Don't Look Up: two physicists explain to us if what happens in the film is possible


Don’t Look Up is the new humorous film written and directed by Adam McKay (The Big Bet, Vice) from Netflix that has totally divided the opinion of both critics and audiences. 

Within the realization, we witness a catastrophic event that threatens the Earth: specifically a comet called “Killer of planets” which is discovered by two scientists, but which is ignored by most of the media and politicians, but also by people, with obviously dire consequences. A title that makes fun of our society and which uses rather absurd scientific pretexts, but intended to make everything irreverent and deliberately peckish.

Well, two physicists, Philip Lubin and Alexander Cohen, of the University of Santa Barbara in California, wanted to study Don’t Look Up from a serious point of view to try to understand if, if a similar comet appears in our world, it was possible to prevent the destruction of our beloved Earth. 

Part of their scientific paper, available thanks to CBS News, leaves no doubt: saving is technically possible, even with only 6 months’ notice, but it would be necessary to act already in the first month, to plan the launch of nuclear penetrators capable of detonating the comet from the inside after destroying the outer crust of the stellar body. They then added that ideally, it is almost impossible to be in such a situation, but at least we should theoretically be ready with the technology we have now.

Too bad that the reasoning behind Don’t Look Up is definitely much more subtle than that and more than highlighting our technological backwardness, it exaggerates that, faced with a similar threat, most of the strong powers would try to earn on the tragedy rather than save the planet, while a part of the media and the inhabitants of the Earth would not believe in the problem at all.

Source: CBS News

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