"Science Guy" Bill Nye had some blunt advice for people looking to explore Mars in an interview with Late Night host Seth Meyers Tuesday night.
"If you want to live on Mars, start on Antarctica. go there for a couple of years -- no candy-ass thing where you're near the shore, OK?" Nye said, drawing a surprised laugh from Meyers' audience. "Where the penguins are flying up and the fish are jumping, the orca are eating the penguins. No, you go to the dry valleys, where it hasn't snowed or rained in centuries and see what you think. Twenty below at noon."
Nye added that even that would be "cheating," since anybody living in Antarctica would be able to breathe. He also tell Meyers that the discovery of any kind of life on Mars would be a game-changer.
"I like that somehow, before you came out, you thought we were all, 'We should go to live on Mars,'" Meyers quipped.
Meyers also pushed back slightly against Nye's public debate with creationist Ken Ham earlier this year, pointing out that Nye had been criticized in some circles for seemingly lending credence to Ham's views by taking him on.
Nye responded by respectfully disagreeing with his colleagues, arguing that he did so specifically to combat "science illiteracy," because science education is what produces innovators.
"We would not be able to feed this many people around the world without understanding science," Nye told Meyers. "So this is deeply important to me, and I hope that in the coming years awareness will be raised, and voters and taxpayers will not let these people with these wrong views about nature try to get on school boards."
Watch Meyers' interview with Nye, as aired Tuesday night, below.
[h/t Mother Jones]
