of living of women and girls.”
Nye says that would benefit all of humankind.
“When you raise the standard of living of women and girls, everybody is healthier and happier, and more efficient. Commerce is more efficient, education is more efficient, everybody’s quality of life is better,” the scientist says. “And then we would address climate change at the same time.”
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For the time being, Nye is doing his part in the fight against pollution, which is what his partnership with Coca-Cola is all about.
“The idea of this program is a world without waste,” Nye tells PEOPLE. “So we want to close the loop. We want to get the plastic that people like to use for their beverages and recycle it in the modern, sophisticated, literal way.”
Detailing that seeing the animated version of himself in the film was “charming,” Nye also explains that he is working to make recycling “become habitual” overall for people across the globe.
“[We want it] to become unthinkable to throw a valuable plastic bottle away,” he says. “We want everybody to just appreciate that this material is worthy of being reused.”
source: people.com
