Don’t Look Up is a cautionary tale of what could happen if Trump-supporters were a majority in the U.S. It is an update, to some extent of the 2006 film Idiocracy, whose underlying message is that Nobel-winning transistor developer William Shockley was correct, i.e., that America’s destiny is a nation of low-skill people because means-tested welfare programs enable higher fertility for no-income and low-income Americans compared to middle-income Americans (Idiocracy did not cover low-skill immigration, but presumably it can be viewed as an argument against it). Fertility versus household income:
Don’t Look Up doesn’t address how Americans became stupid enough to vote for a Trump-like president, but reminds us of the terrible costs of denying Science (capitalized like “God”) and not trusting Scientists. The entire movie is a not-very-subtle mocking of the Trumpkins for their stupidity in not believing “the Science”.
Here’s a sample tweet from the writer/director, whose brief Twitter profile includes the phrase “Climate Emergency is NOW“.
Related Facebook posts from my friends who vote for Democrats:
- It’s the most useful movie, because now you can explain how tech works, and journalism and politics, etc.
- The movie is sexy and true. Yes, we had everything, and we blew it — in the movie and in real life. It’s a critique of our response to climate change, and Covid, and even has a dig at Trump (the president’s chief of staff played by Jonah Hill is her son)
- … it’s [arguably] both the greatest and the most important movie ever made.
If this were a Michael Bay movie, it would make sense to ignore anything incompatible with Physics 101 under the rubric of “artistic license”. But Don’t Look Up is a political statement, not a work of art, and it is specifically about what could happen if don’t deport and/or suppress those who refuse to follow the science.
The Science delivered by this climate change expert-turned-screenwriter starts with a female-identifying astronomer finding a new comet from the Oort cloud. The movie is somewhat, um, retrograde in that she does not explicitly identify as “of color” or 2SLGBTQQIA+. She reports her observation to a male-identifying astronomy professor, played by climate change activist Leo DeCaprio. Within a day, he has calculated that the comet will strike the Earth in 6 months. The rest of the movie explores what would happen if the morons who deny the settled climate change models (and/or assume that some improved tech for dealing with climate change will be developed within the next 100 years, e.g., a solar-powered carbon vacuum) were also to deny orbital mechanics.
How does this compare to lowercase pre-2019 “science”? A 2014 article from the European Space Agency:
In movies about the impending end of the world due to a comet impact, one thing is certain: Detecting the comet and computing its orbit are dead easy. … Computer programs are started, and people frantically hack away at keyboards. In no time at all, they will have identified the fuzzy blob as a comet that is hurtling in from the frozen recesses of space. What’s more, in no time at all, they will have determined the comet’s trajectory and they can categorically state that it will hit Earth. A few more frantic calculations and they also know the date and time of impact – Quick, call Bruce Willis!
In actual fact, one single picture of a comet is just that: a single picture of a comet. … From one picture, you can’t tell where it’s heading; you don’t know how close it will get to the Sun, nor if or when a close encounter with any other planet is due. To find out these things, you need more observations – many more of images that were taken at different dates, ideally spanning a long time frame. … So you have to make an educated guess at the parameters that describe the comet’s trajectory, also known – unsurprisingly – as its ‘orbital parameters’. This initial guess (as even the mathematicians rather candidly refer to it) in all likelihood will be quite far off.
This procedure is known as ‘orbit determination’. It is very time-consuming and involves a lot of complicated and repetitive mathematical calculations, which is why nowadays we let a computer handle most of it. The entire process is known as ‘parametric optimisation’ and each step is referred to as an ‘iteration’. As the optimisation process goes on and many iterations have been performed, you will see that for the epochs at which the images were taken, the computed locations, based on the current estimate of the orbital parameters, will move quite close to what you can see in the actual images.
The article includes a chart showing that it took 450 days to determine the orbit for a 2013 comet:
Regarding the above chart:
In the diagram above, it took almost 200 days to find out that comet Siding Spring would not hit Mars. At that time, the uncertainty in the predicted encounter distance still ran into hundreds of thousands of kilometres. Though the most probable encounter distance was established fairly early, the uncertainty was still significant after more than a year of observation. It took 44 days of observation to achieve even a semblance of an orbit determination – one that was still all over the place, with a predicted mean Mars distance at flyby 900,000 km, with a high guess of 3.6 million!
It took seven years of additional observations to identify an object found with one of the world’s best telescopes as a (huge) comet (National Geographic).
One open question: even if you had the required 500 days of observations to make a reasonably accurate calculation of a comet’s orbit, could you ever know with certainty, six months in advance, that the comet would actually hit the Earth rather than whip around it? (See “Chaos and stability of the solar system” for example and, for laypeople, “Our Solar System’s Planetary Orbits Are Ultimately Chaotic, Says French Astronomer” (Forbes)) Paging Dr. Goldbum!
(I emailed a friend who has spent a few decades working with orbital mechanics. To the European Space Agency’s “take it slow” point of view, he added the following:
One problem is that comets, unlike asteroids, have significant non-gravitational forces acting on them: They outgas directionally, producing random small thrusts. Thus their orbits are not as precisely determinable as planets or even asteroids.
)
Another aspect of Science presented by the Trump-hating writer/director is that people sitting on Earth are able to figure out that the rock part of the comet is packed with $trillions in valuable minerals. They do this with a “spectrometer“, but that instrument would work only on the tail of a comet, not on the rocky core. Although Science could predict that Peru, Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Slovakia would escape COVID-19 deaths due to mask orders and lockdowns and Science plainly has no difficulty predicting Earth’s temperature 100 years from now, I am not aware of Science being able to determine, via remote sensing, the composition of a rock in space. NASA has (easily-found-with-Google) some concepts for doing this, but they involve physical contact with the comet or other space rock. There is no instrument that you can set up in your house to determine the composition of a rock in the neighbor’s yard, right? Why would you imagine that you can set up an instrument in the Atacama Desert and determine the composition of a rock in space?
[Update: see comments for a potential correction to the above from an astronomer.]
In other words, the screenwriter who purports to educate Americans on how stupid Republicans are was apparently unable to use Google to find these written-for-laypeople articles on orbital mechanics and comets. Nor was he/she/ze/they able to read a NASA org chart. All of the scientists at NASA work at the “Kennedy Space Center” (not at Goddard or JPL). They refer to each other as “Dr. X” and “Dr. Y” rather than by first name or first and last names.
One of the elite accusations about the Trumpkins is that only the elites understand that we share our beautiful planet with a veritable rainbow of other nations (though don’t wave that rainbow flag anywhere that it might interfere with elite profits!). Yet the movie makes sense only if we accept that the U.S. is the only country that can act to deflect an incoming comet. If Americans did not exist, the remaining 96 percent of the world’s population would take no action in response to scientifically proven impending species-ending doom. The people who invented rockets and who recently landed a robot on Mars wouldn’t do anything. The people who kicked off the Space Race and who currently operate their own satellite navigation system wouldn’t do anything. The Europeans wouldn’t dispatch any Ariane rockets (this last one is more believable since the EU seems to be 100% occupied with coronapanic!).
(Pravda reports that Russia actually has been working on asteroid deflection since at least 2009. China is a comparative newcomer to this specific area (LiveScience 2021). The Europeans have been working in this area since at least 2005 (ScienceDaily).)
Although the movie cannot be recommended as a tutorial on #Science, it does have some fun parts. Ariana Grande appears (and sings) in the role of pop singer whose romantic life is more interesting to a stupefied and stupid population than an impending extinction event. One of the greatest characters, played by English actor Mark Rylance, is kind of a cross between Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg. The unwashed Science-deniers are also fun, e.g., with a range of beliefs from “the comet doesn’t exist” to “the orbital mechanics calculations handed down by Science are wrong.” They gather in huge rallies in support of their Trump-style president. Some of the comedy is provided by the screenwriter trying to figure out how non-elite Americans speak. For example, he/she/ze/they has a young skateboarder say, “Dr. Mindy, Can I be vulnerable in your car?” (Our apartment in Jupiter, Florida is right near a skateboard park and “vulnerable” is not one of the words we hear from the denizens.)
Don’t Look Up is definitely worth watching if you’re already a Netflix subscriber, mostly to see just how wrong someone can get all of the science while making a movie about the dangers of letting people who don’t understand and respect science vote.
Related:
- Who watched the Dave Chappelle special on Netflix?
- Project Hail Mary, by the author behind The Martian. This book tackles much tougher scientific challenges than orbital mechanics calculations and the non-scientist author doesn’t make too many mistakes, according to a NASA post-doc. The man whom Elon Musk called a “knucklehead” enjoyed it too (GatesNotes).
- Alternate theory about why Republicans are so stupid: they’re distracted by lust for the Democrats’ thought-leader, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Daily Mail)
Hollywood has never cared to sweat details like this, even when it wouldn’t be hard to get them right and even when it wouldn’t hurt the story!
But I’ll leave the last words to Carl Sagan:
“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”
Carl Sagan was a Socialist and (if I’m not incorrect) an atheist, and given the tremendous opportunity that COVID has presented to the United States and governments of the world, he would be helping Dr. Fauci if he was alive today.
Also, despite all of the evidence that Carl Sagan might have used to argue in favor of anthropogenic climate change, which all existed at the time he lived, his biggest concern was not Global Warming, it was Nuclear Winter. He disparaged Ronald Reagan as basically a babbling idiot in speeches that I’ve listened to, thought that the Strategic Defense Initiative was a waste of money, and occupied a lot of his time by shitting on the United States just before the Soviet Union imploded. I don’t think he really wanted to see it go. So despite all his wonderful books and his hosting of “COSMOS” – which I watched as a child on public television – I still place old Carl in the category of “True Believer” to this day. You can feel free to disagree.
He lived most of his life because of the United States government and taught at a very prestigious university, but he was a leftist dude, all the way through – in addition to being a “carbon chauvinist!” (look it up!)
Sagan also was in favor to let hypothetical extraterrestrials know that we exist and where we are, which is a naive and stupid idea:
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-record/
Back in finer times, when tech guys did not mince words https://www.neatorama.com/2012/03/12/butt-head-astronomer/
Look we have a modern Carl Sagan in the making (from the comments on the site linked by anonymous https://www.neatorama.com/2009/11/09/10-neat-facts-about-carl-sagan/). Well, each century has the scientists it deserves.
“garbo • 09Nov09 10:35am
You should check out Neil DeGrasse Tyson from the NY Planetarium. He has a similar child-like wonder and enthusiasm and ability to translate complex concepts. And he has a great story about meeting Carl: http://www.videosift.com/video/Neil-DeGrasse-Tyson-On-The-Day-He-Met-Carl-Sagan“
Expecting understanding of actual science from acolytes of the cult of Government Almighty is too much, methinks. For them Science is what government high priests in white robes (aka lab coats) say it is. No need to actually learn anything. No need to think. And, of course, evebody who expresses a bit of doubt is a dangerous heretic who needs to be burned at stake.
And the worst part: they do not even realize that they’ve become the exact replica of their caricature of Evil Anti-science Church.
I liked this post from Astral Codex Ten about “Don’t Look Up” quite a bit: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up Hilarious and insightful.
The whole Tech CEO plot could be from the “Silicon Valley” comedy show and (probably unintentionally but accurately) describes the behavior of pseudo-leftist valley CEOs. Including the over-promising and incompetence.
Ironically, in the movie Armageddon a group of Deplorable oil rig workers got the job done.
As that review points out, the message is not so clearly to trust the science. The scientists are corrupted and foolish. The tech guru certainly also has all the necessary science info, but is a bad source of advice.
Supposedly the comet is a metaphor for climate change, but it could just as easily be covid-19 or overpopulation or some other pending disaster.
The President has no resemblance to Trump, and seems to be a composite of many politicians.
I would think that rare metals would more likely be found on an asteroid than a comet. That is a minor quibble. The science is not meant to be taken seriously.
Roger, the science was meant as a metaphor. It is not even clear that comet core can make mechanical contact with Earth surface, it is likely to burn out and explode in earth atmosphere. A comet is a guessed cause of Tunguska “meteor” event. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event
I don’t have much to add here except that I’ve known since the beginning that the #Science is always “evolving” which is why Fauci and Walensky talked all about how “fully vaccinated” now means “up-to-date.” 1 year ago, “Fully Vaccinated” was the gold standard that would end the pandemic and bring us all back to nor…..wait……..this just in………….tomorrow is the anniversary of January 6th! Who cares what the #Science is doing when all of America is still being traumatized by those terrible hours?
Also, something like 1,000 Boston-area teachers called in sick yesterday. They were so distraught about remembering January 6th that they couldn’t find the will to teach.
Here’s the link to the Boston teachers who were so traumatized by the events of January 6th that they had to call in sick en masse yesterday.
https://patch.com/massachusetts/medford/s/i1663/over-1000-boston-teachers-staff-out-sick-tuesday
I’d also like to add that I don’t understand what “The Science” means when both Drs. Fauci and Walensky tell us on an almost daily basis now that their definitions change because the #Science “evolves” and is constantly changing! It sounds like another way of saying: “We don’t know anything!”
To me, that sounds like a sham cover story for their incompetence, which is a sham cover story for their willful ignorance, which is a sham cover story for their actual knowledge of what the virus is and exactly where it came from! But the bullshit has to keep getting deeper because they want to put as much distance between themselves and the truth as possible.
Better for your health to ignore them. Think about the amazing experiences you’ve had, what an extraordinary guy your dad is and you’re now working with him, and all the cool things you want to do in the future. That will boost your immune system, strengthen your metabolism, and help you get through your current health troubles.
Philip, fertility is higher and household income is lower in families where wife is a homemaker.
In other posts you have been convincing us that smart females do not pursue office or any other careers and that alimony is not counted towards household income. So hopefully most of the babies in lower income brackets are inheriting genetic components of high intellect from their moms.
perplexed: I hope I didn’t say anything about “smart females” (especially since the last word in that phrase is no longer defined). Certainly an economically rational individual biologically capable of becoming a “pregnant person” and seeking to maximize personal spending power would have sex with 3 or 4 married high-income partners in a state such as California or Massachusetts and thus build a diversified portfolio of lucrative tax-free child support cashflows. (see http://www.realworlddivorce.com/ChildSupportLitigationWithoutMarriage )
But regarding the situation that you posit, a two-parent married household, I think it would be tough to tease out cause and effect. Did the mother become a “homemaker” because three children existed and it didn’t make sense to work at a job that paid less, after tax, than daycare for three kids or did the mother start out as a “homemaker” before the three children existed?
Philip, per observations many families with $150,000 – $200,000 + income are two working parent families with at most 2 children, often 1 child. And per observations women prefer have families with more children to dead – end jobs, so three + children two-parent families are mostly when father is a sole breadwinner. Earlier in my career I have worked with career – minded successful women with more then 2 children but they were rather an exception to the rule and were much better off then modern equivalent of $200,000 / year and could afford house help. And they all came from religious background. But I have not seen such career – minded women in the past 20 years. So mothers became “homemakers” because natural inclination and desire to have children and dropping of workforce because of that, even though per-marriage they were working hard and studied well, and in some cases because work performed was deemed harder then motherhood.
last sentence should read: “So mothers became “homemakers” because of natural inclination and desire to have children and dropped out of workforce because of that, even though pre-marriage they had been working hard and studied well, and in some cases because blue-collar work that they had performed was deemed harder then motherhood.”
perplexed: Certainly our old neighborhood in Maskachusetts was packed with non-working women who had law degrees, MBAs, and even MDs (though usually the latter worked at least part-time). A friend who had an MBA, two kids, and an executive job at a Fortune 500 company said that she felt socially excluded by the credentialed and mostly-idle moms who held high social status in the town. The credentialed-yet-idle moms would talk about their favorite streaming TV shows (plenty of time to watch while the kids were in government-run daycare, a.k.a. K-12 school) and their craft projects and had nothing in common with the corporate warrior. The credentialed-yet-idle moms typically had only 1 or 2 children, maybe because they did not get married until roughly age 30 (i.e., if their husbands had instead married younger women without as many credentials they would have had more children and the same female contribution to household income (i.e., $0)).
Quite a few of these women, of course, eventually cashed out of their marriage via family court. Even with the discarded father taking care of the kids 4-7 nights out of every 14, however, the plaintiff moms generally did not return to the W-2 labor force (but I know one who did and she learned SQL!).
As an astronomer I agree with almost everything you write. And I found the movie quite boring and frankly, a waste of time. However, one point in your arguments I cannot agree with.
It is possible to determine the chemical composition of objects via remote sensing. This is much easier for objects that emit light such as stars, but can also be done (much harder) for objects that can reflect solar (or stellar light) such as planets or comets. As long as you have some light bouncing off, you can measure its properties such as polarisation, which materials in the target object can modify subtly and leave some imprint. With spectroscopy you can also look at light absorption from elements present in the object. For example, ESA’s Mars Express has used spectroscopy to measure the chemical composition of the martial atmosphere, although it was much closer than we are of a comet. So it is theoretical possible, albeit not very easy to do.
Martin, in theory, for spherical caws in vacuum. From wikipedia. “Comet nuclei, at ~1 km to at times tens of kilometers, could not be resolved by telescopes. Even current giant telescopes would give just a few pixels on target, assuming nuclei were not obscured by comae when near Earth” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_nucleus
Actual spaceship encounter corrected educated guesses: “Three rendezvous missions aside, Halley was one example. Its unfavorable trajectory also caused brief flybys at extreme speed, at one time. More frequent missions broadened the sample of targets, using more advanced instruments. By chance, events such as the breakups of Shoemaker-Levy 9 and Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 contributed to our understanding.
Densities were confirmed as quite low, ~0.6 g cm3. Comets were highly porous,[29] and fragile on micro-[30] and macro-scales.[31]
Refractory-to-ice ratios are much higher,[32] at least 3:1,[33] possibly ~5:1,[34] ~6:1,[35][26] or more.[36][37][38]
This is a full reversal from the dirty snowball model. The Rosetta science team has coined the term “mineral organices,” for minerals and organics with a minor fraction of ices.[36]
Comets and active asteroids in the outer asteroid belt demonstrate that there can be a fine line separating the two categories of objects. “
Martin: Thanks for the education. For sensing the composition of a rock, though, you’d at most get some information about what was on the surface of the rock, right? So you’d have to guess that the composition of the interior was the same (maybe a reasonable assumption for a small space object).
[Update: I pinged an experimental astrophysicist friend. He says you can determine some basics, but that it isn’t possible to determine if, for example, a comet’s rocky core contains 10% gold, 5% Iridium, and 3% Palladium. He agreed with me that spectroscopy is primarily useful for looking at “volatile compounds that out gas from the comet”. Those wouldn’t generally be the valuable minerals that the movie characters claimed to have found.]
[Update 2: I wondered if we’d been able to figure out the composition of Mercury, which doesn’t have an atmosphere to obstruct remote sensing. It turns out that we had to send an orbiter there with an X-ray spectrometer. We couldn’t do it from Earth See https://phys.org/news/2012-10-messenger-x-ray-spectrometer-reveals-chemical.html ; Similarly, we didn’t learn much about the minerals on Mars until we landed robots there and, even then, we don’t know what is underneath the surface. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ore_resources_on_Mars ]
The closest real-world situation that I found is https://earthsky.org/space/asteroid-psyche-metal-or-rubble-pile/ (and nobody can agree on the composition)
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/abb67e/pdf is a UV spectrum analysis made from Hubble. The abstract hedges quite a bit (the word “may” is used and also “best batched”).
The only way that NASA could find to settle the dispute regarding what this asteroid is made of is to send a probe out to it (will take 3.5 years). Even then, they’re not promising a comprehensive mineral survey.
Would such movie be a step forward towards movies viewed by future people in Idiocracy? “Trump” -“booo!”
This movie certainly is getting a lot of promotion, but the lion kingdom is still a bit worn out from Deep Impact & Armageddon. Strange correlation between fertility & income. Since Idiocracy came out, the lion coworkers who reproduced are all multimillionare corporate executives women flocked to while the ones who didn’t reproduce are all poor startup programmers women avoided. The child support benefits should favor breadwinners making more babies.
There is a good blog post about the movie and the analogy to climate change that takes somewhat the opposite view of the standard analysis, suggesting it could be viewed as critiquing the alarmists. Its by Judith Curry, a climate researcher (“lukewarmer”) who seems sharp and focused on real science (even if she does come down on the side of still seem more risk than I think is credibly demonstrated to date).
https://judithcurry.com/2022/01/04/existential-risks/
Her post doesn’t address the valid critiques made on this page of the science in the movie. I suspect even many scientists “suspend disbelief” regarding things like rushed timelines for determining orbits (though that part seems easy to chalk up to this being a science fiction future or alternate timeline where there are dispersed satellites or ground stations with precise enough instruments to determine the orbit through measurements over a very short timeline and determine attributes of the comet that would impact its path based on more extensive knowledge about comets than what we have where limited measurements might classify the comet’s likely makeup).
Thanks for the link. Hers is an interesting piece. Her credentials are impressive (“I was Professor and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.”) but somehow I doubt that CNN or NYT will be seeking her out since she implies that we can develop technology 50 years from now to prevent a climate disaster 100 years from now.
re: “Her credentials are impressive…somehow I doubt that CNN or NYT will be seeking her out”
Yup, the alarmist media doesn’t like her. I assume you saw her “about” page then where its instead interviews on Fox news, testimony before Congress due to GOP requesting it, etc. Back around 2010 or so she started writing about the “uncertainty monster”: the problem with the massive uncertainty thats implicit in the climate models but not acknowledged. She seems like someone who grasps the importance of rigorous science and who finally grasped that the climate field had gotten off track and was drawing too strong conclusions from too sparse and uncertain a data set. She also grasped that even if she considers human influence on climate to be a problem: that doesn’t mean the proposed centrally planned solutions are the only approach or the right one.
I think by then her presumptions regarding humans having a major impact on climate change was so ingrained that she errs on the side of “where there is smoke there is fire” , whereas I’m agnostic since I don’t think they have proven their case, the models can’t yet match reality well enough without being tweaked. For decades they’ve had black boxes in the models for things they admit they don’t understand well: yet somehow assume the models are going to give accurate responses despite that. That seems to suggest in essence curve fitting to make those black boxes function “correctly”: except even then they can’t match all the climate observational data. Its “garbage in, gospel out”.
Climate changes: and a model of it thats flawed is likely to be too warm or too cold: their projections were too cold in the 1970s and then when they switched to too warm they were thrown lots of funding “just in case they are right” so all new models were calibrated to also show warming (otherwise they’d be assumed to be flawed).
They average together an ensemble of models: as if the average were somehow guaranteed to be more accurate as if there were some reason that models that are wrong would magically happen to cluster around the real values.
I wonder what the process is for resolving competing claims to the truth when time is of the essence and importance is high? The traditional appeal to authority has gone the way of the Dodo – so what’s left in its place? People can find somebody to dispute any claim it seems, and the respect for expertise has evaporated (other than perhaps certain fields like surgery).
The postmodernists have been telling us that there is no truth, now they are aghast that Deplorables self-identify as vaccinated and don’t believe them.
There is no process. You need authority figures that people trust, and you have to earn that trust. This means restoring meritocracy, quitting racial segregation as practiced by Democrats, quitting affirmative action.
Then the authority figures have to stop lying. If Churchill had promised the British public “two weeks to flatten enemy activities” instead of “blood, sweat, and tears”, everyone would have thought that he is a clown. (This example is for humor and should not imply that COVID-19 anything more than a particularly nasty flu for certain age groups.)
If there were a process, it would be controlled by the powerful. Consider Ethereum smart contracts, where supposedly the code in the contracts was the ultimate truth. When someone discovered a legal way to exploit the contracts, the powerful forked Ethereum (around 2016):
https://ethereumclassic.org/knowledge/roadmap
Note that Ethereum (Ephemerum?) is constantly forking, (the latest ones are in 2021):
https://ethereum.org/en/history/
If there is no process for a supposedly mathematically governed currency apart from
“the powerful and stake holders decide”, how can there be a process for chaotic natural events?
First off, the movie is not a documentary or a paper making claims of scientific fact; it is an allegorical film that makes use of fairly standard visual shorthand to establish plot points for the audience. The whiteboard scene where DiCaprio computes the diminishing relative distance between the earth and the comet is a clear instance of this. In reality, such calculations would be performed on a computer, not by hand. We have to give the filmmakers some license, here; it is unfair to judge them by standards alien to their field. Consider the scene in Lincoln where Mary Todd Lincoln personally attends the vote session for the Thirteenth amendment. She totes up the votes in a small notepad as a way to convey information to the viewer. Does anyone believe she actually did this in real life? Of course not. The movie isn’t a history lesson, but a dramatized version of real events.
Second, the bolded section of the quote from the European Space Agency above makes the rather obvious point that one picture alone cannot suffice to compute the comet’s trajectory, but the movie clearly establishes that the Jennifer Lawrence character has access to pre-discovery data showing the comet at different locations relative to the stellar field. They never say precisely how much of this data exists, but it is clearly much more than just a single point. Whether you find the movie egregiously high-handed or no, at least acknowledge what the film itself portrays.
And while it is true that heavy metals don’t usually sublimate at low temperatures, there are several instances where heavy metal vapors have been detected in the atmospheres around comets distant from the sun. That doesn’t mean that spectral techniques can establish their compositions down the n-th decimal point (another license the film takes), but the idea isn’t some crazy, unscientific claim. Again, it’s a Hollywood film, not a documentary or a scientific paper. You are holding it to an unreasonable standard, even despite its rather heavy-handed theme.
Yes, Don’t Look Up is a Hollywood film and not a documentary or real scientific fact. Unfortunately, this movie, unlike Idiocracy, Deep Impact, Armageddon, et. al., feeds on people fear of today’s events, in the same way The Day After [1] did back in 1983. Our society is so brain washed and woke as such they cannot tell anymore what they read and see on the internet, news and government is real or not. News media that we are suppose to trust, health care providers that we are suppose to depended on, and government that we are suppose to follow and trust are all playing into the fear of the public to either make more money or hold on to power.
Those days, I cannot tell if what I read or see on the internet or the tube is coming from trusted source or is coming from The Onion. Heck, sometimes I trust what I read on The Onion more than what I read from so called other trusted organizations.
If Hollywood, the media and our government wants to help sociality, it should be covering, non stop, real scientific achievements such as James Webb telescope (as one example). This is as break through as the moon landings.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After