Skip to content
Who's in the Video
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[…]

In this week’s edition of #TuesdaysWithBill, Young Aaron asks the Science Guy about the uncountable lengths of space. Why is it like that? Why is it so big?


Bill responds with a challenge. No one really knows the answer now, so maybe Aaron can become an astrophysicist some day and find out.

Aaron Hernandez: Hi Bill Nye the Science Guy. I’m Aaron the Science Guy and I want to know why does space go on forever?

Bill Nye: Aaron the Science Guy. Good to see you. Why does space go on forever? That’s a great question. It’s a deep question and no one really knows the actual answer to that. Maybe you’ll be the one that figures it out. The nearest we can tell, the farther we look into space, the farther it seems to go. With that said we can see that all the stars are moving apart and so people have figured out that they must have all been in one place about 13.6 billion years ago. And so people can observe light that we believe is 13.5 billion years old. But nobody knows what’s beyond that or if it’s even a meaningful question to ask what’s beyond that. Like what would the world be like if there were no world? It would be different. And so these are deep, deep questions and the people who think about these questions are called astrophysicists. They study the motion of stars. "Physics" is the study of motion and "astro" has to do with stars. So perhaps you will be an astrophysicist who figures this out. Cool question.


Related