OK... It's only a movie.. NOT EVEN CLOSE TO REALLITY!!!!!!

The glaring problem with Netflix’s ‘Don’t Look Up,’ according to a Bay Area astronomer

Michelle Robertson

Netflix’s new Adam McKay comedy, “Don’t Look Up,” is intended to be a parable for the ills of modern society. The film follows two astronomers who have discovered that a giant comet will hit Earth, destroying it upon impact, and follows the slapdash, cringe-worthy response of the public, the media and the government. 

Might the comet be a stand-in for climate change? The COVID-19 pandemic? Capitalism? It can be read any which way. The fact remains that the odds of a massive “planet killer” hitting Earth are “infinitesimally small,” said Gerald McKeegan, an astronomer at the Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland. 

But that’s not even the biggest problem with the science in the film, McKeegan said. 

“The most glaring mistake is the government cover-up,” the astronomer noted. “It becomes this government secret. That is just completely bogus.”

McKeegan pointed out that when a comet or asteroid is discovered, the data is “very much shared.” It’s even accessible to the public at a later stage in the process. 

“The government couldn’t keep it a secret even if it wanted to,” McKeegan said. “They may keep secret what response they’re contemplating, but the fact that a comet’s heading to Earth would very quickly become public knowledge.” 

When an observatory discovers a new comet, countless other observatories and scientific organizations jump in to confirm the discovery and conduct their own calculations. 

“There are over 300 observatories across the globe that track these. I routinely communicate with other observatories,” said McKeegan, who heads Chabot’s asteroid search and tracking program. “If someone spots a near-Earth asteroid, other observatories are attempting to confirm and track it within hours. There is a very large effort to find these things.”

McKeegan, who said he wasn’t a big fan of the movie in general, did pick up on the film’s often on-the-nose social and political commentary. He said he interpreted it “more as a parable of the early government response to the pandemic.” 

“It’s accurate in the sense that it sort of highlights the idea that scientists don’t always get believed and taken seriously,” he said. 

But the realism stops there.

McKeegan said the film’s depiction of a massive, multi-agency effort to deflect the comet with nuclear warheads would simply not come together in a matter of weeks. Such an effort would take months, if not years. 

Comet deflection is, however, a real subject of study in astronomy. While blowing up a comet with nuclear warheads or explosives is “not a good idea” (the comet would likely splinter into smaller, destructive chunks), there are a few systems in place in the event a dangerous comet ever gets too close to Earth.

McKeegan specifically cited an effort called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, which is intended to test the technique of deflecting an asteroid. The DART mission is slated to cozy up to a near-Earth asteroid in September of next year and will deliberately impact it in an attempt to deflect the asteroid out of its orbit around a larger asteroid. 

“If you do that with enough lead time — we’re talking years — it takes a very small deflection of the asteroid’s orbit to cause it to miss the Earth,” McKeegan said. “That is tech that is available to us, and they are in the process of testing it right now.” 

Other methods for deflection include a gravity tracker in which you place a spacecraft in front of an asteroid or comet and the mutual gravitation between the two objects slowly pulls the comet or asteroid into a different orbit. 

“This science is well-established,” McKeegan said. “No one has actually done it, but it is a very conceivable method of deflecting an asteroid.” 

Scientists could also ostensibly put a rocket thruster on an asteroid to “push it out of the way.” 

But again, none of these techniques have actually been applied as there hasn’t been a need. If your takeaway from “Don’t Look Up” was a profound fear of an Earth-destroying comet, you can rest easy. The odds of a giant comet or asteroid obliterating Earth are incredibly small. It’s much more likely that the celestial object would burn up in the atmosphere before impact. 

In fact, Earth is actually more likely to be hit by an asteroid than a comet, McKeegan said. (The difference between the two objects is small: “A comet is mostly ice with a lot of rock and sand and dirt embedded in the ice. An asteroid is mostly rock, sand and dirt with a little bit of ice embedded in it.”)

The comet in “Don’t Look Up” is intended to come off as very, very big. But in reality, a comet between 6 and 9 kilometers is not “extraordinarily large,” McKeegan said.

“It is on the large size, typically comets are 3 to 6 kilometers in size,” he said. “But it’s not extraordinarily large.”

At one point in the film, the scientists describe the Dibiasky Comet, named for the scientist who discovered it (played by Jennifer Lawrence), as bigger than the asteroid that supposedly killed the dinosaurs, called the Chicxulub impactor. In actuality, the Chicxulub comet was at least 10 kilometers in size, therefore larger than the Dibiasky Comet. Oops. 

As for the prospect that a company such as Bash Cellular — a Tesla stand-in perhaps? — could mine such a comet, well, that’s not too far off from the actual science.

“It is true that asteroids and comets are often reservoirs of potentially valuable minerals and ores and so forth,” McKeegan said. “But no one has ever attempted to actually mine one, though there are some companies in their very early stages of development with that possibility.” 

Regardless, doing so would require a “huge investment.” “We’re talking billions of dollars,” McKeegan said. 

The overall takeaway from our conversation was that the movie should not be taken at face value. We can sleep soundly knowing a giant comet will likely not destroy the planet during our lifetimes — or our children’s or their children’s children. Watch it for the social commentary, in other words, and not the scientific accuracy.