One of the so far theoretical tasks of the astronomer is to inform the public that something very big and terrible is about to happen: the sun will explode soon, a black hole has just crossed the path of the earth, hostile aliens have amassed an armada. behind the moon.
In the new Netflix movie “Don’t Look Up,” a pair of astronomers, played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, assume this responsibility when they discover a “planet-killing” comet is headed straight for Earth and must spread the word.
It’s not going well. The president of the United States, played by Meryl Streep, is more concerned about her polls. Hosts of talk shows on television ridicule the scientists. Wealthy oligarchs want to exploit the comet’s minerals. “Don’t Look Up” is arguably the most cinematic fun anyone has had with the end of the world since Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 classic black comedy, “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and From the to keep a bomb.”
Watching it came back to my own experience reporting Really Bad News. In March 1998, I was The Times’ new deputy science editor, and my doomsday scenario was small but elite: the top editors of The Times. I had only been working for a month. Nobody really knew me. My immediate boss, the science editor, had taken a week off, leaving me in charge.
And so, late afternoon on March 11, I walked into the 4:30 p.m. news conference where editors pitched stories for the next day’s front page and announced that we had a belated story from leading reporter Malcolm Browne. “It’s a nice story,” I said. “It’s about the end of the world.”
The source was Brian Marsden, director of the Central Bureau of Astronomical Telegrams, the International Astronomical Union’s exchange center for cosmic discoveries, as well as the Minor Planet Center, which is responsible for tracking comets and asteroids. He’d just calculated that a recently discovered asteroid, a mile-wide rock called 1997 XF11 (now asteroid 35396), would pass within 30,000 miles of Earth on October 26, 2028 — and had a slim but real chance of hitting our planet.
“In more than 40 years of computer jobs, I had never seen anything like it,” said Dr. Marsden later. He felt he had an obligation to share this with the world in an IAU circular.
The front page meeting dissolved into a purposeful pandemonium. I spent the rest of the night answering questions from editorial staff who wanted to know if they should keep paying their mortgages, and answering questions and suggestions from the top editors. Astronomers sent pictures of the asteroid, a blurry dot in the darkness. I had an adrenaline-fuelled crash course in control that gets a front page story in the newsroom before it can be published.
I didn’t want to go home that night, but I finally did, in a nervous fritter. The next morning it was already over. Photos of the asteroid from several years earlier had surfaced overnight, and Dr. Marsden had recalculated its orbit and found that the 1997 XF11 would miss Earth by 600,000 miles. That was still close by cosmic standards, but safe from civilization.
In the following days, Dr. Marsden was publicly denounced by his colleagues and the media as a “Chicken Little” who made “cockamamie calculations” without consulting other astronomers who already knew the asteroid posed no risk. NASA told the astronomers to get their act together before dazzling the agency and the public with news of an apocalypse.
dr. Marsden apologized for causing such fear, but noted that he had helped raise awareness of the danger of asteroid strikes and extinctions.
“Although the incident was bad for my reputation, we needed such a scare to bring this issue to the attention,” he later wrote in The Boston Globe. “I also believe that failing to make the announcement, as we did, would have resulted in condemnation and stripping science of its essential openness,” he said.
I felt sorry for Dr. Marsden, a wry, cherubic presence I’d known for twenty years when reporting on astronomy. (He died in 2010.) And I felt bad for myself. How often do you get the chance to cover the possible end of the world after just a month at work? The next day, when The New York Post ran the headline “Kiss Your Asteroid Goodbye!” I took it personally.
But the incident was indeed a turning point of sorts, according to Amy Mainzer, an asteroid expert at the University of Arizona who served as a scientific advisor for “Don’t Look Up.”
In 2005, Congress instructed NASA to find and track at least 90 percent of all asteroids larger than 150 meters wide that come close to Earth. (They failed to provide much money to pay for the search until years later.) It became known that we live in a cosmic shooting gallery.
NASA now spends about $150 million a year on the pursuit. “We’ve come a long way since 1997’s XF11,” said Donald Yeomans, a comet expert at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, who criticized Dr. Marsden.
Today, computers do the job of sorting asteroids and comets, automatically calculate orbits from new observations, compare them to known objects, rate them for how dangerous they are, and send the results to astronomers. Anything that comes within a radius of five million miles from Earth is considered a potentially dangerous object, or PHO.
“We didn’t have that then,” said Dr. Mainzer. “We have learned a lot as a community.”
Directed and co-written by Adam McKay, “Don’t Look Up” arrives Friday — less than three weeks after NASA launched a mission to see if asteroids could be diverted from their orbits. But the film is less about asteroids than about people’s tendency to ignore bad news from science and embrace misinformation. It was conceived as an allegory about inaction on climate change. “A lot of people don’t want to hear it,” said Dr. Mainzer. “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 have the power to bring about change,” said Dr. Mainzer. “How do we make people act based on scientific information?” Do they have to “work within the system,” she asked, even if that means dealing with suppliers of misinformation?
Humor helps, added Dr. Mainzer adds: “We say it doesn’t have to be that way. We don’t have to go down this road.”