What a Times Journalist Learned From His ‘Don’t Look Up’ Moment

In 2005, Congress ordered NASA to find and begin tracking at least 90 percent of all asteroids larger than 500 feet wide or so that come near Earth. (They neglected to provide much money to pay for the search until years later.) The word was out that we live in a cosmic shooting gallery.

NASA now spends some $150 million a year on the endeavor. “We’ve come a long way since 1997 XF11,” said Donald Yeomans, a comet expert at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena who criticized Dr. Marsden back in 1998.

These days, computers do the work of sorting asteroids and comets, automatically calculating orbits from new observations, comparing them with known objects, scoring them for how dangerous they are and sending out the results to astronomers. Anything that comes within five million miles of Earth is considered a Potentially Hazardous Object, or PHO.

“We didn’t have all that back then,” Dr. Mainzer said. “We’ve learned a lot as a community.”

“Don’t Look Up,” directed and co-written by Adam McKay, arrives on Friday — incidentally, less than three weeks after NASA launched a mission to see whether asteroids could be diverted from their trajectories. But the film is less about asteroids than about the tendency of humans to dismiss bad news from science and to embrace misinformation. It was conceived as an allegory about the failure to act on climate change. “A lot of people don’t want to hear it,” Dr. Mainzer said. “As a scientist, this is terrifying.”

However, the film was shot, very carefully, during the pandemic, and the parallels to the ongoing health crisis are hard to miss.

“Scientists don’t possess the power to effect change,” Dr. Mainzer said. “How do we get people to act on scientific information?” Should they “work within the system,” she asked, even if it means they have to cope with purveyors of misinformation?

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/09/science/dont-look-up-movie.html