Photo courtesy of Peacock
“Humor is everywhere, in that there’s irony in just about anything a human does.”- Bill Nye
The End Is Nye isn’t a How To guide to surviving natural disasters, it is a series of 6 well-crafted stories of real impending cataclysmic events that could destroy the world as we know it. Each episode stars Bill Nye and brings to life a colorful backstory involving ordinary people going about their daily lives when they find themselves at the mercy of a natural catastrophe (sometimes human-induced sometimes not) and then ventures into the hows and whys humanity may or may not survive. Once we are sufficiently terrified The Science Guy (that’d be Bill) then walks us through how to prevent or at least minimize the damage from the calamities coming from above and below. Bill also dies a lot in this series, sometimes more than once in an episode. Someone really needs to put a warning label on that Disasater Simulator.
We start off with the storm system that beats all the records, a 5-headed Hydra of cyclons that separately hit various coasts all over the world but collectively can destroy civilization yet there is hope. Kinda.
The Hydra is an example of a plausible situation that is made worse by human-induced climate change and politics, both of which we have a measure of control over. Working towards a carbon neutral (if not carbon negative) future will decrease the risk of such severe storms and you know what to do about the politics, and by that I mean go vote.
In E2 The Volcano Paradox we see we’re on borrowed time while waiting for the giant volcano underneath Yellowstone to blow, causing a massive if not total extinction event. Again. We also learn about Normalcy Bias and after that, a whole lot of our inaction towards preventing disasters makes a lot more sense.
Ep 3 Forever Blackout reminds us just how precious our electric grid is because without it, you guessed it, we’re toast, and no one is spared. We may not be able to stop the cosmos from trying to kill us, but at least here we can mitigate the damage in some very easy, creative ways.
Photo courtesy of Peacock
Ep 4 Midnight At Noon is another event we have control over since we are directly responsible for it, and we know better because this country has already lived through one. This particular storm has the potential to wipe out most of our farmland rendering it unusable for decades to come and destroying lives all over the planet. Not a good look for us but again, it is preventable.
Ep5 One Million Seconds is an asteroid space odyssey gone horribly wrong but with proper deflection techniques like DART and the Laser Bees project (thank you Planetary Society) we could survive. Or at least we’d have a better chance than ignoring it and going on vacation to Mexico. Moving along.
Finally, Ep6 Ring Of Fire is really all about mitigation. If the underwater volcanoes that line the Pacific Rim decide to just blow there’s nothing we can do to stop them. However, with improved technology in building structures, including the stabilization of the power, communication, and travel sectors, we have a better chance of surviving it than say, doing nothing. Again.
No matter what, the future is in our hands and it is up to us to make sure that we as individuals, as communities, and as global partners, are prepared for the worst and so far, we’re failing miserably at it. But as the series proves over and over again, these simulations are not fixed in stone, we can take control of our future but it will take working together on a planet-wide scale to make it happen. That will take voting in representatives who know human-induced climate change is real, that the science to combat it is readily available and needs to be put into practice now.
Lastly, I bet Bill is pretty exhausted from all that dying and resurrecting.
And lastly, lastly, all 6 episodes of The End Is Nye are now available to stream right here on Peacock.