- Two major Hollywood productions dealing
with the asteroid and comet impact danger are being released in 1998: Deep
Impact (a Spielberg/Dreamworld Production) on May 8 and Armageddon (Disney
Films) on July 1. These films may do more to publicize the impact hazard
than all previous media coverage taken together. But are the films technically
credible, and what effect will they have on public attitudes toward asteroid
and comet impacts?
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- Deep Impact (Dreamworks and Paramount
Pictures) is directed by Mimi Leder and stars Robert Duvall, Tea Leoni,
Elijah Wood, Vanessa Redgrave, and Morgan Freeman. The Executive Producers
are Steven Spielberg, Joan Bradshaw and Walter Parkes. Listed as scientific
advisors are Carolyn and Gene Shoemaker, Chris Luchini, Joshua Colwell,
Gerry Griffin, and David Walker, and the original idea is from the novel
Hammer of God by Arthur C. Clarke. The story line concerns a comet a few
miles in diameter that is headed for the Earth. Much of the plot is about
what people would consider most important if they knew that they only had
a few months to live, reminiscent of the classic science fiction film When
Worlds Collide. While the planet prepares for disaster, astronauts try
to use nuclear explosives to deflect the comet, but they succeed only in
breaking it into two pieces, one of which (2 km in diameter) strikes in
the Atlantic ocean and wipes out coastal cities by a spectacular tsunami
that engulfs the entire US eastern seaboard. The larger fragment is deflected
at the last minute by a heroic and suicidal effort, so the rest of the
planet is spared.
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- Technically, Deep Impact is reasonably
accurate. The idea of a comet being spotted about 2 years before impact
is plausible, and the strategy to deflect it with nuclear explosives is
also appropriate. The special effects on the surface of the active comet
are realistic, as is the tsunami produced when the smaller fragment hits
the Atlantic. The film makes no mention of other environmental effects
of a 2-km ocean impact, but it correctly anticipates the extremely serious
consequences of the larger impact (what they call an ELE or extinction-level
event). The idea of a nuclear-powered spacecraft to take astronauts to
the comet is fiction, of course, at least in terms of current technology,
but the film gets high marks for understanding the nature of the impact
threat and for the quality of its special effects imagery.
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- Armageddon, staring Bruce Willis and
produced by Jerry Bruckheimer for Disney, is quite another story, and one
suspects that it was never concerned about technical accuracy -- perhaps
more of a spoof like Independence Day or Men in Black. No one from the
comet/asteroid community was consulted, and the only technical advice that
is credited is from former NASA employees Joe Allen and Ivan Beckey. In
this case the threatening NEO is an asteroid "the size of Texas",
which is about a million times larger (in mass and energy) than any Earth-crossing
asteroid, but the warning time is just a few weeks. Instead of entrusting
planetary defense to trained astronauts or the military, a bunch of amateurs
is recruited, given a week of training, and blasted off in two Space Shuttles
to intercept the asteroid. Apparently no one told the producers that the
Shuttle is limited to low Earth orbits. The job of the astronauts is to
drill down about 200 m and plant nuclear explosives. Unlike the sets of
Deep Impact that try to portray the surface of a comet accurately, the
asteroid set for Armageddon does not look at all like an asteroid, and
strangely the hole they drill glows orange as if there were magma just
below the surface. The world may be saved in Armageddon, but the credibility
of the movie is a casualty.
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- These are the fourth and fifth movies
respectively made about the impact hazard, so further comparisons are in
order. First came the 1979 Hollywood film Meteor, staring Sean Connery
and Natalie Wood, in which a joint US/USSR effort is made to intercept
the incoming asteroid and disrupt it with nuclear explosives. The major
tragedy is thus averted, although several smaller hits demonstrate the
destructive power of impacts (especially one that strikes in Central Park,
New York City). The initial premise of the film, with an asteroid knocked
out of the main belt and into the Earth's path, is ridiculous, but most
of the rest of the film is reasonably plausible, and it makes for a good
cold-war era thriller. Meteor was not well received at the time, however,
in part because reviewers did not take the impact possibility seriously.
The next film was Fire from the Sky, made for television in the late 1980s.
Here a comet takes out Phoenix, Arizona. There is no attempt to intercept
the comet, and most of the drama concerns issues of when to warn the populace
and (given that the warning was delayed till the last minute) how to evacuate
Phoenix in time. Third was the 1997 TV "miniseries" Asteroid,
which ran for more than 3 hours but was later released on videotape in
a 2-hour version. As in Meteor, the film starts implausibly with a comet
diverting a main-belt asteroid into a collision course. This time the target
is Dallas, Texas, with a smaller impact near Kansas City. The special effects
are weak, the efforts to stop the incoming asteroid with airborne radar
are ludicrous, and after the impact the film settles into a generic disaster
format, with people trapped in collapsed buildings, lost children, and
the like. The only good thing one could say about this film is that everyone
works together to deal with the disaster; there are no dumb subplots or
human villains.
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- These five films can be ranked according
to their realism and technical accuracy in portraying the threat of a cosmic
impact. From best to worst, they are Deep Impact, Fire from the Sky, Meteor,
Asteroid, and Armageddon. But whatever their technical strengths or weaknesses,
they should sensitize the public to the existence of an impact danger,
and perhaps also to the fact that we could mount a defense against an incoming
object and thus avert the disaster entirely. One would not expect the defenses
to be entirely successful in a movie, because that would mean no spectacular
visual impact effects, but in real life we proably would have a better
chance of success, at least if we were given several decades of warning
before the impact.
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- It is interesting that the complete Spaceguard
survey could be accomplished for the cost of either one of these films:
Deep Impact or Armageddon.
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