Vocal Voices

Anyone seen it? When I watched it I felt it was serious comment on our society today and how we deal with natural disasters. Right down to the rich industrialist who thinks just over 50% survival rate of "Plan B" where a few hundred "special" people get to survive a global catastrophe.

The Guardian allowed an op ed piece from climate scientist Peter Kalmus entitled

I’m a climate scientist. Don’t Look Up captures the madness I see every day

The film, from director Adam McKay and writer David Sirota, tells the story of astronomy grad student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and her PhD adviser, Dr Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), who discover a comet – a “planet killer” – that will impact the Earth in just over six months. The certainty of impact is 99.7%, as certain as just about anything in science.

The scientists are essentially alone with this knowledge, ignored and gaslighted by society. The panic and desperation they feel mirror the panic and desperation that many climate scientists feel. In one scene, Mindy hyperventilates in a bathroom; in another, Dibiasky, on national TV, screams “Are we not being clear? We’re all 100% for sure gonna fucking die!” I can relate. This is what it feels like to be a climate scientist today.

But what the author does not go on to complete is the response to that in the film.

I think everyone should watch that film, watch that moment, then reflect on what it really means in terms of climate change, what we are doing about it and how it is portrayed in social media and some press outlets.

I watched the film with interest all the way through for nothing more than trying to work out how the director saw our society and how we approach disaster.

I agree with the director. Get a big book about humanity. Put a cover on it with a very prominent Dodo. Give it to everyone and get them to look at the cover for a day or two before opening it.

This might be worth watching too. If you have an interest. It is a highly interesting scientists view of what Don't look up portrays. In fact he says the film is pretty much spot on. In science, social interactions and also the wealth of the solar system and how we can use it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntaidEKs_Ks

One of the biggest points in the film for me was when the "talking heads" were still discussing if there actually was a comet when you could see it in the sky.

That, for me, describes our society today to a T. 100% Dodo material.

This has been a 'thing' with me since the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. They were what got me hooked on astronomy and cosmology.

I mentioned the Didymos and Dimorphos (DART) mission a few weeks back, which is one attempt at solving the problem using a 'nudge' to alter the trajectory. The nuclear options look to have been relegated to the back burner.

An interesting one is from the Japanese(?) and that is to use a laser or lasers to vaporise the surface and create small jets to push the object ever so slightly. These comets / asteroids are only very loosely gravitationally bound and then mostly to the Sun so are effectively weightless despite their size. A small fraction of a degree of deflection when they are something like as far away as Neptune (4.5 bn km) translates into a big miss as they approach Earth.

The big problem is early detection from the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud. Estimates of a Dinosaur style extinction event would need an object about 100 km in diameter. As things stand we would need an array of satellites with ultra-high-very-super-fantastic digital definition to spot them early enough.

Yep that's the problem.

But even if we do discover them, will the authorities actually step up and do what needs to be done and will the people take notice?

And will we have time?

Another idea said to be useful for late discoveries of the sort of size to create local - city / country sized extinction events - is to send mining spacecraft to land on an asteroid and plant chemical 'thrusters' on the surface and manoeuvre it as we do with the likes of the space station.

A lot of these ideas sound very Sci-Fi but they are technically possible even with today's technologies.

Certainly and we would have time to deliver them too.

Only one problem, you need them available before detection and nobody is really interested in funding them.

We do have time, but it's time for bed.

More later...