It is now my privilege to introduce our commencement speaker,
Bill Nye the Science Guy.
[ applause and cheering ]
[ Crowd chanting "Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill..." ]
Bill has been a proponent of math, engineering, 
and science since he was a young man.
He earned a Bachelor of Science degree
 in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University,
and worked as an engineer at the Boeing Company.
He has numerous inventions
spanning from the fields of avionics
 to the Fango Baseball Retriever.
Bill Nye is the Executive Director of the Planetary Society,
an organization whose mission is to create a better future
 by exploring other worlds and understanding our own.
He is a proponent of space exploration and the EarthDial Project,
deploying sundials around the world that are similar to
 the Mars dial on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars.
He conceived the idea of the Mars dial
 and was a member of the design team.
But, what Bill Nye is best known for
is his enthusiastic and attention-grabbing teaching of science.
The character he created, 
complete with white lab coat and bow-tie,
has become an icon in
 elementary and middle schools worldwide.
His "Bill Nye the Science Guy" program has taught 
tens of thousands of children scientific information
through simple yet effective experiments
 with his famous, "Did you know?" facts.
He has written and hosted 
several other television series including
"100 Greatest Discoveries"
"The Eyes of Nye"
and "Solving for X"
a program teaching children algebraic principles.
He has written five children's books
on subjects of germs, dinosaurs, science, and the ocean.
He has won multiple Emmys and many awards
including the International Science Advocate Award 
and the Distinguished Award for Conservation.
We are privileged and happy to have 
this educator and advocate of science with us today.
Please join me in welcoming our 2013 commencement speaker,
Bill Nye.
[ applause and cheering ]
Wow!
Thank you very much.
This better be good.
I worked at Boeing for about three years,
but don't worry, I was very well supervised.
[ laughter ]
So, let's get started, shall we?
Distinguished faculty, parents, guests, alumni, 
ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, kids of all ages,
and especially graduates,
welcome and especially congratulations; 
You made it!
Nicely done.
[ applause ]
I have to say, looking at the program, you've almost made it.
You've got about 18 minutes to go.
When I finally got out...
Uh, what I mean is, when I graduated
after a few relaxing years in engineering school,
the world was full of trouble.
During my college years we wound down
 a miserable war in Southeast Asia,
we experienced the first of several energy crises 
in which people waited in line for fuel for their vehicles,
gasoline prices skyrocketed
 to over $2.00 a gallon on Interstate 476,
and we were still in the throes of the disco era
with its heavy bass, its leisure suits, and the Ford Pinto.
That was something that no designer, no engineer,
and especially no lawyer could be proud of.
We're starting on another energy crisis.
Here's hoping we can avoid another disco era.
There were two world-sized problems
 that my classmates and I faced.
And, although both of these problems are more acute now than
 they were back then, to be fair, we did make a little progress.
As you commence your adult tax-paying lives,
 these two troubles loom larger than ever.
They both are readily expressed with numbers.
The first is the number of us.
People are being born much faster than they are dying.
With every passing 15 seconds the world has more people on it.
The other problem is our air;
its gas fractions are changing faster 
than they have ever in the last 65 million years.
So, in the 16 minutes that are left,
as you graduates of this remarkable university, and your parents, I want you to meet those two challenges:
We want you to—dare I say it?—change the world!
[ Laughter ]
So, please consider the following.
When my great-grandmother refused to let my grandmother 
go for a ride on the Wright Brothers' new flying machine
in College Park, Maryland,
there were about one and three quarters of
 a billion  people in the world.
During World War II
while my father worked a shovel
 in the Japanese Prisoner of War camp,
and my mother, a Navy Lieutenant and cryptographer, 
worked to decipher the infamous German Enigma Code,
our human population had risen to about 2.3 billion.
As a boy at the New York Worlds Fair back in 1965,
I remember well a large display; a tote board 
depicting the estimated world population of humans.
It fascinated my family and me.
It was like the anticipation of watching the car's odometer
 roll all of its nines to zeros at 100,000 miles.
I'm sorry, I say "roll" because 
mileage indicators back then were mechanical.
Unlike a record turntable, 
you couldn't really make music with them.
By the way, in those old days we used those turntables 
to play music rather than just scratch them.
If I'm going too fast, it's okay.
While we were at the Worlds Fair
the world's population changed from 2,999,999,999
 people in the world to 3,000,000,000 people; humans on earth.
During your junior college year, the Halloween before last, 
we reached 7 billion people; 7 billion humans on earth.
In my lifetime it more than doubled.
Wait, wait... there's more.
By the time you graduates reach your billionth second here 
on earth, when you're a little over six months into your 31st year,
we will probably be over 9 billion.
We may very well be well on our way to 12 billion humans on earth.
So, what to do about it?
You could run in circles screaming.
In general that's not so effective.
Instead, to reduce the rate of human reproduction,
the shortest cut is to raise the standard of living of women worldwide.
[ applause and cheers ]
Thank you.
But, I've got to point out that it wasn't really my idea.
1971 was not only the year that Lehigh admitted women,
it was also the year that here in the developed world,
 in the United States in 1971 my mother could not get a credit card.
Credit card companies would not issue a card
 to her for no other reason than she was a woman,
because she was Mrs. Nye, 
even though she was a bread-winner with a master's degree.
Oh yes, don't worry, they did issue her credit cards eventually;
ten years later, after she had gotten a doctorate.
I just want to remind everyone, especially the young
 men and women here, that it wasn't that long ago.
It wasn't that long ago at all that women did not get a fair shake,
even in this country, the world's perhaps
 most developed progressive country in that regard.
In comparison, a woman's lot in life in many 
parts of the world isn't bad... it's just miserable; it sucks!
But, through education we can lift the lives of women worldwide
which will lead to wanted children that are well cared for, 
and richer, happier lives for all of us.
For my mother, everything changed in barely a decade.
Just like that.
Big changes can happen very fast.
Back then in 1971 they didn't even have the internet.
I know, I know... what did they do all day?
[ laughter ]
But, changes were made even then 
when it was slow to share information.
So now, 2013'ers, I want you to get it done soon.
Be part of a world where we all participate
 in business, science, and especially elections.
Reckoning the world's population
in thousands of millions—those are billions—is one thing,
but in the world it's changing much faster.
In the world you can reckon everything another way;
not in millions, but in millionths.
When I rode my bicycle to the first Earth Day on the National Mall
I locked my bike to a flag pole flying the US flag.
By the way, was that a remarkable version
 of the Star Spangled Banner!
That was terrific.
[ applause ]
Thank you.
The thing that is remarkable about the United States
 is that change is built in; it's part of the way we do business
rather than just opening fire.
So, this is how I strongly believe the United States is still the
 world leader, not only in technology and science but in thought.
I'm very hopeful that this class will be part of that
and be part of what I hope will be world-changing changes.
Anyway, I went to the first Earth Day back in 1970.
Rock and Roll was giving way to Motown but it was before disco.
Surf music was fading.
Nevertheless we pressed on.
I celebrated that I had ridden my bicycle to Earth Day 
without having driven a car, without having produced pollution.
It seems a little hard to believe now,
but in the United States, 
along with our rivers which would catch fire from time to time,
we had air pollution that was so thick—how thick was it—
that people died in their sleep.
With regulations in place today, that doesn't happen anymore.
At least not here in the United States.
Today's graduates, along with nearly everyone here,
were born when the earth's atmosphere
—rounding to just one significant digit—
held about .03 percent or 300 parts per million, 
that's the same number, of carbon dioxide.
Today, rounding to one digit,
 it's .04 percent or 400 parts per million.
Now, these are fractions, parts of millions; millionths.
Nevertheless this tiny change,
when it first might seem like an insignificant fraction
 of an insignificant portion of our atmosphere,
is changing our world.
If we had an extraordinary car or vehicle 
that could somehow ride on an extraordinary road,
a thoroughfare that somehow
 went straight up through the atmosphere,
we could drive at regular highway speeds
 and be in outer space in less than two hours.
It's not that far because our planet's atmosphere
 is so extraordinarily thin.
So, it's this convergence of a burgeoning human population
with a remarkably thin layer of atmosphere
that is warming our world 
faster than ever in measurable geologic history.
It's the challenge for you and your classmates 
as you step out into the workplace.
A set of problems like no one before you has had to face.
But, we think you are all up to it.
We — your parents, the other faculty members, and I —
 think you can do this.
We think you can—dare I say it?—change the world!
Our remarkable quality of life here in the developed world
 depends on electricity mostly made by burning old fuel.
We use almost all of the electricity in the world.
This is perhaps nowhere more obvious
 than here in Pennsylvania.
But, people around the planet aren't going to sit by
 and let the developed world use all the energy
while they're pumping out all the carbon dioxide.
Here is some very bad news;
apparently we will never run out of fossil fuels,
we'll never use it all up, not for centuries.
Sure there is oil, and less of the really sweet
 Pennsylvania crude than there used to be,
but there is also natural gas, and there is oil sand, and tar sand,
 and oil shale, and some other words the geologists make up
like shale tar or oil goo or what-have-you.
There's coal, coal, coal, everywhere. 
Right beneath our feet here today especially.
Right now no one pays for the 
smoke and gasses that burning coal creates,
so people worldwide will keep digging it up
 and they'll keep burning it.
Unchecked coal will indirectly kill a great many of us,
that is unless you, YOU, lead the world on new paths, 
new ways to provide electricity, new types of transportation,
and new approaches to doing business.
On the first Earth Day there was emphasis on doing less.
They wanted you to drive less, 
to use less clean water... so wear dirty clothes.
And, you know, humans are bad.
Humans don't belong in the ecosystem so don't even eat.
But, that turned out to be not especially popular.
However, like any environmentalist, 
I'm a big fan of having more by just wasting less.
That's akin to picking low-hanging fruit, 
which is good, but we can't just do less.
The key to our future is instead to find ways to do more with less.
Now, you are Lehigh graduates, 
or you will be in about 13 minutes,
and you really are among the very best in the world
in thinking about new arrangements, 
new tools, and new elegantly engineered designs
to reach for the high hanging fruit,
 the big prizes and the great big prizes.
That's what we want you to do for us.
I'm not kidding.
I want you to change the world in new, exciting, and big ways.
Wind turbines are cool; they're breezy if you will.
Lehigh engineers, I hope, 
will put them where they'll do the most good.
Solar panels like the one in my 
never-winded watch go back about 100 years.
The cell in my watch is around 10% efficient
 which is plenty for a watch.
But, how about if solar panels were 50% efficient or 80% efficient?
Here's hoping a Lehigh material scientist
 becomes the inventor, or venture capitalist,
or the lawyer who grasps the value of discovering, 
protects the idea and he or she would change the world.
If you can invent a better battery; 
one that can store more energy with less exotic metal,
one that could handle the heat without
 loss of performance or just plain catching on fire,
you would change the world alright, but you might also get rich; crazy rich, Bill Gates rich, head of Ikea guy rich.
Speaking of electricity, here's an old problem:
Nuclear power seemed like a great idea when I was a kid.
You dig this stuff up, you purify it somehow, you fission it,
 you make heat, and then you bury it again.
I mean how hard could it be?
Well, it's turned out to be a lot
 messier than that and a great deal more expensive.
I hope no Pennsylvanian ever forgets what happened,
and especially what almost happened at the end of the
 Harrisburg Airport runway at the Three Mile Island Plant.
No one here, none of us, will outlive the damage and heartache 
brought on by the Fukushima nuclear disaster.
We have 430-some commercial nuclear plants around the world.
430.
What if we had 14,430 or 43,030 ?
There just will be another accident, there will be.
We have tens of thousands of pounds and tons 
and kilos of nuclear fuel and nuclear weapons on Earth.
Nothing we throw away here goes away;
it all remains on the planet.
In all this nuclear promise and nuclear disappointment
there may be an opportunity, 
there may be some way for some industrialists,
some Lehigh graduate to—I'm not kidding—change the world.
It is sobering for me, and perhaps for more than a few of 
your parents to consider that all you Lehigh University graduates
know more physics than Issac Newton.
You know more physics than Albert Einstein did.
You know more about the universe
 than Galileo or Copernicus knew.
I can guarantee you that significant discoveries 
will be made in your lifetime that will change the world.
Imagine this everybody:
When I was a kid no one had a good theory
 as to what happened to the ancient dinosaurs.
Mrs. McGonigle, my 2nd grade teacher, 
read to us from a book as she was told,
and she told us that dinosaurs
 had small brains and they were stupid,
so all the mice and rabbits and bats took all the dinosaur food
 and beat them up and the dinosaurs disappeared.
Even Mrs. McGonigle knew that was just lame.
I remember thinking,
 "Mrs. McGonigle, really? Come on, really?"
I'm a tyrannosaurus and you're a rat, okay we're done.
[ laughter ]
But, everybody in my lifetime, 
we discovered the meteoric impact crater near Chicxulub, Mexico.
The ejecta from that collision shot out
 over a diameter bigger than the earth itself.
The earth was surrounded with red hot coals for days on end, 
it set the whole place on fire, cooked everybody.
And, just a few of our ancestors made it here.
It was like science fiction except it was real.
By the way, as a result of that discovery, the air-burst over Chelyabinsk, Russia, and the near miss of asteroid 2012 DA14,
with those, people were at last appreciating
 the astonishing threat of an asteroid impact.
I remind you that just because something
 is very unlikely doesn't mean it won't kill you.
You are the first generation of engineers, scientists, 
educators, and foreign policy wonks,
who can get human kind to do something
 about an oncoming impactor.
What's it going to be?
Is it going to be a gravity space tugboat?
A swarm of rock vaporizing laser space craft?
A kinetic impactor?
Or, just a big bomb in space?
Whatever it is, we're counting on you.
[ laughter ]
An asteroid could change everything very, very quickly.
Get this you guys,
in my early school years no one had yet proven the existence 
of tectonic plates and the global circulation of salt in the sea.
People suspected it, but it wasn't
 really proven  until I was in elementary school.
We now have plate tectonics,
and that understanding has changed geology in the
 way we view our planet and every other planet forever.
I'm claiming that there will be similar world-changing 
discoveries in the coming years; in your lifetimes.
For example, recently we've come to know
 that the universe is bigger than anyone  thought.
Not only that but it's accelerating in its expansion.
Do you know why it's accelerating?
Nobody knows why.
For sure, if a Lehigh engineer or scientist could figure it out,
he or she may be able to control energy in a way 
that science fiction writers have only dreamed of.
All these concerns about climate, the atmosphere, 
and the human population will be a quaint remembrance
from early in the 21st century, back when you were 
graduating in 2013 before the discovery of the darkons.
The darkons... the particles of dark.
[ laughter ]
...energy, or matter...
Sorry, just a little theory I'm working on.
[ laughter ]
I'll get back to you on that.
Heck, in physics everything else has particles.
For crying out loud, why not dark?
Along with the evidence of common sense, 
researchers have proven that humans are all one people; one species.
There really is no such thing as race.
The color of our ancestors' skin, 
and ultimately my skin and your skin,
is a consequence of ultraviolet light, and of latitude and climate.
We are one species, each of us much more alike than different.
We all came from Africa.
We are all the same star stuff.
We are all going to live and die on the same planet.
A pale blue dot in the vastness of space.
So, I'd like to give you some advice, just plain old advice,
like walking between a wall of dartboards 
and a line of people with darts is a dangerous shortcut to take.
Always wear shoes when you're in a thumbtack factory.
And, don't be a backseat driver, 
especially if there is no one in the front seat driving.
Here it is, here's my advice.
If you're going to get a bucket of water
 thrown in your face, un-tuck your shirt.
Yeah, un-tuck your shirt.
You might not think it would make much difference.
A cotton shirt like this one is hydrophilic.
Water is going to stick to it.
There is capillary action, true enough.
But, a shirt tail, even a water-loving one, 
directs a great deal of the blast around your waistband,
so you get a lot less cold water in your trousers.
I know this to be true because 
I did it on the Science Guy show over and over.
It's a unique experience.
Everyone you ever meet has unique experience.
Everyone you ever meet knows something that you don't.
Even my old boss.
As clueless as I thought he was, 
he knew some things that I didn't.
Today auto mechanics debug software, 
cooks know how to use copper to control egg proteins,
bricklayers have intimate knowledge of the strength of materials.
So, my friends, respect their knowledge and learn from them.
It will bring out the best in them and it will bring out the best in you.
By the way, once in a while to do a good job
 you've got to take a couple buckets to the face.
Speaking of buckets of water, in your lifetime 
we have proven that Mars was once a very wet place.
It's possible that in the next few years the extraordinary will happen.
It is possible in the next few years that we may 
discover evidence of life, some sort of fossil martian microbe,
a "Marscrobe" perhaps, on Mars - that other world.
It would surely change this world.
It would change the way each of us thinks
 of his or her place in the cosmos; our place in space.
The Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity Mars rovers,
as President Gast pointed out,
are each fitted with a photometric calibration target,
 a test pattern for the cameras.
These also serve as wonderful little astronomical instruments.
Sundials, and so we call them the Mars dials.
Now, when you put a message in a bottle
 and toss that bottle in the ocean, or Lake Erie,
you might have some vague hope that it will be 
returned to you someday from someone in some exotic place
like Sydney, or Kingdol, or Jersey City.
[ laughter ]
But, perhaps you're hoping to
 remotely touch someone you'll never meet.
Along the aluminum edge of each of those three Mars dials
it says, "To those who visit here, 
we wish a safe journey and the joy of discovery."
The joy of knowing, that's what drives us; that's science.
It brings out the best in us.
It makes our species worthy of the future.
I often reflect on the words
 of my 3rd grade teacher, Mrs. Cochran.
She told us that there are more stars in the sky
 than grains of sand on the beach.
Now, my friends, there are by any measure
 a lot of grains of sand on a beach.
Mrs. Cochran, really?
There are more than you can count, of course.
Not only that, but there are perhaps more than you can imagine.
So, the summer after 3rd grade I stood on the beach 
in Delaware and I got to thinking about her assertion.
Does she mean all of the grains of sand that I can see?
Does she mean the ones I can't see;
the ones that must cover the beach a few meters deep
 and a few thousand nautical miles north and south?
Mrs. Cochran, that is a lot of grains of sand.
So, there are more stars than all of those grains?
In a moment I was paralyzed by self doubt.
I mean I was just a little kid standing on a beach,
and that beach is but one of many beaches on a planet that 
turns out to be, in the cosmic scheme of things, pretty small;
a speck really.
Furthermore, my home speck, the earth,
is just a speck orbiting a star that really, 
considering all the other sand grain numerous stars,
is just another speck in the galaxy of stars.
The galaxy in turn being another speck 
among billions and billions of galactic specks.
I am a speck on a speck orbiting a speck
 in the middle of deep-spacey specklessness.
I don't matter at all.
But then I think, "Wait, I have a brain!"
Albeit only this big.
My old boss of course...
[ laughter ]
...quite a bit smaller.
But, I can imagine all of this.
That is wonderful.
That is remarkable.
That is venerable.
That is worthy of respect.
So, class of 2013, here's wishing you the joy of discovery.
Keep reaching, keep seeking,
keep using your abilities to bring out the best
 in those around you, and let them bring out the best in you.
And as you do, you can and you will
—dare I say it?—
change the world!
Congratulations you all!
This has been an honor.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
[ applause and cheering ]
