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On this week's episode of Tuesdays With Bill, Rachel from Columbia University asks two questions for the price of one: What would happen if a human being went the speed of light, and why don't we just eject our trash into outer space?

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BILL NYE:

Bill Nye, scientist, engineer, comedian, author, and inventor, is a man with a mission: to help foster a scientifically literate society, to help people everywhere understand and appreciate the science that makes our world work. Making science entertaining and accessible is something Bill has been doing most of his life.

In Seattle Nye began to combine his love of science with his flair for comedy, when he won the Steve Martin look-alike contest and developed dual careers as an engineer by day and a stand-up comic by night. Nye then quit his day engineering day job and made the transition to a night job as a comedy writer and performer on Seattle’s home-grown ensemble comedy show “Almost Live.” This is where “Bill Nye the Science Guy®” was born. The show appeared before Saturday Night Live and later on Comedy Central, originating at KING-TV, Seattle’s NBC affiliate.

While working on the Science Guy show, Nye won seven national Emmy Awards for writing, performing, and producing. The show won 18 Emmys in five years. In between creating the shows, he wrote five children’s books about science, including his latest title, “Bill Nye’s Great Big Book of Tiny Germs.”

Nye is the host of three currently-running television series. “The 100 Greatest Discoveries” airs on the Science Channel. “The Eyes of Nye” airs on PBS stations across the country.

Bill’s latest project is hosting a show on Planet Green called “Stuff Happens.” It’s about environmentally responsible choices that consumers can make as they go about their day and their shopping. Also, you’ll see Nye in his good-natured rivalry with his neighbor Ed Begley. They compete to see who can save the most energy and produce the smallest carbon footprint. Nye has 4,000 watts of solar power and a solar-boosted hot water system. There’s also the low water use garden and underground watering system. It’s fun for him; he’s an engineer with an energy conservation hobby.

Nye is currently the Executive Director of The Planetary Society, the world’s largest space interest organization.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Rachel: Hi, I’m Rachel and I'm a student at Columbia. What would we see if theoretically a human were able to travel at the speed of light. My teacher told me, somewhat confusingly, that we might see the past and the present or maybe the past and the future, I can’t remember, simultaneously. But whatever his response was it didn’t make a lot of sense to me so I was wondering if you could give me a better clarification.

Bill Nye: Rachel this is a great question. So about what happens when you go the speed of light. I mean this is a great — we love to ask this question in physics class. It’s big fun here on Big Think. But if you have mass, which we all do — we are not pure energy, we are not beams of light, we are not electrical fields. We’re not gravitational fields. We have mass. It has been shown beyond any doubt that you cannot go the speed of light. You can go arbitrarily fast, approaching the speed of light, but you can’t quite go the speed of light. All the energy you pump in just adds to your mass. And this seems incredible. It adds to your mass relative to something you’re going to run into in a particle accelerator or an atom smasher like at CERN in Switzerland. We call it a target that you run into. That said, you can’t help but wonder what would happen if you go the speed of light. You’ve got to figure the only light you’d see is the light that you’d run into either light that you happen to cross paths with or light that was beamed straight at you. You wouldn’t see anything else. About the change in time. There’s been a lot of talk about that. Can time have a speed effectively? Can you go backwards in time? Apparently not. People love to speculate about oh, they can’t get enough about this. What happens if you fall into a wormhole and then you like end up in another part of the universe like in another...

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