Dont Look Up, Netflixs star-studded comedy is now available to view, sharing Adam McKays idea of a catastrophe movie based on astronomy for the year 2021 with the rest of the world.
Despite conflicting reviews, the films dark humor and portrayal of a civilization resistive to the truth of a planet-killer comet hurtling towards them, as well as its outstanding cast of Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Timothe Chalamet, and others, has struck a chord with fans.
From arithmetic equations to near-Earth object tracking to cryogenics, the film throws a lot of science and technology at its audience. But how accurate, or even practical, is any of this? How does Dont Look Up stack against some of Hollywoods earlier space-themed efforts?
Lets get right into the movies main plot, in which a comet is discovered six months before it is due to strike Earth. What are the chances of that happening?
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I dont think so. Comets dont get into the inner solar system very regularly, adds Zac Ross, a postgraduate researcher researching exoplanet astronomy and astrophysics at the Open University.
And you usually see them when they do because they have big, long tails that make them quite apparent as they got closer, so you get a bit more warning about them. Theyre also much, much further out in the solar system than asteroids, for example.
According to Ross, near-Earth objects (comets, asteroids, and anything else that isnt a planet or natural satellite) are also being tracked by NASA and the European Space Agency.
Theyre following thousands of people, and those are only the ones they can see. They arent usually so near to Earth. The majority of them are somewhere between Jupiter and Mars [where the asteroid belt is located], so theyre quite a distance away.
Lets speak about the movies dramatic frenetic calculations, scratched on a whiteboard it turns out the intricacy has been missed, as have the concerns with the room for error Mindy (DiCaprio) and Dibiasky (Lawrence) offer on the size of the comet. Ross explains that:
The math on the board is, you could accomplish that, but it would be complicated, and you wouldnt be able to predict with any certainty whether or not it would reach Earth.
You might claim itll cross Earths orbit when it gets close, but the extent of the miscalculation was between five and ten kilometers. When its six months distant, thats a two-and-a-half-kilometer mistake, indicating that its probably out past Jupiter.
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They think, extrapolating that to say itll certainly strike Earth seems quite doubtful, based on the fact that if theyve got that huge of an error on the size of it, they wont be able to calculate the route correctly enough to predict itll hit Earth.
To properly identify its location and monitor its orbit accurately enough to indicate where its heading, which they do, youd need a lot of data, perhaps from numerous observatories but I dont believe you could do that on a whiteboard, 10 minutes after youve taken the observations!
Extragalactic astronomy is significantly different from solar system astronomy, Ross further says.
Nowadays, human observation is unlikely to lead to discoveries too much labor is necessary thus, software and, perhaps, citizen research are more likely to detect anything unique.
You have to take hundreds of photographs to try and see the specks of light moving about, Ross explains, to spot whats possibly moving and on a crash path with the Earth.
Essentially, you take a click of the sky at one location, then another image of the sky at a later time, and then subtract the two pictures from one other to remove all the background, leaving only anything that is moving relative to the backdrop.
If youre doing that, if youre taking 100 images every night, you dont have the personnel to go through them all.
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Youll either have some program that sorts through all of them and picks out anything apparent, or youll have citizen science [through a site like Zooniverse], where youll have all of these photographs and ask the public to comb through them and find anything that they think is of interest.
The main point is that the film should not be accepted at face value. We may rest easy knowing that a massive comet is unlikely to destroy the globe in our lifetimes. In other words, watch it for social commentary rather than scientific correctness.
Continued here:
How Accurate Is the Science in Netflix's Don't Lookup? - The Lee Daily Register
Recommendation and review posted by G. Smith
