Do watch ‘Don’t Look Up’

Last week I went to a movie theater for the first time in two years. I am so relieved that the pandemic spared the New Haven Bow Tie Cinemas, a precious downtown cultural resource. So what overcame my lockdown inertia? The new movie “Don’t Look Up.”

This captured my attention, not only as a sci-fi blockbuster about a comet due to crash into Earth, but mainly because I myself have worked with the actual people who are trying to prevent just such a catastrophe from occurring in real-life. I was privileged to serve on the team that produced the 2020 planetary defense goals document of NASA’s Small Bodies Assessment Group.

So how does this new movie stack up? There is no doubt it was striving for verisimilitude. Just as in the movie, there actually is a planetary defense officer at NASA. And just like Dr. Oglethorpe in the movie, Lindley Johnson is a person of integrity and competence (and wry humor), who more than anyone else on Earth is responsible for our protection from this existential menace and can point to a solid record of achievement under his leadership, such as last month’s launch of the DART mission.

But the movie takes a satirical and even conspiratorial view of the topic. In this it resembles the way “Dr. Strangelove” dealt with the threat of nuclear catastrophe and “Wag the Dog” dealt with White House scandal. Unfortunately the quality of “Don’t Look Up” is closer to the latter than the former: competent but far from brilliant. Don’t expect anything like the direction of Stanley Kubrick, the screenwriting of Terry Southern, or the acting of Sterling Hayden, George C. Scott, Peter Sellers, and Slim Pickens.

But even more unfortunate is what the movie gets right. Inadequate urgency is still being paid to implement a fully effective defense against comets and asteroids. The movie is spot-on in having the window of opportunity be under a year to stop a newly discovered comet on Earth trajectory, but even this movie errs in holding open the possibility that this could be accomplished with our current state of readiness.

The problem is not a conspiracy of greed and idiocracy, as in the movie (and as with climate change or the pandemic), and furthermore we have the technology, money and brains to do what needs to be done. Rather what holds us back, in my opinion, are institutional cultures. In the U.S. two agencies are the natural homes of planetary defense: NASA and the Department of Defense. But NASA’s primary missions have always been science and exploration, while the DoD has always focused on national defense against foreign adversaries.

Thus the United States has radar and other devices scanning the horizon continuously for incoming missiles, and with backups in case of failures, and is prepared to respond massively to any detection at once. But we have only incomplete surveillance of possible impactors and mostly without backups, and should an incoming impactor be discovered with relatively short warning, we have at present zero response capability regarding even a city buster, not to mention a civilization ender.

One can only hope, therefore, that “Don’t Look Up” is not as prescient as 2011’s “Contagion” was. A movie like last year’s “Greenland” offers a more graphic view of how the world would respond to an incoming comet in today’s circumstances, but see last year’s “Asteroid Hunters” to learn about the genuine progress the real planetary defenders are making.