If you go outside on a clear night and look up at the sky,
it looks like the universe is beautiful and peaceful,
nothing changes, nothing happens,
but that really is an illusion -
the universe is a violent place.
In the last few decades,
we've started to monitor asteroids,
there are tens of thousands of big ones across the Earth's orbit,
any one of those could hit us. Just to give some sense
of the energy that these impacts create,
that even small-ish objects, about ten, twenty meters across,
when they hit the Earth's atmosphere,
deposit, the energy of twenty, thirty, fifty Hiroshima bombs.
And it's roughly five-to-ten
kilometers wide...
An extinction level event.
I think that we take our safety
and our existence on this planet for granted, so impacts happen,
naturally occurring events that can threaten a city,
or a country or a continent, or indeed, our civilisation happen.
And the reason we ignore them really, is because they don't happen very often -
but low probability events happen,
and the thing about probabilities is that they're not certainties,
so until we see one coming and until we can map it's orbit,
then we can't say with any certainty when the next one will hit.
In 'Don't Look Up' the threat is from a comet.
Comets exist in the far frozen outer-reaches of the solar system
in a region called the Kuiper Belt and then the Oort Cloud
far beyond the orbit of Neptune.
And there are millions of these things, they're icy snowballs, but they're big.
And very often those comets that come into the solar system are new discoveries.
Now comets don't have orbits
that cross the Earth every year, or two years or so -
even if they come back and come back and come back, like Halley's comet,
you can be talking about eighty, a hundred, two-hundred, a thousand years,
and so unlike the asteroids,
we can't really ever assume that we can map their orbits -
the film is very accurate, actually.
In the film, we have six months from detection of this thing to the impact,
and that's fairly typical for a comet.
I keep getting the same result,
a direct hit of Earth in six months and fourteen days.
Me too.
So the United States has an organisation now,
which goes by the catchy title of 'The Near-Earth Orbit
Impact Threat Emergency Protocols Interagency Working Group',
or 'NEOITEP IWG' I think is how they pronounce it.
It's a collection of organisations that are charged with observing
and mapping the paths of potentially dangerous
asteroids, and also then dealing with them
if we see one that may be a threat, there is a protocol in place, actually.
There's a flowchart - detect it, make precision
observations, assess whether there's a greater than one percent chance of impact-
then you have to model what happens if this thing hits,
and eventually there is a civil defense contingency,
so do we evacuate the city or do we try to move it?
And a lot of it, I suppose, quite disturbingly in a way
but I suppose it's the way it has to be,
a lot of it is to do with the economic impact of the impact.
I say we sit tight and assess.
The decision you're making is to sit tight and assess?
I'm sorry, who is she?
Because we have powerful computers and we have precise observations,
within about, what, two months from detection,
then we'll have a complete planning scenario,
and on that basis, then we can decide
what we should do about it. It says this in the report as well,
if we have about three years or four years, then
that is how long it takes at the moment to construct a spacecraft
which might be able to deflect it.
So, but we need three or four years at the moment because we don't have
those spacecraft lined up because they're billion dollar spacecraft.
So let's say Chelsea or Manchester United, spend more
on the wages of the footballers every year
than we spend as a civilisation on asteroid defense.
Think about our priorities as a civilisation.
Now you might say, 'Well, in that
case, shouldn't we line a load of these spacecraft up ready?'
Maybe yes, but the problem is we don't know how big that spacecraft
has got to be or what kind of technology it's got to employ -
should it have a nuclear warhead on it? Should it just nudge it?
Should it just bang into it?
We don't really know until you've seen the sort of object,
and the size of object that's causing the problem.
There's a mission called 'DART' which is as I speak currently
flying towards an asteroid, and it's going to hit the asteroid,
so it's what's called an impactor mission, and that's testing out the technologies
that we will need in the future, potentially to deflect one.
I mean, would you want trillions of dollars
of your money spent lining up lots of different spacecraft
in order to protect us from something that might not happen
in the next ten thousand years?
Maybe you'd say no,
and that's the dilemma.
If you're trying to convince
some politicians or a government to invest
hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars in technology
and mapping systems and mapping programmes to mitigate these events,
then if I say, 'well, it's very,
very unlikely that it'll happen when you're in office', right,
then I suppose there's a tendency to go 'oh well, leave it for the next person then',
and that's just the way that our brains work and our political cycles work.
One of the things I love about the film, and I think the reasons that it's
very important, is that it really does deal
with the level of trust
that people have in scientific statements.
You see it with Leo DiCaprio's character,
I think it's beautifully acted and beautifully written, where
he tries to be very very precise -
- exactly ninety nine point seven eight percent to be exact
-Oh! Great! OK, so it's not a hundred percent.
Well, scientists never like to say one hundred percent.
Call it seventy percent and let's just let's move on.
-and suddenly there's a window to sort of distrust the science and
deflect yourself away from the potential catastrophic nature of the prediction.
We know that there are objects out there
that we have not yet discovered, that may pose a threat.
And that's notoriously difficult,
you see it in the film. In fact, in the film, you see that
people can see the thing in the sky, right,
you can actually look up and see it,
and still there's a robust public debate about whether it's there...
We're hearing that there is no comet -
...even though you can look up and see it.
We, we've been trying to tell you!
We've been trying to tell you this whole time, it's right there,
it's right there, Kate.
I think one of the problems we face as a civilisation
is we don't know how valuable we are.
In our galaxy, the Milky Way,
there are four hundred billion stars, and countless trillions of planets,
and yet it is possible that you could count
the number of civilisations on the fingers of one hand.
In fact, it's possible that there is only one, and that's us, here.
Talk about meaning there's a word that doesn't sound
particularly scientific, 'meaning',
what does it mean to exist?
Well I would argue that meaning is a property of intelligence,
and if this planet is the only place where intelligence exists,
then I would argue that this is the only place
where meaning exists in a galaxy of four hundred billion stars.
And it's possible that by not taking the violence of the universe seriously,
we may allow or be complicit in,
the destruction of meaning in a galaxy.
There's a very famous name in space exploration, Robert Zubrin.
I interviewed him once and he said to me
'ideas have consequences, and the worst idea that we have ever
had as a human civilisation is that we have access to limited resources'.
The correct thing to say is we have access to limited resources on Earth
and indeed we have to be extremely careful
because there are limited resources on Earth,
that means that we fight over them and we damage our planet and our environment,
but, Zubrin points out, the idea is false.
It's false because the moment you lift your gaze up from the surface of the Earth
and out into space to the asteroid belt and beyond,
then you see that there are effectively unlimited resources out there.
Ladies and gentlemen, what we thought, what the world
thought was an impending and terrifying danger
turns out to be an astonishing opportunity,
There's one fact that I love, which is out there in the asteroid belt
which is where most of the asteroids are, there is enough metal
to build a skyscraper, a hundred stories high and cover the entire Earth in it.
Asteroids are not just a threat, they're a tremendous opportunity,
You see that in the film,
in fact the fact that they are potentially
tremendously valuable ultimately leads to our destruction.
The comet actually contains almost one hundred and forty
trillion dollars worth of assets.
about forty trilly -
In terms of mining asteroids,
we know what many of
the asteroids are made of because a lot them have landed on Earth,
I mean, here's a piece of one, and it's very heavy.
Many of them are metal rich
and so these are valuable things.
Interestingly the technology that we need to deflect them to mitigate the risks,
is pretty much the same technology that we need to go and mine them -
so the question arises, what role do big corporations currently play?
In the film, the bad guys, well virtually everyone's a bad guy actually,
but one of the primary bad guys is Bash Cellular.
I don't think we should demonise the companies
that build the technology, because one day we're going to need them.
I call this one Free-mo the first -
If you look at what
SpaceX have done and Blue Origin are doing,
then they are making access to space reliable and relatively cheap.
And the revolution in the last decade
or so has been the invention of reusable rockets.
Imagine how expensive it would be to fly from London to New York
if you got on the plane, flew across the Atlantic,
got off the plane and then the plane exploded,
it would be ridiculous -
single use aircraft.
One of the things I really love about the film
is that it addresses a problem that worries I think all of us in science,
and all of us in many fields of human endeavor actually, which is how do we
compete with all the noise in our civilisation?
How do we make people pay attention to reliable and important knowledge
when there's so much unreliable and trivial knowledge out there
competing for mental space?
Just think about it for a moment,
are you really more interested in the private life
of your favourite celebrity than you are in the protection
of intelligent life in a galaxy of four hundred billion stars?
Are you really more concerned about that?
Probably, you'd probably say yeah, you're probably saying, 'yes'.
Actually, probably as I speak, you're on your phone trying to have a look at, what,
you know, what the football results are.
Thing of it is, we really,
we really did have everything didn't we?
I mean when you think about it.
The last line that Leo DiCaprio's character delivers,
I think is really powerful and important line, he's right
we do have it all.
This is the only place where anything probably matters.
I think it would be a tragedy,
I'm sure you agree if you only realise that
with thirty seconds to go before the comet hits.
My advice, if we're to avoid the fate
of our civilisation depicted in the film,
is to look up. To face nature in all its beauty and all its terror.
Don't hide your head in the sand,
don't shy away from the universe beyond
because if you do that, then before we know it,
something will come tearing down from the skies and wipe us out.