If you want a recent movie that doesn’t focus on *America’s* response, I can’t recommend highly enough you check out the Chinese big-budget sci-fi blockbuster _The Wandering Earth_. I found it refreshing to see a movie in which humanity confronts a global crisis via engineering, politics and various human-interest subplots in which - for no particular reason - everyone important to the story happens to be Chinese.
There is a thirty-second aside where someone mentions that a joint China/Russia/India (or something like that) coalition also tried a comet deflection mission but it failed. They were clearly trying to nod to this possibility while also wanting to keep the focus on the US.
Insisting that anyone who dislikes Marxism must be part of the establishment when the Establishment is trying to shove anyone using the word "Marxism" in a pejorative sense out the Overton Window and into the Midden of the Pariahs doesn't seem very sensible.
It seems the only reason for your hypothesis that Scott hasn't read a basic political textbook is that he seems to find Marxism to be a bunch of BS. Have you considered alternative hypotheses for why someone would find Marxism to be a bunch of BS, apart from ignorance of political theory?
Here’s why someone would consider marxism to be a bunch of BS: because it has utterly failed every time it’s been tried, while murdering millions. That is why everyone despises Marxism. It boggles my mind you can’t wrap your mind around that. Add to this your tone and constant snides and, for the life of me, I can’t figure out why you’re not banned already.
You seem to be repeating my thesis and then saying you've disproved me. Yes, they go through the reasons they think it is biased. That's what I mean when I say it's the Man - a systematically-biased-towards-capitalism-and-imperialism thing.
Without actually looking back at the essay. I am pretty sure the quoted sentence is coming from the basic modern American understanding where in the media is considered to be liberal leaning, and as such the argument Chomsky and Herman describe, where in the media is instead biased in favor of capital is 'startling', since bias in favor of capital is (again in the basic modern American understanding) associated with conservatives and not liberals.
As far as I can tell the only substantive complaint you have here is that you think 'the man' is being used as a sneer to mock and or downplay communist concerns with regard to the influence of capital. This might be rude or dismissive but does not actually elucidate an error in Scott's reasoning, only his evaluation of the severity of the problem.
The trouble with heavy-handed satire is that if you don't precisely share the author's world view then you can't even engage with it. The movie says "HEY DON'T YOU SEE? THIS FICTIONAL SITUATION IS EXACTLY LIKE THIS REAL-WORLD SITUATION!" And if you think "Well it's a little bit like that, but y'know, the real world situation is more complicated, there's more uncertainties involved..." then the movie says "HA! HA! YOU'RE LIKE ONE OF THOSE FAT GUYS WEARING DON'T LOOK UP HATS, LOL"
I too find it very hard to see Meryl Streep playing the President of the US without thinking of Hillary Clinton. Aside from that, there wasn't much Clintonian in Orlean's character (except where Clinton and Trump correspond), though the part about polling driving her smoking might be something.
President Streep had a line where she said she wanted to check Sexy Science Man's astronomy with people from a real university, Harvard. Or something along those lines.
I figured fawning at the Ivy Leagues was a dig at democrats.
Movie reviewer Tim Brayton interpreted President Orlean as being a conflation of Trump and Clinton:
> A character who can be best described as "what if Donald Trump was also Hilary Clinton?". So on the one hand, blind incuriosity; on the other, smug Ivy League credentialism. On the one hand, oafish provincialism; on the other, sneering technocratic condescension. On the one hand, making America great again; on the other, yass kweening. She even wears both red and blue pantsuits at different points in the film.
Also, why is nobody pointing out that Streep played Susan Orlean in Adaptation and in this film plays President Orlean? Is Don't Look Up a sequel to Adaptation? "Orlean" isn't exactly a common last name, this can't be a coincidence.
Yeah sure, it's full of soviet movies where the average new soviet man is a complete moron, the secretary of the communist party is an idiot dooming everybody for short term thinking, and a guy in charge of a huge part of the economy too greedy to do even his own self interest.
(Before you engage in some sophistry on how the Ivy league and Hollywood are the real government... I have already read all moldbug. Did not make sense, does not make sense now)
Moldbug is straightforward: distilling away the many walls of texts and mad-at-literally-everyone-and-everything rants, his one and only message is "The world is fallen because I am not the king of America*"
To be honest, from all I've read I wasn't aware it had jokes. Either the reviews are unfair or the jokes were not worth mentioning, and since the reviewers have included people who stated they wanted to like the film, I doubt it's the former possibility.
I didn't see this movie because I was in the mood for a laugh; I wasn't expecting one, didn't get one, and it seemed entirely beside the point in any case. I care about it as an illustration of a really important and underappreciated problem.
I didn't expect it to be funny, although Adam McKay *can* be very funny, e.g., Eastbound and Down.
I watched it as mere Hollywood spectacle and found it enjoyable and unintentionally apolitical. Its lack of coherent messaging is a virtue. It isn't funny, but it is entertaining. The acting and visuals are good.
This was my interpretation, too. It's a movie about the challenges of consensus building, even in the face of an existential problem. The scientists found the comet, but they didn't have all the answers and frequently undermined themselves.
I think it's true that that's what the movie is about, but that there are also key disagreements between Adam McKay and most of the commenters here about how this dynamic comes into being.
Curious why you've avoided seeing even one single show, given the prominence of it in our pop culture, its enduring popularity, and given that the episodes are so short? I'm not remotely a huge fan, but there are some episodes that are worth a watch.
I was subjected to part of an episode of South Park once. They're 22 minutes, according to Wikipedia. In 22 minutes, I could share a wonderful sexual encounter with my partner; I could design a circuit; I could read a chapter of a good novel; I could have a longish meditation session. I have less than a million 22-minute units left of my life, quite likely only a few thousand. Why would I waste one of them watching South Park?
The later stuff turned me off so completely that I gave up on it (and for instance I never found "Family Guy" funny even at the start, and it seems from comments on it that I see that it has become a lot worse) but the start was funny. Terribly crude and vulgar, but funny. I suppose the test of tolerance for it is: do you find the concept of Saddem Hussein in Hell as Satan's Gay Lover funny or not?
(Actually, now that I think of it, Lil Nas X finagled a lot of kudos and praise for this very concept - Satan's Gay Lover taking over Hell!)
I haven't watched it for a long time, and the problem with it seems to be the same problem with all very long-running shows, where the constant necessity for new material means going ever more extreme when you've exhausted the obvious plots.
Plus apparent Seth McFarlane having tons of agendas he rams down your throat?
But at the start, it was very vulgar but also funny. It definitely is/was the fart joke type of humour, which is not my type of humour, but it was so exaggerated and corny (Mr Hanky, the Talking Poo?) that it became ludicrous enough to be funny (and they lampooned that as well with Philip and Terrence, and the fact that these kids are young so they will find fart humour hilarious).
Describing it in cold blood does make one go "Uh, well, there's this character who - ah, yeah, that sounds offensive, doesn't it?" but it really is "you have to watch it to get the joke".
This doesn't mean that watching it will make you a convert to it, but you do have to give the early episodes a chance. I decided I had better not get offended easily, for instance, with their portrayal of Jesus (which isn't even the most mocking).
Oh, this was David Sirota’s work? Yeah, that makes perfect sense. You’re dead-on here: critique of institutional liberalism and the right-wing as a whole fits very tidily into the dirtbag left worldview, and can only really scan as making fun of everyone to people who don’t care about a left that goes further than the NYT.
The film does not "make fun of everyone". What it does is the SNL version of political satire: The types that Democrats hate are mocked for everything they stand for. Everything from their mannerisms to their characters and core beliefs are ridiculed. But those that Democrats like are at worst mocked as lovable goofs screwing up while trying to do the right thing. That's far from just "making fun of everyone".
Not really, as the movie goes out of its way to be respectful to the devout Christian. A social conservative might like this movie far more than your average liberal because of it.
Interesting - I have not seen the film, and based on my extremely negative reaction to Vice, I probably won't, but this intrigues me - which character was that?
On a similar note, the whole “re-united family and new friends have a nice dinner together while the world is ending” was something most social conservatives could get behind, I think.
I’m a pretty cynical guy, but that tugged at my heartstrings a little bit.
Yes, but isn't there several films that already do that, like "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World" and so forth? Why do socialcons need to get slapped in the face a lot to get to that moment?
He's not the type of Christian that Democrats dislike. He's a punk kid with a spiritual side and a belief in God. He's religious but doesn't like to tell people, isn't really part of a religious community and doesn't seem to have the conservative political beliefs we usually associate with a devout Christian.
Interesting. From an atheistic point of view, American movie characters look rather religious to me.
Though mostly in the sense that when religion is brought up, people turn out to be religious. It's not brought up all that often though, because stories have other things to tell.
Agreed - PRIVATE Christianity is OK with progressives, but PUBLIC Christianity (of a non-Unitarian brand) is evil. And you should feel a little bad about it ("I don't advertise it"). Chalomet is the ideal of a non-threatening Christian.
When the Chalomet character appeared, it seemed to signal that the film had failed to reach escape velocity as satire. But it soon became clear that the film had hived off a non-satirical subplot. The introduction of the long-haired, surprisingly charismatic outsider delivering a message of love and forgiveness on the eve of Armageddon, and presiding over a last supper, where a room full of scientists and atheists so unfamiliar with the traditions of religion that they don't even know how to say "amen" face their doom in serene prayer, is hardly subtle--this character and message is a repudiation of both the know-nothings and the frantic do-gooders. Or so it seems to me. It is possible of course to take the position that the "last supper" is no more than a sympathetic depiction of one of a variety of ways to meet the end of the world. But the piling on of the imagery (bread and wine in abundance, and the configuration of the table, not to mention the tone of the final prayer) suggests otherwise. And the film seems to go out of its way to encourage this Christian reading. The Bezos/Musk character and delivers a prediction the viewer is meant to remember: his algorithm has calculated that the sexiest astronomer in the world will die alone. And we learn later that the algorithm is so clairvoyant that it could accurately predict the cause of the president's death millennia in the future at the hands of a previously unknown species. And yet, the algorithm is wrong about the astronomer--he dies surrounded by those he loves. Somehow, thanks to the Christlike Chalomet character, the astronomer has escaped the hell he has created for himself. All of which is to say, I don't think the Christian message is hidden at all. It seems to be outlined in Christmas lights.
Maybe this is just me projecting my own worldview onto the movie, but I don't think the movie portrayed the people who screwed up trying to do the right thing as "lovable goofs". Ariana Grande, maybe, but it seemed like the protagonists' failures were taken deadly seriously, with the point being that these kinds of screwups are really, really bad and get people killed, and ultimately the people who can't do better than that aren't much better than the outright villains.
(The protagonists are portrayed much more *humanly* than the villains, and we get to see them deal with the consequences of their failures in a sympathetic way, but that's a far cry from taking the failures themselves lightly.)
I think that, in real life, the background level of overhyped crises is responsible only in small part for the inability of the public to react appropriately to big new developments. Like, media alarmism about scary new infectious diseases was always a thing, but most of what happened with COVID seems pretty unrelated to that.
I'd like to see better documentation of that comparison - how similar is this to the 1918 thing? It sounds like there were pro-maskers and anti-maskers then, but there was never a vaccine, and I haven't seen enough granular discussion of culture of the time to understand what sorts of conspiracy theories there were. There *doesn't* seem to be an important parallel in responses to World War II (though maybe Vietnam?)
There was a meme going around Facebook showing the Time Magazine cover article freaking out about a new disease for every year since 2008, with a clear implication of "Why should we believe this year is different?"
I only have a couple of covid-deniers on my wall, but the wolf-crying mass media is a recurring theme for them, and I think a substantive crux.
Most of the "overhyped crises" are things that people are told are happening *right now*, and are *real bad*. Then they look around and can maybe sort of vaguely notice that winters aren't as cold as they were ten years ago, or that a few of their friends got bad colds last winter, and they smell hype.
But, every year we tell people that satellites are tracking a thing that is going to be absolutely harmless until next Thursday morning and then suddenly maybe really bad, and sure, *some* of them respond with "hurricane, shmurricane, I'm staying put", but others evacuate. Some competently, some in panic, but at least *caring* about the issue.
So I'm not sure your comparison is valid. Hard to predict exactly what the response to a predicted comet impact would be, except that it won't be *nobody* cares. Or even just nobody but the protagonists.
I think there's more than one way to read the movie. I think you can read it the way Scott did, in which case it's mostly bad with some good points, or you can read it this way, in which case it's mostly good with some bad points.
Going a bit further with this, let's view it as a metaphor for three different things:
- Climate change. Adam McKay is on record as having intended this. As in the movie, we have a reasonably good idea what ought to be done about it, and are mostly frustrated by lack of political will (there will be lots of uncertainty on various details, but the big picture seems clear enough on an expected-value level). Otherwise, the movie's analysis of the relevant social dynamics and their causes is terrible.
- Pandemics. The script was finished too late to have been influenced by COVID-19, but the movie itself was not. As in the movie, we have lots of knowledge of how to address it that failed to be reflected in the political process (broadly construed to include business and such), but unlike in the movie, there are still lots of crucial considerations that even experts and other smart people with aligned incentives can't come to agreement on. The movie's analysis of the relevant social dynamics and their causes is likewise half-right.
- AI safety. I'd be really surprised if this were on McKay's radar at all. Unlike in the movie, the problem of figuring out what to do is fiendishly difficult and maybe just totally intractable. Otherwise, the movie's analysis of the relevant social dynamics and their causes is uncannily accurate, to the point of (apparently coincidentally) having caricatures of some of the same people playing the same roles as in real life; I think it's pretty probable that we're all going to die and it's going to look like this.
We do NOT "have a reasonably good idea what ought to be done about" climate change. Oh, sure, at a very high level of generality: we should try to keep temperature from going up much more if we can do it at reasonable cost. But that leaves so much up in the air, especially what is "reasonable cost".
Do we make carbon-emitting energy generation very expensive, or go to banning it entirely? Well, that f*cks the poorer half of the world's people. To be blunt, you can't get out of poverty with expensive energy. Do we build lots and lots of new model nukes that come with promises of simple and safe? Well, maybe you don't believe the promises, or you just hate nukes. Do we put lots of money into research on carbon-neutral energy but hold off on retiring present carbon-generating plants in the hope that there will be breakthroughs in cost? And so on.
While I’m hesitant to disagree with a golden retriever, I feel the need to point out that intermittent power sources require storage solutions to address the worlds energy needs. Talking only about one part of the equation is misleading. To the best of my knowledge there is no obvious solution to the storage problem which can scale sufficiently.
This being the case, is it fair to say that climate change is a problem that will mostly solve itself? As solar becomes the cheapest form of power generation, we'll naturally move off coal and oil without the need for any major government intervention. Temperature keeps going up a little bit, then it comes back down again, a few localised bad things happen, life goes on.
Maybe we can tweak a bit around the edges to speed this process up a little.
That's always been the most likely scenario - that the concern naturally becomes irrelevant with continued technological development. In the 1890s cities were in crisis because the use of horses was unsustainable - if you plotted out the curves, places like London and New York were obviously going to drown in horse manure - our concern with climate change feels a lot like that. The easiest prediction of all is that a century from now we'll still be worried about SOMETHING but the specific concerns of today will seem quaint by then because new concerns will have replaced them. Just as we no longer worry about horse manure or the population bomb or "killer bees".
Solar energy is not the cheapest form of energy. That's actually a literal scam.
If it was cheapest, then we'd expect places like California and Germany to have super cheap electricity. They don't. In fact, it's quite expensive, despite the fact that the price of electricity sometimes "goes negative".
Of course, that negative cost should be a huge alarm bell that something really bad is going on, because obviously you're going to need to make up for that at some point...
IRL, solar power is significantly more expensive than gas. They get the "cheaper" number via accounting mischief.
"Worthless" might be a better term than "cheap", as it would give a better view of what is going on in real life.
IRL, the cost of solar power is the cost of solar power + the cost of backup/storage, because solar energy sucks and produces energy only during the day, and produces a lot less when it is cloudy.
Power is a service, not a commodity, and storing it is horribly expensive.
Everything you've ever been told about this to make it seem otherwise is a lie.
To give you some idea of the scale of the problem - to use pumped water storage to store enough power for the US, you'd have to pump the equivalent of a Great Lake worth of water uphill every day.
One note, there seems to be a school of economic thought that says spending money for the sake of spending money is a social good - "stimulus package."
A bunch of state of the art nuclear plants along with uranium recycling infrastructure would be 1) quite a nice thing to pass along to future generations, 2) a way to spend a ton of money, and 3) probably reduce the carbon footprint (I admit there could be objections to 3).
I think a lot of that stuff is a mix of values disagreements (as opposed to empirical uncertainty) and things where there's a range of uncertainty about what's best but the status quo is very clearly outside it. There are also other things we could do at relatively little cost, like subsidize development of renewable energy and carbon sequestration in areas where the low-hanging fruit hasn't already been picked, such as countries currently climbing out of poverty.
Sure, I'll bite. This line of reasoning reminds me of a cartoon that depicts two dinosaurs looking up at the meteorite, and one exclaiming, "Oh, the Economy!"
As a 'skeptic' I enjoyed the Listen to the Scientists message on grounds of policy. The IPCC projects the cost of unabated climate change to be 2.6% in 2100
The climate economists, including Nobel winner Nordhaus, project that the ideal policy will result in a warming level of about 3.5 degrees by 2100, reducing the cost substantially - but none that I'm aware of remotely proposes that the cost-benefit is positive for current policies in two ways. First of all, under ideal policies the economic modelling is that 2 degrees would be not just uneconomic but nearly literally impossible. Secondly, the current policies of short term hard reductions in emissions are considered to be half as efficient as a carbon tax, which should be about $40 dollars a tonne if:
"Climate economists" and "the ideal policy will result in a warming level of about 3.5 degrees by 2100" sent me into a state that might have a German word for it. There might have been a facepalm involved, but I lost tactile sensation for a brief moment, so I'm not sure.
What you are coolly describing here as "optimal policy" is almost verbatim taken out of a currently fashionable, timely, yet poorly made, Netflix sensation, where two scientists discover a comet is about to hit the Earth.
This is an understandable sensory reaction, and delightfully there is even a Nobel winner on the Bad Side in the movie
I would respond with my own sensory type reaction to the Paris Accord - in theory a trillion or two dollar a year policy with a benefit as low as 10 cents on the dollar
Imagine someone told you they were going to spend World War levels of money on a problem that certainly deserves good solutions - and then find out that the policy, by simple back of the envelope calculations will not only result in World War type expenses but also do almost literally nothing to improve the situation
Back to the movie: the Good Guys decide that the correct policy is to move 1/3rd of the population to one side of the world in order to jump up and down in a nearly futile effort to move the earth out of the comet's path. Then they spend the rest of their attention and energy criticizing the people who, for a variety of reasons, disapprove of this
The IPCC didn't project the cost of unabated climate change to be 2.6% in 2100. That's the cost of increasing our CO2 emissions by a factor of something like 5. But it's the scenario the press always cite.
A price that starts low doesn't do much to change people's burning of carbon. I'm not sure there is such a thing as "long-term commitment" when it comes to climate change. The last 25 years are full of nice sounding words and little action when words have to be translated into reality. But assuming the price did get high, yes, the poor would be f*cked if there are no cheap reliable replacements. Right now there aren't.
I believe that Hawaii and New Zealand have done the start-low-with-a-commitment-to-go-high thing for the age of cigarette sales. I believe that many minimum wage increases and tax changes have also been phased in in that sort of gradual way. The way to get cheap reliable replacements is to make it clear to big companies that they won't be able to continue to profit unless they make a cheap, reliable replacement. (In this case, it is absolutely clear that cheap, reliable replacements are possible and will eventually arrive, and just need a clear economic signal in order to bring them forwards.)
I completely agree that many laws take effect in steps. And it usually works. On the other hand, with both Clinton and Bust I, there were large packages of immediate tax increases and somewhat vague promised expenditure cuts. Much of the expenditure cuts didn't happen. Raising energy prices has been like the latter.
Perhaps I do not have as good a crystal ball as you do but my awful cloudy one does not tell me that "it is absolutely clear that cheap, reliable replacements are possible and will eventually arrive, and just need a clear economic signal in order to bring them forwards."
I enjoyed that liberals in an excellent allegorical documentary of themselves as they see it depicted themselves as the people who believe the sky is falling
We have a reasonably good idea of what to do about climate change but that idea is nothing like what the sky is falling people are saying. The UN's projection for unabated warming is a cost of 2.6% of the 2100 economy while the Paris treaty has been analyzed to have a benefit to cost ratio of 10 to 30 cents on the dollar
Essentially what's happened is Chicken Little thinks the sky is falling, got really excited and cut off his head (the sky is falling, we have to do something dramatic and costly immediately!) and is now running around headless to virtually no positive effect. Torching trillions of dollars for benefits of hundreds of billions several decades from now. The fact that there are also ostriches with their heads in the sand doesn't change this essential fact about climate policy
Should be noted those Texas wind farms also involve a heavy amount of subsidies to get built. ~$30/MWh in a market where the clearing prices is regularly $20-30/MWh
If fossil fuels are so clearly uneconomical, why do greedy, profit-motivated corporations continue to use them? Do they specifically hate the planet for some reason, even more than they like making money?
A good example of the value rather than profit resulting from policy was a fairly recent assessment of the benefits of EVs. They found that even in the most decarbonized electricity grid the value of EV subsidies was negative due to an increase in the cost of accidents involving heavier EVs. The EV driver is safer but the other driver is not to a greater degree and the cost is more than the benefit of reduced emissions
Rather than subsidies that suffer from non market decision making and from potential rent seeking (even if no one bribes you higher subsidies buy votes and support) there should instead be a carbon tax applied on the system (and apparently an accident cost tax based on vehicle safety that would neutrally penalize EVs and Hummers)
How much of that money is from customers vs. from subsidies? In any case, seems like most of the companies involved in digging shit out of the ground and shipping it to me to burn once are doing pretty fine.
If you actually read the IPCC reports, you'll find that they predict climate change will have little impact on humans. Some arctic tundra and boreal forests will begin to support more life; many corals will die out; many shellfish may die. Amazonian forests will lose species. Weather patterns will shift. But the environmental damage global warming can do is trivial compared to the damage humans have already done just by building houses and planting crops.
The world's poor will be hit the worst, but no more badly than they were hit last year alone by Covid and Covid-induced work stoppages. No water-level rise fast enough to be a huge problem. No climate tipping point. Probably no agricultural lands lost that aren't made up by gains somewhere else, though they didn't go into that.
Interesting that liberal leaning folks tend to agree/enjoy this aesthetic. I would think it would be repulsive. I guess we should all descend into nihilism and misanthropy?
It’s a little bit comforting to know that others are just as depressed about the state of the world as you are, and yet we do the right thing in spite of it. But some of us just enjoy dark humor.
I'm trying to find a polite way of saying this, but it's pretty late in my time zone so please don't think I'm trying to offend: isn't this what you'd think if you're already a believer in a Cause? You think the Cause is pretty straightforward but feel boundless frustration that people fail to see it that way.
This says nothing about the Cause being right or wrong, only that Scott made some pretty good points on coordination being genuinely difficult.
I kind of feel like the people are engaging with the movie as an attempt at a serious social message instead of as a farce, and the reason they're doing that is because it's not very funny.
I'd argue the whole film is a motte-and-bailey, in essence, where it's trying to make very strong and sweeping social statements but dressing them in the clothes of farce as a shield if the ideas are poorly-received.
I think Sirota and McKay meant it as allegory for a serious social message (about climate change), and I think that allegory is off-base (the truth is far from obvious to a layman), and I think that can be worth pointing out. With that said, I found the movie pretty funny, and enjoyed its caricaturing of various different kinds of people.
I haven't seen the movie, but in Scott's summary, the major axis of conflict is between two different technical solutions which are both endorsed by different experts - one which is in reality more reliable, and one which is more profitable. Before that conflict, nobody knows about the comet because it's only visible through specialized telescopes.
I think there are a few major axes of conflict. In Act I, the conflict is between taking the comet seriously and bureaucratic indifference, and taking the comet seriously eventually wins. This leads to Act II, where the conflict is between deflecting the comet and harnessing its mineral resources, and the dodgier, greedier plan wins. And Act III centers on dueling PR campaigns ("Just Look Up"/"Don't Look Up"), with "Don't Look Up" winning by force, glassing the site of the "Just Look Up" international deflection effort and dooming the planet.
I think each of these could be viewed as commentary on climate change and the discussions around it, and I think the makers meant them to be (I think the director is on record saying so).
No, this is a false equivalence in the expertise. Notice how the original plan was designed, reviewed and endorsed by many different experts across the world, where with the profitable plan, the main characters literally asked each other, "has this been peer reviewed?", to which the audience knows the answer.
At the object-level of astronomical bodies colliding, do you think the "basic math" is simple enough that you yourself could calculate everything correctly on your own in ... six months?
I like math, I did well in math classes in school, including calculus, my favorite undergraduate class was 'real analysis' (i.e. calculus for math majors including deriving proofs of all the fundamental theorems), and I remember being daunted by trying to find an analytic solution to the _two_-body gravity problem. Any calculations accurate enough to predict the trajectory of a comet in our solar system are FAR beyond what I myself think of as "basic math".
You can solve the n-body problem pretty easily by writing the coupled differential equations for all the bodies and using a computer to solve it numerically with very small time steps, y(t+dt) = y(t) + y'(t) * dt, etc. You can do fancier and more efficient schemes by just looking at the ODE-solving chapter in any numerical computing book. No need to solve anything analytically, I could program this myself in a few hours at most, but asking wolfram alpha would probably be easier.
Yeah, that's a bit trickier, if I have available pictures of the comet through 2 separate telescopes on earth over a few weeks of observation, knowing the position of the earth over time (and the angles the telescopes made with the ground) I can convert those images to comet positions relative to the sun with some trigonometry. Finding the center of a fuzzy blob in a picture is actually pretty accurate, I don't think it would take much comet data to get a good idea of the near-term trajectory.
The problem is that all of this is already done automatically (and probably much better than I can do it in a few hours) by standard astronomy software that all telescopes use, so there would really be no point in me going through the trouble of likely having to email the relevant graduate students working at those telescopes to send me the raw data.
I start by calculating it as a 2-body problem -- the comet and the sun, determine the point it crosses Earth's orbit. I imagine Earth's ephemerides I could just look up and find out if it'll be there at the time. If that path doesn't bring it near any other massive solar system bodies (as a comet with high inclination likely will not), it's probably good enough. If it does, the calculation's going to have to be numeric anyway.
The hardest part would probably be figuring out the comet velocity (with associated probability distribution) and position from the blurry telescope pictures. But this is all moot because I'm sure that there's a very convenient python astronomy package that does all this in a single line.
I'm disputing that even a 2-body (gravitational) problem is "basic math".
I'm not sure calculating/estimating the trajectory, or even the position, of a comet could be done with "basic math" either.
I'd think there are quite a few people that _could_ produce pretty accurate calculations/estimations, especially if they can just use existing software, but then I wouldn't consider any of that to be "basic math".
A 2 body problem with one of the bodies negligible in size to the other (which makes it simpler) really is just "basic math". Even better, it's _solved_ basic math. The solutions are the Keplerian orbits (ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas), and going from observation to orbital elements is a well-documented (if tedious) procedure.
As Nybbler says, for the two-body case this is a problem that can be solved with pencil-and-paper calculation using algebraic formulas that have been published in textbooks that don't *quite* walk you through the exact process of solving this particular problem, but pretty close. There are still plenty of innumerate or math-phobic people who will screw it up (or more likely not even try), but if it's a matter of life and death, probably most people in the developed world know a guy who knows a guy who can get them the right answer.
Except, it's really a five-body problem at least, maybe seven, and the inputs will be a bit fuzzy, and now the math gets *really* hairy.
Seconded. I would define "basic math" (as opposed to "trust the experts") as math on a level most persons could do, like tallying electoral college votes.
While it is true that you do not a Field medalist to numerically solve the n body problem, the average person will not be able to follow the calculations. And trusting python packages is functionally no different from trusting experts. (The difficulty of measuring the comet velocity precisely was already mentioned.)
I would predict that different space agencies and academic groups would do any number of independent measurements and simulations, reach a consensus on which effects (e.g. relativity if the comet passes close to the sun, effect of light pressure, effect of material loss) are important enough to include and reach compatible probability estimates.
Also, there would be any number of dissenting voices out on youtube, telegram etc:
* "You forgot to account for the neutrino pressure/dark matter/dark energy."
* "I did my own calculation in Excel (or KSP) and we will be fine"
* "Comets pass by earth all the time. This is just a hype by Musk to sell more rockets."
While we would probably get more expert convergence than for climate change or covid predictions, laypersons would still have to trust the experts (or not).
By contrast, not even Trump would argue that he won the 2020 election simply because 232 is obviously bigger than 306.
To be charitable to the commenter to which I replied, "basic math" could be interpreted as 'math that humanity as a whole is reasonably capable at performing reliably', e.g. along the lines you mentioned with multiple organizations/groups performing parallel calculations.
"Trust this python package written 10 years ago" is far better than "Trust the experts". Especially if I can try it out with various different packages.
From worst to best:
"Trust that Leo and J. Law wouldn't lead me wrong" (Maybe Leo and J. Law are lying or just wrong)
"Run Leo and J. Law's observations through pre-existing software to determine orbital elements. (but what if Leo and J. Law fudged the observations? The math works both ways!)
"Get independent confirmation from other scientists" (OK, but what if there's a big conspiracy?)
"Get independent observations from other scientists, and run that through existing software" (But they could all be fabricating the data!)
"Get a telescope and observe the thing myself, with my crack team of lone gunmen astronomers, and run THAT through existing software" (now they have to either corrupt my lone gunmen, or software that's been around for a while)
"Get a telescope and observe the thing myself with my crack team of lone gunmen astronomers. Then with multiple crack teams of lone gunmen grad students, work through the calculations by hand and cross-check with each other and those existing software packages" (yeah, I guess it's hitting. Shit)
Major governments will obviously make it to the penultimate step (where "myself" = some group of government-affiliated researchers, or President Orleans's Ivy League people); it's trivial for them. Depending on how bright the comet is, normal people may be stuck relying on publicly released observations for a while.
If it passes near the sun your precision is shot in any case; unpredictable heating effects will assure that.
Seconded. In the movie, the only way to get people's attention is either to entertain them or to riot their emotions. There's no place for the truth or cold hard facts. I think the second rant of the expert invited on the talk show reflects that.
I think the tone of the movie reflects pretty well the experience of navigating media and social media, with serious issues being juxtaposed to clickbait and thus seeming less important.
Yeah, it is possible to make a movie that concerns the process of science communication, but doesn't have a coherent view on it because the thing it is trying to advance a view about is something else.
Well, everyone is entitled to an opinion. The movie was so full of tropes it is hard to take any message seriously. Start with the notion that the initial effort to blow up or move the "comet" ... That is stupid beyond description, certainly in the current day. And, by the way, comets are mainly frozen ice. They don't have all the chemicals the so-called corporate CEO lusts for. Just a really stupid move that will, nevertheless, capture the imaginations of the smart set. You know, like Scott.
Also, will probably ban this commenter for a month for a combination of being nasty and wrong, but I'll wait to see if they have some response to this first.
Yep. I asked the question because it seemed relevant to the discussion, not rhetorically. I do not know the answer to my question, though I suspect you are right.
I think if somebody comes to a home on invitation to hang out and chat about movies, and call the host an idiot, and the host shows the offender the door and asks not to come back for a while - there's not much basis to complain. Maybe on objective scale it's a bit of overreaction, but playing stupid games wins stupid prizes...
If you read the entirety of the single sentence comment you replied to it sure seems like he's still waiting for a final decision on whether the guy is wrong.
He provided a link demonstrating that the commenter is wrong, and has given the commenter a chance to explain why he isn't wrong. I don't see any process skipping or smugness from Scott here. Maybe from you though.
Fair enough. I was just trying to point out that it's hard to draw a hard line between what's wrong and what's not. I think it was in keeping with the spirit of Scott's post. If I'm wrong, then hey, I'm wrong!
Are you really sure you're making a good point, or did you skip the process of thinking it through to act smug about it?
Does the fact that I'm directing this phrase at *your* post, to which it seemingly doesn't really apply, in order to point out that your post is itself directing the phrase at a comment to which it seemingly doesn't really apply, actually show that your point — that it is hard to know when this phrase can fairly be applied — is valid after all and *not*, in fact, a smug misapplication?
Or does it show that a thinker of my calibre (heavy, obviously) can quickly and reliably tell when it is, indeed, fair to apply this criticism, and when it is not? Or does it instead show that unwarranted confidence in the level of one's own understanding is, truly, endemic, and the post was making a good point after a—
[transmission ends in burst of smug meta-reasoning]
I'm pretty confident that from an engineering and orbital mechanics perspective, a comet massive enough to wipe out all life on earth could probably not be deflected given 6-months-to-impact notice, with our current state of preparation. I think we're much closer to being able to do so than we were 20 years ago, given the success of spacex, but the limiting factors are pretty extreme.
edit: obviously, this depends on a variety of factors including its trajectory (a slow-approaching comet would be easier to deflect than one shooting in at a fraction of C)
To be fair, a more accurate analog to either COVID or climate change would be a comet large enough to, say, wipe out a large city when it impacts or maybe create tidal waves that deluge coastal cities- total casualties of, say, 10-20 million people. Worth paying attention to, but also not world-ending.
I'm *guessing* a comet that small could conceivably be deflected with today's technology if you detonated a couple thousand nukes on one side, assuming you got enough manpower and resources behind the project. But... on the other hand, most people on earth could just ignore the problem and it wouldn't make any serious difference to their lives, and a strategic evacuation of affected areas might make more economic sense.
delivering "a couple thousand nukes" to a point in deep space in a couple months (remember, every day closer increases the delta-V needed to deflect) sounds basically impossible.
edit: additionally, you'd likely need some kind of timing trick to get that to work? because nukes aren't like TNT, if a nuke goes off next to another nuke, it generally doesn't "trigger a chain reaction", the other nuke usually just is blown apart without a nuclear detonation.
Yes it was a silly approach shown, in a comedic film meant to parody reality...I think that was the point and it was an intentional joke for the audience. Where even the most intelligent people doing their best to get the truth out don't seem to know a lot about comets vs asteroids or about realistic methods to deflect dangerous objects in space.
It was a wink at the audience that none of the characters were working with fully correct information.
Like in the parody movie Airplane! where it is a jet plane and you can hear the propellers in the background the entire film. In this case it was everyone talking about a comet when an asteroid would have made more sense.
I'd say it would be highly technically and logistically challenging to deliver a thousand nukes into deep space and wire them all to detonate simultaneously, but bear in mind that nuclear warheads themselves are not that large (it's the delivery system that's bulky.)
I'm not sure how many of those you could squeeze into a Dragon capsule, but if you could deliver 25 per trip and do a launch every 3 days, then in 120 days (4 months) you'd have 1000 warheads in space.
I have no idea what the specific mass/energy of a city-destroying comet would be, and whether that many warheads would suffice, but someone here can probably do the math. Again, the question is whether it would be cheaper and easier to just evacuate at-risk areas and rebuild afterward.
Delivering the nukes in a constant stream would probably be better logistically and a less fragile approach in general than setting off a single big bang.
I did the calculations for deflection with only one month notice in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up/comment/4300386, and for many comets you would need only a tiny fraction of one nuke, not thousands of nukes. Suppose such a comet (3e9 kg) were in a solar orbit at nearly escape velocity from the sun (42 km/s) and then fell to earth, which would give it 11 km/s of velocity from rest. It would impact at about 43 km/s if the Earth were at rest relative to the sun:
You have: (42**2 + 11**2)**(1/2)
You want:
Definition: 43.416587
But Earth's orbital velocity is another 29.8 km/s, so depending on the relative angle of the Earth's orbit and the comet's orbit at the intersection point, the impact speed could be anywhere between 13.6 km/s and 73.2 km/s. Barring a gravitational assist from another planet during the same comet pass, it can't be higher than that because a comet moving faster than that wouldn't be in orbit around the Sun at all; it would be an interstellar intruder like ʻOumuamua.
13.6 km/s would give it 300 PJ of impact energy, 60 megatonnes of TNT, about an eighth of Tsar Bomba [correction: slightly larger than Tsar Bomba], which as far as we know didn't injure anybody. But if it had hit a city, it would have largely destroyed the city:
You have: half 3e9 kg (13.6 km/s)**2
You want: PJ
* 277.44
/ 0.0036043829
You have: half 3e9 kg (13.6 km/s)**2
You want: megatonnes tnt
* 60.155195
/ 0.016623668
At the other extreme, 73.2 km/s would be 8 exajoules, 1.7 gigatonnes TNT:
You have: half 3e9 kg (73.2 km/s)**2
You want: EJ
* 8.03736
/ 0.12441896
You have: half 3e9 kg (73.2 km/s)**2
You want: megatonnes tnt
* 1742.6793
/ 0.00057382903
That's three or four times the size of Tsar Bomba [no, 350 times] and eight times the size of the Krakatoa eruption, which produced a two-year-long volcanic winter.
In conclusion, the impact of such a comet would probably be city-destroying rather than planet-destroying, but it would not be technologically challenging to prevent it, just as with keeping covid under control.
But there are other comets out there that are three or four orders of magnitude larger. Fortunately, there aren't nearly as many of them, and we know where most of them are.
You should only need 1 nuke. If it is still a long ways away from earth you would only need to deflect its path slightly and a nuke has lots of energy. A nuke does however have very little mass. You would likely need to drill into the comet and use the nuke to split it so that the two pieces (likely one large one small) would split apart with the large part adequately deflected.
Interestingly, nuclear-scale impactors hit earth every couple of years! A 170 kt tnt-equivalent asteroid blew up over the Bering sea in 2019. They generally miss populated areas (or, more rarely, air-burst high enough up to avoid mass casualties, as in the case of the Chelyabinsk Oblast bolide, which was about a half megaton and injures a bunch of people).
But we are just sort of blithely rolling the dice every few years that one of these things isn't going to hit manhattan and kill three or four million people in five seconds.
I've seen documentaries making a reasonable case for the math of asteroid insurance, though I'd agree that having a more reliable warning + deflector system would be preferable. Probably have to wait until we get that space bridge installed in 2087.
An interesting assertion. We can take as a minimum the impactor thought to be responsible for Meteor Crater (about 50m across) and as a maximum the Chicxulub impactor (10-75 km). The former has a kinetic energy of ~120 MT while the latter about 10^9 MT. So that's about how much energy you need to supply to deflect it if you discover it too late for anything other than a wide angle deflection to work. (The world's supply of thermonuclear weapons probably totals about 1400-3000 MT.) If you catch it far enough away that a small angle will work, multiply approximately by the sine of the angle required.
I would say in terms of the sheer energy to be supplied, it is perhaps barely possible. But when you add in the logistics -- transporting thousands of tons of devices and heavy machinery, and either the exquisitely complex and sophisticated robots or the large well-trained human crew necessary to use the force precisely, to interplanetary distances, in an era when the biggest rockets we have are barely able to throw a metric ton or two to Mars -- I would say it moves into the realm of implausible even for quite small impactors.
I did the calculations for one month notice in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up/comment/4300386, and it looks like it would be pretty straightforward from an engineering perspective, just because the amount of energy required is so small. (Getting bureaucratic approval for a launch within a week or two, with nukes on it, is the harder aspect of the problem.) Agreed that relativistic projectiles would not be so easy.
I don't think they can in fact launch rockets without approval from the US government (I think there are controls in place to prevent this) and they are internally a bureaucracy as well. But the potentially larger problem is getting the warheads.
SpaceX could probably launch *once* without bureaucratic approval, if they were willing to deal with "legal fallout" that would make all their future launches much more difficult. But this is a problem that will take much more than a single launch to solve.
Legally, SpaceX needs FAA approval to launch anything, even from an offshore or foreign site, and the bureaucrats in question can call on uniformed men with guns to enforce the rules. We can hope that whoever is running the executive branch of the government would make sure that's not a problem in this scenario, but if POTUS is being an ass (or an incompetent buffoon), then SpaceX can't fix the problem alone/
FWIW, the science consultant on the movie, Amy Mainzer, agrees with you:
"McKay and Mainzer first connected two years ago, when McKay was writing the screenplay. One issue was Comet Dibiasky’s size, which McKay had imagined at thirty-two kilometres in diameter. “I said, ‘No, no—if it’s too big, people just throw up their hands,’ ” Mainzer recalled. They settled on nine kilometres: big enough to wipe out humanity, but small enough that there was a chance of stopping it. Mainzer had pushed for a longer interval between discovery and impact, since you’d want four or five years to build a comet-busting spacecraft, but, for dramaturgical reasons, McKay stuck with six months. “It would be like doing ‘Jaws’ where the shark attacks take place over a fourteen-year period,” he said."
I haven’t seen the actual movie, but surely whether or not deflecting an interstellar body within 6 months is ‘possible’ depends hugely on the mechanics of exactly where it’s predicted to hit, and which way we’re moving at the time.
For instance, if it’s predicted to hit perpendicular to the Earth’s direction of motion, and ‘hit’ means ‘graze the trailing edge’ then a 1-second delay in impact time converts that to missing the Earth’s atmosphere completely (we move about 30km/s Google tells me). I haven’t sat down and done the maths, but that seems pretty doable. Certainly a very different scenario from ‘it’s hitting dead centre at the precise point in our orbit when we’re also heading straight for it’
For almost any impact, nudging the impactor off course by a couple of Earth diameters (sideways) would be sufficient to prevent it. Time before impact and size/composition of the object are the main factors in the difficulty of deflection. Difficulty of reaching it far in advance is also a factor, and that can depend on which way the Earth is heading at the time as well as the impactor's trajectory. But the angle of impact is not so important.
In the part 4 of Axis of Madness, Species War, the hive mind is faced with a similar situation. A 60 mile in diameter asteroid is headed towards earth, and it has very little time to decide what to do. The description of the colision is earth shattering. And the description of degeneracy leading to the formation of the hive is even more explicit.
Agreed, although I think it's more accurate to say that our ability to do so has waxed and waned in direct proportion to the heavy-lift vehicles humanity has at its disposal. We probably had a better shot in the 70s than we did in the 90s.
I could hear John Schilling screaming at the screen from where I was.
At *best*, the original attack would deflect the comet, not destroy it, and only *barely* deflect it.[1]
But if you live in a world where the Deflect Mission can happen, then the proper response is to just let Deflect Mission happen, and then attempt to do Capture Mission on the now barely-deflected comet.
Very good point. All the sensible options leave the comet largely intact and on almost the same trajectory. Still, if the writers want to turn "Deflect Mission" into "Blow Comet to Smithereens Mission" for dramatic purposes, that would be one of the lesser sins of this screenplay.
yes, but you're ignoring travel time and lead time; let's say it takes 2 months to decide and build our response. I think that would be shockingly quick, but regardless.
You might be thinking "so what, 4 months is only 50% more energy needed!", but we still need to factor in how long it takes us to make the intercept. let's say our comet is moving at roughly 30 km/s relative to the earth; this is fast, but this is also the orbital velocity _of the earth_, so most asteroids and all comets will be moving faster (relative to the sun) than that.
reaching low earth orbit from the ground takes roughly 10 km/s of delta-v. a Falcon 9 rocket can deliver 22.8 tons to low earth orbit. a laden Falcon 9 rocket weighs 550 tons. let's be crazy and just pretend we can ship a falcon 9 up, piece by piece, on falcon 9s (or, more realistically, put one in orbit and then shuttle fuel to it) in one month. this gives us, in orbit, a rocket that can impart 10 km/s of delta-v on a 22.8t payload, sitting in space. That's pretty good, we've never been anywhere near that amount of power in space before. with 3 months left, if we assume our comet is closing at 15 km/s and our rocket is closing on it at 10 km/s, we should meet it with roughly 36 days left. a nuke could probably still do that? it's "only" about 6 times your estimate, so 180 kT of kinetic energy? that's a lot, but relatively little compared to nukes. but remember that nukes do not impart 100% of their energy on a comet/asteroid; at the limit, one would expect them to impart 50% of their energy (imagine exploding against a flat wall), but I think much less of it would actually go to kinetic energy.
The nuke-to-kinetic energy calculation is beyond my paygrade. I also think the "launching an entire, fueled falcon 9 to LEO" scenario is ludicrously optimistic, and while you could do your launch piecemeal (i.e. send things straight at the comet rather than waiting to assemble in LEO) and that's probably better, I think it's still pretty far from clear-cut.
Yes, certainly am ignoring all that - was just talking about the physics of it which is what I thought the claim was. You're right that even if we have something ready to go, the intercept time is unavoidable. Sending a falcon 9 up piecemeal obviously isn't something we can do right now, but orbit-refuellable starships might fit the bill, Musk says a fully-fuelled one with 100 tons of cargo would have 7km/s of delta v, which is getting close to the Falcon 9's 10km/s. If some of the 100T was itself a vehicle with its own propulsion, you could get even more delta v.
That's also assuming 100% conversion of nuclear explosion energy to asteroid kinetic energy, which isn't plausible. Even 1% isn't plausible. For scenarios that don't involve Bruce Willis drilling a hole into the asteroid, the coupling is closer to 0.01%.
The scenarios that involve launching Bruce Willis out to the comet with a bunch of nuclear warheads, involve him watching the comet whiz past at better than fifty kilometers a second, lamenting the fact that we don't have engines capable of matching that sort of velocity.
Disclaimer: I'm an idiot. This thought that occurred to me is likely idiotic. So go easy on me.
But, rather than blowing it out of it's orbit why not instead land thrusters on the comet and change its trajectory that way. I have no idea about the numbers, it's probably as unlikely as trying to nudge it out of orbit with nuclear bombs, but it's still a possible scenario if you're looking at all scenarios, right?
That's been discussed for asteroids that we can track and predict twenty years into the future, and that have lower relative velocities than comets. In that context, it's reasonable.
Comets come out of the deep dark of trans-Neptunian space on very short notice(*), and at speeds great enough that flying out to meet them in a timely manner and then reversing course to rendezvous with and land on them while carrying any significant payload is impractical with current or near-future technology.
* Except for the periodic comets that we already know about, and none of those are impact threats.
You have to admit that it's a good jab - you've unfortunately (perhaps unintentionally) become one of the leading lights of a group of people who can generally be described as "extremely smart, but also extremely dumb". I should know - I've followed you for years and I'm very much that.
It's a late response to a comment waaaay upthread, with the result that it seems to have been buried down here. No matter - the issue was resolved amicably it seems.
Yes. There are certainly a lot of scientific inaccuracies in the movie, but that's not too bad imo given the genre we're in here.
The basic idea of deflecting a comet with nukes is serious, even if basically all details in the movie pertaining to implementation are not. (Also, the detection scene is fairly silly. But then again, not a big deal really)
> With one year of notice, and at an interception location no closer than Jupiter, it could also deal with the even rarer short period comets
From the _Don't Look Up_ Wikipedia article:
> [Female scientist] discovers a previously unknown comet just inside of Jupiter's orbit at 4.6 au from the Sun. Her professor [] calculates that it will impact Earth in about six months
Read together, it seems like the deflection depicted in the movie is significantly more challenging than the one described in the Wikipedia article (which itself relies on rockets more powerful than any currently in service)
It's an open question, although in all likelihood we would be completely powerless to deflect a mass-extinction class comet/asteroid with current level technology. The delta v change required simply requires a tremendous amount of energy, given the kinetic energy of the astronomical body itself. Maaaaybe if you catch it really far away? People are trying to investigate it though. Stay tuned for the results of the DART mission. :-) For context, the impacted object in this mission will be a minor-planet moon 170 meters across...
I'm not sure it's that unrealistic. If you catch it 1 month out, you need enough delta v to move it by the radius of the Earth or so over the course of a month. That's like 2.5 m/s. If you assume this thing is a sphere of diameter 170 meters with the density of water, that's something like 1.5*10^10 J, which is a lot, but not on the scale of nuclear weapons.
It should affect things a bit. Gravity will increase the scattering cross-section some. I haven't done the calculation, but I would imagine that the effect will be small because the comet will be traveling by the Earth fairly quickly (and thus there will be fairly little time for gravity to have an impact).
The comment would probably be on a hyperbolic orbit relative to Earth (meaning if it doesn’t hit it will just blow right by, not be captured into an Earth orbit) and presumably Earth’s gravity would already be taken into account when you worked out that it was on a collision trajectory. Probably doesn’t change the calculation terribly much.
Mostly confirmed, but you overestimated the mass by an order of magnitude [correction: the energy, by a factor of 2], and also 1.5e10 J is only 4200 kWh, so we're talking about only a few thousand watts of rocket power. Calculations provided with GNU units 2.19 for reproducibility:
$ units
Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2019-05-31
3460 units, 109 prefixes, 109 nonlinear units
You have: earthradius/month
You want: m/s
* 2.4226732
/ 0.41276718
You have: spherevol(half 170 m) water / gravity
You want:
Definition: 2.5724408e+09 kg
You have: half spherevol(half 170 m) water (2.42 m/s)**2 / gravity
You want: J
* 7.5326211e+09
/ 1.3275591e-10
You have: half spherevol(half 170 m) water (2.42 m/s)**2 / gravity
You want: kilotonnes tnt
* 0.0016332407
/ 612.27964
You have: half spherevol(half 170 m) water (2.42 m/s)**2 / gravity
You want: kWh
* 2092.3948
/ 0.00047792129
You have: 1.5e10 J
You want: kWh
* 4166.6667
/ 0.00024
You have: half spherevol(half 170 m) water (2.42 m/s)**2 / gravity month
You want: W
* 2864.3935
/ 0.00034911405
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet mentions several comets in that size range, but also says Halley's Comet and a few others are three or four orders of magnitude larger than that, 1e13 to 3e14 kg. Such a comet would require three or four orders of magnitude more energy to deflect given only a month's warning, 1-10 kilotonnes TNT instead of a few megawatt-hours. Probably that could be delivered with current human capabilities as a small nuke but not as, for example, ion engines. Starship will change that if it works.
I think I just missed the factor of 2 in E = 1/2 m v^2. (7.5e9 is half of 1.5e10).
But yeah, this is probably in the range where you could use rockets rather than than nukes. Though both cases run into the issue of trying to turn energy into momentum losing you a lot unless you have reaction mass to spare.
I appreciate the tip from the other comment, but I'm not sure what these numbers are referring to? Could you walk me through it a bit more explicitly?
Would a comet only 170m^3 really pose an existential threat to life on earth or even be visible from the ground for long, though? In the other thread I was positing a comet large enough to wipe out millions (but not the planet)- can you estimate what size that would be and the effort needed to deflect it, given 6 months' warning?
Sorry, I can't find the specs for the comet in the other thread.
Looking at this one though... googling "comet impact velocity" says that we should expect something like 50km/s. Using this exactly, we compute the impact energy on Earth as...1.3e19 J.
That's... probably not wiping out all life on Earth. It's like 100x the energy of the biggest nukes, but something like 100,000x short of the impact that killed the dinosaurs.
If we scale the mass up by five orders of magnitude though, that is probably enough to kill most people and still means that a nuke will deliver enough energy (if delivered properly) to divert it.
170 cubic meters would not be big enough to matter. Objects that size hit Earth every year or so without anybody noticing. The Chelyabinsk meteor was about 4000 cubic meters and would have done major damage if it had hit a city instead of exploding in the upper atmosphere, injuring a thousand people and giving instant sunburns to some of them.
170 meters in diameter is 2.6 million cubic meters:
You have: spherevol(half 170 m)
You want:
Definition: 2572440.8 m^3
That's big enough to wipe out millions, but not the planet. If you had 6 months instead of 1 month to deflect it, you'd need to change the comet's velocity by only one sixth as much, about 400 millimeters per second:
You have: earthradius/6 months
You want: mm/s
* 403.77887
/ 0.0024766031
This would require about 3% as much energy, about 200-300 MJ for the 170-m-diameter size we were talking about:
You have: half 3e9 kg (earthradius/6 months)**2
You want: MJ
* 244.55607
/ 0.0040890419
Or about 70 kilowatt hours, or 50 kg TNT:
You have: half 3e9 kg (earthradius/6 months)**2
You want: kWh
* 67.932241
/ 0.014720551
You have: half 3e9 kg (earthradius/6 months)**2
You want: kg tnt
* 53.025223
/ 0.01885895
This could be a rocket of under 100 watts, a few hundred newtons of thrust, depending on how long it had to operate (there's a tradeoff where you can use lower power over a longer period of time, but requiring more total energy).
You have: 3e9 kg 400mm/s/2months
You want: N
* 228.15911
/ 0.0043829064
As for walking you through it a bit more explicitly, can you be more specific about which parts are unclear? Is it the GNU Units syntax, the Newtonian physics, or something else? Maybe you understood all of that and I just made a dumb calculation error?
Extinction-level comets/asteroids, such as the one in the movie/the one that wiped the dinosaurs, are more on the 5/10km diameter range. Assuming the same density, here alone we're talking about a 3640-fold increase in mass (assuming 170 vs. 10000 meter diameter bodies). You're also being optimistic on the average density, but I doubt you'd be off by more than a factor of 1-2x, hence all things considered a rather small deviation when compared to the former.
Yeah, I think we came to this conclusion elsewhere. A 7000-fold increase still leaves nukes with easily enough *energy* output to deflect it, though there is still an issue with how effectively you can turn that energy into momentum.
I used the wrong formula (area of circle instead of volume of sphere). The energy is actually ~200k times higher. Please see my other comment. Also, agree with the problem of effective use of a bomb to impart momentum on a celestial body.
Extinction-level impactors are more on the 5-10km diameter range. Considering the same density and velocity relative to Earth, mass sphere r=5000/mass sphere r=85 =~ 203541 times more kinetic energy than Didymoon. Also quite unsure how effective a nuke or any other kind of high-yield explosive device would be an efficient way to impact momentum on a celestial body, given that most energy would not be directed at the body (assuming a spherical blast, which seems reasonable).
So, the good news mechanically is that the earth is really small by cosmic standards. Hitting a target like the earth from months or years away requires extreme precision. Even a small change in velocity is generally enough to turn a hit into a miss, and the power of that disruption increases the further out from impact it is. I know in some cases, simply painting the object white to increase the pressure exerted by the sun's light would be sufficient, if you had enough lead time. A sufficiently large nuclear weapon could also potentially nudge it enough. There's more we could (and should!) do to prepare, but we aren't entirely helpless, especially if Starship works out (which would enable us to put a high-delta-v high-payload mission together in a hurry).
To be clear, I don't mean to imply you're completely wrong. There's lots of scenarios where we'd be pretty much screwed, especially if we detected it really shortly before impact. But doing something about it with ~current technology isn't physically ridiculous, and there is a subset of scenarios where we have more warning where you could put a meaningful mission together. I also think the near-future outlook may improve a great deal.
Someone should make a series of questions on metaculus to determine what's the largest impactor that humans could deflect given 0.5/1/2/10/100 years advance notice.
I'm 75% confident that the internet would still exist in some form the next day after a chixculub-equivalent impact, and 98% confident humans would still exist ten years later.
* Animals were immediately buried under 10cm of debris 1600 miles from the impact, but lots of humans will survive that by being farther away or inside buildings
* magnitude 9 earthquake on average across the entire globe, which would be very bad, but won't kill everyone.
* Datacenters are connected to each other by underground cables that likely survive, and many of them have dedicated primary and backup generators nearby.
* Most of the starlink satellites would not be destroyed by ejecta.
* Cooling and partial dimming of sunlight will reduce global agricultural productivity by a lot for many years (wild guess: 40-80%, Help me on this if you have more specific data). We can supplement it with LED grow lights. A human consumes 100 watts of food, and crops are ~0.4% efficient in sunlight, but much more efficient when illuminated by LEDs that only produce the appropriate frequencies. LEDs themselves are 85% efficient. So I guess it's going to take 3000-10000 watts of electricity to grow enough food for one person. Total global electrical capacity of ~10^13 watts could support 1-3 billion people on grow lights. So it seems very plausible that less than half of the humans will starve.
My thinking is this: A comet is an ice ball, at worst a dirty one. Not sure they can be “diverted”. Heck it responds to solar “wind” by elongating, not moving. Maybe shattered into smaller ice balls. But moved? I have my doubts. A meteor? Better chance but it’s mass relative to a comet? Hmmm.
My objection was to what I saw as a simplistic “believe the scientists, not the greedy capitalist” theme. A commenter here noted that tropes were the point. But that really is my point. It was not believable but the movie seeks to shape a false science - in my view - to push a narrative that is just not supported. The narrative of Trump/capitalism versus “truth”. It’s a bit much, particularly in our current milieu of “believe the science” where the science is sometimes suspect and doesn’t consider alternatives. And is often political - on both sides.
Scott, my comment was snarky and smart-assed for sure. But “nasty” I am not so sure. But it’s your blog, your site, and clearly you can ban me if you choose. I can live with that. Heck, I think that was my first comment here. Maybe I just don’t really get the posting etiquette.
OK, Scott, but I still take issue with the disproportionate size of the ban you considered imposing on someone who was briefly snide about you -- as compared to what you're willing to mete out to someone who goes after somebody else. I'm moving up to here a comment about this matter that was originally lower in the thread, but seems more appropriately placed here:
Jeez Scott, as low-quality comments go this one seems relatively low in toxicity and discourtesy. Until the last sentence it's just rambly personal reactions to the movie, plus some info about comets which yeah, we know. Then at the end he says something snide about you. And you're proposing to ban the person for a *month*?! It's not the length of the sentence I object to, it's the inequity. A couple threads ago I posted a complaint, civil in tone, about someone on Substack whom I thought was publishing misinformation about covid vaccination, and got showered with half a dozen *ridiculously* rude, mocking and insulting comments by one individual, comments with no argumentive substance to them at all, and you only banned that person for a week. The term "incivility" really doesn't cover the level of nastiness and savagery this person was dealing out. Privately I thought, Wow, what does this guy have to do to get banned for longer than a week -- threaten murder?
And now you want to ban someone for a *month* for a post that has one little sarcastic sneer at the end about your membership in the smart set?
And by the way, the same poster who savaged my posts then liberally sprinkled the whole rest of the thread with multiple responses to other people's posts. Most were content-free, just pure stoopit sneer. Want some examples?
-"You people crack me up."
-"Friendly reminder: You don´t get it."
-"Yes, great handwaving pains with no actual basis in the data."
I'm not crazy about how much your standards vary depending on whether the person getting shit on is Self or Other. Others are selves too.
Well, not exactly. My point isn't that rudeness to me is more important than rudeness to others, it is that a recent episode of rudeness to me was vastly greater in both degree of rudeness and in number of rude comments. And the rest of my point was that it was not a great look for Scott to propose a month-long ban for the lower-scale rudeness, to him, and a much shorter ban for a way bigger load of rudeness to another member of the forum — whether the other member of the forum was me or, for instance, you, Adam.
I feel like I have a pretty consistent policy of banning people who are rude to others more than to me - this is part of why MarxBro rarely gets banned. The main thing that annoyed me about this post was him calling people who believe you can deflect comets "stupid beyond description, certainly in the current day" - you can read the comment policy here, it's very clear that the combination of insulting and wrong gets you banned. But I was also annoyed about the "this movie is bad so it appeals to the smart set" stuff - I realize I'm at risk of compulsive anti-elitism and cultivating a comment section that does that too, and so I try to be harsh on people who are snide, extremely anti-elite, have few actual things to say, and wrong about the facts all at once.
I haven't yet read this poster's other bad comments. I am not able to read every comment on this blog. The main reason I read this comment and not others is that this was the first comment on this post. I'm working on getting a "report comment" function available, but it's not ready yet.
Also consider the possibility that the reason bad posters don't get banned as often as they should is that whenever I even moot the possibility of a banning, people write long comments like this one about how biased and mean and selfish I am, and so I dread having to even consider it.
OK, Scott, having thought all this over I’ve realized what my real complaint is, and also what it isn’t.
What my complaint isn’t:
I don’t really mind your not displaying the wisdom of Solomon in your response to a piece of snark. Threatening to ban the poster still seems like an overreaction to me, but maybe I’m wrong, and anyhow you don’t have to be perfect to stay in my good graces. In hosting this forum you are giving a lot of people something quite special and good, and I feel grateful and not inclined to make a fuss about little things.
What my real complaint is:
There is *too much incivility* on this forum, and I’m pretty sure the amount is increasing. It’s cutting into the pleasure of being here — at least it’s cutting into *my* pleasure. I really don’t know what to do about the increase in low-grade incivility —things like silly gotchas, unkindness, irritable bickering etc. Moderating aimed at low-level incivility may be destructive of the ecosystem, and anyhow it’s too time-consuming to be practical. But I’ll settle for a reduction in the highest level of incivility, verbal abuse, of which I have seen a fair amount in recent threads. I’ll post some thoughts about incivility and how to handle it on the next open thread.
You can definitely divert it with a big enough nuke - not through the shock wave (vacuum), but through the asymmetric outgassing caused by the *massive* radiation flux, which produces thrust. This works for asteroids as well as comets
Moving the closest approach of some comet a certain amount then becomes a question of bomb yield and intercept time (earlier intercepts need smaller dV for obvious reasons)
I don’t think you understand the physics - the solar wind absolutely does “move” the comet, just not very much because the force is very low relative to the kinetic energy.
It’s just a mass in space. If you apply force to it, it will be accelerated. Enough force, and it will be accelerated enough to miss earth.
If you smack it with a nuke, you’ll probably blow a big crater into it, some of the material from which will certainly achieve escape velocity from the comet. But the bulk of the comet would absorb the energy and be accelerated in the opposite direction of the impact.
I mean, landing a rocket on it and applying thrust that way, or blasting it sequentially with a bunch of small bombs, might work better. But the fact that it’s a “dirty ice ball” instead of a rock doesn’t alter the fundamental problem of “apply force, get acceleration”.
A fusion or fission bomb would probably work better than a chemical rocket engine. Just because you get more bang for your kg.
Btw, even just blowing the comet to bits but not altering the trajectory much might also be useful: the atmosphere is better at burning up lots of small bits before they hit the ground than one big one.
That seems a little oversimplified to me. A thermonuclear explosion doesn't provide force (= change in momentum), it supplies energy, almost all in a huge blast of X-rays and gammas. On Earth you get a large amount of momentum change (a blast wave) because the atmosphere rapidly converts energy to momentum -- lots of air gets superheated on one side and accelerates in the other direction.
So if we set off an explosion near a comet, what happens is that the mass of the comet under it gets hot, and if it gets hot enough to ablate away we would indeed get a rocket effect, but to the extent it just gets hot no momentum is created.
You could bury the nuke to try to heat more material but I dunno if that would improve things. There's probably an optimum altitude for the best ablative rocket effect. Too high or too low and probably most of your energy just gets wasted (= not converted to momentum change).
Light itself does have some momentum, fwiw. Not sure if it'd make a difference on this scale, but it does mean that the blast of light technically does produce force even absent atmosphere.
As for being hot enough to ablate the object, I think most comets have plenty of ice and getting that to outgas isn't particularly unreasonable.
Yes, and there were some people who -- encouraged by artfully constructed semi-official rumor I would say -- who actually believed radiation pressure underlay the Ulam-Teller mechanism. How those in the know must have laughed at that.
As I've said below, I don't see *any* mechanism *other* than ablation and a rocket effect for delivering momentum to a heavenly body with a nuke. You need to convert a big pulse of energy into a big change in momentum, and that's the only way I think it can be done.
People have a habit of thinking "a bomb is a bomb, and my instincts on what a chemical explosion does ought to translate fairly well to what a nuclear explosion does." One of my main points here is to point out that this is wrong.
According to the movie, it's not just an ice ball - at least not entirely, it has enough minerals to be worth asking the president to let the Tech CEO to mine it. The question, of course, is how the mass is structured, and depending on this, it may be beneficial to either try to move it as a whole chunk, or split it into a number of smaller chunks moving into different directions.
> Maybe I just don’t really get the posting etiquette.
I believe the general rule has usually been, comments should pass at least two of "Buddha's gates" (is it true? is it necessary? is it kind?). The descriptor 'nasty and wrong' appears to reference this directly (read as: 'not kind and not true').
> I think astronomers and others take comet deflection pretty seriously
"It could be used to instantaneously vaporize a one-kilometre (0.62 mi) asteroid, divert the paths of ELE-class asteroids (greater than 10 kilometres or 6.2 miles in diameter) within short notice of a few months."
So it would be necessary to design, produce and launch one-gigaton nuclear explosive device within weeks. (or repurpose existing one but it also would be not easy)
And if that comet is sufficiently large then 6 months is already too late to act.
There are different groups that came to very different assessments, and there are definitely credible groups that reached much more pessimistic conclusions about our ability to avoid asteroid impacts. This Veritasium video (https://youtu.be/4Wrc4fHSCpw?t=873) covered some information (time stamp 14:32 for the more relevant bit) about it.
I agree comet deflection is feasible for smallish ones. After actually doing some math, I think humanity has a very low chance of deflecting a chixculub-size asteroid, but a high chance of deflecting anything under 10^11kg. People who aren't into math can skip the rest of this post.
Here's some napkin math. Escape velocity is twice orbital velocity, so when a comet from the oort cloud reaches Earth it'll be going almost twice earth's orbital velocity of 30km/s, and when it reaches Jupiter it'll be going almost twice Jupiter's orbital velocity of 13km/s. Linearly interpolating that because I'm lazy and this is an upper bound, we get a mean velocity of 2*21km/s on the path from Jupiter orbit to Earth, which is at least 4.2AU long. 4.2AU / 42km/s = 0.5 years. So an interception at the distance of Jupiter will be at least 0.5 years before impact. Earth's diameter is about 7 minutes times its orbital velocity, so we only have to push the comet enough to accelerate it by 13km/s * (7 minutes / 0.5 year) = 0.346m/s.
How much momentum would it have taken to do that for a comet of the size the one associated with the late cretaceous extinction (chixculub crater)? That one is estimated to be 10^16kg (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014arXiv1403.6391D/abstract). LEO delta V is around 10km/s. 10^16 kg * ((0.346m/s) / (10km/s)) = 346 million metric tons. The momentum required is the equivalent of putting 346 million tons into LEO. For comparison, falcon heavy only puts about 60 tons into LEO, so we'd need about six million of those, plus at least twenty times that to deliver them to Jupiter. So chemical rockets are definitely out. Only nukes can save us.
How much momentum could be imparted per megaton of nukes? I don't really know how to calculate that. It probably depends a lot on the composition of the comet (Albedo and whether it has vaporizable volatiles on the surface. You probably get a much larger effect from the recoil of those volatiles leaving when they're heated)
Ignoring the effect of recoil from volatiles, which might 1000x the momentum for all I know, I can compute a rough estimate based on the energy released. D-T fusion releases 17.6 MeV, a helium-4 atom, and a neutron. sqrt(17.6MeV /5 amu) = 18429km/s. 10^16 kg * ((0.346m/s) / (18429km/s)) = 187747 tons. So deflection of a chixculub-mass iron asteroid could require fusing as much as 187747 tons of helium if you model it as shooting helium and neutrons at it at the same velocity they would have if all of the energy from fusion went into accelerating them. But recoil from ablation of the asteroid's own materials may increase the momentum imparted by 100x-100,000x. Hard to model that. And it may be hard to know the composition of the object far enough in advance to build the appropriate-sized nuke.
If humanity was at stake and enough people would agree, we might manage.
Keep in mind, that you wouldn't just build one spaceship and hope it works. You'd have lots of efforts in parallel, so that even if 80% of them fail, you'd still have a chance.
This is "make a baby in one month using nine women" territory, saying that hey, even if 88% of the women fail we still get a baby.
We don't even have the tools to build an Orion, and I don't think we even have viable blueprints for the tools to build an Orion. Nor do we have the blueprints for the Orion itself - it wasn't nearly that advanced when it was cancelled - and that's not the sort of thing you can solve by throwing the Best Rocket Scientists in a room full of Red Bull for a long weekend.
For comparison, the Tunguska asteroid was 10^7 kg. So between 10^7 kg and 10^11kg there are a lot of potential asteroid impacts that would be very bad but very preventable.
An upper bound on efficacy of nukes would be to assume they're as effective as a chemical rocket of the same total energy. Falcon heavy uses 518 tons of fuel, which is about 21% methane. Methane has a heat of combustion of 55514kj/kg. 518t * 0.21 * 55514kj/kg = 6*10^12 J.
1 kiloton of TNT = 4*10^12 J
1 falcon heavy = 1.5 kilotons TNT
So instead of six million Falcon Heavies to deflect the next chixculub we'd need *at least* 9000 megatons of nukes in the best case scenario. This is the same order of magnitude as the peak cold war stockpile of the US or USSR.
KE=mv^2, P=mv, so P=KE/v. This means the faster the debris exits, the more energy you have to spend per unit of momentum. A sudden nuclear blast would produce very hot, very fast debris, which would be a very inefficent allocation of energy. The root-mean-squared velocity of the debris would probably be much faster than the exhaust velocity of the methalox engines on the falcon heavy, and on average only like half of the velocity would be on the relevant axis (and only half of the nuke's energy would go towards the comet in the first place). So the nuke is probably at least an order of magnitude less efficient at turning energy into to momentum.
You could probably get a couple orders of magnitude higher energy efficency than a nuke by using some nuclear reactors to gradually heat up the comet on the side where you want to boil off volatiles for thrust. But realistically you're not going to have enough lead time to build and launch early enough to intercept it way outside the orbit of Jupiter to make that work. A giant light beam from the surface of earth to the comet might do the job with a lot less lead time. But at 4.2 AU a 10km diameter impactor would be ~ 0.003 arcseconds across, and atmospheric distortions would blur things on scales of ~1 arcsecond, so most of the beam would miss the target.
Our best hope is probably very very early detection, because the impulse required is inversely proportional to the square of the time before impact.
I think the idea would be to let the nuke explode on (or better, slightly in) the comet/meteor, on the side you want to apply the pushing force. Then the momentum will result mostly of comet/meteor bits being ejected, not from bits of the bomb itself....It's more a question of fracturing the objects into smaller parts each having new momentum so slightly different trajectories (hopefully most not on a collision course), rather than a real push.
At least that's how I see how (thermo) nuclear explosions would help...
Rockets are generally optimized for exhaust velocity instead of energy efficiency as the former directly affects delta v.
If we want to be irresponsibly optimistic, assume that your nuke manages to split our 1e16kg asteroid into two parts of equal mass, and puts most of its yield energy into moving these two masses moving into equal and opposite directions.
Assuming we want 0.3m/s for either fragment, we would come out at
Apart from unimportant practical problems (like how do you drill a nuke into an asteroid, and would it split into fragments, and in how many) the main downside from that method is that the escape velocity of such an asteroid would be much higher, so our two neat half asteroids will probably meet each other again. Gravity finds a way and all that.
Instead, let's try to bomb out a small fragment which will fly away with twice the surface escape velocity, which I take to be 10m/s. This seems to be the roughly the energetically optimal way to do it: faster, and we waste energy without gaining much momentum, slower, and most of the momentum will gravitationally return to our asteroid (lets call it 'K-Pg 2.0' or something).
So the fragment we want to nuke away should weight some 3e14 kg. with v = 20m/s (out of which gravity will steal back half), this gives some 6e16 J or 16 Mt TNT, which puts us firmly into the thermonuclear section of Amazon. Assume we find a "used and new" B41 there (5000kg, 2 left in stock), which has a yield in that magnitude.
As Prime delivery does not cover solar orbits, this would be the next problem. Nukes are fragile things, and lithobraking them with some kilometers per second will void their warranty, and exploding it in space nearby would accomplish little. To land a nuke on an asteroid will be quite costly in terms of delta v. Then we need a drilling system to put our B41 perhaps a kilometer or so deep into the asteroid. So we would probably want to get Switzerland on board, as they have a good track record for building tunnels on time and below budget. Drilling in free-fall and vacuum with a limited mass allowance of perhaps another 5000kg will still be quite a challenge.
All in all, I can feel some sympathy for the dinosaur decision not to bother with civilisation and space flight.
Also, this makes a great case for autonomous colonies on mars, as they would invariably lead to the development of interplanetary weapon delivery platforms which could be essential for asteroid deflection.
This mostly checks out (except, isn't it sqrt(2) times the orbital velocity, not 2 times?), but I don't think there are any comets that big. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet says even Halley's Comet is only 3e14 kg, and we know it isn't going to hit Earth anytime in the next few centuries. The other comets are substantially smaller than that.
You can put a minimum on the energy required just by mvv/2; unless the comet's volatiles start fusing or combusting or something, the ad-hoc rocket engine you're propelling it with can't be more than 100% efficient, so the energy content of the bombs puts a limit on how much you can deflect it. I did that calculation in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up/comment/4300386 and it looks considerably more optimistic than your calculation based on only using the bomb itself as reaction mass.
Yes, escape velocity is only sqrt(2) times orbital velocity, not 2x, sorry. Not enough of an error to matter in an order-of-magnitude estimate.
See my calculation below about the optimistic reaction mass scenario (i.e. assuming the nuke's energy is converted to momentum as efficiently as the Falcon Heavy's fuel energy is converted to momentum)
Assuming chixculub was a sphere of radius 5km, a mass of 10^16 kg implies a density of 2 kg/liter, which seems reasonable for an ice/rock mix. 1036 Ganymed at the same density would be a mass of 4*10^17 kg.
Another deflection approach that might work is shooting a continuous gigawatt laser to the correct side of the asteroid to heat up frozen gasses and deflect it. That's probably the most energy efficient approach because you're letting the gasses escape gradually at low temperature and low velocity instead of wasting energy on extreme temperatures and high velocities of a much smaller amount of material.
But mvv/2 is at least two orders of magnitude too optimistic. That's the energy cost of the momentum if your reaction mass is the entire asteroid and you're perfectly efficient.
Yes, lots of Chicxulub-sized asteroids (though all the other NEAs are smaller than Ganymed), but no comets that size I think. It'd still be a pretty huge disaster for the humans if something like Hale-Bopp hit Earth.
I'm not really up on my rocket dynamics, but is it really more energy-efficient for a rocket to eject its reaction mass at low temperature and low velocity, rather than extreme temperatures and high velocities of a much smaller amount of material? I mean I guess in a sense your objective is momentum, or actually sideways bolide velocity, and if your reaction mass goes twice as fast it gives you twice the momentum but costs you four times the energy, so maybe it is. I'd never thought of that.
The most efficient case, as you say, is where you split the impactor in half and send the halves to opposite sides of Earth at the time when they would have impacted, which is the case where you can use only mvv/2 energy. All the extra energy you put into blowing reaction mass far out of the impact path with Earth is wasted.
I have the impression (and this might be wrong) that inner-system asteroids don't have much ice left after 4.6 billion years in near proximity to Sun, unlike comets. So you might need to use higher temperatures to ablate their surfaces; this might be hard to do with Earth-hosted lasers.
How long do static electric charges survive in the solar wind? I think the Debye length in the interplanetary medium is about 10 meters? How conductive are comets and asteroids? Maybe you could use an Earth-mounted ion beam to selectively charge up one side of the potential impactor, ejecting dust to propel it in the other direction. 10 meters seems like enough distance to get some good velocity going for the dust particles. But I don't know if there's a way to get the ion beam to go that far; Newton's penetration depth approximation still applies to the interplanetary medium, doesn't it?
Splitting a chixculub-size comet down the middle very unlikely. Bruce Willis isn't going to be out there to drill down 5km into the center to place the nuke, and even if he did, it would just turn the comet into an unpredictable series of fragments, much of which would still hit earth and cause mayhem. Instead of a single large impact in the pacific maybe you get multiple smaller direct hits on all the cities in that hemisphere. Also the gravitational attraction of the two halves of a 10^16 kg impactor is several orders of magnitude larger than 0.346m/s per 0.5 years. If you wait until later gravity is less of a problem but then you need a much larger v to plug into mvv/2. Also most of the nuke's energy will be converted to heat rather than kinetic. So I think the energy requirement of mvv/2 for delta-v = 0.346m/s is several orders of magnitude too optimistic.
Nukes don't impart any momentum, all by themselves. A nuclear explosion is very different from a chemical explosion, in which a very large amount of very hot gas is suddenly generated and expands. A nuclear explosion delivers almost all of its energy as a big blast of X-rays and gammas. It's the interaction with the surrounding material (e.g. the atmosphere) that converts this heat to a blast wave, i.e. turns energy into momentum change. If you set one off in a vacuum, it's not going to deliver any push at all.
I mean, the Sun is the biggest nuclear explosion imaginable, going off all the time, and it doesn't push anything away (barring the solar wind and meager radiation pressure), because it's just delivering huge amounts of energy but very little momentum.
So all of your momentum change is going to have to happen from the rocket effect: that is, your nuke is going to have to heat the material of the asteroid/comet enough for it to ablate away, and it's the shove this impromptu short-lived "rocket" gives to the body that can change its momentum.
Perhaps, he's thinking of the specific strategy used by Bruce Willis in Armageddon, which was to split "an asteroid the size of Texas" in two with an H-Bomb so that the two halves just miss Earth on either side.
"The infeasibility of the H-bomb approach was published by four postgraduate physics students in 2011[28] and then reported by The Daily Telegraph in 2012:
A mathematical analysis of the situation found that for Willis's approach to be effective, he would need to be in possession of an H-bomb a billion times stronger than the Soviet Union's "Big Ivan", the biggest ever detonated on Earth. Using estimates of the asteroid's size, density, speed and distance from Earth based on information in the film, the postgraduate students from Leicester University found that to split the asteroid in two, with both pieces clearing Earth, would require 800 trillion terajoules of energy. In contrast, the total energy output of "Big Ivan", which was tested by the Soviet Union in 1961, was only 418,000 terajoules.[29][30] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armageddon_(1998_film)#Scientific_accuracy:
But Willis's particular strategy seems excessively showboat-y. Starting at any significant distance from Earth, you wouldn't think it would take too much energy to just ever-so-slightly change the trajectory of the thing to miss Earth.
That's for a Texas-sized asteroid, presumably about 1000km in diameter. This movie involves a 9km diameter asteroid, which would be about a million times less massive. Actually it's a 9km diameter comet, so maybe ten million times less massive. So we're talking a hundred Big Ivans, and we're back within the realms of being vaguely plausible-ish.
I see others have already started talking about this, while I was pulling up the notes from a conference presentation I gave six years ago. And I may add more detail tomorrow, but the bottom line is:
On a time scale of one year or less, there's realistically nothing we could do against anything big enough to be a real problem. We don't have the right specialized systems standing ready, our spaceship-building tools are all designed for one- to two-year lead times, and if you try to rush the process or use e.g. automobile-building tools to build spaceships, too much will go wrong to recover from in that short a time.
We might be able to deflect a *very small* asteroid or comet, the sort where only a single calibrated near-miss by a surplus hydrogen bomb shortly before impact is enough. But we're talking Tunguska Event here, not Dinosaur Killer. And if you're facing the Tunguska Event six months out, you basically just evacuate Tunguska and hire Michael Bay to film the fireworks.
On a timescale of two years, a maximum effort by the United States of America could probably divert a comet or asteroid of up to ~2 km diameter. A long-period comet of 2 km diameter impacting the Earth would lay waste to one average continent, or the coastal regions bordering one ocean, but it wouldn't be an extinction event.
That doesn't change much if the rest of the world tries to help; the US has more than half of the relevant capacity, and the management overhead of trying to cobble an international effort together would eat up most of the gains. You really don't want to rush your English-to-metric conversions when you're trying to build and launch interplanetary nuclear missiles.
On a timescale of 5 years, a global effort does become reasonable and at that point we could reasonably hope to divert a 10-kilometer dinosaur-killer class comet.
Also, our ability to detect long-period comets is limited to (coincidentally) about two years warning time if we use existing systems but dedicate them to that mission, or maybe five years if we build a large space telescope designed specifically for the job. Six months warning from a random astronomer happening to notice the comet is about right.
And since I have the notes, the probability of a 2 km comet impacting the Earth is ~5E-7 per year, and the probability for a 10 km comet is ~1E-8 per year.
> [...] and if you try to rush the process or use e.g. automobile-building tools to build spaceships, too much will go wrong to recover from in that short a time.
If you run enough efforts in parallel, you could cope with eg an 80% failure rate.
At the moment, one reason space flight has such long lead times is because people don't accept these kinds of failure rates, especially not for manned space flight.
The same parallel argument applies to international efforts. People mostly need to agree in which direction they want to deflect the asteroid, but otherwise much more coordination might not be necessary. Delta-v changes are additive.
Of course, perfect coordination would be more efficient. But I suspect parallel efforts with loose coordination would still be more efficient than a single effort.
Again, you're talking nine women making a baby in a month. You can get a baby in less than nine months if you're really desperate and not very picky about the quality of the baby, but you won't get anything worthy of the name in one month, not no way, not no how.
"And if you're facing the Tunguska Event six months out, you basically just evacuate Tunguska and hire Michael Bay to film the fireworks."
Well yeah, and hope to hell it hits Siberia again, not New York or wherever. Though damn it, Tunguska II: This Time We've Got Video sounds *incredibly* cool and makes me sort of want to see it happen. Yes, I'm an idiot.
"if you're facing the Tunguska Event six months out, you basically just evacuate Tunguska and hire Michael Bay to film the fireworks."
Would we be able to determine that it's just Tunguska that needs to be evacuated, rather than the entire thousand mile radius around Tunguska? What level of precision would we be able to have? I'd really like to have the film crew available (though I'd probably prefer the Attenborough crew to the Bay crew)!
That's the sort of situation where we probably would be able to do something useful, by sending a small probe to do a close flyby and get more precise trajectory data. That can be done by basically any vehicle designed for interplanetary flight, so just pick the probe that was scheduled to launch to Ganymede or wherever next month, make a few tweaks, and put it on the biggest rocket with the biggest kick stage you can find.
Back when 99942 Apophis was still considered an impact risk, I was part of a program at AFRL to figure out how to cheaply and quickly put a transponder in orbit around the asteroid so we could very precisely track it going forward. But it turned out in that case ground-based astronomy was good enough to rule out an impact, before we could get around to building the probe.
Assuming this is a 9-km comet of typical composition, "aimed" at a spot 70% of the distance from the midpoint of the Earth to its periphery, with Our Heroes having perfect knowledge of all of this, then deflecting the comet to barely miss skimming the Earth's atmosphere given six months' notice would require approximately 220 megatons of military-surplus thermonuclear weapons. You wouldn't want to use anything bigger than 5 megatons for this, and the biggest weapon in current US inventory is the 1.2 megaton B83, so call it two hundred of those just to be safe.
Detonate them 1.5-2 km from the comet to more or less uniformly irradiate and ablate a large area of the comet's surface; breaking off chunks makes the problem harder. And ideally do this at intervals of a couple of hours to allow the comet to settle down and precisely retarget follow-on shots; that will take a couple of weeks, but we've got six months. Each detonation will give the comet a slight nudge, and if you do it right that adds up to a very near miss of Earth.
Except, this assumes we can Thanos-fingersnap the warheads into existence right next to the comet as soon as Plucky Male Astronomer and Plucky Female Astronomer discover it. More realistically, assume we spend three months building the hardware(*), and two months flying it out to meet the comet with our clumsy slow rockets, conducting the diversion effort only one month before impact. Now we need 1100 warheads minimum. I don't think we've actually got 1100 B83's, but we can throw in enough 475 kT W88 warheads to make up the difference. We're not spacing these out by hours each, obviously, so cross your fingers and hope your models were right.
We could do somewhat better, maybe twice as good, with custom-built thermonuclear explosives, but any plan that involves designing a new hydrogen bomb from scratch in three months is a bad plan.
A B83 weighs 1.1 metric tons. In order to intercept the comet a month before impact, we're going to have to launch them with a hyperbolic excess velocity of at least 20 km/s past Earth escape. There's a slight problem that we don't have any rockets with enough performance to launch even their own burnt-out upper stage at that speed, never mind any sort of payload.
But, OK, let's assume I can design three optimized hypergolic upper stages using one, three, and nine Aerojet XLR-132 engines each and a mass fraction of 0.9, stack them one atop the other underneath the Falcon Heavy fairing, designed built and assembled in three months (*), and somehow the whole thing actually *works*, OK, that will boost a single W83 to 18 km/s hyperbolic excess velocity with 100 kg left over for the guidance, navigation, telemetry, and midcourse propulsion system. 18 km/s is not 20 km/s, but meh, close enough.
How do you feel about the odds of arranging eleven hundred Falcon Heavy launches, or the equivalent, on three months' notice?
* Narrator voice: six months later, they were still assembling the hardware
Could a Hubble image by chance capture a comet with a 5-year lead time? Perhaps two images of the same region days apart, taken for some other reason? Also, assuming either such a fluke 5-year-early detection, or a 2-year-early detection, how long would it take to achieve a high confidence of collision, for some definition of "high confidence"? I picture the actual sequence of events being the public announcement of a comet, followed by months of increasing concern as the chance of hitting earth grows. So no chance to make it classified. Does that sound right?
Hubble would get you about two years, if you either got lucky or devoted Hubble to full-time comet-watching status. Webb is pretty close to being the instrument you'd design for a five-year early warning system, but it's going to spend the next five-plus years looking at Not Comets and not likely to find comets except by extreme luck.
NASA launched an asteroid deflection mission on 24th Nov last year (https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/dart), intending to make contact with the target in September this year. The NASA target is much smaller than the comet in the film (and I don't know if the fact it is an asteroid rather than a comet matters), but you'd surely be grasping at some rather weak straws to say that a thing which is literally happening right overhead as we speak is too ridiculous a concept to make an allegorical film about.
It's a case of magnitude, my dude. DART is aimed at a 160m asteroid, while the one in the movie is supposedly 9km across. Do even some cursory estimation, and you'll realise that the amount of energy needed is orders of magnitude more.
Worse, the delta-v needed to change a point in an orbit is a function of distance from that point. Moving an asteroid so that it misses the earth is exponentially easier and cheaper (in terms of delta-v) if the asteroid is years out as opposed to months out.
It's not that the concept is ridiculous, it's that there's no way it can be done given the setup provided by the film. That's the man's point.
I am not the original commenter, but I think they're pointing to something true in the case of the specific comet from the movie. From the fact that deflecting comets is theoretically very possible, it does not follow that deflecting that specific comet is possible.
The quoted Wikipedia article says (lightly edited):
"In 1994, Edward Teller proposed to design a one-gigaton nuclear explosive device, which would be equivalent to the kinetic energy of a one-kilometer-diameter (0.62 mi) asteroid. The theoretical one-gigaton device would weigh about 25–30 tons, light enough to be lifted on the Energia rocket. It could be used to instantaneously vaporize a one-kilometre (0.62 mi) asteroid, divert the paths of GCR-class asteroids (greater than 10 kilometres or 6.2 miles in diameter) within short notice of a few months."
The last sentence describes the situation in the movie more or less accurately - the notice is short, of a few months, and the best estimate of the comet size is 6-9km, with an asteroid-type composition (rock rather than ice). So far so good, if we got this gigaton bomb we could deflect the comet.
Problem is, we don't have the bomb. The nastiest nuclear explosive tested during the Cold War was the Soviet's Tsar Bomba (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba), and that 1961 H-bomb had a yield of 50 Mt - 5% of what would be needed. It could theoretically go up to 100Mt, but that would likely require some tweaking and research even if we had some Tsar Bombas lying around. This alone would likely take up more than the couple months available before launching. There's also the problem that even the strongest nuke ever made, at 5% of the necessary power, already weighs 27 tons, which is within the weight range estimated for the whole theoretical 100% power thing.
Of course, in ideal circumstances you could add up 20 bombs with 5% of the power each and get to the minimum required power to do the thing. Problem is, what we do have available is much weaker than 50 Mt. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent#Examples (locate the row that mentions Hiroshima), "The modern nuclear weapons in the United States arsenal range in yield from 0.3 kt (1.3 TJ) to 1.2 Mt (5.0 PJ) equivalent, for the B83 strategic bomb". The 1980s B83 weighs 1.1 ton and a total of 650 were built. Even if all of these were still available and we were to take our chance with only 78% of the yield suggested by Teller, we'd still need to get 715 tons of bombs to the comet, and I doubt we even have 650 rockets capable of reaching deep space or the ability/resources to make those on short notice, especially when you consider the need for advanced guidance systems (the comet is about the size of San Francisco proper, so if you try to meet it even at the middle of the Bay Bridge you miss).
In short, I think the Wikipedia article you cite suggests that we don't have a large enough number of nukes, the ones we have are not big enough, we also don't have enough rockets, and we cannot make enough of these things in time.
Moving the comet is a great idea if you already have a comet-mover built and ready to go, and have four or five months of warning time to boot. If not, 'several months' is a really protracted time frame to both build a comet mover and also hit a sizeable object in time to deflect it. Though I admit this topic is far outside my knowledge domain. But considering we have no actual experience in comet deflection as a species, I'm going to discount the expected utility of any purely theoretical proposals that come down the pipe.
One of the more subtle points of the movie is that we can't help paying more attention to the message around a thing than to the thing itself. It's extremely exaggerated with the comet, of course. Now the fun part is that this is happening with the movie too! A lot of the messaging around Don't Look Up is about how the movie is poorly made, unsubtle, stupid, etc. But the correct attitude — and this is what Scott does here — is to engage with the points the movie makes about existential risk, dysfunctional institutions, politics and so on, *regardless of whether you think the movie is good/realistic/entertaining*.
Surely the correct attitude you specify requires that people be able to overcome the problems they have found with the film. However worthy the intention of the piece, if it is badly presented it fails. If you make a movie and people are to busy bemoaning your use of heavy-handed symbology and partisan allegory, they're already using their thoughts on something other than your intended meaning. And that's what happens: you cannot control the reception of a piece of art, so however striking your message, however vital the correct attitude to take, if it is concealed behind other more obvious talking points it will fail.
Also, since when was the correct attitude to Hollywood movies to engage with the points the movie makes, rather than enjoy it? If you're going to try and get a message across through film, you know your film has to be good, and we're talking One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest good. People want entertainment from film, not moral lessons, hence successful films mostly reflecting contemporary morality rather than promoting alternatives.
Of course making a good, entertaining film is a better way to send a message than failing to do that. I'm not saying this should be a general rule for all pieces of media. Rather, it's a phenomenon that is specifically interesting in the case of Don't Look Up, considering its themes and the fact that the phenomenon itself was a major cause of the disaster depicted in the film.
Also, the fact that the movie is being discussed a lot right now is a sign that it touches upon something important in the zeitgeist. Thus the criticism about the movie as art (which is valid! I agree with a lot of it!) hits very differently than for virtually any other piece of media. In itself, that's interesting.
"everyone around you is a mouth-breathing idiot, and only *you, wise liberal viewer* can see clearly. (but sadly, there's nothing you can do anyway)" is not a particularly interesting thesis worth discussing
(the above synopsis is my own interpretation from seeing the movie, not anyone else's. i suppose there's a more charitable reading of the film's narrative but i found it condescending and not worth engaging with.)
There were definitely a lot of people on adjacent parts of the internet who took that perspective (though the crux wasn't liberalism, but instead something more like https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WQFioaudEH8R7fyhm/local-validity-as-a-key-to-sanity-and-civilization), and I found it pretty grating. I guess it seemed more important than that to me because I think it's likely that this kind of failure will *actually kill everyone*, and that's not such an obvious thing (plenty of people would have assumed that people would get their act together if enough was at stake for them personally).
Am I the only person who actually liked the film as as a piece of entertainment? It kept me interested, made me laugh a few times, the characters were interesting, etc. I was pleasantly surprised by it, was expecting it to be worse.
Scott's metaphor included a Gnostic God and a lion-headed demon. "Don't Look Up"'s metaphor is longer, but includes alien dinosaurs and goofy sci-fi spaceships. Both of these things are fine for the same reasons.
Don’t agree with this reading. I genuinely think it was also intending to make fun of the total incompetence of the “good guys”. They’re right, but ultimately all they’re capable of doing is organizing some ineffectual marches, throwing a benefit concert and interviewing celebrities. Clear allegory for climate activism. I think this was pretty heavy handed by the end.
I I I I am looking at the linked Metaculus page on mobile. Am I crazy, or are there no units whatsoever for the “amount of time” prediction to be made? I don’t see any mention of months or years. On either the chart showing the current value of the prediction market, or the chart where I am asked to make a prediction.
In fact, I don’t even see a clear statement of the question in a form like “how many (months/years) will elapse between creation of human level AI and super intelligent AI,” Despite the presence of a clearly marked “question” subsection on the page.
I wrote the question. The original title was "After an AGI is created, how many months will it be before the first superintelligence?" but it seems this text was at some point removed from the question body.
The movie is definitely not perfect. The probability of the comet hitting could have been 87%, the whole thing could have been 1 hour shorter, and there could have been less obvious super-easy political bashing. And I agree it rests on the paradox wherein we are told to Believe Science, but really we just believe the protagonists because they're, well, the protagonists.
However, if we broaden our scope from the obvious mappings (Female President onto Trump) and admit that pure satires don't make the best cinema, at its broadest, it's a movie about institutional failure. Across party lines (though it skewers one more than the other, sure). It's for this reason it felt fresh to me and that I liked it. Institutional failure, even human failure, is becoming more and more obvious, as it's undeniable that our institutions, from academia to the White House, are more sclerotic and incapable and, well, foolish, than they either were in the past or appeared to be. And to me this movie was like an expression of America's Id realizing that over the past several years.
Erik, I heard you on a podcast recently (won't say which one in case you're not intent on publicizing it), but you came across as very intelligent and reasonable. I didn't watch the movie, but I agree our institutions are sclerotic.
Thanks cdh, kind of you to say! And as someone who is probably going to make my living by writing and (sometimes) speaking online, I've learned it's necessary to embrace publicity, although it's not something natural for me...
Not just institutional failure, although our institutions are captured, but also on how popular opinion is manipulated to support short-term factional goals, even at the expense of longer-term societal goals (in my feline experience, the distinguishing feature of a third world society).
In fact, we even do the manipulation ourselves, all so we can get a couple of clicks.
That, to me, was the point, not an physics problem concerning how big a nuke is needed to divert a comet.
But no institution actually fails in the movie. Every problem is caused by an obviously stupid bad guy (the president or the CEO) doing obviously stupid things with personal greed as their motivation. The movie has zero things that looks like e.g. the CDC mishandling of the early pandemic. Every institution in the movie is shown to be perfectly efficient at what it does, the only problem is that bad guys at the top wants it to do the wrong thing.
Are you serious? Literally every institution fails in this movie. POTUS, the press, academia eventually too, as the main character notes how his colleagues critical of the BASH plan were being systematically fired and otherwise silenced.
The moral of Don't Look Up wasn't *about* Experts vs. Outsiders, it was about Substance vs. Fluff, and how the public is stupid enough to believe the Fluff every time. If you ask the writers if you should believe your grocery bagger about their pet conspiracy theory, they'll say "if they have good scientific evidence on their side, yes; otherwise, no - but you're probably too dumb to figure out whether the evidence is good, so you're kind of fucked." Which isn't too different from what you and I believe.
I can't imagine they'd admit that you can't know. I'd expect them to say that you should know better than to believe in [elite-disfavored theory] or to disbelieve in [elite-favored theory], even if they can't coherently explain why.
I'd expect them to say you can know if you see the evidence in front of you, if you're a domain expert, or if you're competent enough to identify trustworthy domain experts. They'd say that, for climate change, we have very visible evidence (icecaps melting, extreme weather events) that should make even a rube support proactive climate policy, and that only right-wing disinfo is preventing those policies from being implemented. They also seem to take the cynical view that almost everyone is unmotivated to really find out the truth, so if you're asking these questions you're already ahead of the ballgame.
Small correction: we do see icecaps melting, but we don't see any extreme weather events yet that could directly attributed to climate change. A good climate expert will tell you that almost all extreme weather events could've happened without climate change. And even the probability of such events didn't go up by a lot yet.
This is a very very uncomfortable fact for climate change advocates but its nonetheless a fact.
Obviously you can't pin an extreme weather event directly on climate change, but it seems (from my brief dip into the literature) that there's some controversy over how much climate change has affected and will affect their likelihood and intensity.
Agreed, but I am kind of confused, that he is moderating himself. Seems like that is not a good way to spend the limited recource of Scots time. Maybe you cole hire someone?
I was once a mod, and then ran the mod team, for an extremely active forum. Once you have a mod or mods that aren't the "purpose" of the forum, a dedicated minority of the posters will try to troll them, bait bans, and otherwise cause as much trouble right on the borderline as they can, because they like trouble and they have no a priori reason to respect the mods. Few mods avoid becoming angry/frustrated/mind-killed by such, especially considering even great people make mistakes.
One possible solution is to pay disinterested mods and rotate them relatively quickly, so that personality, ingroup interest, etc., are close to irrelevant. Then again, the poor paid FB mods seem quite traumatized.
I think there is a real version of "trust science" that applies to some situations, where it's not too hard to know which side represents physical reality and which side represents social reality, and to take a step back and go "wait physical reality is important here, I should do that". Vaccines being safe and effective is probably a good example - old people in America are not generally more liberal or pro establishment than young people, but they do have much higher vaccination rates, presumably because they care more about the physical reality and the physical reality question here isn't actually that hard.
There are, though, also situations where people disagree about physical reality but are so convinced in their views that it's hard to imagine anyone genuinely disagreeing with you, so you assume they're all just playing a social role (e.g. where pro choice people are sure pro life people don't actually care about abortion prevention and just want to control women).
I think the elderly vaccination rates have nothing to do with caring more about reality and more to do with either being in poorer health generally, or caring more about the specific fact of their own looming mortality.
Yeah that's what I said. They have more stake in the real physical problem since their health risk is bigger, so they're less likely to die on the hill of "actually vaccines are bad".
Another interpretation of the age differences in vaccination rates is that almost everyone has a fairly good estimate of their risk from covid and from the vaccine, and the elderly correctly conclude their risk from covid is higher than their risk from the vaccine while young people correctly conclude their risk is higher from the vaccine. I admit this is contradicted by the innumeracy shown in answers to polls about these subjects, but perhaps people have better intuitive understanding than they can put into numbers.
I got the vaccine, but only to try to help my community achieve herd immunity back when people were saying that was possible. I didn’t believe it would help me personally as a young healthy person who probably already had covid in March 2020. I didn’t think it would harm me either, but in fact I had a very bad reaction that resulted in me going to the ER. Based on my best understanding of the current evidence I will definitely not get a booster myself, but would still encourage those most at risk to do so.
Any age difference in vaccination rates might be due to the older population being targeted first, before the dis-information campaigns ramped up. My mom is vaccinated but refuses to get the booster. If she could revert her vaccination she would. When I asked her why she had the entire list of misinformation we've all heard, starting with the vaccines editing her DNA. When she heard my children were sick she shared all her info about the various medicines and her story about obtaining and using ivermectin, lists of side effects from accepted medicine, etc. I think she cruised into the first two vaccinations under the momentum of a lifetime of accepting vaccines as critical and important.
100% agree. They probably have better instinctive understanding, and some collective intelligence: within age groups, there are people able to do the math and more or less convince other who trust them on those matters. Hell, even official experts told frankly that vaccine benefit is far higher for elders (hence all the talk about altruism targeted at young people), and (much less frankly, but recommendations talk for themselves) that risk is higher for young (cardiac and blood clots issues).
It's almost as if the risk-benefit calculation is different for someone with thousands of times higher risk.
It's interesting how the narrative has shifted.
"It's perfectly safe and effective"
became "It has extremely rare mild side effects, but the benefits vastly outweigh the risks"
became "Some people are getting blood clots and heart inflammation, but COVID is more likely to cause that, so the benefits still outweigh the risks"
became "Yes, in young men, heart inflammation is actually several times more likely from the vaccine than from COVID, but it's, uh, the mild type of heart inflammation. Also long COVID."
... became "The Vaccine is Perfectly Safe", again.
Back when they did the initial EUA, the FDA found the risk/benefit calculation was in favor of vaccines for the elderly, but comparable and even against the vaccines for young age groups. Even assuming a 95% efficacy, you'd have to vaccinate around 1 million kids to prevent 1 death. And dozens in that group would die from blood clots alone.
Then everyone forgot that it was a very tenuous risk/benefit balance and proclaimed that the vaccines are Perfectly Safe. Because the vaccines are Good, and anti-vaxxers are Bad, and anti-vaxxers say the vaccines are not Perfectly Safe, and so the vaccines are Perfectly Safe.
For young people, the actual physical reality is pretty clear - young male athletes are dropping dead left and right, and highly vaccinated areas are surging with COVID. And no one, even the most naive, actually behave like they believe the vaccines work - triple-vaccinated left-wingers are still double-masking, quarantining, and quaking in fear.
Except all of this is lies. Maybe you should try living in reality for a change?
The reality is that the initial EUA was for elderly people, but it was quickly expanded because it was obvious that it wasn't causing side effects at any significant rate for any group.
And that's correct. It still isn't.
The risk of dying from getting the vaccine is less than one in a million.
Unvaccinated people are an order of magnitude more likely to die from catching COVID.
Even amongst low risk groups, the odds of dying of COVID are roughly on the order of 1-3 per 1,000.
If you assume 70% of the population gets infected, then your odds of dying of COVID are about 700-2,100 per 1 million if you are in a low risk group and unvaccinated, and about 70-210 per 1 million if you are vaccinated.
The risk of death, meanwhile, is less than 1 per 10 million.
As such, you're reducing your odds of dying by somewhere on the order of 630-1900 per 1 million by getting the vaccine, or reducing your odds of death by somewhere on the order of 0.6 to 1.9 per 1,000.
Your make-belief narrative has zero relationship with reality. The reality is that the messaging has very consistently been "The vaccine is safe and effective", because it is. There has never been any other narrative.
You seem to be suffering from an inability to understand scope and scale.
Your false beliefs that "young athletes are dropping left and right" due to the vaccine is symptomatic of delusional psychosis. They aren't.
The number of young athletes who have died from being vaccinated for COVID is 0.
I don't agree with the poster you are responding to, but your information is also wrong.
The low risk groups are kids between the ages of 0-17. There have been under 700 deaths in that group from almost 8 million cases. That's far less than 1-3 per 1,000. That's less than 1 per 80,000. That's for all kids in that age range, and almost all of the deaths were from those with underlying health issues. Healthy young people really aren't dying from COVID and the risk of taking the vaccine truly is comparable (both numbers are very low, so the actual risk could be higher for either, due to low ability to determine true risk in low numbers). It looks like the risk of getting a blood clot is about 1/1,000 and there is a ~20% mortality rate from getting a blood clot (https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/study-sheds-more-light-on-rate-of-rare-blood-clots-after-oxford-astrazeneca-vaccine/) for AstraZeneca. That's 1/5,000 compared to less than 1/80,000 for COVID.
That's also the kind of conclusion I reached: benefit/risk is much much higher than 1 for older people. For young people, it's not clear at all. Both benefits and risks are very low, that's about the only clear thing. Another fact is that some vaccines are not given anymore to young women (clots) / men (heart inflammation), and non-RNA ones are basically phased out for all (too low efficiency with the new variants). So yes, while it's certainly not youngs dropping from vaccine-induced cardiac arrests left and right, for youngs the vaccination benefit/risk was unclear from the start (hence all the altruistic vaccination talks, which I never accepted and are now mostly false, at least from a transmission point of view, only maybe true from a hospital-saturation point of view), and Variants can only lower this already low benefit/risk. With an at-risk population massively vaccinated and mostly getting booster after booster as fast as they can get it, the talks around mandatory vaccination for all (directly or through vaccination pass) is lo longer understandable from a classic health decision point of view (based on individual benefit/risk) so it's at best linked to health infrastructure management, but more likely (given where we are in the covid waves/season, the practical effects of more vaccinations now will probably be super small) purely political.
Is it really not clear for people in their 30s and 40s? I take it that the cost/benefit analysis of the flu vaccine comes out clearly positive for people of this age range, and I haven't heard anything giving me any reason to believe that the cost/benefit analysis of the covid vaccine for people in this age range comes out any less positively.
For people in this age range, most of the benefit from both vaccines probably comes in the form of reduced likelihood of feeling sick for a week or two, not in the form of reduced likelihood of death. No one has so far said anything that suggests to me that the costs of the vaccine are larger than the costs of driving two miles to the drugstore to get the vaccine (apart from a day of fever and headache afterwards).
For 30-40 y/o women the mRNA vaccines are probably even or perhaps slightly positive vs getting COVID. For men in that age range the vaccines are probably worse. All of this assumes an otherwise-healthy person.
Previous infection both reduces the need for vaccination and (reportedly) adds to any complications of getting vaccinated, providing a pretty strong confounder on the numbers. It is likely that someone who has an existing level of immunity has significantly less reason to get vaccinated, changing the calculus.
My own impression is that people should get or at least seriously consider vaccination if they are above age 50 or have any of the known conditions that make COVID more dangerous for them. Under age 20, for healthy individuals, they probably should outright avoid the vaccination - but the risks are low enough to not worry about if they do want to get vaccinated. Between 20 and 50, it's pretty open and lots of factors can influence the decision. The closer a person is to one of the ends, and an honest evaluation of how "healthy" they really are should be important. Age 49 with a meh healthiness should probably get vaccinated anyway, as the gains seem to clearly outweigh the cost. Age 25 with a near perfect health? Probably better off not getting vaccinated.
It looks like the mRNA vaccines have a higher rate of myocarditis than AZ, so the numbers are actually worse. For healthy young men, it's more likely they will get significant heart issues and die than that they will have complications from COVID. The chances go up significantly with each additional booster shot - doubling after each consecutive shot.
You're correct. 1/11,000 is still less severe than the side effects of at least AZ (It was the first one I found with lots of relevant data, not necessarily representative of the other vaccines in terms of complications).
Care to comment on relative risk, even with the adjusted numbers? What about the fact that almost all of the deaths from COVID in the under 18 group are from individuals with one or more medical conditions, rather than "healthy" people, who would have significantly lower risks?
Nah. Ludex is correct. You display an issue that a lot of people here seem to share: certainty in a mathematical model even after reality has shown that model to be false over and over again.
Do you have a source for "in young men, heart inflammation is actually several times more likely from the vaccine than from COVID"? Last I checked the opposite was true, but there may have been new studies since.
"For this group, Covid-vaccination thus apparently increases the chance of myocarditis even if it prevents 100% of infections (which, of course, it does not), and if 100% of recipients would otherwise have been infected (a benchmark which, if it ever arrives, appears to still be several years away) - and effects are clearly compounded by multiple doses."
This study comes from a particularly legit source and is therefore much harder to dismiss than most skeptic studies.
thanks for the source! Still going to take it with a grain of salt, since I'm inherently suspicious of studies of incredibly rare things. Tbh just looking at the variation in the rates, seems to me like everything but second dose of Moderna is random noise; but (assuming that all the data and statistics are legit) I'll admit that's a relatively strong case for "about 1 in 10,000 males under 40 who get a second dose of Moderna get hospitalized or die due to myocarditis as a result of that vaccination"
I don't know where you're getting your information, but you might want to look more closely at those sources. "young male athletes are dropping dead left and right"? You make it sound like all over the country people are dying from these vaccines, but I do not think that is the case. If it is, please link a source for that claim, because that would be very good information to know.
I think it's more because people evaluates risks/benefits more accurately than what they get credit for, especially when it is personal risks. Old people just have very different covid risk than young ones, and the vaccine risk is probably also different. I do not understand many things about covid, and it seems experts are not much better, but there is one thing that is crystal clear: when you are 70, the vaccine benefit/risk ratio is order of magnitude better than when you are 20.
When you have a very clear benefit/risk, and the risk is not vanishingly small, there is usually very little discussion and very little political posturing. That's the case for covid once you get to 60y and more, or for ebola or tetanos. But when you are 20-30-40 without specific risk factor, it's different: you are hit the worst by the NPIs, risk is very low (hence all the fuss around altruistic vaccine (protect the elderly, weak and the hospital), so it become a political marker, it has the perfect characteristics to become one
The main exception I have seen is for elderly that have an eternal youth complex. Those are at risk of refusing to get vaccinated because "they are still young and strong",
I think the claim is that when the risk/benefit ratio is exceptionally clear, people evaluate it well, but when the risk and benefit are both fairly small, people often evaluate it wildly incorrectly.
Indeed... But if both are fairly small, it's also likely to vary wildly along individuals... So using average (per age and sex, at best) is also widely incorrect. Maybe individuels adjust for factors unknowns (the benefits or risks include stigmatisation in their social circle, for example). Or more likely it's shooting in the dark both at individual level and on policy....my point is that in the second case, it's difficult to say how people are wrong in evaluating the ratio if the ratio is largely unknown
For what it’s worth Asian Scientist was found out to be a campaign backer with limited credentials. In any case I thought the movie was more of a musing on what would happen, given our limp responses to Covid and climate change. If you want to see what the filmmaker is really capable of, go watch The Big Short, where because it’s based on true events you no longer are caught up with suspending reality and can instead enjoy the absurdity of collective human failure. I agree that Don’t Look Up was pretty hamfisted at times and full of plot holes, but I still had fun watching it.
Haven't seen the movie, but thinking about the parallels to real life, there was concern early in the Trump administration about his nominee to lead NASA, Oklahoma congressman Jim Bridenstine. Bridenstine had been a pretty conservative Republican as a congressman with conservative statements about things like climate change. Lots of liberals and scientists opposed his nomination for those reasons. After he got confirmed, he turned out to be a solid administrator who supported all aspects of the agency's mission, including science.
I'd say the moral of that is that while political hacks or those seen as such can be incompetent or corrupt, sometimes they do good work. My take is that decent oversight needs to be maintained after confirmation for all administration appointees.
Another interpretation is that unless the political appointee has a lot of knowledge and a lot of strong opinions, he will simply be captured by the lifers in the agency.
Oh wow I wasn’t expecting that to be the result of that appointment.
Signalboosting this since it was surprising and makes me way more optimistic about political competence, since most of my opinions on it, in retrospect, was mostly evidence free doomerism.
Even better than The Big Short is Margin Call. The whole film can be watched for free on Youtube.
US scriptwriters, directors and actors are usually terrible at making "talk only - movies". (Unlike the British, who are the masters of the genre.) But Margin Call is different. Nothing happens in Margin Call except people talking to each other. Yet the tension is fantastic throughout the move.
Perhaps when very big money is at stake, this feeds into the US psyche, and US scriptwriters are for once able to write dialogue that keeps you at the edge.
Margin Call is brilliant, and such a contrast to The Big Short.
It's a realistic slice of life written by people who appear to actually understand finance, where The Big Short is a preachy sermon written by people who obviously don't. Everything about Margin Call feels real, from the dialogue to the characters. It trusts its audience to keep up with what's going on, where The Big Short very explicitly doesn't.
Most of all, it's the best depiction I've ever seen on screen of organisational dynamics. How problems arise, and how they get fixed. How power and information flow through about eight different layers of hierarchy. How organisations can do stupid or evil things without anyone within the organisation actually being stupid or evil.
I haven't watched the movie (and probably won't) but when you say that
"the right answer is super obvious to you"
is the take-home message at the end of the movie, then it doesn't sound like there is much of a contradiction. The message isn't supposed to be "don't trust 'the man'" /or/ "trust experts", the message is "trust your people".
See which sub-culture the protagonist most closely aligns with and I think you'll have found the target audience for the movie. It doesn't sound like the movie is trying to teach that target audience (or anyone else) a lesson. Rather, it seems like the movie is trying to reaffirm the target audiences' faith in their own righteousness.
Can someone help me out with who "Hungarian women from third-tier colleges" might be? I did some googling but didn't come up with anyone that seemed to click like a particular "Swiss patent clerk" clicked.
Conspicuously absent from the movie was any criticism of government bureaucracies. Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan) was the only career bureaucrat and he was shown positively. The government screwups all came from the president and her cabinet and her Asian Scientist appointee.
Political appointees are very different from lifers, and are certainly not the biggest problem. Political appointees generally do come in with some sort of agenda beyond just collecting a paycheck, whereas normal government bureaucrats have little to no incentive to accomplish anything. The people who end up in those jobs get there because they like them so much, and are generally so risk averse that they want to do everything by the manual as it's the safest way to avoid ever being fired.
Oglethorpe is portrayed as ultimately ineffectual, and the Air Force general (not Ron Perlman's character, the other guy from the beginning of the movie) is portrayed as somewhere between unhelpful and malicious. (I'm not sure how much it makes sense to call the military brass "career bureaucrats"; there are obvious cultural differences but their role in governance is pretty similar in important respects.) The movie doesn't spend as much time raking them over the coals as it does politicians and the media, but they don't come out looking good (nobody does).
There is something lacking though in that there were no bureaucratic obstacles to getting things done.
There ought to have been a bureaucrat saying "these rockets are not certified for the carriage of class 5 dangerous goods, which includes radioactive material. And a simultaneous launch has never been done, you will need to go through our process to approve it including noise and environmental impact surveys and community stakeholder consultation."
Incorporating that would have required so much of the plot to change that I can understand them not doing it. But I agree that it would have been, in an important sense, more realistic.
(Also, I think that before the pandemic, when the script was finalized, most of us would have overestimated the ability and/or inclination of the most powerful political figures to take decisive action in a universally-recognized emergency. By contrast, it seems reasonably clear what's going on with bureaucratic obstacles to climate change mitigation; the bureaucrats are carrying out the will of the people, who suck.)
What (especially fictional) movies, novels, media etc do you think best portray Science? I'm a fan of some interpretations of Sherlock Holmes (especially Elementary, which makes the case that Sherlock is not so special, and the way he thinks can be taught to some extent beyond his genetic genius).
Haven't seen Contact but with Sagen's involvement i could see it being more realistic, but perhaps not idealistic about 'the scientific process'.
John Barry's The Great Influenza did a very good job showing how scientific fields progress/get fooled by experimental artifacts etc. I was quite impressed, especially considering the author is a non-scientist.
Hooray, an Elementary fan! :) I also like that balance it strikes between the idea of the innate and the learned with regards to intelligence and ability.
And how often Sherlock gets information by just asking more people, rather than being a silod genius he is a genius who is decently aware of what he doesn't know.
I dislike "Elementary" because I thought it took a very American view of things (I had no problem making Watson a woman, or Asian-American, but very much a problem with 'Watson is so competent, she does Sherlock better than Sherlock does' and 'Sherlock is, after all, One Of Us with a set of problems that need therapy and 12-step programme to overcome" and 'You can learn this yourself').
I had different problems with BBC Sherlock, but that 's another rant.
Granted, the original stories often had Holmes chide Watson for "you see, but you do not observe" and saying that his method could be learned and applied by anyone, but this particular take just didn't resonate with me.
I suppose I'm a dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist when it comes to Holmes adaptations and pastiches!
imo the original holmes suffers from a very victorian view of society that has not borne out over the century since it was written. it (often) views the downtrodden with a malthusian sense of 'well it's just the way it is, too bad they're not geniuses like sherlock'.
there are implications even in the original novels that watson had a hand in breaking sherlocks addiction (which he describes as 'sleeping' not defeated). to me it is a more faithful adaption of a 'modern detective' who struggles with addiction than other interpretations. i like 'elementary' because sherlock seems to be rude not because he intends to hurt anyone, which i think is more faithful to the story. he has a very aggressive moral code that the BBC sherlock seems to lack.
perhaps i'll get annoyed with watson's competency too, but im only in season 2 and i prefer the relationship of sherlock teaching watson than i do watson being a sidekick or lackey. i have seen absolutely 0 indication thus far that she is *better* than sherlock, at best she occasionally sees things he does not because of her different experiences. Sherlock isn't god!
What are your favorite interpretations that are more traditionalist?
(1) I don't get the same impression of Malthusian sense of "too bad they're not geniuses like Sherlock", although I do agree about the Victorian views - after all, Doyle was a Victorian and the stories were written over the late Victorian - Edwardian-George V periods (1887-1917).
Holmes (or Doyle?) often shows the politicans, rich, and nobility in a poor light; since they come to him for help, naturally the dirty laundry gets aired and some of the laundry is very dirty. The Baker Street Irregulars are, I suppose, the example of Malthusian values you mean: these are very poor children, 'street Arabs' in the parlance of the day, and nobody seems to be doing anything it, just accepting that 'this is how it is'. But it's a bigger problem than Holmes can tackle, and he (or again, Doyle) has the sense of optimism that education is the way out for the working classes, or even - for the likes of the Irregulars - the way *into* the respectable working class:
"It's a very cheery thing to come into London by any of these lines which run high, and allow you to look down upon the houses like this."
I thought he was joking, for the view was sordid enough, but he soon explained himself.
"Look at those big, isolated clumps of building rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-colored sea."
"The board-schools."
"Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wise, better England of the future. — “The Naval Treaty”
(2) Yes indeed, Watson helps Holmes out of his addiction, but it's again something that is considered differently then from attitudes today. It was legal to buy such drugs as cocaine and morphine and dose yourself up, even if discouraged, and we see the attitude towards the illegal drugs like the opium dens of Limehouse ("The Man With The Twisted Lip"). Watson can't legally do anything to stop Holmes, but he does lecture him and remonstrate with him (and offer support and help).
I think - and again, I'm basing my view of "Elementary" on second-hand reports, reviews and excerpts from episodes but not watching episodes myself - that the view of Sherlock in that series is more in line with the modern one: that he is an addict, that intervention is required, that he needs the traditional 12-step programmes and sponsor to get him out of it. And that's not a bad view! But I think what Doyle was trying to achieve with his description of Holmes the opium-eater (as it were) was not so much a moral Victorian condemnation of addiction, as a trope of Bohemianism, of Holmes' deliberately distancing himself from conventional society, the artistic genius.
(3) And again with Watson's competency, the gushing over the sort of "strong independent woman" annoyed me because the people blogging about it did seem to make it that Watson was now the one, having mastered Sherlock's technique, making all the running while he was admitting his flawed humanity and reaching out to make connections with those around him (something that is very American, and exactly the sort of thing to grate on me as an introvert who would rather have my toes set on fire than sit around in a group therapy circle 'sharing').
It is a different take on a modern version of Holmes, and the BBC version which started out promisingly made such a mess (from the ridiculous Orientalism of only the second episode) that I'm not standing up and claiming "Sherlock" is better. Just that "Elementary" is not to my tastes 😀
(4) Traditional versions - well, Granada has to take the palm here. It went a bit wibbly at the very end, partly because of Jeremy Brett's increasingly bad health and partly because they had gone through nearly all the stories and were now branching out with their own interpretations of some of them - "The Last Vampyre" is very much *not* The Sussex Vampire and is not an episode I can re-watch.
But when they were good, they were very, very good. Most adaptations of the Holmes stories fall into the trap you talk about with Watson - the lackey, the side-kick. I love the Rathbone movies (they were my first introduction to the character) but Nigel Bruce's Watson is made into a bumbling old buffer which is not Doyle's Watson. Other versions do the same; in order to show off how much of a genius Holmes is, they have to make Watson an idiot by comparison. Granada didn't do this.
Also, the way Irene Adler is handled. Again, Granada is the only adaptation that is faithful to the original story. Every other version, including "Elementary", has to make her into a love interest of some sort. That's not what she, or Holmes, were about.
It is a rather mannered performance, and even they couldn't help making some vague hints in the direction of romantic attraction, but the ending with the king is very funny:
Holmes being unnecessarily rude or dismissive. He can be, but generally he is sympathetic to his clients and is very capable of being charming when he puts his mind to it.
Take "A Case of Identity", where the client is a young lower middle-class/upper working-class woman, and isn't very sympathetically described, plus the younger (at this time) Holmes makes the general kind of remarks about women which are stereotypical at best. Yet he does his duty by her, and does feel a sense of personal injury on her behalf:
“The law cannot, as you say, touch you,” said Holmes, unlocking and throwing open the door, “yet there never was a man who deserved punishment more. If the young lady has a brother or a friend, he ought to lay a whip across your shoulders. By Jove!” he continued, flushing up at the sight of the bitter sneer upon the man’s face, “it is not part of my duties to my client, but here’s a hunting crop handy, and I think I shall just treat myself to—” He took two swift steps to the whip, but before he could grasp it there was a wild clatter of steps upon the stairs, the heavy hall door banged, and from the window we could see Mr. James Windibank running at the top of his speed down the road.
“There’s a cold-blooded scoundrel!” said Holmes, laughing, as he threw himself down into his chair once more. “That fellow will rise from crime to crime until he does something very bad, and ends on a gallows. The case has, in some respects, been not entirely devoid of interest.”
And of course there is the exchange in "The Speckled Band":
“I am Dr. Grimesby Roylott, of Stoke Moran.”
“Indeed, Doctor,” said Holmes blandly. “Pray take a seat.”
“I will do nothing of the kind. My stepdaughter has been here. I have traced her. What has she been saying to you?”
“It is a little cold for the time of the year,” said Holmes.
“What has she been saying to you?” screamed the old man furiously.
“But I have heard that the crocuses promise well,” continued my companion imperturbably.
“Ha! You put me off, do you?” said our new visitor, taking a step forward and shaking his hunting-crop. “I know you, you scoundrel! I have heard of you before. You are Holmes, the meddler.”
My friend smiled.
“Holmes, the busybody!”
His smile broadened.
“Holmes, the Scotland Yard Jack-in-office!”
Holmes chuckled heartily. “Your conversation is most entertaining,” said he. “When you go out close the door, for there is a decided draught.”
“I will go when I have said my say. Don’t you dare to meddle with my affairs. I know that Miss Stoner has been here. I traced her! I am a dangerous man to fall foul of! See here.” He stepped swiftly forward, seized the poker, and bent it into a curve with his huge brown hands.
“See that you keep yourself out of my grip,” he snarled, and hurling the twisted poker into the fireplace he strode out of the room.
“He seems a very amiable person,” said Holmes, laughing. “I am not quite so bulky, but if he had remained I might have shown him that my grip was not much more feeble than his own.” As he spoke he picked up the steel poker and, with a sudden effort, straightened it out again."
if you've mostly been basing your impression of elementary on tumblr i beg you to watch it, i avoided it for years for that same reason.
that being said there's a particular sensibility about victorian-era/1930s era adaptions in the dialogue that you might be craving from this detective, in which case they'll always fail. but on the 12-step thing - elementary is very very clever about how they show holmes absolutely detest the process and how they have to convince him of XYZ step being valuable. elementary is nice to me because there's just so much of it - most sherlock is either books or films, so a procedural TV show is nice. i also am a huge fan of depictions of platonic friendships and admire that the show so steadfastly resists shipping watson/holmes.
agree on irene, although i think elementary's take is alright. the book version is always funnier though - she basically treats holmes like a bug, puts him under a cup and slides him out of the way.
there's a sense in the first two-ish seasons of the show that we're watching a 'prequel' to the real show of holmes and watson working together, which maybe is baggage you're not interested in anyways.
so far Sherlock has not ceased to be an introvert, but he is inching towards something closer to the books characterization - able to understand when and how to be empathetic, and really mean it! i don't mind the idea that sherlock had to grow to be the character we met, and i think even in the books (though they aren't chronological) watson alludes to his softening over the years.
but yeah elementary is the only version that has watson not be an idiot and sherlock not be a dick, and still interprets him as a 'modern detective'. 'Monk', 'House', and 'Sherlock' are the competitors in this era and i find them all very very frustrating interpretations. it's not a purists tale, but i actually think elementary hews closest to the books of any adaption in my lifetime. it's also a show filled with the incredible and accurate diversity of new york city itself, and depicts it without pomp or circumstance, which i like a lot.
Oh, dear, that article gives me so many flashbacks to grad school. :) I disagree with the idea that Elementary says "Sherlock is one of us" - he's still enormously talented and gifted and trained beyond anyone else in the show - and I also disagree with the idea that hierarchy is inherently bad, that permeates the whole article. Ah, well, there's a reason I don't read a lot of academic English/film studies stuff anymore.
Yeah, I tend to go for the more traditional versions. I've been reading a ton of pastiches and continuations of the canon etc. over the years, everything from Nicolas Myers' "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution" to whatever I can scrape up on Amazon's recommendations list.
I do *not* like the Laurie King version with Mary Russell, the snippy little madam! Mainly because if you insult, belittle, or sideline Watson, you have made me your mortal enemy. I much prefer David Marcum's view on that character, as seen here (you'll need to scroll a fair ways down the page) "A Descent into Madness":
I've read Sherlock Holmes as time-traveller, the real Jack the Ripper (the Michael Dibdin novel, which is well-written but such an alteration of the characters that I can't thole it, even if the ending is slightly redemptive) and more. I haven't (yet) seen Basil the Great Mouse Detective.
While we're at the recommendations game, adaptations that poke fun at the canon -
(1) "Without A Clue", the film with Ben Kingsley and Michael Caine. Original twist, very funny, and ultimately respectful of the characters
(2) Roy Hudd's series of radio comedies "The Newly Discovered Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes". This one is vulgar, full of music hall jokes, and very much of its time. There are a lot of topical references that you'll miss if you don't recognise local references to London places and events in the British news of the time. Very much only if you can handle that type of humour, e.g. describing Holmes as "Sherlock Holmes - the brilliant detective, master of disguise, and toffe-nosed ponce".
Link to download the episodes here, where even the site describes it as "The Newly Discovered Casebook Of Sherlock Holmes (written by Tony Hare and also starring Jeffrey Holland & June Whitfield) ran for 6 episodes in 1999. Dreadful puns, risqué jokes and meta material, adrift somewhere between Round The Horne and The Burkiss Way."
Wikipedia describes it as "The burlesque series was a comic pastiche of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. The series was recorded in front of a live audience and each 30 minute episode was broadcast on BBC Radio 2 at 1 pm, making some of the rude, and occasionally crude, jokes rather risqué for the time of day."
The funniest bits are the music hall song interludes.
The Bert Coules radio plays adaptations - again, generally very faithful to canon save now and again, as in the version of "The Lion's Mane" which scraps most of the original story and makes it mostly about Holmes and Watson, including the llama/lama joke!
I would not ever say that Watson becomes better than Sherlock in Elementary. I do think that Sherlock being a human who has serious flaws, and one of those main flaws being addiction, is very supported by the original stories.
Elementary definitely didn't resonate with a lot of folks, but it did get 7 seasons, so it obviously resonated with some. Whether those some were Holmes fans, I don't know - but I definitely am!
I can understand the traditionalist take - I adore the Jeremy Brett series and the BBC radio series - but Holmes is a fascinating property that survives many different takes.
I made an effort to read "Arrowsmith", written by Sinclair Lewis with help from Paul de Kruif, but it's just too unpleasant and cynical for me, especially re: women. But it won lots of awards and is the best example of "great scientist helps great writer write novel about scientist".
Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters remains a classic, albeit more on the young adult level. "Charlatan", which is about J.R. Brinkley, Morris Fishbein, and the rise of evidence-based medicine is also a good read if not quite what you are asking for.
Isn't the tech CEO telling us we SHOULD worry about hostile AGI the same tech CEO telling us NOT to worry about the comet? At least I assumed Peter Isherwell was supposed to be Musk. So does that mean the point of the movie is we shouldn't trust Musk and therefore hostile AGI isn't a problem?
Eh, I guess I'll just believe whichever grocery checker looks most like Jennifer Lawrence.
Despite initially being inspired by Bostrom's Superintelligence, Elon Musk's concerns about AI safety are/were very different in character from MIRI's and I think pretty different from most of the rest of the field as well (or at least that part of it that EA considers itself aligned with). Eliezer in particular has accused him of being unduly influenced by the kinds of power-and-status dynamics that the movie portrays. In that respect, Isherwell was likely a more accurate portrait of Musk than the filmmakers knew.
> Eliezer in particular has accused him of being unduly influenced by the kinds of power-and-status dynamics that the movie portrays
To be fair, Eliezer's power-and-status dynamics are set up in a way that he _would_ do that. Elizer sees AI Safety as his own personal kingdom, and so if a more powerful higher-status man shows up and starts talking about AI Safety then that's a threat.
I wasn't sure Isherwell was just supposed to be Musk - his soft-spoken personality seemed too opposite, and his cell phone empire felt more like Apple or something. I thought he was a vague mix of Musk, Gates, Jobs, and a few other people.
His personality and background are derived from a bunch of people, but as far as things go that are actually relevant to the plot, he's Musk. At least, that's my view.
I'm glad they leaned away from a Muskian portrayal, as that would've been an insult to someone who will probably prove a key lynchpin of our actual asteroid deflection plan, if the need arises (by his founding and leading SpaceX).
Also, my impression was that Tech CEO wasn't involved with the first plan, only the second plan. The first plan, which would've worked, would likely be carried out by the company with the stockpile of reusable rockets.
I was not really thinking about asteroid deflection, which is not near the top of my list of X-risks to worry about (though I'm also a bit skeptical that SpaceX will be the difference between success and failure if an asteroid shows up). I was thinking about AI risk, wherein Elon Musk has played a role similar to that of the tech CEO in the movie.
Do you know of anyone who can corroborate Eliezer's public comments on this? For example, Eliezer said Musk didn't like Hassabis, and that's why he made OpenAI; but there's no evidence I can find of disagreements or anything other than friendliness between them. Also ... all the rest of it. A "spirit of collaboration" that was blown up by Musk's comments? It all sounds rather abstract, the kind of thing where I can't be sure how Eliezer could even know the counterfactuals... and I want to be careful with condemning a person on such evidence.
I don't know anyone who can corroborate Eliezer's public comments. I do know that Musk's original publicly-stated rationale for launching OpenAI, and OpenAI's original publicly-stated strategy, did not make sense on the merits as a reasonable way to prevent the kind of AI risk Bostrom describes in Superintelligence (which Musk publicly cited as a primary influence). This indicates that something bad along these lines must have happened, even if we aren't privy to all the relevant interpersonal dynamics. (OpenAI has since pivoted.)
Umm ... Musk absolutely, unequivocally, 100% founded SpaceX, and nobody disputes that. It was his idea, his money, his team. He was employee #1, and he hired employee #2, etc.
You are thinking of Tesla, where there was a spat over whether Musk was a founder or just an early investor. In that one, one could quibble semantics, but your description is certainly one accurate way to summarize it.
Wow! I cannot believe how completely wrong I was. You are absolutely correct that I had swapped Tesla and SpaceX.
My futile, but perhaps interesting, explanation for this complete wrongness is that I give Gwynne Shotwell 99% of the credit for SpaceX being amazing, and Musk +10% for apparently inspiring people who work for him and -9% for being a crazy jerk, and so it fits my narrative for Musk to be an after the fact glom-on.
But, I think I may need to adjust upward my opinion of Musk: He can hire and retain brilliant people, and that is actually job number one of any leader.
I once had a boss who hired me, and we had a team of ~15 people 90% of whom thought the boss was an incredibly pompous dumb guy. Then we had a reunion 5 years later (old boss not invited) and noticed that almost of all the people he hired were now extremely successful people at our megacorporation, and I made a similar revision upwards: he may have been laughably inept operationally, but at hiring, he was a star.
Also Thiel was a donor and an advisor to Trump. To me this character is basically a Musk/Thiel hybrid. Incidentally, both of them played important roles in the launch of OpenAI.
Virgin Airlines has (or had earlier this year) a flight attendant who was a dead ringer for J. Law with a much better haircut, but I'd be suspicious of a grocery checker with a decent fashion sense; might be CIA plant or something.
The feeling I got is certainly *not* that this is a movie intended to push a "trust the science" message as Scott implies and criticizes it for failing at that. It felt like a tragicomedy - a comedy that's funny only until you acknowledge that despite the exaggerations the depiction of likely reactions and results is *so real* that it becomes a tragedy. Like, all the counterproductive things the society manages to do for various reasons sadly seem so plausible, I felt convinced that yes, in reality in similar situations we as a society actually fail in similar ways, instead of wrangling a happy end by protagonists heroism or some deus ex machina.
All the potential "morals of the story" that this review does not find in it are not in this movie because those morals are IMHO false wishful thinking that don't reflect the reality we live in. Yes, there are anti-establishment crackpots with bullshit theories - but it's also true that the scientific establishment will lie to us for all kinds of political reasons; IMHO the behavior of Fauci at certain points is the inspiration for some of the messages the Male Scientist pushes despite knowing better and intending well. Yes, you will most likely fail if you try to do your own science, however, all kinds of potential authorative sources will also be misleading (sometimes intentionally) in certain cases. That's not "contradicting itself", that's simply reality.
So I feel that the movie gets the proper message across properly - that truth is complex, determining the truth is more complex, convincing others and establishing consensus is yet even more complex, and in the face of political considerations it *will* get distorted - and IMHO that message is a far better reflection of reality than any simplified "trust *that*" morals, and thus accepting that message is valuable for viewers.
I would agree that 'tragicomedy' is the correct description - I enjoyed the movie, despite its many flaws (the confused message/moral element of which Scott has, I think, accurately pointed out).
I'm willing to recognise the possibility that the movie is *accidentally* better than the director intended; It's certainly possible that the director meant it in the smugly superior way it's often been received, but my general approach to art is that I feel no obligation regarding authorial intent.
The core message I got was that, even in a maximally obviously bad and straightforward scenario, we would not necessarily Take It Seriously and Band Together, and the people with the right idea might be incompetent and unable to make it clear why they're correct in a big confusing world. This is an important and not necessarily intuitive point!
An interesting take, although I'm worried that you might be conflating "trust science" with "trust scientists." The first is an excellent plan, the second, well, you probably want to make sure those scientists aren't really shills for Philip Morris or the moral equivalent thereof. Scientists are humans prone to the human things like wanting attention, respect, and somebody finding them sexy. I thought Don't Look Up did a nice job of illustrating that fallibility. There was also an Emperor's New Clothes aspect to it, where anyone could just take a look and realize that the talking heads and media darlings weren't really interested in the truth.
That's what I'm trying to say. My point is that this assertion is hard to square with contempt for the "deniers" and "conspiracy theorists" who also doubt the conclusions of the scientific establishment and want you to "do your own research".
I gotcha. Maybe there's an order of explanation distinction to be made. (1) Legitimate criticisms of 'experts' as not being real experts, or being compromised, or dishonest --> therefore I will withhold judgment about their conclusions, vs. (2) I deny the conclusions of your experts --> therefore they are compromised, dishonest, and not real experts. (1) looks pretty good, and it's why we don't sign on for the Philip Morris guys saying cigarettes are harmless. (2) is more the conspiracy mindset. Your example of Behind the Curve is a good illustration.
I think a real problem tho is that once you admit that scientists can be "compromised, dishonest, and not real experts", it's much harder to argue that that's not true of any particular scientist. There are (somewhat) plausible mechanisms by which anyone, on any side, could be compromised, dishonest, and thus not a 'real' expert.
I think that’s skepticism on the cheap. The default should not be “they’re all corrupt, I’ll believe whatever I want,” but “ok, is this purported expert legitimate? Are their positive reasons to think they are compromised? Is what they say within the mainstream of thinking by other domain experts or is this an outsider view?” That sort of thing. As nonexperts, we should generally default to believing mainstream experts because they are probably right. Every nutter believes he is Galileo fighting the church, but almost no one is.
I don't disagree that you've outlined a very reasonable 'social epistemology', but that still doesn't really help someone determine whether any particular 'positive reason to think an expert is compromised' is itself reasonable.
I think your explanation [2] is bad epistemology because it's backwards, but from the 'outside', i.e. learning of a supposed expert's claims or beliefs, it's not always obvious that their beliefs aren't formed via that avenue. (Of course, to be consistent, I should be skeptical of my own beliefs and reasoning along the same lines!)
But I also don't think it's unreasonable to be skeptical of experts, to varying degrees, based on _other_ expert knowledge, e.g. about experts themselves and the processes, mechanisms, and 'forces'/'pressures' involved by which they form beliefs. The replication crisis, the strong evidence of _extremely_ poor application of non-domain expertise by other experts (e.g. statistics), and, e.g. what seems like the poor performance of supposed domain experts in the current pandemic, all seem like good reasons to be somewhat skeptical of particular experts and experts in general (to a smaller degree). Even mathematicians aren't exempt from what I think is reasonable skepticism, especially of 'new' results/ideas/beliefs/supposedly-mainstream-views.
I also think there's a really big spectrum between 'mainstream expert' and 'nutter that believes he is Galileo fighting the church' too.
And all of this seems to rely on non-experts being able to reliably identify "domain experts". Should I trust the captions on television to identify these experts? Or do I need to perform a literature review every time I want to determine exactly what the 'mainstream' views are of any particular domain? Is it even the case that there _are_ experts on, e.g. astrology? What's a general algorithm for resolving disputes _between_ (or among) 'domain experts'?
A further complication here is that there are almost always plausible "experts" arguing on different sides of the same issue. Maybe they aren't completely contradictory opinions (climate change is real vs. no it isn't) but instead one adding enough nuance to the other to change some fundamental conclusions (climate change will kill us all in ten years vs. slow change with moderate results).
Well, I’m flattered that you believe me capable of producing an entire social epistemology monograph in a comment section! Sadly, this is a case of a man’s reach exceeding his grasp. Anyway, your point about how to distinguish between domains that have true experts (are real wissenschaften) and those like astrology and phrenology that only have people cosplaying experts is a very hard one. I don’t have a handy solution. However, I do want to say that I think expert disagreement is frequently overblown. It takes place against a massive backdrop of consensus. The cutting edge where disagreement takes place is a thin line, and we should acknowledge the rest of the blade that supports it.
Maybe it's just me, but I really loathe things purporting to be reviews that narrate the entire storyline (even if snarkily).
Regardless of whether I planned to see this film or not, I now feel like the entire plot line has been so contaminated and spoiled for me that I will not be able authentically to watch it as a virgin viewer.
I take this to heart when I post my own reviews on Goodreads and other places. And therefore I don't summarize (beyond the most cursory, one sentence description). Every other review of any book about which I'm curious includes an entire summary of the plot. What's the point?
If I needed Cliff notes I would buy them.
When I read a review I am trying to learn the reviewer's opinion of what works, doesn't work, makes it interesting, makes it boring, makes it scintillating. But, while I may be unique in this respect, I never read a review to preempt hearing (seeing) the story for a first time. The unnecessary summary has stolen that possibility. I wish I'd never read the stupid review.
The subtitle of the email was "contains spoilers". Was the problem that you didn't see this, or that you interpreted "spoilers" as less strong than "plot summary"?
Yes. The problem was that I didn't see it. But even if I had (I have already seen the previews, and read other reviews) I did not expect it to be a blow-by-blow narration of every single plot twist.
Email. I think you may need to bold, underline, bang,etc. "THIS TELLS THE WHOLE PLOT. EXTENSIVE SPOILER ALERT!". Yes, I am being hyperbolic. But, I think for those of us who read you with some degree of commitment and regularity, only that level of disclaimer would have kept me from reading it.
Another possibility would be to do what NPR does. Give a warning of what portion is spoiler and when it ends and the review begins. Eg: "To avoid spoilers skip to the 3rd paragraph".
I really enjoyed the commentary. I only wish I hadn't read the preceding paragraphs.
This sort of thing - "full plot summary in section 1, fewer spoilers, but probably not none, starting in section 2" - sounds like the best combination of helpful and easy.
FWIW (I saw the warning, and didn't care because I have already seen the movie) I think you just need to put it in the first sentence or the first paragraph in the main text rather than the subtitle. Your warning is in subtitle text and not in the main text, and that could
(a) lead to various HTML display quirks that lead to it not being displayed in a timely or prominent enough manner
(b) lead people to automatically or unconsciously gloss over it because it sticks out but is actually less prominent in some ways (like the color) than the text itself.
Your point (a) is particularly relevant to readers who use RSS. Many RSS readers can't, or do not normally, display Substack's subtitles at all. Mine doesn't, although I wasn't bothered by this.
(This is for hysterical raisins. The original RSS spec defined a "description" field for items; it was envisioned to contain a synopsis, but in practice was (and is) often used for the entire item content. A later extension defined "content" for explicit use. Substack puts the subtitle in the description and the post text in the content, which is technically correct—but because of the historical ambiguity, most RSS readers ignore description if content is available.)
This might be related to the confusion I and others have often had when a post is a guest post (often, with Matthew Yglesias's Substack, and quite often here during the book review contest, though the recent Georgism posts seemed to me to be helpfully-enough labeled).
FWIW, the post was exactly what I expected to see from the title, knowing the blog.
However, this blog's use of the term “review” is substantially different than I usually see, the content being _much_ more in-depth. Which is of course a good thing, but I feel like this is part of the disconnect.
Agreed with this point and was going to say the same. Book reviews on this blog are not 1-3 paragraphs vaguely discussing the likes/dislikes; they're a mix of summary, analysis and commentary that generally give the major points of the book. I expected the same from this post as a 'movie review'. It would perhaps be clearer to refer to both this and other 'reviews' more as 'analyses', but that might also imply an even more in-depth critique, especially for technical subjects.
Also from my experience as someone who also hadn't seen the film, it was around the point talking about the Scientists going on TV and then subsequently to the NYT that I got the feeling all the main points of the story were going to be covered. It was around this point I decided I wasn't interested enough in the film to put aside reading this post until I watched it who knows when, but if I were, this seems early enough to stop reading and not get upset that the "the entire plot line has been so contaminated and spoiled".
I missed the content of the subtitle too, though it did not matter to me; I did not plan to watch the movie anyway.
There is something inherently skipp-able about subtitles. They often contain some pithy but short message about the text you are about to read, and a hasty reader like me will often jump right over them to the "real stuff".
That's kind of the problem isn't it? You are now going to miss the movie because of Scott's summarization that may or may not be accurate, and certainly does not reflect what your own impression would have been. So, he ruined the possibility of your enjoyment of it too.
Totally get what you're saying here, if you were planning to see the movie and got spoiled that is annoying, but as a person who wasn't planning to watch, I wouldn't have read this review without a summary. I'd prefer good spoiler warnings to removing summaries all together
To provide an other data point, I hate when a review does not include a deep plot summary, because the object level of the plot is over determining for the meta level of the review and because I mostly read review either to decide if something is worth watching or to keep myself on point on movies who will have a strong mediatic impact but that I don't have the time to watch.
I can see that if you wanted to watch this movie, the "contains spoilers" bit wasn't prominent enough. But I've heard enough about this movie, even though I haven't sought out such information, to know I would never go to watch it.
It's more a case of "where *can* you avoid seeing information about a particular movie nowadays?" than "Scott ruined this movie for me". I do think that unless you avoid all social media, even the most innocuous, you are going to get bombarded with "this is the plot/these are the characters/I loved this/the ending sucked" from all angles.
It's a genuine problem in that I've now seen so much about particular movies or TV shows, I don't need to watch the actual thing itself, I already know all about it. On the other hand, some things have intrigued me and sent me to the movie/show, because it's "Okay, I have to see what is going on for myself".
Yes, of course I knew something of it. I have seen the preview, and I have heard about the movie and read other reviews.
I knew the basic plot: "Scientist discovers a comet is coming toward Earth. They warn the powers that be. The powers that be do not listen. (With a somewhat allegorical nod toward COVID 19 or climate change). That is what I knew. I did not need to know every turn in the plot.
It's also noteworthy that every person responding to my comment included a caveat that they never planned to see the film. IE, they have no skin in the game. I do.
I'm tempted to say that having "skin in the game" should have made you more cautious of potential spoiler warning. But my point was that some people (well, me, so that's n>=1) prefer to read a full summary before committing the time and money to watch a movie.
And my second point was that a review which does not refer to relevant part of the plot generally present no interest whatsoever.
Even if you missed the explicit spoiler warning in the subtitle, Scott *also* says, "But first, the plot in a nutshell" in the second paragraph, and then launches into summarizing the specific details that open the movie, with an obvious intention to continue in this vein.
He continues summarizing specific details for EIGHT PARAGRAPHS.
You should have reasonably recognized what he was doing by the end of the first paragraph and bailed out if you didn't want to see the rest similarly summarized.
I'm not sure if Scott does this deliberately or not, but his review avoided a solution for how Don't Look Up is perfectly consistent with human cognition. Let's just this: "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup"
Using this lens, the both sides hollywood celebrities/media figures and Tech Ceo are of course the nearest of outgroups, hence hated the most. More than the Trump figure, or his supporters. But to be fair, it seems like the movie tries to spread the hate around a bit more. And to the extent it does this, it's a better movie.
I think a major source of disagreement between Scott and me (and in general between people who hated DLU and liked DLU) is about whether DLU was trying to make some straightforward criticism but was self-contradictory, or whether DLU's criticism was actually intended to be more nuanced. E.g. when the scientists in DLU were portrayed as incompetent, or bad at communicating, or affected by political calculus, I took it as part of the message whereas Scott took it as undermining the message. Whether you thought it was unintentionally undermining itself or actually making a deeply nuanced point, I thought it was nevertheless pretty realistic and captured a lot of the complexities of navigating the informational environment during COVID.
I'm confused; it seems to me that, in the movie's universe, the plan to capture and mine the asteroid was doomed from the start, and that any unbiased domain expert would have concluded as such (obviously those don't exist but this is a hypothetical here), and it went forward because the tech billionaire was detached from reality and everyone else succumbed to a mix of wishful thinking and political pressure to play along. Some "midwit academics" would presumably have come to the wrong conclusion here, but that doesn't seem particularly relevant; obviously the people in charge would have gotten the most prestigious experts they could and gotten as much media focus on them as possible. And it doesn't seem unrealistic that they could have successfully done that.
I suspect that Adam McKay thinks of scientific peer review primarily as a procedural safeguard against corruption. If you have a lot of money, and you want to be able to tell the public "scientists have found X" for one reason or another, but in fact everyone who studies this question knows that X is false, then you can pay for a study that says whatever you want, but it presumably won't pass peer review. So in that situation, it makes sense to stigmatize "non-peer-reviewed" studies, assuming that the genuine scientific consensus (which we're stipulating exists here) is at all trustworthy.
This is obviously very, very idealized and most science failures don't look anything like this at all, but I could believe that something similar-ish sometimes happens in fields like climate science where there's lots of internal agreement within the field but it's been politicized by outside forces. Though even there, it's probably not a dominant dynamic.
Is your complaint that the movie should have been a metaphor for something different?
Yeah, I guess I don't object to that because I don't think that the quality of our scientific institutions is among the most important causes of the kinds of problems that the film is a metaphor for. (It does cause other problems.)
I can think of two critiques of scientific institutions from the movie:
1) The scientists in DLU were awful at science communication. I thought this was a realistic representation of the actual state of affairs -- sometimes it's hard to "trust the science" because the scientists are bad at saying what "the science" is.
2) Sometimes the scientists became politically corrupted, most importantly the astronomy professor. (This is the point I was trying to make in my original comment -- Scott took this as undermining the "trust science" message, whereas I mainly thought "yeah this seems realistic, good job movie.")
As someone who has done his fair share of peer review, it annoys me to no end when people seem to believe that peer review is a magical process that prevents falsehoods from getting published.
I am somewhat confident in my ability to catch glaring errors, rather unconfident in my ability to catch subtle errors, and one hundred percent confident in my ability to find a place where the author should have cited one of my papers and didn't.
I didn’t like the “but it’s not peer-reviewed!” part. The problem with the mining plan is just that it’s way more complicated than the deflection plan, and when you’ve only got one shot to get this right you want to reduce risk as much as possible.
Death of the Artist. I don't care what the writers actually intended, they created a masterpiece. I think they portray overall realistic reactions of people - if a bit exaggerated. There *are* many times when there is an obvious truth that is *deliberately* obfuscated by those with power. This doesn't mean that the people who don't have the information are idiots, but it clearly happens time and again. I don't think the movie was unsympathetic to the anarachist group who suggested it was a lie (before the comet became visible), because they were already being lied to on so many other levels. I don't think there was a clear moral that you should 'just trust the experts.' Maybe you could argue the moral was to trust 'scientific consensus', but definitely not the heads of any organization. I also think the escape space ship (which was WAY higher tech level than comet deflection) was mainly put in for comic effect and not to be taken as a thing we could seriously do now. I thought it would have been better if the thing had just been hit by a piece of debris and exploded, however I think that may have been too depressing given the earth was already destroyed. I also don't think you are supposed to take the last man on earth bit seriously.
Overall I thought it did a great job of capturing a lot of civilizational inadequacy and the way politics (both big P and little p) obfuscate the seeking of truth and problem solving. I also agree that it captured so many of the emotions of the last year so well. I think you are holding it to too high a standard by insisting it had a *specific* moral.
"I don't care what the writers actually intended, they created a masterpiece."
Making a movie is an artistic process. The original screenwriter may have been a Bernie staffer, McKay may have intended for the audience to come away from this movie more determined to fight climate change--none of that matters. It's a movie and all that matters in the end is its artistic value. McKay has been successful in this business because he is a very good cinematic storyteller who seems to be driven ultimately by his artistic instincts not his politics.
Reminds me of Gwern's review of They Live where he notes that even tho the movie was clearly intended as a critique of Reaganism, it's surprisingly easy to misinterpret as an antisemitic piece.
If there's one thing that everybody agrees on, it's that "they" secretly control everything, and that "they" are terrible. There's only the minor matter of disagreeing over who "they" actually are.
I think you misinterpreted the "Believe Experts" argument being made. It's not "Believe Anyone who is an Expert", it's "Believe (domain) Experts".
The only domain experts in the movie are the original scientists. Nobody else - the NASA guy is a political appointee, the tech CEO has no subject matter expertise, the politicians are politicians.
We're supposed to realize that we should be listening to scientists with specific domain expertise, like how for climate change there's almost complete consensus among domain experts but conflict among non-domain experts.
Male Scientist described himself as "an expert on trace gases in dead galaxies". It seemed like they incidentally discovered the comet when doing cosmology research. Neither of them is a domain expert in comets, and they're *certainly* not domain experts in quantum explosives, which turned out to be what Tech CEO's plan's failure hinged on. The domain experts in quantum explosives were the Nobel Prize winners who invented them and said they would work.
Also, a scientist who can't explain their work to anyone other than a certified "domain expert", needs to hand in their Ph.D.
Really, they shouldn't have a Ph.D. in the first place, because one of the standard rules is that your dissertation committee has to include at least one professor from a different field. Science done properly is not some medieval Guild system with everyone sticking to their narrowly-defined lane.
A cosmologist, an astrodynamicist, and a "quantum-explosives expert" should be able to come to a consensus. If they can't, the one saying "you are not a domain expert so shut up" is the one to be skeptical of.
The outside member on the committee isn't there to ensure that you can explain your research in a way that someone outside the field can actually understand - they're there to make sure that someone from outside the field can actually think there's something meaningful going on, and there's neither obvious abuse of the student by the supervisor nor obvious charlatanry by the student and committee together, even if they can't really follow what's happening.
I had a strange experience once as an outside member. The student's defense, and mastery of his field, was so appalling that I wondered how he was even admitted to the program in the first place. But it turned out he had done long and faithful labor for a very senior member of the department. (More or less, he did all the semi-science-skilled labor of running the lab.)
I recall the department members asking me "What would your department do with a student like this, given the fact that his advisor is so-and-so, very important?" And, being young and naive, I said "We would decline to give him a degree." They all smiled. The guy got his degree. It wasn't the most discouraging thing I ever learned about academia.
I think you're making too big a deal of Male Scientist's credentials. The movie is very clear that the President does not take him at his word: she even orders his findings to be triple-checked (by Ivy League scientists!) The movie doesn't dwell on this vetting process because it's dull, but I think we can assume that it does happen and that the scientists' message can be viewed as the consensus of domain experts.
(Otherwise this would have been a much shorter movie about a scientist at Michigan State who made a very foolish prediction and was immediately humiliated on Twitter and arXiv.)
The scene where Male Scientist was unable to object to Tech Billionaire's plan (due to his lack of domain expertise in "quantum explosives") actually did a great job capturing the limitations of modern science. In practice, domain expertise is usually very narrow and the number of true domain experts in a given field is very small. Modern science deals with this through radical openness. However, that process is extremely easy to disrupt: which is exactly what Tech Billionaire does in the film.
When people say "Trust Science", I think what they mean is "trust people with technical expertise".
I completely agree with this for non-controversial topics. Like "Gene X is a transcription factor for Gene Y", or something like that.
But for controversial topics, it can be a bit more complicated. Like, when we're making regulations about the financial system, should we listen exclusively to investment bankers and hedge fund managers, since they have the most technical knowledge about finance? Probably not, because in this case technical knowledge is tied to a vested interest.
I think this is also true of politically-charged topics, when the people with technical expertise in the field are heavily skewed towards one political side.
I don't think I understand the concluding paragraph (and maybe I wasn't meant to). Yes, if I know that a comet is coming, I should try to deflect it -- but the whole point is that I *don't* know. Are you saying that I should attempt to avert every potential risk, no matter how remote it seems to me personally, just on the off chance it might turn out to be true ? Doesn't this conclusion obligate me to exhaust all of my resources pretty much immediately, since there are very many risks, and only one of me ?
You might say, "no, you should only spend your efforts on obvious risks, like the comet", but maybe the risks are not obvious to me. I've got one astrophysicist saying one thing, I've got a team of Ph.D.s saying another, and I've got a grocery clerk saying something entirely different.
The suggestion to "collide the two narratives and integrate them" sounds great in principle, but I'm not an astrophysicist, nor an epidemiologist, nor a data scientist, nor a nuclear physicist, nor a geneticist, nor a climatologist, nor... So, how can I make a reasonably informed decision on any of these threats ?
I think I'm agreeing with you. I'm saying in real life these kinds of questions are hard without having competent authorities who we can trust to get the right answer for us.
(though I do think a bias towards responding to plausible existential threats is a pretty good idea)
It seems to me that Don't Look Up *is* pushing the progressive line on COVID, but it comes from the alternate universe where Donald Trump won re-election.
Cast your mind back to the political world of mid-2020. Anyone with any sense is saying that the only way to solve COVID-19 is strict lockdowns and mask policies. The President, on the other hand, is telling people that some new high-tech "vaccine" is just around the corner. We don't need to suffer the economic consequences of lockdowns, we just need to wait for this complicated new medical technology to solve everything for us. What a dangerous lie, and he even tried to compromise institutions like the CDC and the FDA to support it! "I certainly won't be putting anything Trump approves in my body," said my left-wing friends, "I only trust independent scientists not tainted by his administration."
Unfortunately for the filmmakers, Joe Biden won the election, so the vaccine is safe and effective and all the government agencies saying so are perfectly trustworthy. So now the movie has to try and awkwardly pivot away from its Trump-era narrative in editing (and PR to claim it's about climate change).
The only hole in this theory is that I don't know how long it takes to make movies. Anyone know if it's plausible for the script to have been written, and shooting started, in early-to-mid 2020?
The script was completed before the pandemic started (and Adam McKay has said that he intended it as a metaphor for climate change). However, principal photography occurred after the 2020 election, so the actors and director would have had it in mind and minor changes to the script could have been made. (The time in between was spent waiting for the pandemic to subside or at least for people to be okay with pushing ahead through it.)
Your second paragraph reads as a strawman to me. Support for anti-covid measures never had a necessary connection with vaccine pessimism. Once it became apparent that decent vaccines were pretty likely to arrive, the main pro-lockdown position was 'let's minimise suffering and death in the dangerous pre-vaccine phase of the pandemic, and then open up relatively safely once we've had time to get vaccinated'. Vaccine pessimists always had a harder time arguing for tough measures, because the obvious retort was 'what, forever?'
I haven't seen the movie, but FWIW, its plot is not unique. Most science fiction movies (or TV series) have a scene where our heroes discover some looming threat (incoming asteroid, Goa'uld mothership, robot uprising, etc.), report it to their superiors, and the superiors immediately quash the news because it would hurt their reelection campaigns. Although it does sound like *Don't Look Up* went a little further with the premise.
I think the point is that it shows what it would actually look like if something like that were attempted, instead of just posing it as a plot obstacle to make the heroes' lives harder.
In the respect that it satirically illustrates a really dangerous sociopolitical dynamic that actually exists in real life and could very well get us all killed, then sure. Except of course that it's a completely different dynamic, and that a lot of what's good about Don't Look Up seems unintended, and also of course that it's something like 0.1% as funny.
My main beef with the film, and I tried to be nice about it as I've worked with David Sirota in the past, is that it portrays the news media as uninterested in scaring people. I have worked in media for around a dozen years, if there was an actual comet heading towards the earth, CNN would probably have a Comet Tracker Hologram on screen at all times for six months. It felt like a very surface-level critique of our systems. https://www.inquiremore.com/p/dont-look-up-is-a-fun-movie-but-bad
I could see there being partisan warfare over the comet, but it would be more in the vein of the sides both blaming eachother for not doing enough about it, or something of that nature.
I'm not sure - a tracker sounds more useful than the things the media actually does. There are a bunch of media organizations that have covid trackers, but I've never seen one that actually does regular updates on traffic fatalities or global climate, let alone a tracker.
The entire CNN.com front page is fearful stories about COVID-19 including anecdotes about kids getting it (there is still very low risk to children from COVID-19). I guess the critique could always be that CNN should've dispatched reporters in December 2019 to tell everyone they're going to die...
Stories on the Diamond Princess ship carrying COVID, a report on the number of cases in the U.S., and a story on how masks won't help against coronavirus.
Going backwards in time will undoubtedly show fewer COVID-19 stories on the front page. The cruise ship was a major story in February because of its surreal fate sitting off the coast of Japan while doctors and supplies were helicoptered in.
It did take a couple of months for the U.S. media to go from "China reports they've seen a new virus" to full-blown panic, but once they were in, they were all in.
You are absolutely right, though I'm not sure how a more plausible media would look in a similarly satiric movie.
I believe that movie is poking at one problem-- the use of frivolity to ignore real risks. It isn't hitting all the ways a polluted information environment can go wrong.
Author, IMHO, really misses the point. Even though the satire bites and the allegory is spot on, Don’t Look Up is a COMEDY. Getting serious about the license it takes on characters and cliches is an error of over-thinking.
The problem is with a farce like this, you need to keep the humor coming and the pace fast, so the viewers don't have time to think about just how damned absurd the story you're selling them is (even as you're making jokes about it). This neither had enough humor nor a fast enough pace.
It's funny - 90 minute movies are being replaced by 120 and 150 minute movies, as their only way of keeping up with things like 300 minute or 600 minute TV seasons (and the movies often only work when you watch them in sequence as part of a whole "cinematic universe") - even as 10 minute videos are losing ground to 90 second videos.
I enjoyed it, but maybe minute 150 through minute 200 could've been cut and the total quality [1]would rise, as it takes out the parts where the movie-makers were worried their messaging was too subtle.
[1] not just average quality, but total quality over all
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but the joke didn't work for me since it doesn't make any sense for an algorithm so powerful as to predict a death that can only occur following the destruction of the planet, to be unable to predict the destruction of the planet.
I wrongly predicted a post-credits scene where he's revealed to have survived somehow, based on this, and everyone correctly mocked me when that didn't happen.
It’s not in the realm of comedy as belly laughs. Non the less it’s a comedy. Absurd broadcasters. Insane politicians. Megalomaniacal industrialists. All with their volume turned up to 11. Etc.
Eh, there are plenty of comedies that are more likely to raise a smile than a guffaw, and some of them are even good. Though I would agree that not-LOL-funny satire usually relies way too much on eliciting the smug self-congratulatory kind of smile.
Section II doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why couldn't the movie be saying that mainstream institutions are frequently full of shit, but conspiracy theorists usually manage to be even wronger than the official truth?
The tone of the movie seemed to be that everyone was extremely stupid for not just doing the obvious thing and deflecting the comet correctly. This matches the tone of eg global warming activism where everyone is extremely stupid for not just doing the obvious thing and slashing carbon emissions.
But this only works if true things are obvious, which isn't right in a world where all the institutions are compromised and insane. In a world where all our institutions are compromised and insane, how should we know whether climate change is real or not? And if the answer is "we can't", then is our response really so irrational?
I think all these questions have answers, it's just that they're hard answers and I felt like this movie was trying to insist they were easy ones.
Yes, I agree here - time was of the essence - wasting time by forgoing the already planned opportunity to deflect comet is obvious insanity - if the 'mining' plan doesn't work, there is no time to make another one, and that is exactly what happened. Taking this level of risk with all of life on earth to bolster the economy is beyond irresponsible.
Also worth pointing out that Bash wasn't allowing the scientific community to see its research and make judgements of its own, because it was trying to keep it's technology to itself. It hired particular people to endorse it, but there couldn't be an actual scientific arena for discussion or disagreement given their secrecy.
This seems importantly relevant to covid as well. One thing I've been seeing from many commentators is that Australia and New Zealand may have made the right decision in keeping the covid-zero policy for classic covid and the alpha variant, but giving it up with delta, while China is clearly making the wrong decision in keeping covid-zero through delta and now omicron. If something like this becomes the consensus, then it becomes a real question, for future pandemics, whether they're the kind where full suppression is relevant for island nations and totalitarian regimes, for everyone, or for no one.
Thanks, that makes sense. This paragraph still seems illogical to me --
> Take this seriously, and the obvious moral of the story is: all conspiracy theories are true. If some rando bagging groceries at the supermarket tells you that every scientist in the world is lying, you should trust her 1000 percent.
-- but maybe I'm taking it too close to literally.
I know it's tongue in cheek, but in context I read it as an exaggerated version of a real point, rather than random humour or sarcasm. I think I did take this part too close to literally though: "the obvious moral of the story is: all conspiracy theories are true".
As someone who's probably more progressive than not these days (my friends think I'm a centrist making a deal with the right-wing devil but that's because everyone's gone insane), the biggest thing that bothers me about the progressive movement is the need to pretend that they are rebels fighting the power instead of...y'know, the power.
Don't get me wrong, they don't have *all* the power because power is a multi-faceted thing and there are lots of types of power you can have. But we currently have a left-leaning congress, a Democratic president, a media apparatus that's supportive of progressive aims, and an academic environment that's hostile towards conservative viewpoints. And everyone from my progressive social circle to Capitol Hill is still doing the "Viva la revolution" song and dance.
The issue appears to be that far-left progressive power isn't absolute. It does not have 100% support and sometimes they are therefore required to work with a person who does not agree completely with their goals. Occasionally they have to pass a bill that's only some of the stuff they want, or engage in debate to convince a local government to implement reforms they support. This is apparently an intolerable restraint on their freedom.
Here's the thing though. I think that if tomorrow we turned the whole country over to Ocasio Cortez as absolute dictator, the amount of the progressive agenda that would actually get passed is none of it. I think the idea of taking action, and having that action judged, terrifies this movement to the point of paralysis. They want to be the scrappy underdogs from the movies, and the second they get in charge they become the villains (because holding institutional power in movies always makes people evil). The magic "make everything better" button won't work, or will work with complications, and then they'll have to defend their choices and priorities.
Tl;dr: I don't think the progressive movement holds contradictory ideas about what "trusting science" looks like. I just think anyone who does anything is suspect to them, while people who know the truth and are prevented from acting on it are the good guys. Action, by itself, is evil.
The Disney Star Wars sequels are the perfect expression of this impulse — despite actually being in power, the Republic casts their soldiers as a scrappy “Resistance” against an upstart movement that holds no official power at all (but inexplicably possesses superior military might). The good guys are then relieved of power as soon as possible so they can go back to fighting the Man.
Or the way that certain regimes in certain countries that have been in power for decades still refer to themselves as "The Revolution" and any resistance that might arise as "Counter-revolutionaries"
FYI, the expanded universe established that the Republic had almost completely demilitarized and their "warships" were barely armed. The government made a choice to be helpless.
Because I can't help talking about Star Wars at any available opportunity: I interpreted the situation as a little more nuanced in The Force Awakens. It seemed clear to me that the First Order and the Republic were more or less two nations controlling different regions of space, existing in an official state of truce, but the Republic was secretly funding/supporting a grassroots insurgency in First Order space, called "the resistance" because they resist First Order rule. Presumably the Republic did this because they recognized the threat of the First Order but couldn't, or didn't want to, risk all-out war, or something like that.
I know they couldn't get Carry Fisher for The Force Awakens, but can you imagine how good a sequel it could have been if we'd seen her struggle with the realities of power? Opening crawl, pan down to some ominous looking building on Coruscant, cut to her, dressed in black, sitting in some high seat, giving an order that will obviously get people killed. The New Main Characters are never sure they can trust her. The public refers to her as The Emperor Reborn. Through dramatic irony we know she's just trying her best but there's still a danger there. Man, that would've been great.
> the biggest thing that bothers me about the progressive movement is the need to pretend that they are rebels fighting the power instead of...y'know, the power.
Eh, progressivism isn't a monolith. I think there are lots of people who actually, for real, want to enact the entirety of the progressive agenda without compromise, and they compose a lot of its volume and cultural influence, and they feel like the underdogs because they're not getting what they want. Not saying there's no pageantry or ingroup signaling, but that's not all of it.
Of course, the system is somewhat designed to marginalize those people at the expense of those who have to avoid angering a broad range of people (and whose most common incentive is therefore to do nothing). Also, those people's tactics tend to be totally unproductive, since they involve seeking power and influence in domains where progressivism is already dominant and ignoring domains where progressivism is sidelined (but not so sidelined as to be irrelevant).
"The system is somewhat designed to marginalize those people at the expense of those who have to avoid angering a broad range of people (and whose most common incentive is therefore to do nothing)."
This question is going to sound like a gotcha but it's not, and I'm genuinely curious.
Our current system tends to discourage action for lots of reasons, but foundationally it's because of a basic democratic ethos that if more than 50% of people don't want a thing done it doesn't happen. Would you/progressive folks you know prefer a system where sometimes minority groups get to pass policies even without a majority?
The Supreme Court is often cited as a positive example of this but the Supreme Court really only has the power to enjoin government from doing things - no matter how "activist" people may claim it is it can't levy taxes or raise the minimum wage. Should a true democratic ethos say "if you have 40% of the support, you get to pass 40% of the laws"? And if so any thoughts on how to make that a viable system?
Courts actually do have the power to raise taxes in some circumstances. The most important example was the Kansas City schools desegregation case. The judge found that the system had been illegally segregated, and as part of the remedy, required a substantial tax increase to remake the school system. This went up and down the appeals process and was eventually okayed.
The story has a sad ending. Even with lovely, well-equipped new buildings and a lot higher budget for the school system, student achievement stayed stuck at a low level.
I'm mostly just providing a descriptive story here of why people have the attitudes and perceptions that they do. For my own part, I do suspect that Congress and the federal civil service do a lot more nothing than is optimal, but I don't have any good ideas about how to fix that without making other things worse. If I did, I'd quit software engineering and start a think tank or something. But it seems like a hard problem.
That being said, some (not all) progressive policies have majority support among the electorate but still don't get enacted. The U.S. is constitutionally much more vetocratic than most democracies (which still don't let policies pass with <50% support!), and on top of that there are lots of additional factors gumming up the works (and I think there's a real argument that that's more true now than at most times in U.S. history). You probably don't want any given policy to instantly take effect whenever >50% of people are in favor, that's too much instability, but there's clearly room in between those extremes.
> Our current system tends to discourage action for lots of reasons, but foundationally it's because of a basic democratic ethos that if more than 50% of people don't want a thing done it doesn't happen. Would you/progressive folks you know prefer a system where sometimes minority groups get to pass policies even without a majority?
I think the American system goes a lot further than that - if more than 40% of people - or, more accurately, if pluralities of more than 40% of the states - don't want a thing done then, outside of certain fairly narrow categories, it doesn't happen. And there are a bunch of progressive policies which command more than 50% support, but less than 60%.
I think that some checks on the ability to radically change the status quo with a 50%+1 vote majority are probably a good thing, but I also think that the US is pretty clearly too far towards the vetocracy end of the vetocracy/bulldozer axis.
If progressives are "in power" when do I get to stop giving hundreds of dollars a month to some fuckhead in health insurance business? Would really appreciate some kind of timeline on this or literally any policy that would benefit me personally, since the progressives are supposed to be into that kind of thing.
The *Democrats* are in power (for another year and a few days after that). Sadly, they are no more progressives than Republicans are libertarians.
Right now progressives hold the presidency, somewhere between (about) 40 and (precisely) 49 seats in the Senate depending on who you count, and a near-majority or small majority of the seats in the house.
In order to actually implement most of a progressive agenda, in would be necessary for progressives to hold the presidency and a majority in the house, and either for progressives to hold 60 seats in the senate or progressives who support abolishing the filibuster (which is not a position which automatically follows from being a progressive) to hold 50 seats.
(You can implement a bigger chunk of a conservative agenda with less than that, because there's better overlap between "things on a conservative agenda" and "things the US political system allows you to do without a supermajority, but there's still a lot conservatives would like to do but couldn't if the numbers were reversed).
America is unusually far towards the vetocracy end of the vetocracy/bulldozer axis. The part of the statement "progressives are in power" that deserves close dissection and questioning isn't "progressives", it's "in power".
Let's put aside if the most right wing Democratic candidate in the primary is "progressive" or not, and look instead to a period when the Dems held unambiguous power: under Obama, who had 60 votes in the Senate, we got the ACA - which is what ultimately ensured I would keep sending money to insurance companies (as someone in a state that blocked the Medicaid expansion, it's particularly grotesque, as I spent my years under the poverty line giving 30+% of my income to such companies). He also enacted exactly zero policies that raised the federal minimum wage.
At what margin should we expect the following policies to be practically produced by the Democratic Party: some type of public option, single payer, or other thing that means I stop sending money to vampiric private insurance companies, or, a federal minimum wage hike? I don't think these are extreme far left progressive ideas, but fairly straightforward, popular ones - that are going exactly nowhere and look to continue to be going in that direction for the forseeable future.
I try to be a realistic person. The only way that I see these things happening is with significant pressure from below, a generational shift, or some other process that pushes the DNC to the left (i.e., if the current DNC held 60 seats it wouldn't do these things either because it does not want to do these things). If I were a right winger who similarly saw the sorts of obstacles to popular policies on the right, I would conclude that the government was not controlled by right-wingers.
I think you might be taking it for granted that insurance companies are the devil incarnate, and that a federal minimum wage hike would be great.
Re: minimum wage: I've always seen "higher minimum wage provides an incentive for businesses to automate more and hire fewer people" as a pretty strong argument from basic economics. Furthermore, cost of living varies wildly across the country, so even if a minimum wage was good, it seems to me like different levels in different places would be much more reasonable than a single federal value.
Re: health insurance: I typed up the below paragraph, then thought "eh I kind of agree with you." I'll keep it for posterity, but essentially my argument boils down to "eh it's complicated and there are some good features of a private system that many people would be incredibly hostile to losing." Don't think that necessarily invalidates the proposal to have a gov't funded *option*.
IIRC, insurance companies have relatively small (~10% I think?) profit margins. So, out of the 30% of your income that you're sending to them, 3% is going to their profits and 27% is going to pay for someone's medical bills (who knows whose). There are clearly problems with the current system, but I'd categorize many of them as overregulation--shit where you can't see a doctor one state over, or insurance companies can negotiate prices with hospitals but uninsured people have to pay full price, or tax benefits are given for employers providing insurance but not for buying your own insurance. I agree there's a problem, but I don't think it's clear that "single-payer system" is the best solution.
> I think you might be taking it for granted that insurance companies are the devil incarnate, and that a federal minimum wage hike would be great.
I'm not taking it as a given. Who knows? The world's unpredictable and complex. I *do* know it's broadly popular and signature progressive policy that has gone exactly nowhere. The specific efficacy of the policy is irrelevant.
It's like if Republicans held all three branches and couldn't pass a tax cut - are tax cuts good? It's unanswerable, since it's not a well-defined question. Do people like tax cuts, and are tax cuts core to the general Republican platform? Yes.
I would argue that Obama was not ever a "Progressive" and neither were the Democrats of 2008-2012 (when the voting mattered to Obama). Progressives grew significantly leading up to the 2016 election and even more so after that. Quite a few people responded to the election of Trump by going further left on key Progressive issues. AOCs career is altogether post-Obama, and she's one of the most well known Progressives. Bernie Sanders was practically sitting alone in a corner for decades before rising to national prominence for the 2016 election.
Not to say that Democrats are going to pass the entire Progressive legislative agenda if they had a bigger majority, but most of the very Progressive Build Back Better agenda would have been DOA in 2009, instead of coming within a few votes of passing in 2021.
I can't believe this is written in good faith. This is like Tucker Carlson calling Biden a communist. Your representation of who progressives are and how much power they have is nearly opposite from the truth.
The vast majority of the Democratic party that currently holds power and the major media apparatus could not be called progressive by anyone paying attention and intending to portray the truth. They don't even call themselves progressives. Honest libertarians/an-caps that think neoliberal Democrats are evil and dumb and Progressives are even dumber still wouldn't confuse the two.
As to your latter point, about progressives being afraid of action, there's no evidence one way or the other so you're making it up. In fact, people who don't like progressives usually like to compare what would happen if they actually had power to authoritarian communist examples such as the USSR and China, regimes not typically noted for inaction or paralysis.
Yeah, admittedly we still live in a coalition democracy and even an historically successful election doesn't give them *absolute* power over the whole governmental apparatus.
A counterpoint to my main thrust is just that US democracy is bad at passing laws, and I'll own that. But also the progressive movement made it clear during the recent Building Back Better debate that they'd rather advocate for their perfect plans and pass nothing than pass imperfect compromises that can survive our process. Their failure to get major changes made at the local or state levels also bears my hypothesis out.
The only NDP premier of Ontario, Bob Rae, commented once that getting elected was hard on the Ontario NDP because governing turned out to be a lot harder than they thought.
He almost became leader of the federal centrist party some years later.
There is a big lesson there for NDP members, who mostly will never learn it.
I thought that “Don’t Look Up” joins “Dr. Strangelove” as one of the greatest and most important movies of all time … and yet I somehow also liked this post, bringing its narrative contradictions to the surface.
I’d propose the following, as a message that the movie is 100% clear and consistent about throughout: in general, trust experts insofar as they say that a problem affecting all of humanity is a real problem and we should come together and put in the hard work to solve the problem. Don’t trust the people—even ones with impressive credentials—who are more worried about politics and image than the underlying reality of the problem, or who advocate simply ignoring the problem, or who seek to profit from the problem.
I’m sure one could come up with counterexamples where even the above advice leads to the wrong answer, but broadly speaking, it’s a message that I strongly endorse, and I thought the movie conveyed it clearly and well.
> Don’t trust the people—even ones with impressive credentials—who are more worried about politics and image than the underlying reality of the problem, or who advocate simply ignoring the problem, or who seek to profit from the problem.
Great, but the problem is identifying those people versus the others. In the movie it's easy, they're the good-looking ones played by famous actors. In the real world it's much trickier, and you can't hope to resolve a tricky issue (like AGI or AGW) by simply identifying all the _bad_ people and then ignoring them.
<i>Don’t trust the people—even ones with impressive credentials—who are more worried about politics and image than the underlying reality of the problem</i>
But that's not a simple task at all. To take one example, are people who are concerned about climate and oppose nuclear power "more worried about politics and image than the underlying reality of the problem"?
Maybe we should turn the question on its head: which movies DO let us compute the mapping from its characters to who the good guys and bad guys are in a real-life situation, in a way that isn’t “hard” or prone to error? Is this a reasonable thing to ask a movie to do? Particularly when people really *are* polarized and the movies are trying to appeal to viewers from all sides, so they *have* to at least create plausible deniability about who’s who?
The Crucible is my go-to example of propaganda* done reasonably well, Ender's Game would also be on my short list (I've not seen the movie though) even though I disagree with the ideology being pushed in Ender's Game. Star Trek Tos and TNG I think are also solid outing even if they abandoned their ideologies with DS9 an everything after it. I would generally prefer for the propaganda to at least be decent fiction in its own right, and a bit subtle in its propagandizing.
*Propaganda has a negative connotation, but I just mean media that is intended to promote an ideological position. I am honestly not familiar with a neutral word for this? Advocacy maybe?
In "the golden age of Hollywood", they were called "message movies". One famous producers was reputed to have put them down, "If you want to send a message, call Western Union."
"I saw the phrase 'a constant impulse to overleap the process of becoming genuinely sure of something to get to the part where you're smug about it' somewhere and can't stop thinking about it."
It seems like there ought to be a five syllable German word to describe this tendency. Some reader in Germany want to try to coin one?
Anyway, nice review. Makes me want to go see Licorice Pizza instead.
Good suggestion. Looking at google's translation, it appears that the word for "skipping" itself has about five syllables in German, so it looks my original sentiment was well short of the necessary length. Kinda glad I studied French in high school.
I've had this similar sentence stuck in my head for decades, about a man who was a leftist radical in the 1960s and has been a right-wing agitator for decades [name redacted]: "He went from from being a Communist to being a right-wing propagandist without ever pausing for a moment of self-doubt."
This movie promotes the progressive line on science issues, and that line is be afraid, no matter the issue or who is promoting it. Take the most economically damaging course of action, because that will keep us "safe". If anyone claims there is a shortcut, like geoengineering, mining asteroids, or that vaccines negate the need for lockdowns or masks, they are self-interested and wrong.
"be afraid, no matter the issue or who is promoting it"
No it isn't! That's part of the problem - fear would at least be a consistent heuristic!
You shouldn't be afraid of vaccines causing autism. You shouldn't be afraid of pedophile rings. You shouldn't be afraid of chemicals turning the frogs gay.
The problem is there are two separate narratives, "be afraid" and "don't believe the loony fearmongers", and without realizing that you have to deploy both at different points, people get excessively certain of whichever one they're applying to the current situation.
OK, be afraid as long as that would require expensive government action. And all chemicals as long as they aren't health related in which case they are all essentially government produced and should be free.
Or maybe the movie is not trying to push any progressive agenda, and is instead trying to entertain and make money by depicting the complexity of the world and the weaknesses of people's heuristics in a satirical way? Why was this interpretation not even considered?
We shouldn't necessarily trust the filmmakers about what their agenda is. It's much more acceptable in polite company to say you've made a film trying to push a political agenda than it is to say you've flattened some political issues because you figured out that's what sells.
If you interpret the movie as not being _primarily_ about science, but as being an arugment for 'the people' to overthrow the current corrupt system, it all fits together:
Science works, byut only if you have trustworthy institutions and elites, which we don't. The elites are all corrupted by money and politics, and any attempts to change the system are derailed by cranks who see marxist conspiracies everywhere.
When she says 'elites aren't that competent', this is meant to be showing how _wrong_ she is - yes they _are_ that competent, the paranoid conspiracy theorists in the crowds were basically _right_, but even the good guys weren't convinced that of the true problem.
I have not, and probably will not see this film. A lot of commenters seem to be saying that this film has a complex and nuanced message that Scott missed, so in that line of thinking I am curious about something from Scott's plot summary. As far as I can tell, the Trump analog president individually made two choices that collectively doomed the earth, first to ignore the comet, then to take the bad (profit motivated) plan instead of the good plan.
To what extent does the plot fall apart if Josiah Bartlett is president? If the plot falls apart with Josiah Bartlett as president, then surely the message of this film is anything but subtle.
I think "if we had smart good people in power instead of dumb bad people, things would go better" is consistent with a "our institutions suck and we are stupid" message.
It feels weird to quote you at yourself, but if people said the film was important, but hard to watch, made their 'blood boil' because it was critical of them and their peers, sure. So far, I've not seen a lot of comments that are both for the film and take that kind of tone. If 'our' and 'we' are the special formation of those words that does not actually include the person using them, well that seems to reduce back down to the same basic message.
For what it's worth, I mostly enjoyed the film, perhaps because I saw the message as much less nuanced:
Even existential threats may not be enough to overcome tribalism and perverse incentives. Also, Trump is bad. (And possibly, but not as clear a message: credentialism is bad, capitalism is bad, and being a scientist from a non-prestigious university is cool)
There are other people besides the president (most especially the media) whose screw-ups are portrayed as contributing to the problem, even though the pivotal decision was hers.
To what extent would the plot fall apart if a smart Trump stand-in written by people who like him was the President instead? Josiah Bartlett isn't real; he's a fantasy reimagining of Clinton by people who wish they were Monica Lewinski. If you wrote such a similarly fawning and fantastical version of Trump, stripped bare of any actual character flaws, I'm sure he would roll out Operation Warp Speed intended to utterly destroy the comet as fast as possible.
Interesting, but I've always seen that as part of a shift in language. So in classic Aristotle there are three forms of government, monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. Modern English contains the same three concepts, we just use new words for them: dictatorship, democracy and populism.
I'd definitely agree there's a Russell conjugation with the first two. The Saudi monarchy is our friend, the Russian dictatorship is our enemy. But the last two pairs don't work out so well. Referring to oligarchy as democracy is not to praise it but to obfuscate the reality. I don't think it's common for people to use democracy and populism as a Russell conjugate. But "politics" and "democracy" do fit the bill (and it gives us the most lovely nonsensical statements like "we have to get politics out of our democracy.")
There is tyranny too, monarchie and tyranny are two différent regime (the difference being that the king reigns using authority while the tyran use power).
I think you missed the point when trying to take a comedic film seriously and where a parody of our insane and inconsistent reality is what....going to be internally consistent? The tone and style played towards our real experiences of experts and institutions screwing us around and over. It is abundantly clear the elites are playing their own games with no real regard for the general populace. As every group of elites all through history in every nation and culture have collectively done in every single moment of jostling and vying for more power.
The depiction of confusing, contradictory, and every shifting messaging from the experts and people you're telling us to 'trust' is the main reason people don't trust them. That was delivered beautifully and painfully in the film and at moment comedically.
The changing messaging on climate change and on covid have not been science led, they have been deeply political messages and all the actually good points of criticism are continually ignored. The media's main ability here is picking and choosing which critiques of them they will respond to and they always choose to make themselves look right and good. Through labels like 'anti-vaxx'er and propaganda terms like 'pandemic of the unvaccinated' and continually lying to us about how hospitals are full...they continually seek to control the narrative and avoid asking any meaningful questions.
Never questioning the profit motives of newly minted billionaires, never acknowledging corruption, never noticing that the chairman of the board of Reuters who has been appointed the high priesthood and ministry of truth and fact checking also personally sits on the board of Pfizer. Never ever questioning anyone powerful or challenging them, because the people asking the questions are powerful or work for the powerful.
A few fringe or uncertain ideas are endlessly fixated upon, while the real solutions and ideas felt and desired to people are ignored. The poor see a chimera of advice which changes daily and monthly. 6 months ago you were excommunicated and banned for the Wuhan lab leak idea as if you were a catholic eating meat on Friday before they changed the rule. Now it is an OK thing to think....but just like the damned souls of those horrible non-fish eating Catholics...those lifetime bans against those who brought up those ideas 'too early for offical acceptability'/before they lost control over that story...they remain forever banned for thought crimes which are no longer illegal to think!
The truth-agnostic and self-serving nature of each person in Don't Look Up was the main point. There are no 'adults in the room'...just an endless string of selfish elite jackasses pushing for what they want. With the quasi-placeholder of 'the truth' in the two scientists were also corrupted by that very environment where the truth cannot be said.
Many empires and civilisations and governments have collapsed and the people always suffer from the incredibly poor choices of their 'leaders'. In one breath they care about our health and in the next they say you're not allowed to have healthcare if you're poor. In one instance they want the vaccines to be taken, and in the next moment they refuse to make the vaccines publicly owned, even though governments invested all the money. Then they gave them full legal immunity, and guaranteed purchases of the vaccines.
Trust us, we've guaranteed profits for no reason and created a context of highest bidder 4th jabs for the rich nations while Africa has a less than 10% vaccination rate. Can't you see the need for the new variants and total lack of science or rational thought involved....we NEEDED to create more billionaires much much much more than we needed a public vaccine platform. Not a SINGLE ONE is publicly owned, all private. That's not an accident. But yea...trust them. Anyone who knew enough and thought about it for 30 minutes would see this would lead to many many more variants and an endless source of booster profits.
Is that a crazy idea or is that the exact idea spoken by the CEO of Pfizer on an investor call a while back? Even quoting their own words to them and how much money they planned on making due to the highly foreseeable consequences of their choices is....well you're a crazy person for even knowing that! You need to shut up and think the thoughts the media tell you to think and don't worry about that investor call where they promised booster based profits due the hoarding of vaccines by.....themselves.
They want you to isolate and stay home, but they refuse to give people the money they need or laws guaranteeing paid sick leave in order to do so. They want the world vaccinated, and yet they refuse to do anything to compromise Big CEO donor's profits to actually make that happen.
The world itself is insanely contradictory and inconsistent, so it makes sense for art depicting and making fun of our inconsistent world to itself be internally inconsistent. That's incredibly consistent in its own way.
I confess I did not see the inconsistencies above although they make sense. I saw it as a parable about attention economics and low trust. I guess in a sense I expected everyone to be irrational. Though I think I have a much more sour opinion of the corporate press that prevents me from seeing clearly. So many things are going on that are interesting no one has the ability to focus on the things that matter in any way that was effectual. Trust is so low that no one could just say “well I haven’t paid very much attention to it but Hank over at NASA is taking care of it and I’ve sent him enough resources to do so.” Similar paradigm happened with Afghanistan. Many reports produced stated exact problems and boots on the ground tended to know what would happen (this is colloquial of course) but none of that knowledge was connected to any kind of circuit that could power any sort of sensible action. Carry that for decades and you have a debacle. Same with climate change, somewhat the same with COVID, etc. I think they felt the problem well enough to make the movie, although maybe not explicitly or even intentionally, and to your point they didn’t really have an answer to it. Agree with you on AI, but try not to talk about it as it makes me feel like a lunatic (which is one of the biggest problems) and also (this is very insane) I sort of think there should be a group of people who don’t ever leave records of what they think about AI so that it can’t read them when it gets turned on.
I feel like I've been seeing this movie mentioned in my RSS feeds for months now (despite it only being a few weeks old) and this is the first time I've bothered to read something past the summary blurb. Something felt off about the amount of attention it was getting from my admittedly-left-biased news sources. After reading your summary, I don't feel as bad for choosing to watch anime instead of it when it got to Netflix.
This also feels like it hits extra close to home after reading the chapter of The Scout Mindset about the importance of identity in decision making.
The plot, setting, and character decisions of parodies don't need to be realistic or internally consistent. Dr. Strangelove depicts an absurd world full of incredibly unlikely contrivances, where people make absolutely insane choices, and yet it still works as an excellent work of satire that holds up even decades later.
But I'd argue that the actual *message* of a parody needs to be internally consistent, or else there's no point in making it at all. Don't Look Up absolutely fails in that regard.
> A former Deputy Secretary of Defense dismissed the idea that someone could authorize the use of a nuclear weapon without the President’s approval: “Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.”
(...)
> we now know that American officers did indeed have the ability to start a Third World War on their own.
(...)
> Eisenhower agreed to let American officers use their nuclear weapons, in an emergency, if there were no time or no means to contact the President.
(...)
> President John F. Kennedy was surprised to learn, just a few weeks after taking office, about this secret delegation of power. “A subordinate commander faced with a substantial military action,” Kennedy was told in a top-secret memo, “could start the thermonuclear holocaust on his own initiative if he could not reach you.” Kennedy and his national-security advisers were shocked not only by the wide latitude given to American officers but also by the loose custody of the roughly three thousand American nuclear weapons stored in Europe. Few of the weapons had locks on them. Anyone who got hold of them could detonate them. And there was little to prevent NATO officers from Turkey, Holland, Italy, Great Britain, and Germany from using them without the approval of the United States.
(...)
> American control of the weapons was practically nonexistent. Harold Agnew, a Los Alamos physicist who accompanied the group, was especially concerned to see German pilots sitting in German planes that were decorated with Iron Crosses—and carrying American atomic bombs. Agnew, in his own words, “nearly wet his pants” when he realized that a lone American sentry with a rifle was all that prevented someone from taking off in one of those planes and bombing the Soviet Union.
(...)
> Despite public assurances that everything was fully under control, in the winter of 1964, while “Dr. Strangelove” was playing in theatres and being condemned as Soviet propaganda, there was nothing to prevent an American bomber crew or missile launch crew from using their weapons against the Soviets.
(...)
> George’s novel about the risk of accidental nuclear war, “Red Alert,” was the source for most of “Strangelove” ’s plot. Unbeknownst to both Kubrick and George, a top official at the Department of Defense had already sent a copy of “Red Alert” to every member of the Pentagon’s Scientific Advisory Committee for Ballistic Missiles. At the Pentagon, the book was taken seriously as a cautionary tale about what might go wrong.
(...)
> Although the Air Force now denies this claim, according to more than one source I contacted, the code necessary to launch a missile was set to be the same at every Minuteman site: 00000000.
(...)
> A decade after the release of “Strangelove,” the Soviet Union began work on the Perimeter system—a network of sensors and computers that could allow junior military officials to launch missiles without oversight from the Soviet leadership. Perhaps nobody at the Kremlin had seen the film. Completed in 1985, the system was known as the Dead Hand.
And as a satire, it certainly seems to _think_ it's elucidating an important truth about the world, so it seems fair to point out all the ways in which it isn't.
I don't get all the love for the movie. I would give it a 5/10 (too long, some good ideas but it didn't do much interesting with them). But it seems to spark conversation and most people have their own takes. Most of whom I don't share, but that's conversation.
I saw its primary message as a pretty basic left-wing revolt-of-the-public thing: "Our current leaders are stupid - kick these losers out of power, and replace them with anybody who had the common decency to press the miracle button!" (direct Scott quote from the book review). Most badness is actively caused by Trump and the tech CEO (aka. enemies of the left). Their supporters are irredeemably stupid and overall bad people. There are some fleeting notion of news and social media being bad somehow (by distracting the "good public", to which you dear viewer surely belongs) but it's never in a direct, active way.
Here's a fun game when some group of scientists says "just trust the science!" — ask them to trust the economists on economic policy. If we look back at the history of science, it becomes clear how silly "just trust the science" narratives are. They'd be wrong across most fields most of the time. Science has loads of philosophical difficulties (e.g. demarcation between pseudoscience and science, skepticism vs denialism) that the majority of scientists are not taught and don't care about. Thanks for the post — I think this review is one of my favorite pieces of yours.
Economics involves a heavy amount of sociology and non-controllable variables that many branches of science don’t have to worry about. I wouldn’t say that your two directives are equivalent, as there’s a lot more inherent uncertainty in economics.
Due to other replies, I’m beginning to think that it was a mistake to pick at the equivocation of “science” and “economics.” “Science” means too many things!
"Economics [has] non-controllable variables that many branches of science don’t have to worry about" — I think you're narrowing your definition of science arbitrarily here. Neuroscience, developmental biology, ecology, etc. are all areas where you can't control for things. Even if you could control for things, it's a complexity problem; the only realistic dynamics happen when numerous things interact in a way you cannot control. Heck, even mechanics becomes difficult when the gravity of a few things interacts. Economics has a lot in common with many fields of science full of people that smugly believe their field is on a more sure foot. Clearly economics is far from a good science; I think it had a groupthink markets-are-perfect culture for many years and is only recently on slightly better empirical foundation (at least for micro).
If you want a recent movie that doesn’t focus on *America’s* response, I can’t recommend highly enough you check out the Chinese big-budget sci-fi blockbuster _The Wandering Earth_. I found it refreshing to see a movie in which humanity confronts a global crisis via engineering, politics and various human-interest subplots in which - for no particular reason - everyone important to the story happens to be Chinese.
https://youtu.be/vzoGinOmHDA
There is a thirty-second aside where someone mentions that a joint China/Russia/India (or something like that) coalition also tried a comet deflection mission but it failed. They were clearly trying to nod to this possibility while also wanting to keep the focus on the US.
I was surprised there was no speculation that the US sabotaged it to ensure they could still get all the valuable stuff in the comet.
Insisting that anyone who dislikes Marxism must be part of the establishment when the Establishment is trying to shove anyone using the word "Marxism" in a pejorative sense out the Overton Window and into the Midden of the Pariahs doesn't seem very sensible.
You are saying that people who attack the establishment by calling it "Marxist" are actually pro-establishment?
Randos on Facebook are not "the establishment".
It seems the only reason for your hypothesis that Scott hasn't read a basic political textbook is that he seems to find Marxism to be a bunch of BS. Have you considered alternative hypotheses for why someone would find Marxism to be a bunch of BS, apart from ignorance of political theory?
You didn’t answer the question: have you considered why someone would find Marxism to be a bunch of BS?
Sigh.
Here’s why someone would consider marxism to be a bunch of BS: because it has utterly failed every time it’s been tried, while murdering millions. That is why everyone despises Marxism. It boggles my mind you can’t wrap your mind around that. Add to this your tone and constant snides and, for the life of me, I can’t figure out why you’re not banned already.
You seem to be repeating my thesis and then saying you've disproved me. Yes, they go through the reasons they think it is biased. That's what I mean when I say it's the Man - a systematically-biased-towards-capitalism-and-imperialism thing.
I don't understand what about my review sentence you think contradicts what I'm saying above.
Without actually looking back at the essay. I am pretty sure the quoted sentence is coming from the basic modern American understanding where in the media is considered to be liberal leaning, and as such the argument Chomsky and Herman describe, where in the media is instead biased in favor of capital is 'startling', since bias in favor of capital is (again in the basic modern American understanding) associated with conservatives and not liberals.
As far as I can tell the only substantive complaint you have here is that you think 'the man' is being used as a sneer to mock and or downplay communist concerns with regard to the influence of capital. This might be rude or dismissive but does not actually elucidate an error in Scott's reasoning, only his evaluation of the severity of the problem.
The trouble with heavy-handed satire is that if you don't precisely share the author's world view then you can't even engage with it. The movie says "HEY DON'T YOU SEE? THIS FICTIONAL SITUATION IS EXACTLY LIKE THIS REAL-WORLD SITUATION!" And if you think "Well it's a little bit like that, but y'know, the real world situation is more complicated, there's more uncertainties involved..." then the movie says "HA! HA! YOU'RE LIKE ONE OF THOSE FAT GUYS WEARING DON'T LOOK UP HATS, LOL"
The Noah story is a total heavy-handed global warming metaphor though - can't believe the libs had control of media that early!
Story of Cain and Abel is a textbook example of being soft on crime... including the predictable consequences [Genesis 4:23-24].
The entire Old Testament was clearly written by liberals.
"Who doesn't believe in the existence of COVID-19?"
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-53892856
This is a fairly extreme weakman, but it's certainly not a strawman.
He was very far from the only commentator who said that. (But I share your bafflement that anyone's having that take.)
I too find it very hard to see Meryl Streep playing the President of the US without thinking of Hillary Clinton. Aside from that, there wasn't much Clintonian in Orlean's character (except where Clinton and Trump correspond), though the part about polling driving her smoking might be something.
I also thought the President was supposed to be a Hillary standin until she opened her mouth.
President Streep had a line where she said she wanted to check Sexy Science Man's astronomy with people from a real university, Harvard. Or something along those lines.
I figured fawning at the Ivy Leagues was a dig at democrats.
Movie reviewer Tim Brayton interpreted President Orlean as being a conflation of Trump and Clinton:
> A character who can be best described as "what if Donald Trump was also Hilary Clinton?". So on the one hand, blind incuriosity; on the other, smug Ivy League credentialism. On the one hand, oafish provincialism; on the other, sneering technocratic condescension. On the one hand, making America great again; on the other, yass kweening. She even wears both red and blue pantsuits at different points in the film.
Also, why is nobody pointing out that Streep played Susan Orlean in Adaptation and in this film plays President Orlean? Is Don't Look Up a sequel to Adaptation? "Orlean" isn't exactly a common last name, this can't be a coincidence.
They're both named after Joan of Arc, the Maid of Orleans.
I kept thinking of Adaptation every time I heard the name of the character in this movie. I totally forgot that she was also played by Meryl Streep!
He didn't even read the article.
Yeah sure, it's full of soviet movies where the average new soviet man is a complete moron, the secretary of the communist party is an idiot dooming everybody for short term thinking, and a guy in charge of a huge part of the economy too greedy to do even his own self interest.
(Before you engage in some sophistry on how the Ivy league and Hollywood are the real government... I have already read all moldbug. Did not make sense, does not make sense now)
Moldbug is straightforward: distilling away the many walls of texts and mad-at-literally-everyone-and-everything rants, his one and only message is "The world is fallen because I am not the king of America*"
*(or "Columbia")
I'm glad someone mentioned this! That was, more-or-less, the only part of the movie which actually got me to laugh.
To be honest, from all I've read I wasn't aware it had jokes. Either the reviews are unfair or the jokes were not worth mentioning, and since the reviewers have included people who stated they wanted to like the film, I doubt it's the former possibility.
I didn't see this movie because I was in the mood for a laugh; I wasn't expecting one, didn't get one, and it seemed entirely beside the point in any case. I care about it as an illustration of a really important and underappreciated problem.
This was one of many respects in which I didn't expect to like it and in fact didn't. Still seems important.
I didn't expect it to be funny, although Adam McKay *can* be very funny, e.g., Eastbound and Down.
I watched it as mere Hollywood spectacle and found it enjoyable and unintentionally apolitical. Its lack of coherent messaging is a virtue. It isn't funny, but it is entertaining. The acting and visuals are good.
This was my interpretation, too. It's a movie about the challenges of consensus building, even in the face of an existential problem. The scientists found the comet, but they didn't have all the answers and frequently undermined themselves.
I think it's true that that's what the movie is about, but that there are also key disagreements between Adam McKay and most of the commenters here about how this dynamic comes into being.
I saw it the same way. It did a nice job of making fun of everyone and kind of reminded me of a south park where Jennifer Lawrence was Stan.
I've never seen South Park but feel vaguely hostile based on what I've heard about it.
Curious why you've avoided seeing even one single show, given the prominence of it in our pop culture, its enduring popularity, and given that the episodes are so short? I'm not remotely a huge fan, but there are some episodes that are worth a watch.
I guess that he avoided by default? I am not going to deliberately watch it and as result I never ever watched it.
I was subjected to part of an episode of South Park once. They're 22 minutes, according to Wikipedia. In 22 minutes, I could share a wonderful sexual encounter with my partner; I could design a circuit; I could read a chapter of a good novel; I could have a longish meditation session. I have less than a million 22-minute units left of my life, quite likely only a few thousand. Why would I waste one of them watching South Park?
I've avoided seeing most shows. All I know of South Park is that people say it's really vulgar.
(I'm 37, so maybe a little older than the target audience)
The later stuff turned me off so completely that I gave up on it (and for instance I never found "Family Guy" funny even at the start, and it seems from comments on it that I see that it has become a lot worse) but the start was funny. Terribly crude and vulgar, but funny. I suppose the test of tolerance for it is: do you find the concept of Saddem Hussein in Hell as Satan's Gay Lover funny or not?
(Actually, now that I think of it, Lil Nas X finagled a lot of kudos and praise for this very concept - Satan's Gay Lover taking over Hell!)
I haven't watched it for a long time, and the problem with it seems to be the same problem with all very long-running shows, where the constant necessity for new material means going ever more extreme when you've exhausted the obvious plots.
Plus apparent Seth McFarlane having tons of agendas he rams down your throat?
But at the start, it was very vulgar but also funny. It definitely is/was the fart joke type of humour, which is not my type of humour, but it was so exaggerated and corny (Mr Hanky, the Talking Poo?) that it became ludicrous enough to be funny (and they lampooned that as well with Philip and Terrence, and the fact that these kids are young so they will find fart humour hilarious).
Describing it in cold blood does make one go "Uh, well, there's this character who - ah, yeah, that sounds offensive, doesn't it?" but it really is "you have to watch it to get the joke".
This doesn't mean that watching it will make you a convert to it, but you do have to give the early episodes a chance. I decided I had better not get offended easily, for instance, with their portrayal of Jesus (which isn't even the most mocking).
Personally I thought ManBearPig made for much better climate change satire than this.
Huh. For me, that one was Worst.Episode.Ever. Not a single laugh.
Though I’ve heard they did another episode recently which sorta/kinda/maybe admitted that Gore was right.
So he did invent the internet?
Trey and Matt renounced that episode with an episode about how manbearpig was in fact, real. They deserve a lot of credit for that.
Oh, this was David Sirota’s work? Yeah, that makes perfect sense. You’re dead-on here: critique of institutional liberalism and the right-wing as a whole fits very tidily into the dirtbag left worldview, and can only really scan as making fun of everyone to people who don’t care about a left that goes further than the NYT.
The film does not "make fun of everyone". What it does is the SNL version of political satire: The types that Democrats hate are mocked for everything they stand for. Everything from their mannerisms to their characters and core beliefs are ridiculed. But those that Democrats like are at worst mocked as lovable goofs screwing up while trying to do the right thing. That's far from just "making fun of everyone".
Not really, as the movie goes out of its way to be respectful to the devout Christian. A social conservative might like this movie far more than your average liberal because of it.
Interesting - I have not seen the film, and based on my extremely negative reaction to Vice, I probably won't, but this intrigues me - which character was that?
The punk boyfriend of the Female Astronomer. A sympathetic portrayal, without being condescending.
Thanks! Appreciate the info.
On a similar note, the whole “re-united family and new friends have a nice dinner together while the world is ending” was something most social conservatives could get behind, I think.
I’m a pretty cynical guy, but that tugged at my heartstrings a little bit.
Yes, but isn't there several films that already do that, like "Seeking a Friend for the End of the World" and so forth? Why do socialcons need to get slapped in the face a lot to get to that moment?
He's not the type of Christian that Democrats dislike. He's a punk kid with a spiritual side and a belief in God. He's religious but doesn't like to tell people, isn't really part of a religious community and doesn't seem to have the conservative political beliefs we usually associate with a devout Christian.
Still nice to see something other than default atheism, even if it's pretty squishy.
Interesting. From an atheistic point of view, American movie characters look rather religious to me.
Though mostly in the sense that when religion is brought up, people turn out to be religious. It's not brought up all that often though, because stories have other things to tell.
Agreed - PRIVATE Christianity is OK with progressives, but PUBLIC Christianity (of a non-Unitarian brand) is evil. And you should feel a little bad about it ("I don't advertise it"). Chalomet is the ideal of a non-threatening Christian.
When the Chalomet character appeared, it seemed to signal that the film had failed to reach escape velocity as satire. But it soon became clear that the film had hived off a non-satirical subplot. The introduction of the long-haired, surprisingly charismatic outsider delivering a message of love and forgiveness on the eve of Armageddon, and presiding over a last supper, where a room full of scientists and atheists so unfamiliar with the traditions of religion that they don't even know how to say "amen" face their doom in serene prayer, is hardly subtle--this character and message is a repudiation of both the know-nothings and the frantic do-gooders. Or so it seems to me. It is possible of course to take the position that the "last supper" is no more than a sympathetic depiction of one of a variety of ways to meet the end of the world. But the piling on of the imagery (bread and wine in abundance, and the configuration of the table, not to mention the tone of the final prayer) suggests otherwise. And the film seems to go out of its way to encourage this Christian reading. The Bezos/Musk character and delivers a prediction the viewer is meant to remember: his algorithm has calculated that the sexiest astronomer in the world will die alone. And we learn later that the algorithm is so clairvoyant that it could accurately predict the cause of the president's death millennia in the future at the hands of a previously unknown species. And yet, the algorithm is wrong about the astronomer--he dies surrounded by those he loves. Somehow, thanks to the Christlike Chalomet character, the astronomer has escaped the hell he has created for himself. All of which is to say, I don't think the Christian message is hidden at all. It seems to be outlined in Christmas lights.
Maybe this is just me projecting my own worldview onto the movie, but I don't think the movie portrayed the people who screwed up trying to do the right thing as "lovable goofs". Ariana Grande, maybe, but it seemed like the protagonists' failures were taken deadly seriously, with the point being that these kinds of screwups are really, really bad and get people killed, and ultimately the people who can't do better than that aren't much better than the outright villains.
(The protagonists are portrayed much more *humanly* than the villains, and we get to see them deal with the consequences of their failures in a sympathetic way, but that's a far cry from taking the failures themselves lightly.)
Yeah in the movie the real problem is not that people don't believe in the comet, it's that no one seems to care.
I think that, in real life, the background level of overhyped crises is responsible only in small part for the inability of the public to react appropriately to big new developments. Like, media alarmism about scary new infectious diseases was always a thing, but most of what happened with COVID seems pretty unrelated to that.
I'd like to see better documentation of that comparison - how similar is this to the 1918 thing? It sounds like there were pro-maskers and anti-maskers then, but there was never a vaccine, and I haven't seen enough granular discussion of culture of the time to understand what sorts of conspiracy theories there were. There *doesn't* seem to be an important parallel in responses to World War II (though maybe Vietnam?)
There was a meme going around Facebook showing the Time Magazine cover article freaking out about a new disease for every year since 2008, with a clear implication of "Why should we believe this year is different?"
I only have a couple of covid-deniers on my wall, but the wolf-crying mass media is a recurring theme for them, and I think a substantive crux.
Most of the "overhyped crises" are things that people are told are happening *right now*, and are *real bad*. Then they look around and can maybe sort of vaguely notice that winters aren't as cold as they were ten years ago, or that a few of their friends got bad colds last winter, and they smell hype.
But, every year we tell people that satellites are tracking a thing that is going to be absolutely harmless until next Thursday morning and then suddenly maybe really bad, and sure, *some* of them respond with "hurricane, shmurricane, I'm staying put", but others evacuate. Some competently, some in panic, but at least *caring* about the issue.
So I'm not sure your comparison is valid. Hard to predict exactly what the response to a predicted comet impact would be, except that it won't be *nobody* cares. Or even just nobody but the protagonists.
Yeah, this was my reading, too. I honestly don't think the political details matter all that much
I think there's more than one way to read the movie. I think you can read it the way Scott did, in which case it's mostly bad with some good points, or you can read it this way, in which case it's mostly good with some bad points.
Going a bit further with this, let's view it as a metaphor for three different things:
- Climate change. Adam McKay is on record as having intended this. As in the movie, we have a reasonably good idea what ought to be done about it, and are mostly frustrated by lack of political will (there will be lots of uncertainty on various details, but the big picture seems clear enough on an expected-value level). Otherwise, the movie's analysis of the relevant social dynamics and their causes is terrible.
- Pandemics. The script was finished too late to have been influenced by COVID-19, but the movie itself was not. As in the movie, we have lots of knowledge of how to address it that failed to be reflected in the political process (broadly construed to include business and such), but unlike in the movie, there are still lots of crucial considerations that even experts and other smart people with aligned incentives can't come to agreement on. The movie's analysis of the relevant social dynamics and their causes is likewise half-right.
- AI safety. I'd be really surprised if this were on McKay's radar at all. Unlike in the movie, the problem of figuring out what to do is fiendishly difficult and maybe just totally intractable. Otherwise, the movie's analysis of the relevant social dynamics and their causes is uncannily accurate, to the point of (apparently coincidentally) having caricatures of some of the same people playing the same roles as in real life; I think it's pretty probable that we're all going to die and it's going to look like this.
We do NOT "have a reasonably good idea what ought to be done about" climate change. Oh, sure, at a very high level of generality: we should try to keep temperature from going up much more if we can do it at reasonable cost. But that leaves so much up in the air, especially what is "reasonable cost".
Do we make carbon-emitting energy generation very expensive, or go to banning it entirely? Well, that f*cks the poorer half of the world's people. To be blunt, you can't get out of poverty with expensive energy. Do we build lots and lots of new model nukes that come with promises of simple and safe? Well, maybe you don't believe the promises, or you just hate nukes. Do we put lots of money into research on carbon-neutral energy but hold off on retiring present carbon-generating plants in the hope that there will be breakthroughs in cost? And so on.
While I’m hesitant to disagree with a golden retriever, I feel the need to point out that intermittent power sources require storage solutions to address the worlds energy needs. Talking only about one part of the equation is misleading. To the best of my knowledge there is no obvious solution to the storage problem which can scale sufficiently.
In other words, right now replacing entire power generation with solar/wind is not viable as power storage is unsolved.
I have read a few reviews of system costs of intermittents, it appears you should expect $40/MWh extra at 50% penetration and it slopes on up from there: https://www.carbonbrief.org/in-depth-whole-system-costs-renewables
As a result there is I would say there is at minimum 1/3rd of the market that cannot be met without baseload power without a revolutionary technology
Many thanks! I couldn’t find the time to look up concrete numbers.
This being the case, is it fair to say that climate change is a problem that will mostly solve itself? As solar becomes the cheapest form of power generation, we'll naturally move off coal and oil without the need for any major government intervention. Temperature keeps going up a little bit, then it comes back down again, a few localised bad things happen, life goes on.
Maybe we can tweak a bit around the edges to speed this process up a little.
That's always been the most likely scenario - that the concern naturally becomes irrelevant with continued technological development. In the 1890s cities were in crisis because the use of horses was unsustainable - if you plotted out the curves, places like London and New York were obviously going to drown in horse manure - our concern with climate change feels a lot like that. The easiest prediction of all is that a century from now we'll still be worried about SOMETHING but the specific concerns of today will seem quaint by then because new concerns will have replaced them. Just as we no longer worry about horse manure or the population bomb or "killer bees".
Solar energy is not the cheapest form of energy. That's actually a literal scam.
If it was cheapest, then we'd expect places like California and Germany to have super cheap electricity. They don't. In fact, it's quite expensive, despite the fact that the price of electricity sometimes "goes negative".
Of course, that negative cost should be a huge alarm bell that something really bad is going on, because obviously you're going to need to make up for that at some point...
IRL, solar power is significantly more expensive than gas. They get the "cheaper" number via accounting mischief.
"Worthless" might be a better term than "cheap", as it would give a better view of what is going on in real life.
IRL, the cost of solar power is the cost of solar power + the cost of backup/storage, because solar energy sucks and produces energy only during the day, and produces a lot less when it is cloudy.
Power is a service, not a commodity, and storing it is horribly expensive.
Everything you've ever been told about this to make it seem otherwise is a lie.
To give you some idea of the scale of the problem - to use pumped water storage to store enough power for the US, you'd have to pump the equivalent of a Great Lake worth of water uphill every day.
> you'd have to pump the equivalent of a Great Lake worth of water uphill every day
That claim is useless. It depends on a pumping height.
One note, there seems to be a school of economic thought that says spending money for the sake of spending money is a social good - "stimulus package."
A bunch of state of the art nuclear plants along with uranium recycling infrastructure would be 1) quite a nice thing to pass along to future generations, 2) a way to spend a ton of money, and 3) probably reduce the carbon footprint (I admit there could be objections to 3).
This is an incorrect school of economic thought. It's literally the broken windows fallacy.
I think a lot of that stuff is a mix of values disagreements (as opposed to empirical uncertainty) and things where there's a range of uncertainty about what's best but the status quo is very clearly outside it. There are also other things we could do at relatively little cost, like subsidize development of renewable energy and carbon sequestration in areas where the low-hanging fruit hasn't already been picked, such as countries currently climbing out of poverty.
Sure, I'll bite. This line of reasoning reminds me of a cartoon that depicts two dinosaurs looking up at the meteorite, and one exclaiming, "Oh, the Economy!"
As a 'skeptic' I enjoyed the Listen to the Scientists message on grounds of policy. The IPCC projects the cost of unabated climate change to be 2.6% in 2100
The climate economists, including Nobel winner Nordhaus, project that the ideal policy will result in a warming level of about 3.5 degrees by 2100, reducing the cost substantially - but none that I'm aware of remotely proposes that the cost-benefit is positive for current policies in two ways. First of all, under ideal policies the economic modelling is that 2 degrees would be not just uneconomic but nearly literally impossible. Secondly, the current policies of short term hard reductions in emissions are considered to be half as efficient as a carbon tax, which should be about $40 dollars a tonne if:
we listened to the scientists!
"Climate economists" and "the ideal policy will result in a warming level of about 3.5 degrees by 2100" sent me into a state that might have a German word for it. There might have been a facepalm involved, but I lost tactile sensation for a brief moment, so I'm not sure.
What you are coolly describing here as "optimal policy" is almost verbatim taken out of a currently fashionable, timely, yet poorly made, Netflix sensation, where two scientists discover a comet is about to hit the Earth.
This is an understandable sensory reaction, and delightfully there is even a Nobel winner on the Bad Side in the movie
I would respond with my own sensory type reaction to the Paris Accord - in theory a trillion or two dollar a year policy with a benefit as low as 10 cents on the dollar
Imagine someone told you they were going to spend World War levels of money on a problem that certainly deserves good solutions - and then find out that the policy, by simple back of the envelope calculations will not only result in World War type expenses but also do almost literally nothing to improve the situation
Back to the movie: the Good Guys decide that the correct policy is to move 1/3rd of the population to one side of the world in order to jump up and down in a nearly futile effort to move the earth out of the comet's path. Then they spend the rest of their attention and energy criticizing the people who, for a variety of reasons, disapprove of this
The IPCC didn't project the cost of unabated climate change to be 2.6% in 2100. That's the cost of increasing our CO2 emissions by a factor of something like 5. But it's the scenario the press always cite.
Putting a price on carbon that starts low but has a long-term commitment to get higher doesn't really "f*ck the poorer half of the world's people".
A price that starts low doesn't do much to change people's burning of carbon. I'm not sure there is such a thing as "long-term commitment" when it comes to climate change. The last 25 years are full of nice sounding words and little action when words have to be translated into reality. But assuming the price did get high, yes, the poor would be f*cked if there are no cheap reliable replacements. Right now there aren't.
I believe that Hawaii and New Zealand have done the start-low-with-a-commitment-to-go-high thing for the age of cigarette sales. I believe that many minimum wage increases and tax changes have also been phased in in that sort of gradual way. The way to get cheap reliable replacements is to make it clear to big companies that they won't be able to continue to profit unless they make a cheap, reliable replacement. (In this case, it is absolutely clear that cheap, reliable replacements are possible and will eventually arrive, and just need a clear economic signal in order to bring them forwards.)
I completely agree that many laws take effect in steps. And it usually works. On the other hand, with both Clinton and Bust I, there were large packages of immediate tax increases and somewhat vague promised expenditure cuts. Much of the expenditure cuts didn't happen. Raising energy prices has been like the latter.
Perhaps I do not have as good a crystal ball as you do but my awful cloudy one does not tell me that "it is absolutely clear that cheap, reliable replacements are possible and will eventually arrive, and just need a clear economic signal in order to bring them forwards."
I enjoyed that liberals in an excellent allegorical documentary of themselves as they see it depicted themselves as the people who believe the sky is falling
We have a reasonably good idea of what to do about climate change but that idea is nothing like what the sky is falling people are saying. The UN's projection for unabated warming is a cost of 2.6% of the 2100 economy while the Paris treaty has been analyzed to have a benefit to cost ratio of 10 to 30 cents on the dollar
Essentially what's happened is Chicken Little thinks the sky is falling, got really excited and cut off his head (the sky is falling, we have to do something dramatic and costly immediately!) and is now running around headless to virtually no positive effect. Torching trillions of dollars for benefits of hundreds of billions several decades from now. The fact that there are also ostriches with their heads in the sand doesn't change this essential fact about climate policy
Should be noted those Texas wind farms also involve a heavy amount of subsidies to get built. ~$30/MWh in a market where the clearing prices is regularly $20-30/MWh
If fossil fuels are so clearly uneconomical, why do greedy, profit-motivated corporations continue to use them? Do they specifically hate the planet for some reason, even more than they like making money?
A good example of the value rather than profit resulting from policy was a fairly recent assessment of the benefits of EVs. They found that even in the most decarbonized electricity grid the value of EV subsidies was negative due to an increase in the cost of accidents involving heavier EVs. The EV driver is safer but the other driver is not to a greater degree and the cost is more than the benefit of reduced emissions
Rather than subsidies that suffer from non market decision making and from potential rent seeking (even if no one bribes you higher subsidies buy votes and support) there should instead be a carbon tax applied on the system (and apparently an accident cost tax based on vehicle safety that would neutrally penalize EVs and Hummers)
How much of that money is from customers vs. from subsidies? In any case, seems like most of the companies involved in digging shit out of the ground and shipping it to me to burn once are doing pretty fine.
If you actually read the IPCC reports, you'll find that they predict climate change will have little impact on humans. Some arctic tundra and boreal forests will begin to support more life; many corals will die out; many shellfish may die. Amazonian forests will lose species. Weather patterns will shift. But the environmental damage global warming can do is trivial compared to the damage humans have already done just by building houses and planting crops.
The world's poor will be hit the worst, but no more badly than they were hit last year alone by Covid and Covid-induced work stoppages. No water-level rise fast enough to be a huge problem. No climate tipping point. Probably no agricultural lands lost that aren't made up by gains somewhere else, though they didn't go into that.
Agree
Interesting that liberal leaning folks tend to agree/enjoy this aesthetic. I would think it would be repulsive. I guess we should all descend into nihilism and misanthropy?
> I guess we should all descend into nihilism and misanthropy?
My first convert!
It’s a little bit comforting to know that others are just as depressed about the state of the world as you are, and yet we do the right thing in spite of it. But some of us just enjoy dark humor.
I'm trying to find a polite way of saying this, but it's pretty late in my time zone so please don't think I'm trying to offend: isn't this what you'd think if you're already a believer in a Cause? You think the Cause is pretty straightforward but feel boundless frustration that people fail to see it that way.
This says nothing about the Cause being right or wrong, only that Scott made some pretty good points on coordination being genuinely difficult.
I kind of feel like the people are engaging with the movie as an attempt at a serious social message instead of as a farce, and the reason they're doing that is because it's not very funny.
I'd argue the whole film is a motte-and-bailey, in essence, where it's trying to make very strong and sweeping social statements but dressing them in the clothes of farce as a shield if the ideas are poorly-received.
I think Sirota and McKay meant it as allegory for a serious social message (about climate change), and I think that allegory is off-base (the truth is far from obvious to a layman), and I think that can be worth pointing out. With that said, I found the movie pretty funny, and enjoyed its caricaturing of various different kinds of people.
I haven't seen the movie, but in Scott's summary, the major axis of conflict is between two different technical solutions which are both endorsed by different experts - one which is in reality more reliable, and one which is more profitable. Before that conflict, nobody knows about the comet because it's only visible through specialized telescopes.
I think there are a few major axes of conflict. In Act I, the conflict is between taking the comet seriously and bureaucratic indifference, and taking the comet seriously eventually wins. This leads to Act II, where the conflict is between deflecting the comet and harnessing its mineral resources, and the dodgier, greedier plan wins. And Act III centers on dueling PR campaigns ("Just Look Up"/"Don't Look Up"), with "Don't Look Up" winning by force, glassing the site of the "Just Look Up" international deflection effort and dooming the planet.
I think each of these could be viewed as commentary on climate change and the discussions around it, and I think the makers meant them to be (I think the director is on record saying so).
No, this is a false equivalence in the expertise. Notice how the original plan was designed, reviewed and endorsed by many different experts across the world, where with the profitable plan, the main characters literally asked each other, "has this been peer reviewed?", to which the audience knows the answer.
> I think that allegory is off-base (the truth is far from obvious to a layman)
The truth was also far from obvious for the layman before they could see it with their own eyes. I think the allegory is quite apt actually.
At the object-level of astronomical bodies colliding, do you think the "basic math" is simple enough that you yourself could calculate everything correctly on your own in ... six months?
I like math, I did well in math classes in school, including calculus, my favorite undergraduate class was 'real analysis' (i.e. calculus for math majors including deriving proofs of all the fundamental theorems), and I remember being daunted by trying to find an analytic solution to the _two_-body gravity problem. Any calculations accurate enough to predict the trajectory of a comet in our solar system are FAR beyond what I myself think of as "basic math".
You can solve the n-body problem pretty easily by writing the coupled differential equations for all the bodies and using a computer to solve it numerically with very small time steps, y(t+dt) = y(t) + y'(t) * dt, etc. You can do fancier and more efficient schemes by just looking at the ODE-solving chapter in any numerical computing book. No need to solve anything analytically, I could program this myself in a few hours at most, but asking wolfram alpha would probably be easier.
Where would you get the input data with sufficient precision and reliability?
Yeah, that's a bit trickier, if I have available pictures of the comet through 2 separate telescopes on earth over a few weeks of observation, knowing the position of the earth over time (and the angles the telescopes made with the ground) I can convert those images to comet positions relative to the sun with some trigonometry. Finding the center of a fuzzy blob in a picture is actually pretty accurate, I don't think it would take much comet data to get a good idea of the near-term trajectory.
The problem is that all of this is already done automatically (and probably much better than I can do it in a few hours) by standard astronomy software that all telescopes use, so there would really be no point in me going through the trouble of likely having to email the relevant graduate students working at those telescopes to send me the raw data.
Sure – but then that's not "basic math" (IMO).
I start by calculating it as a 2-body problem -- the comet and the sun, determine the point it crosses Earth's orbit. I imagine Earth's ephemerides I could just look up and find out if it'll be there at the time. If that path doesn't bring it near any other massive solar system bodies (as a comet with high inclination likely will not), it's probably good enough. If it does, the calculation's going to have to be numeric anyway.
The hardest part would probably be figuring out the comet velocity (with associated probability distribution) and position from the blurry telescope pictures. But this is all moot because I'm sure that there's a very convenient python astronomy package that does all this in a single line.
I'm disputing that even a 2-body (gravitational) problem is "basic math".
I'm not sure calculating/estimating the trajectory, or even the position, of a comet could be done with "basic math" either.
I'd think there are quite a few people that _could_ produce pretty accurate calculations/estimations, especially if they can just use existing software, but then I wouldn't consider any of that to be "basic math".
A 2 body problem with one of the bodies negligible in size to the other (which makes it simpler) really is just "basic math". Even better, it's _solved_ basic math. The solutions are the Keplerian orbits (ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas), and going from observation to orbital elements is a well-documented (if tedious) procedure.
As Nybbler says, for the two-body case this is a problem that can be solved with pencil-and-paper calculation using algebraic formulas that have been published in textbooks that don't *quite* walk you through the exact process of solving this particular problem, but pretty close. There are still plenty of innumerate or math-phobic people who will screw it up (or more likely not even try), but if it's a matter of life and death, probably most people in the developed world know a guy who knows a guy who can get them the right answer.
Except, it's really a five-body problem at least, maybe seven, and the inputs will be a bit fuzzy, and now the math gets *really* hairy.
Seconded. I would define "basic math" (as opposed to "trust the experts") as math on a level most persons could do, like tallying electoral college votes.
While it is true that you do not a Field medalist to numerically solve the n body problem, the average person will not be able to follow the calculations. And trusting python packages is functionally no different from trusting experts. (The difficulty of measuring the comet velocity precisely was already mentioned.)
I would predict that different space agencies and academic groups would do any number of independent measurements and simulations, reach a consensus on which effects (e.g. relativity if the comet passes close to the sun, effect of light pressure, effect of material loss) are important enough to include and reach compatible probability estimates.
Also, there would be any number of dissenting voices out on youtube, telegram etc:
* "You forgot to account for the neutrino pressure/dark matter/dark energy."
* "I did my own calculation in Excel (or KSP) and we will be fine"
* "Comets pass by earth all the time. This is just a hype by Musk to sell more rockets."
While we would probably get more expert convergence than for climate change or covid predictions, laypersons would still have to trust the experts (or not).
By contrast, not even Trump would argue that he won the 2020 election simply because 232 is obviously bigger than 306.
To be charitable to the commenter to which I replied, "basic math" could be interpreted as 'math that humanity as a whole is reasonably capable at performing reliably', e.g. along the lines you mentioned with multiple organizations/groups performing parallel calculations.
"Trust this python package written 10 years ago" is far better than "Trust the experts". Especially if I can try it out with various different packages.
From worst to best:
"Trust that Leo and J. Law wouldn't lead me wrong" (Maybe Leo and J. Law are lying or just wrong)
"Run Leo and J. Law's observations through pre-existing software to determine orbital elements. (but what if Leo and J. Law fudged the observations? The math works both ways!)
"Get independent confirmation from other scientists" (OK, but what if there's a big conspiracy?)
"Get independent observations from other scientists, and run that through existing software" (But they could all be fabricating the data!)
"Get a telescope and observe the thing myself, with my crack team of lone gunmen astronomers, and run THAT through existing software" (now they have to either corrupt my lone gunmen, or software that's been around for a while)
"Get a telescope and observe the thing myself with my crack team of lone gunmen astronomers. Then with multiple crack teams of lone gunmen grad students, work through the calculations by hand and cross-check with each other and those existing software packages" (yeah, I guess it's hitting. Shit)
Major governments will obviously make it to the penultimate step (where "myself" = some group of government-affiliated researchers, or President Orleans's Ivy League people); it's trivial for them. Depending on how bright the comet is, normal people may be stuck relying on publicly released observations for a while.
If it passes near the sun your precision is shot in any case; unpredictable heating effects will assure that.
I haven't seen this movie but I think you lose your ability to deploy the farce defense when you're trying to moralize at people
Seconded. In the movie, the only way to get people's attention is either to entertain them or to riot their emotions. There's no place for the truth or cold hard facts. I think the second rant of the expert invited on the talk show reflects that.
I think the tone of the movie reflects pretty well the experience of navigating media and social media, with serious issues being juxtaposed to clickbait and thus seeming less important.
Agree to this analysis. The cacophony of "influence" is maddening.
Yeah, it is possible to make a movie that concerns the process of science communication, but doesn't have a coherent view on it because the thing it is trying to advance a view about is something else.
Well, everyone is entitled to an opinion. The movie was so full of tropes it is hard to take any message seriously. Start with the notion that the initial effort to blow up or move the "comet" ... That is stupid beyond description, certainly in the current day. And, by the way, comets are mainly frozen ice. They don't have all the chemicals the so-called corporate CEO lusts for. Just a really stupid move that will, nevertheless, capture the imaginations of the smart set. You know, like Scott.
Wait, why is it stupid to try to move the comet? I think astronomers and others take comet deflection pretty seriously - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_impact_avoidance#Comet_deflection_possibility .
Also, will probably ban this commenter for a month for a combination of being nasty and wrong, but I'll wait to see if they have some response to this first.
Are you genuinely sure the commenter was wrong or did you skip the process of finding out so that you can be smug about it?
I don’t think Scot was smug. I think he was stung by being labeled as a member of the “smart set”, and over reacted a wee tad.
Yep. I asked the question because it seemed relevant to the discussion, not rhetorically. I do not know the answer to my question, though I suspect you are right.
I think if somebody comes to a home on invitation to hang out and chat about movies, and call the host an idiot, and the host shows the offender the door and asks not to come back for a while - there's not much basis to complain. Maybe on objective scale it's a bit of overreaction, but playing stupid games wins stupid prizes...
You were invited? I had to pay to get in here!
Agree.
"Home" is an awful and totally misleading metaphor for any form of social media.
If you read the entirety of the single sentence comment you replied to it sure seems like he's still waiting for a final decision on whether the guy is wrong.
He provided a link demonstrating that the commenter is wrong, and has given the commenter a chance to explain why he isn't wrong. I don't see any process skipping or smugness from Scott here. Maybe from you though.
Fair enough. I was just trying to point out that it's hard to draw a hard line between what's wrong and what's not. I think it was in keeping with the spirit of Scott's post. If I'm wrong, then hey, I'm wrong!
Are you really sure you're making a good point, or did you skip the process of thinking it through to act smug about it?
Does the fact that I'm directing this phrase at *your* post, to which it seemingly doesn't really apply, in order to point out that your post is itself directing the phrase at a comment to which it seemingly doesn't really apply, actually show that your point — that it is hard to know when this phrase can fairly be applied — is valid after all and *not*, in fact, a smug misapplication?
Or does it show that a thinker of my calibre (heavy, obviously) can quickly and reliably tell when it is, indeed, fair to apply this criticism, and when it is not? Or does it instead show that unwarranted confidence in the level of one's own understanding is, truly, endemic, and the post was making a good point after a—
[transmission ends in burst of smug meta-reasoning]
The latter, obviously.
I'm pretty confident that from an engineering and orbital mechanics perspective, a comet massive enough to wipe out all life on earth could probably not be deflected given 6-months-to-impact notice, with our current state of preparation. I think we're much closer to being able to do so than we were 20 years ago, given the success of spacex, but the limiting factors are pretty extreme.
edit: obviously, this depends on a variety of factors including its trajectory (a slow-approaching comet would be easier to deflect than one shooting in at a fraction of C)
To be fair, a more accurate analog to either COVID or climate change would be a comet large enough to, say, wipe out a large city when it impacts or maybe create tidal waves that deluge coastal cities- total casualties of, say, 10-20 million people. Worth paying attention to, but also not world-ending.
I'm *guessing* a comet that small could conceivably be deflected with today's technology if you detonated a couple thousand nukes on one side, assuming you got enough manpower and resources behind the project. But... on the other hand, most people on earth could just ignore the problem and it wouldn't make any serious difference to their lives, and a strategic evacuation of affected areas might make more economic sense.
delivering "a couple thousand nukes" to a point in deep space in a couple months (remember, every day closer increases the delta-V needed to deflect) sounds basically impossible.
edit: additionally, you'd likely need some kind of timing trick to get that to work? because nukes aren't like TNT, if a nuke goes off next to another nuke, it generally doesn't "trigger a chain reaction", the other nuke usually just is blown apart without a nuclear detonation.
Yes it was a silly approach shown, in a comedic film meant to parody reality...I think that was the point and it was an intentional joke for the audience. Where even the most intelligent people doing their best to get the truth out don't seem to know a lot about comets vs asteroids or about realistic methods to deflect dangerous objects in space.
It was a wink at the audience that none of the characters were working with fully correct information.
Like in the parody movie Airplane! where it is a jet plane and you can hear the propellers in the background the entire film. In this case it was everyone talking about a comet when an asteroid would have made more sense.
I'd say it would be highly technically and logistically challenging to deliver a thousand nukes into deep space and wire them all to detonate simultaneously, but bear in mind that nuclear warheads themselves are not that large (it's the delivery system that's bulky.)
https://www.quora.com/How-large-is-an-ICBM-warhead?share=1
I'm not sure how many of those you could squeeze into a Dragon capsule, but if you could deliver 25 per trip and do a launch every 3 days, then in 120 days (4 months) you'd have 1000 warheads in space.
I have no idea what the specific mass/energy of a city-destroying comet would be, and whether that many warheads would suffice, but someone here can probably do the math. Again, the question is whether it would be cheaper and easier to just evacuate at-risk areas and rebuild afterward.
ICBMs already carry multiple warheads, look up MIRVs
Delivering the nukes in a constant stream would probably be better logistically and a less fragile approach in general than setting off a single big bang.
I did the calculations for deflection with only one month notice in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up/comment/4300386, and for many comets you would need only a tiny fraction of one nuke, not thousands of nukes. Suppose such a comet (3e9 kg) were in a solar orbit at nearly escape velocity from the sun (42 km/s) and then fell to earth, which would give it 11 km/s of velocity from rest. It would impact at about 43 km/s if the Earth were at rest relative to the sun:
You have: (42**2 + 11**2)**(1/2)
You want:
Definition: 43.416587
But Earth's orbital velocity is another 29.8 km/s, so depending on the relative angle of the Earth's orbit and the comet's orbit at the intersection point, the impact speed could be anywhere between 13.6 km/s and 73.2 km/s. Barring a gravitational assist from another planet during the same comet pass, it can't be higher than that because a comet moving faster than that wouldn't be in orbit around the Sun at all; it would be an interstellar intruder like ʻOumuamua.
13.6 km/s would give it 300 PJ of impact energy, 60 megatonnes of TNT, about an eighth of Tsar Bomba [correction: slightly larger than Tsar Bomba], which as far as we know didn't injure anybody. But if it had hit a city, it would have largely destroyed the city:
You have: half 3e9 kg (13.6 km/s)**2
You want: PJ
* 277.44
/ 0.0036043829
You have: half 3e9 kg (13.6 km/s)**2
You want: megatonnes tnt
* 60.155195
/ 0.016623668
At the other extreme, 73.2 km/s would be 8 exajoules, 1.7 gigatonnes TNT:
You have: half 3e9 kg (73.2 km/s)**2
You want: EJ
* 8.03736
/ 0.12441896
You have: half 3e9 kg (73.2 km/s)**2
You want: megatonnes tnt
* 1742.6793
/ 0.00057382903
That's three or four times the size of Tsar Bomba [no, 350 times] and eight times the size of the Krakatoa eruption, which produced a two-year-long volcanic winter.
In conclusion, the impact of such a comet would probably be city-destroying rather than planet-destroying, but it would not be technologically challenging to prevent it, just as with keeping covid under control.
But there are other comets out there that are three or four orders of magnitude larger. Fortunately, there aren't nearly as many of them, and we know where most of them are.
You should only need 1 nuke. If it is still a long ways away from earth you would only need to deflect its path slightly and a nuke has lots of energy. A nuke does however have very little mass. You would likely need to drill into the comet and use the nuke to split it so that the two pieces (likely one large one small) would split apart with the large part adequately deflected.
Interestingly, nuclear-scale impactors hit earth every couple of years! A 170 kt tnt-equivalent asteroid blew up over the Bering sea in 2019. They generally miss populated areas (or, more rarely, air-burst high enough up to avoid mass casualties, as in the case of the Chelyabinsk Oblast bolide, which was about a half megaton and injures a bunch of people).
But we are just sort of blithely rolling the dice every few years that one of these things isn't going to hit manhattan and kill three or four million people in five seconds.
I've seen documentaries making a reasonable case for the math of asteroid insurance, though I'd agree that having a more reliable warning + deflector system would be preferable. Probably have to wait until we get that space bridge installed in 2087.
An interesting assertion. We can take as a minimum the impactor thought to be responsible for Meteor Crater (about 50m across) and as a maximum the Chicxulub impactor (10-75 km). The former has a kinetic energy of ~120 MT while the latter about 10^9 MT. So that's about how much energy you need to supply to deflect it if you discover it too late for anything other than a wide angle deflection to work. (The world's supply of thermonuclear weapons probably totals about 1400-3000 MT.) If you catch it far enough away that a small angle will work, multiply approximately by the sine of the angle required.
I would say in terms of the sheer energy to be supplied, it is perhaps barely possible. But when you add in the logistics -- transporting thousands of tons of devices and heavy machinery, and either the exquisitely complex and sophisticated robots or the large well-trained human crew necessary to use the force precisely, to interplanetary distances, in an era when the biggest rockets we have are barely able to throw a metric ton or two to Mars -- I would say it moves into the realm of implausible even for quite small impactors.
But we would certainly try! lol
I did the calculations for one month notice in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up/comment/4300386, and it looks like it would be pretty straightforward from an engineering perspective, just because the amount of energy required is so small. (Getting bureaucratic approval for a launch within a week or two, with nukes on it, is the harder aspect of the problem.) Agreed that relativistic projectiles would not be so easy.
SpaceX (or so) could probably just launch without bureaucratic approval? They can deal with the legal fallout later?
I don't think they can in fact launch rockets without approval from the US government (I think there are controls in place to prevent this) and they are internally a bureaucracy as well. But the potentially larger problem is getting the warheads.
SpaceX could probably launch *once* without bureaucratic approval, if they were willing to deal with "legal fallout" that would make all their future launches much more difficult. But this is a problem that will take much more than a single launch to solve.
Legally, SpaceX needs FAA approval to launch anything, even from an offshore or foreign site, and the bureaucrats in question can call on uniformed men with guns to enforce the rules. We can hope that whoever is running the executive branch of the government would make sure that's not a problem in this scenario, but if POTUS is being an ass (or an incompetent buffoon), then SpaceX can't fix the problem alone/
FWIW, the science consultant on the movie, Amy Mainzer, agrees with you:
"McKay and Mainzer first connected two years ago, when McKay was writing the screenplay. One issue was Comet Dibiasky’s size, which McKay had imagined at thirty-two kilometres in diameter. “I said, ‘No, no—if it’s too big, people just throw up their hands,’ ” Mainzer recalled. They settled on nine kilometres: big enough to wipe out humanity, but small enough that there was a chance of stopping it. Mainzer had pushed for a longer interval between discovery and impact, since you’d want four or five years to build a comet-busting spacecraft, but, for dramaturgical reasons, McKay stuck with six months. “It would be like doing ‘Jaws’ where the shark attacks take place over a fourteen-year period,” he said."
Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/27/how-to-design-a-world-killing-comet
I haven’t seen the actual movie, but surely whether or not deflecting an interstellar body within 6 months is ‘possible’ depends hugely on the mechanics of exactly where it’s predicted to hit, and which way we’re moving at the time.
For instance, if it’s predicted to hit perpendicular to the Earth’s direction of motion, and ‘hit’ means ‘graze the trailing edge’ then a 1-second delay in impact time converts that to missing the Earth’s atmosphere completely (we move about 30km/s Google tells me). I haven’t sat down and done the maths, but that seems pretty doable. Certainly a very different scenario from ‘it’s hitting dead centre at the precise point in our orbit when we’re also heading straight for it’
For almost any impact, nudging the impactor off course by a couple of Earth diameters (sideways) would be sufficient to prevent it. Time before impact and size/composition of the object are the main factors in the difficulty of deflection. Difficulty of reaching it far in advance is also a factor, and that can depend on which way the Earth is heading at the time as well as the impactor's trajectory. But the angle of impact is not so important.
In the part 4 of Axis of Madness, Species War, the hive mind is faced with a similar situation. A 60 mile in diameter asteroid is headed towards earth, and it has very little time to decide what to do. The description of the colision is earth shattering. And the description of degeneracy leading to the formation of the hive is even more explicit.
Agreed, although I think it's more accurate to say that our ability to do so has waxed and waned in direct proportion to the heavy-lift vehicles humanity has at its disposal. We probably had a better shot in the 70s than we did in the 90s.
I could hear John Schilling screaming at the screen from where I was.
At *best*, the original attack would deflect the comet, not destroy it, and only *barely* deflect it.[1]
But if you live in a world where the Deflect Mission can happen, then the proper response is to just let Deflect Mission happen, and then attempt to do Capture Mission on the now barely-deflected comet.
[1] We can't even deflect it.
Very good point. All the sensible options leave the comet largely intact and on almost the same trajectory. Still, if the writers want to turn "Deflect Mission" into "Blow Comet to Smithereens Mission" for dramatic purposes, that would be one of the lesser sins of this screenplay.
Ignoring orbital mechanics, to deflect a 9km diamter comet made of ice by 1 earth diameter over six months, would take 30 kT of energy. Seems small.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1%2F2+*+%284%2F3+*+pi+*+%284.5km%29+%5E3+*+density+of+water+%29+*+%28earth+diameter+%2F+six+months%29%5E2
yes, but you're ignoring travel time and lead time; let's say it takes 2 months to decide and build our response. I think that would be shockingly quick, but regardless.
You might be thinking "so what, 4 months is only 50% more energy needed!", but we still need to factor in how long it takes us to make the intercept. let's say our comet is moving at roughly 30 km/s relative to the earth; this is fast, but this is also the orbital velocity _of the earth_, so most asteroids and all comets will be moving faster (relative to the sun) than that.
reaching low earth orbit from the ground takes roughly 10 km/s of delta-v. a Falcon 9 rocket can deliver 22.8 tons to low earth orbit. a laden Falcon 9 rocket weighs 550 tons. let's be crazy and just pretend we can ship a falcon 9 up, piece by piece, on falcon 9s (or, more realistically, put one in orbit and then shuttle fuel to it) in one month. this gives us, in orbit, a rocket that can impart 10 km/s of delta-v on a 22.8t payload, sitting in space. That's pretty good, we've never been anywhere near that amount of power in space before. with 3 months left, if we assume our comet is closing at 15 km/s and our rocket is closing on it at 10 km/s, we should meet it with roughly 36 days left. a nuke could probably still do that? it's "only" about 6 times your estimate, so 180 kT of kinetic energy? that's a lot, but relatively little compared to nukes. but remember that nukes do not impart 100% of their energy on a comet/asteroid; at the limit, one would expect them to impart 50% of their energy (imagine exploding against a flat wall), but I think much less of it would actually go to kinetic energy.
The nuke-to-kinetic energy calculation is beyond my paygrade. I also think the "launching an entire, fueled falcon 9 to LEO" scenario is ludicrously optimistic, and while you could do your launch piecemeal (i.e. send things straight at the comet rather than waiting to assemble in LEO) and that's probably better, I think it's still pretty far from clear-cut.
Yes, certainly am ignoring all that - was just talking about the physics of it which is what I thought the claim was. You're right that even if we have something ready to go, the intercept time is unavoidable. Sending a falcon 9 up piecemeal obviously isn't something we can do right now, but orbit-refuellable starships might fit the bill, Musk says a fully-fuelled one with 100 tons of cargo would have 7km/s of delta v, which is getting close to the Falcon 9's 10km/s. If some of the 100T was itself a vehicle with its own propulsion, you could get even more delta v.
That's also assuming 100% conversion of nuclear explosion energy to asteroid kinetic energy, which isn't plausible. Even 1% isn't plausible. For scenarios that don't involve Bruce Willis drilling a hole into the asteroid, the coupling is closer to 0.01%.
The scenarios that involve launching Bruce Willis out to the comet with a bunch of nuclear warheads, involve him watching the comet whiz past at better than fifty kilometers a second, lamenting the fact that we don't have engines capable of matching that sort of velocity.
Disclaimer: I'm an idiot. This thought that occurred to me is likely idiotic. So go easy on me.
But, rather than blowing it out of it's orbit why not instead land thrusters on the comet and change its trajectory that way. I have no idea about the numbers, it's probably as unlikely as trying to nudge it out of orbit with nuclear bombs, but it's still a possible scenario if you're looking at all scenarios, right?
That's been discussed for asteroids that we can track and predict twenty years into the future, and that have lower relative velocities than comets. In that context, it's reasonable.
Comets come out of the deep dark of trans-Neptunian space on very short notice(*), and at speeds great enough that flying out to meet them in a timely manner and then reversing course to rendezvous with and land on them while carrying any significant payload is impractical with current or near-future technology.
* Except for the periodic comets that we already know about, and none of those are impact threats.
You have to admit that it's a good jab - you've unfortunately (perhaps unintentionally) become one of the leading lights of a group of people who can generally be described as "extremely smart, but also extremely dumb". I should know - I've followed you for years and I'm very much that.
what do you mean by this and who is it addressed to?
It's a late response to a comment waaaay upthread, with the result that it seems to have been buried down here. No matter - the issue was resolved amicably it seems.
Yes. There are certainly a lot of scientific inaccuracies in the movie, but that's not too bad imo given the genre we're in here.
The basic idea of deflecting a comet with nukes is serious, even if basically all details in the movie pertaining to implementation are not. (Also, the detection scene is fairly silly. But then again, not a big deal really)
From the Wikipedia article Scott posted:
> With one year of notice, and at an interception location no closer than Jupiter, it could also deal with the even rarer short period comets
From the _Don't Look Up_ Wikipedia article:
> [Female scientist] discovers a previously unknown comet just inside of Jupiter's orbit at 4.6 au from the Sun. Her professor [] calculates that it will impact Earth in about six months
Read together, it seems like the deflection depicted in the movie is significantly more challenging than the one described in the Wikipedia article (which itself relies on rockets more powerful than any currently in service)
It's an open question, although in all likelihood we would be completely powerless to deflect a mass-extinction class comet/asteroid with current level technology. The delta v change required simply requires a tremendous amount of energy, given the kinetic energy of the astronomical body itself. Maaaaybe if you catch it really far away? People are trying to investigate it though. Stay tuned for the results of the DART mission. :-) For context, the impacted object in this mission will be a minor-planet moon 170 meters across...
I'm not sure it's that unrealistic. If you catch it 1 month out, you need enough delta v to move it by the radius of the Earth or so over the course of a month. That's like 2.5 m/s. If you assume this thing is a sphere of diameter 170 meters with the density of water, that's something like 1.5*10^10 J, which is a lot, but not on the scale of nuclear weapons.
How would earth's gravity play into that? If you changed the comets's path, but not enough, would gravity pull it back towards the earth?
It should affect things a bit. Gravity will increase the scattering cross-section some. I haven't done the calculation, but I would imagine that the effect will be small because the comet will be traveling by the Earth fairly quickly (and thus there will be fairly little time for gravity to have an impact).
The comment would probably be on a hyperbolic orbit relative to Earth (meaning if it doesn’t hit it will just blow right by, not be captured into an Earth orbit) and presumably Earth’s gravity would already be taken into account when you worked out that it was on a collision trajectory. Probably doesn’t change the calculation terribly much.
Mostly confirmed, but you overestimated the mass by an order of magnitude [correction: the energy, by a factor of 2], and also 1.5e10 J is only 4200 kWh, so we're talking about only a few thousand watts of rocket power. Calculations provided with GNU units 2.19 for reproducibility:
$ units
Currency exchange rates from FloatRates (USD base) on 2019-05-31
3460 units, 109 prefixes, 109 nonlinear units
You have: earthradius/month
You want: m/s
* 2.4226732
/ 0.41276718
You have: spherevol(half 170 m) water / gravity
You want:
Definition: 2.5724408e+09 kg
You have: half spherevol(half 170 m) water (2.42 m/s)**2 / gravity
You want: J
* 7.5326211e+09
/ 1.3275591e-10
You have: half spherevol(half 170 m) water (2.42 m/s)**2 / gravity
You want: kilotonnes tnt
* 0.0016332407
/ 612.27964
You have: half spherevol(half 170 m) water (2.42 m/s)**2 / gravity
You want: kWh
* 2092.3948
/ 0.00047792129
You have: 1.5e10 J
You want: kWh
* 4166.6667
/ 0.00024
You have: half spherevol(half 170 m) water (2.42 m/s)**2 / gravity month
You want: W
* 2864.3935
/ 0.00034911405
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet mentions several comets in that size range, but also says Halley's Comet and a few others are three or four orders of magnitude larger than that, 1e13 to 3e14 kg. Such a comet would require three or four orders of magnitude more energy to deflect given only a month's warning, 1-10 kilotonnes TNT instead of a few megawatt-hours. Probably that could be delivered with current human capabilities as a small nuke but not as, for example, ion engines. Starship will change that if it works.
I think I just missed the factor of 2 in E = 1/2 m v^2. (7.5e9 is half of 1.5e10).
But yeah, this is probably in the range where you could use rockets rather than than nukes. Though both cases run into the issue of trying to turn energy into momentum losing you a lot unless you have reaction mass to spare.
Oh yeah, sorry.
I appreciate the tip from the other comment, but I'm not sure what these numbers are referring to? Could you walk me through it a bit more explicitly?
Would a comet only 170m^3 really pose an existential threat to life on earth or even be visible from the ground for long, though? In the other thread I was positing a comet large enough to wipe out millions (but not the planet)- can you estimate what size that would be and the effort needed to deflect it, given 6 months' warning?
Sorry, I can't find the specs for the comet in the other thread.
Looking at this one though... googling "comet impact velocity" says that we should expect something like 50km/s. Using this exactly, we compute the impact energy on Earth as...1.3e19 J.
That's... probably not wiping out all life on Earth. It's like 100x the energy of the biggest nukes, but something like 100,000x short of the impact that killed the dinosaurs.
If we scale the mass up by five orders of magnitude though, that is probably enough to kill most people and still means that a nuke will deliver enough energy (if delivered properly) to divert it.
170 cubic meters would not be big enough to matter. Objects that size hit Earth every year or so without anybody noticing. The Chelyabinsk meteor was about 4000 cubic meters and would have done major damage if it had hit a city instead of exploding in the upper atmosphere, injuring a thousand people and giving instant sunburns to some of them.
170 meters in diameter is 2.6 million cubic meters:
You have: spherevol(half 170 m)
You want:
Definition: 2572440.8 m^3
That's big enough to wipe out millions, but not the planet. If you had 6 months instead of 1 month to deflect it, you'd need to change the comet's velocity by only one sixth as much, about 400 millimeters per second:
You have: earthradius/6 months
You want: mm/s
* 403.77887
/ 0.0024766031
This would require about 3% as much energy, about 200-300 MJ for the 170-m-diameter size we were talking about:
You have: half 3e9 kg (earthradius/6 months)**2
You want: MJ
* 244.55607
/ 0.0040890419
Or about 70 kilowatt hours, or 50 kg TNT:
You have: half 3e9 kg (earthradius/6 months)**2
You want: kWh
* 67.932241
/ 0.014720551
You have: half 3e9 kg (earthradius/6 months)**2
You want: kg tnt
* 53.025223
/ 0.01885895
This could be a rocket of under 100 watts, a few hundred newtons of thrust, depending on how long it had to operate (there's a tradeoff where you can use lower power over a longer period of time, but requiring more total energy).
You have: 3e9 kg 400mm/s/2months
You want: N
* 228.15911
/ 0.0043829064
As for walking you through it a bit more explicitly, can you be more specific about which parts are unclear? Is it the GNU Units syntax, the Newtonian physics, or something else? Maybe you understood all of that and I just made a dumb calculation error?
Extinction-level comets/asteroids, such as the one in the movie/the one that wiped the dinosaurs, are more on the 5/10km diameter range. Assuming the same density, here alone we're talking about a 3640-fold increase in mass (assuming 170 vs. 10000 meter diameter bodies). You're also being optimistic on the average density, but I doubt you'd be off by more than a factor of 1-2x, hence all things considered a rather small deviation when compared to the former.
Yeah, I think we came to this conclusion elsewhere. A 7000-fold increase still leaves nukes with easily enough *energy* output to deflect it, though there is still an issue with how effectively you can turn that energy into momentum.
I used the wrong formula (area of circle instead of volume of sphere). The energy is actually ~200k times higher. Please see my other comment. Also, agree with the problem of effective use of a bomb to impart momentum on a celestial body.
Extinction-level impactors are more on the 5-10km diameter range. Considering the same density and velocity relative to Earth, mass sphere r=5000/mass sphere r=85 =~ 203541 times more kinetic energy than Didymoon. Also quite unsure how effective a nuke or any other kind of high-yield explosive device would be an efficient way to impact momentum on a celestial body, given that most energy would not be directed at the body (assuming a spherical blast, which seems reasonable).
So, the good news mechanically is that the earth is really small by cosmic standards. Hitting a target like the earth from months or years away requires extreme precision. Even a small change in velocity is generally enough to turn a hit into a miss, and the power of that disruption increases the further out from impact it is. I know in some cases, simply painting the object white to increase the pressure exerted by the sun's light would be sufficient, if you had enough lead time. A sufficiently large nuclear weapon could also potentially nudge it enough. There's more we could (and should!) do to prepare, but we aren't entirely helpless, especially if Starship works out (which would enable us to put a high-delta-v high-payload mission together in a hurry).
To be clear, I don't mean to imply you're completely wrong. There's lots of scenarios where we'd be pretty much screwed, especially if we detected it really shortly before impact. But doing something about it with ~current technology isn't physically ridiculous, and there is a subset of scenarios where we have more warning where you could put a meaningful mission together. I also think the near-future outlook may improve a great deal.
Someone should make a series of questions on metaculus to determine what's the largest impactor that humans could deflect given 0.5/1/2/10/100 years advance notice.
I'm wondering what the resolution mechanism will be.
I'm 75% confident that the internet would still exist in some form the next day after a chixculub-equivalent impact, and 98% confident humans would still exist ten years later.
* Animals were immediately buried under 10cm of debris 1600 miles from the impact, but lots of humans will survive that by being farther away or inside buildings
* magnitude 9 earthquake on average across the entire globe, which would be very bad, but won't kill everyone.
* Datacenters are connected to each other by underground cables that likely survive, and many of them have dedicated primary and backup generators nearby.
* Most of the starlink satellites would not be destroyed by ejecta.
* Cooling and partial dimming of sunlight will reduce global agricultural productivity by a lot for many years (wild guess: 40-80%, Help me on this if you have more specific data). We can supplement it with LED grow lights. A human consumes 100 watts of food, and crops are ~0.4% efficient in sunlight, but much more efficient when illuminated by LEDs that only produce the appropriate frequencies. LEDs themselves are 85% efficient. So I guess it's going to take 3000-10000 watts of electricity to grow enough food for one person. Total global electrical capacity of ~10^13 watts could support 1-3 billion people on grow lights. So it seems very plausible that less than half of the humans will starve.
My thinking is this: A comet is an ice ball, at worst a dirty one. Not sure they can be “diverted”. Heck it responds to solar “wind” by elongating, not moving. Maybe shattered into smaller ice balls. But moved? I have my doubts. A meteor? Better chance but it’s mass relative to a comet? Hmmm.
My objection was to what I saw as a simplistic “believe the scientists, not the greedy capitalist” theme. A commenter here noted that tropes were the point. But that really is my point. It was not believable but the movie seeks to shape a false science - in my view - to push a narrative that is just not supported. The narrative of Trump/capitalism versus “truth”. It’s a bit much, particularly in our current milieu of “believe the science” where the science is sometimes suspect and doesn’t consider alternatives. And is often political - on both sides.
Scott, my comment was snarky and smart-assed for sure. But “nasty” I am not so sure. But it’s your blog, your site, and clearly you can ban me if you choose. I can live with that. Heck, I think that was my first comment here. Maybe I just don’t really get the posting etiquette.
Thanks for the reply.
All right, fine, you clearly care enough to defend yourself pretty well, so I'll hold off on banning for now.
OK, Scott, but I still take issue with the disproportionate size of the ban you considered imposing on someone who was briefly snide about you -- as compared to what you're willing to mete out to someone who goes after somebody else. I'm moving up to here a comment about this matter that was originally lower in the thread, but seems more appropriately placed here:
Jeez Scott, as low-quality comments go this one seems relatively low in toxicity and discourtesy. Until the last sentence it's just rambly personal reactions to the movie, plus some info about comets which yeah, we know. Then at the end he says something snide about you. And you're proposing to ban the person for a *month*?! It's not the length of the sentence I object to, it's the inequity. A couple threads ago I posted a complaint, civil in tone, about someone on Substack whom I thought was publishing misinformation about covid vaccination, and got showered with half a dozen *ridiculously* rude, mocking and insulting comments by one individual, comments with no argumentive substance to them at all, and you only banned that person for a week. The term "incivility" really doesn't cover the level of nastiness and savagery this person was dealing out. Privately I thought, Wow, what does this guy have to do to get banned for longer than a week -- threaten murder?
And now you want to ban someone for a *month* for a post that has one little sarcastic sneer at the end about your membership in the smart set?
And by the way, the same poster who savaged my posts then liberally sprinkled the whole rest of the thread with multiple responses to other people's posts. Most were content-free, just pure stoopit sneer. Want some examples?
-"You people crack me up."
-"Friendly reminder: You don´t get it."
-"Yes, great handwaving pains with no actual basis in the data."
I'm not crazy about how much your standards vary depending on whether the person getting shit on is Self or Other. Others are selves too.
"I know people are rude to you, but what about ME!"
Well, not exactly. My point isn't that rudeness to me is more important than rudeness to others, it is that a recent episode of rudeness to me was vastly greater in both degree of rudeness and in number of rude comments. And the rest of my point was that it was not a great look for Scott to propose a month-long ban for the lower-scale rudeness, to him, and a much shorter ban for a way bigger load of rudeness to another member of the forum — whether the other member of the forum was me or, for instance, you, Adam.
People being rude to Scott can discourage Scott from writing more great articles. That is much worse than e.g. people being rude to me.
Once a person becomes an internet janitor they very rarely make good decisions about how to use their mop and bucket. Scott is no exception.
I feel like I have a pretty consistent policy of banning people who are rude to others more than to me - this is part of why MarxBro rarely gets banned. The main thing that annoyed me about this post was him calling people who believe you can deflect comets "stupid beyond description, certainly in the current day" - you can read the comment policy here, it's very clear that the combination of insulting and wrong gets you banned. But I was also annoyed about the "this movie is bad so it appeals to the smart set" stuff - I realize I'm at risk of compulsive anti-elitism and cultivating a comment section that does that too, and so I try to be harsh on people who are snide, extremely anti-elite, have few actual things to say, and wrong about the facts all at once.
I haven't yet read this poster's other bad comments. I am not able to read every comment on this blog. The main reason I read this comment and not others is that this was the first comment on this post. I'm working on getting a "report comment" function available, but it's not ready yet.
Also consider the possibility that the reason bad posters don't get banned as often as they should is that whenever I even moot the possibility of a banning, people write long comments like this one about how biased and mean and selfish I am, and so I dread having to even consider it.
OK, Scott, having thought all this over I’ve realized what my real complaint is, and also what it isn’t.
What my complaint isn’t:
I don’t really mind your not displaying the wisdom of Solomon in your response to a piece of snark. Threatening to ban the poster still seems like an overreaction to me, but maybe I’m wrong, and anyhow you don’t have to be perfect to stay in my good graces. In hosting this forum you are giving a lot of people something quite special and good, and I feel grateful and not inclined to make a fuss about little things.
What my real complaint is:
There is *too much incivility* on this forum, and I’m pretty sure the amount is increasing. It’s cutting into the pleasure of being here — at least it’s cutting into *my* pleasure. I really don’t know what to do about the increase in low-grade incivility —things like silly gotchas, unkindness, irritable bickering etc. Moderating aimed at low-level incivility may be destructive of the ecosystem, and anyhow it’s too time-consuming to be practical. But I’ll settle for a reduction in the highest level of incivility, verbal abuse, of which I have seen a fair amount in recent threads. I’ll post some thoughts about incivility and how to handle it on the next open thread.
You can definitely divert it with a big enough nuke - not through the shock wave (vacuum), but through the asymmetric outgassing caused by the *massive* radiation flux, which produces thrust. This works for asteroids as well as comets
Moving the closest approach of some comet a certain amount then becomes a question of bomb yield and intercept time (earlier intercepts need smaller dV for obvious reasons)
I don’t think you understand the physics - the solar wind absolutely does “move” the comet, just not very much because the force is very low relative to the kinetic energy.
It’s just a mass in space. If you apply force to it, it will be accelerated. Enough force, and it will be accelerated enough to miss earth.
If you smack it with a nuke, you’ll probably blow a big crater into it, some of the material from which will certainly achieve escape velocity from the comet. But the bulk of the comet would absorb the energy and be accelerated in the opposite direction of the impact.
I mean, landing a rocket on it and applying thrust that way, or blasting it sequentially with a bunch of small bombs, might work better. But the fact that it’s a “dirty ice ball” instead of a rock doesn’t alter the fundamental problem of “apply force, get acceleration”.
A fusion or fission bomb would probably work better than a chemical rocket engine. Just because you get more bang for your kg.
Btw, even just blowing the comet to bits but not altering the trajectory much might also be useful: the atmosphere is better at burning up lots of small bits before they hit the ground than one big one.
That seems a little oversimplified to me. A thermonuclear explosion doesn't provide force (= change in momentum), it supplies energy, almost all in a huge blast of X-rays and gammas. On Earth you get a large amount of momentum change (a blast wave) because the atmosphere rapidly converts energy to momentum -- lots of air gets superheated on one side and accelerates in the other direction.
So if we set off an explosion near a comet, what happens is that the mass of the comet under it gets hot, and if it gets hot enough to ablate away we would indeed get a rocket effect, but to the extent it just gets hot no momentum is created.
You could bury the nuke to try to heat more material but I dunno if that would improve things. There's probably an optimum altitude for the best ablative rocket effect. Too high or too low and probably most of your energy just gets wasted (= not converted to momentum change).
Light itself does have some momentum, fwiw. Not sure if it'd make a difference on this scale, but it does mean that the blast of light technically does produce force even absent atmosphere.
As for being hot enough to ablate the object, I think most comets have plenty of ice and getting that to outgas isn't particularly unreasonable.
Yes, and there were some people who -- encouraged by artfully constructed semi-official rumor I would say -- who actually believed radiation pressure underlay the Ulam-Teller mechanism. How those in the know must have laughed at that.
As I've said below, I don't see *any* mechanism *other* than ablation and a rocket effect for delivering momentum to a heavenly body with a nuke. You need to convert a big pulse of energy into a big change in momentum, and that's the only way I think it can be done.
People have a habit of thinking "a bomb is a bomb, and my instincts on what a chemical explosion does ought to translate fairly well to what a nuclear explosion does." One of my main points here is to point out that this is wrong.
According to the movie, it's not just an ice ball - at least not entirely, it has enough minerals to be worth asking the president to let the Tech CEO to mine it. The question, of course, is how the mass is structured, and depending on this, it may be beneficial to either try to move it as a whole chunk, or split it into a number of smaller chunks moving into different directions.
> Maybe I just don’t really get the posting etiquette.
I believe the general rule has usually been, comments should pass at least two of "Buddha's gates" (is it true? is it necessary? is it kind?). The descriptor 'nasty and wrong' appears to reference this directly (read as: 'not kind and not true').
(edit to add, from the old blog: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/02/the-comment-policy-is-victorian-sufi-buddha-lite/ )
> I think astronomers and others take comet deflection pretty seriously
"It could be used to instantaneously vaporize a one-kilometre (0.62 mi) asteroid, divert the paths of ELE-class asteroids (greater than 10 kilometres or 6.2 miles in diameter) within short notice of a few months."
So it would be necessary to design, produce and launch one-gigaton nuclear explosive device within weeks. (or repurpose existing one but it also would be not easy)
And if that comet is sufficiently large then 6 months is already too late to act.
There are different groups that came to very different assessments, and there are definitely credible groups that reached much more pessimistic conclusions about our ability to avoid asteroid impacts. This Veritasium video (https://youtu.be/4Wrc4fHSCpw?t=873) covered some information (time stamp 14:32 for the more relevant bit) about it.
I agree comet deflection is feasible for smallish ones. After actually doing some math, I think humanity has a very low chance of deflecting a chixculub-size asteroid, but a high chance of deflecting anything under 10^11kg. People who aren't into math can skip the rest of this post.
Here's some napkin math. Escape velocity is twice orbital velocity, so when a comet from the oort cloud reaches Earth it'll be going almost twice earth's orbital velocity of 30km/s, and when it reaches Jupiter it'll be going almost twice Jupiter's orbital velocity of 13km/s. Linearly interpolating that because I'm lazy and this is an upper bound, we get a mean velocity of 2*21km/s on the path from Jupiter orbit to Earth, which is at least 4.2AU long. 4.2AU / 42km/s = 0.5 years. So an interception at the distance of Jupiter will be at least 0.5 years before impact. Earth's diameter is about 7 minutes times its orbital velocity, so we only have to push the comet enough to accelerate it by 13km/s * (7 minutes / 0.5 year) = 0.346m/s.
How much momentum would it have taken to do that for a comet of the size the one associated with the late cretaceous extinction (chixculub crater)? That one is estimated to be 10^16kg (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014arXiv1403.6391D/abstract). LEO delta V is around 10km/s. 10^16 kg * ((0.346m/s) / (10km/s)) = 346 million metric tons. The momentum required is the equivalent of putting 346 million tons into LEO. For comparison, falcon heavy only puts about 60 tons into LEO, so we'd need about six million of those, plus at least twenty times that to deliver them to Jupiter. So chemical rockets are definitely out. Only nukes can save us.
How much momentum could be imparted per megaton of nukes? I don't really know how to calculate that. It probably depends a lot on the composition of the comet (Albedo and whether it has vaporizable volatiles on the surface. You probably get a much larger effect from the recoil of those volatiles leaving when they're heated)
Ignoring the effect of recoil from volatiles, which might 1000x the momentum for all I know, I can compute a rough estimate based on the energy released. D-T fusion releases 17.6 MeV, a helium-4 atom, and a neutron. sqrt(17.6MeV /5 amu) = 18429km/s. 10^16 kg * ((0.346m/s) / (18429km/s)) = 187747 tons. So deflection of a chixculub-mass iron asteroid could require fusing as much as 187747 tons of helium if you model it as shooting helium and neutrons at it at the same velocity they would have if all of the energy from fusion went into accelerating them. But recoil from ablation of the asteroid's own materials may increase the momentum imparted by 100x-100,000x. Hard to model that. And it may be hard to know the composition of the object far enough in advance to build the appropriate-sized nuke.
We could restart Project Orion and use nuclear weapons to launch a space ship. The ship would contain a huge hydrogen bomb. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
We cannot do this in six months. No matter what they said in that one really cool science fiction novel.
If humanity was at stake and enough people would agree, we might manage.
Keep in mind, that you wouldn't just build one spaceship and hope it works. You'd have lots of efforts in parallel, so that even if 80% of them fail, you'd still have a chance.
This is "make a baby in one month using nine women" territory, saying that hey, even if 88% of the women fail we still get a baby.
We don't even have the tools to build an Orion, and I don't think we even have viable blueprints for the tools to build an Orion. Nor do we have the blueprints for the Orion itself - it wasn't nearly that advanced when it was cancelled - and that's not the sort of thing you can solve by throwing the Best Rocket Scientists in a room full of Red Bull for a long weekend.
For comparison, the Tunguska asteroid was 10^7 kg. So between 10^7 kg and 10^11kg there are a lot of potential asteroid impacts that would be very bad but very preventable.
An upper bound on efficacy of nukes would be to assume they're as effective as a chemical rocket of the same total energy. Falcon heavy uses 518 tons of fuel, which is about 21% methane. Methane has a heat of combustion of 55514kj/kg. 518t * 0.21 * 55514kj/kg = 6*10^12 J.
1 kiloton of TNT = 4*10^12 J
1 falcon heavy = 1.5 kilotons TNT
So instead of six million Falcon Heavies to deflect the next chixculub we'd need *at least* 9000 megatons of nukes in the best case scenario. This is the same order of magnitude as the peak cold war stockpile of the US or USSR.
Wouldn't chemical rockets be a lower bound on nukes' efficacy?
Btw, if you had enough time, you could harvest energy and mass on the comet itself.
KE=mv^2, P=mv, so P=KE/v. This means the faster the debris exits, the more energy you have to spend per unit of momentum. A sudden nuclear blast would produce very hot, very fast debris, which would be a very inefficent allocation of energy. The root-mean-squared velocity of the debris would probably be much faster than the exhaust velocity of the methalox engines on the falcon heavy, and on average only like half of the velocity would be on the relevant axis (and only half of the nuke's energy would go towards the comet in the first place). So the nuke is probably at least an order of magnitude less efficient at turning energy into to momentum.
You could probably get a couple orders of magnitude higher energy efficency than a nuke by using some nuclear reactors to gradually heat up the comet on the side where you want to boil off volatiles for thrust. But realistically you're not going to have enough lead time to build and launch early enough to intercept it way outside the orbit of Jupiter to make that work. A giant light beam from the surface of earth to the comet might do the job with a lot less lead time. But at 4.2 AU a 10km diameter impactor would be ~ 0.003 arcseconds across, and atmospheric distortions would blur things on scales of ~1 arcsecond, so most of the beam would miss the target.
Our best hope is probably very very early detection, because the impulse required is inversely proportional to the square of the time before impact.
I think the idea would be to let the nuke explode on (or better, slightly in) the comet/meteor, on the side you want to apply the pushing force. Then the momentum will result mostly of comet/meteor bits being ejected, not from bits of the bomb itself....It's more a question of fracturing the objects into smaller parts each having new momentum so slightly different trajectories (hopefully most not on a collision course), rather than a real push.
At least that's how I see how (thermo) nuclear explosions would help...
Rockets are generally optimized for exhaust velocity instead of energy efficiency as the former directly affects delta v.
If we want to be irresponsibly optimistic, assume that your nuke manages to split our 1e16kg asteroid into two parts of equal mass, and puts most of its yield energy into moving these two masses moving into equal and opposite directions.
Assuming we want 0.3m/s for either fragment, we would come out at
1e16 kg /2*pow(0.3 m/s, 2) = 4.5e14 J = 107 kt TNT.
Apart from unimportant practical problems (like how do you drill a nuke into an asteroid, and would it split into fragments, and in how many) the main downside from that method is that the escape velocity of such an asteroid would be much higher, so our two neat half asteroids will probably meet each other again. Gravity finds a way and all that.
Instead, let's try to bomb out a small fragment which will fly away with twice the surface escape velocity, which I take to be 10m/s. This seems to be the roughly the energetically optimal way to do it: faster, and we waste energy without gaining much momentum, slower, and most of the momentum will gravitationally return to our asteroid (lets call it 'K-Pg 2.0' or something).
So the fragment we want to nuke away should weight some 3e14 kg. with v = 20m/s (out of which gravity will steal back half), this gives some 6e16 J or 16 Mt TNT, which puts us firmly into the thermonuclear section of Amazon. Assume we find a "used and new" B41 there (5000kg, 2 left in stock), which has a yield in that magnitude.
As Prime delivery does not cover solar orbits, this would be the next problem. Nukes are fragile things, and lithobraking them with some kilometers per second will void their warranty, and exploding it in space nearby would accomplish little. To land a nuke on an asteroid will be quite costly in terms of delta v. Then we need a drilling system to put our B41 perhaps a kilometer or so deep into the asteroid. So we would probably want to get Switzerland on board, as they have a good track record for building tunnels on time and below budget. Drilling in free-fall and vacuum with a limited mass allowance of perhaps another 5000kg will still be quite a challenge.
All in all, I can feel some sympathy for the dinosaur decision not to bother with civilisation and space flight.
Also, this makes a great case for autonomous colonies on mars, as they would invariably lead to the development of interplanetary weapon delivery platforms which could be essential for asteroid deflection.
This mostly checks out (except, isn't it sqrt(2) times the orbital velocity, not 2 times?), but I don't think there are any comets that big. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet says even Halley's Comet is only 3e14 kg, and we know it isn't going to hit Earth anytime in the next few centuries. The other comets are substantially smaller than that.
You can put a minimum on the energy required just by mvv/2; unless the comet's volatiles start fusing or combusting or something, the ad-hoc rocket engine you're propelling it with can't be more than 100% efficient, so the energy content of the bombs puts a limit on how much you can deflect it. I did that calculation in https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/movie-review-dont-look-up/comment/4300386 and it looks considerably more optimistic than your calculation based on only using the bomb itself as reaction mass.
Yes, escape velocity is only sqrt(2) times orbital velocity, not 2x, sorry. Not enough of an error to matter in an order-of-magnitude estimate.
See my calculation below about the optimistic reaction mass scenario (i.e. assuming the nuke's energy is converted to momentum as efficiently as the Falcon Heavy's fuel energy is converted to momentum)
Chixculub-size-plus NEAs exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1036_Ganymed is a near earth asteroid with a diameter of 35km. By comparison, the chixculub impactor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater) had a diameter around 10km. So 1036 Ganymed would be 3.5^3 = 42 times more massive.
Assuming chixculub was a sphere of radius 5km, a mass of 10^16 kg implies a density of 2 kg/liter, which seems reasonable for an ice/rock mix. 1036 Ganymed at the same density would be a mass of 4*10^17 kg.
Another deflection approach that might work is shooting a continuous gigawatt laser to the correct side of the asteroid to heat up frozen gasses and deflect it. That's probably the most energy efficient approach because you're letting the gasses escape gradually at low temperature and low velocity instead of wasting energy on extreme temperatures and high velocities of a much smaller amount of material.
But mvv/2 is at least two orders of magnitude too optimistic. That's the energy cost of the momentum if your reaction mass is the entire asteroid and you're perfectly efficient.
Yes, lots of Chicxulub-sized asteroids (though all the other NEAs are smaller than Ganymed), but no comets that size I think. It'd still be a pretty huge disaster for the humans if something like Hale-Bopp hit Earth.
I'm not really up on my rocket dynamics, but is it really more energy-efficient for a rocket to eject its reaction mass at low temperature and low velocity, rather than extreme temperatures and high velocities of a much smaller amount of material? I mean I guess in a sense your objective is momentum, or actually sideways bolide velocity, and if your reaction mass goes twice as fast it gives you twice the momentum but costs you four times the energy, so maybe it is. I'd never thought of that.
The most efficient case, as you say, is where you split the impactor in half and send the halves to opposite sides of Earth at the time when they would have impacted, which is the case where you can use only mvv/2 energy. All the extra energy you put into blowing reaction mass far out of the impact path with Earth is wasted.
I have the impression (and this might be wrong) that inner-system asteroids don't have much ice left after 4.6 billion years in near proximity to Sun, unlike comets. So you might need to use higher temperatures to ablate their surfaces; this might be hard to do with Earth-hosted lasers.
How long do static electric charges survive in the solar wind? I think the Debye length in the interplanetary medium is about 10 meters? How conductive are comets and asteroids? Maybe you could use an Earth-mounted ion beam to selectively charge up one side of the potential impactor, ejecting dust to propel it in the other direction. 10 meters seems like enough distance to get some good velocity going for the dust particles. But I don't know if there's a way to get the ion beam to go that far; Newton's penetration depth approximation still applies to the interplanetary medium, doesn't it?
The comet of 1729 is listed on wikipedia as 100km across. That's 10^3 times bigger than chixculub. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_of_1729
Splitting a chixculub-size comet down the middle very unlikely. Bruce Willis isn't going to be out there to drill down 5km into the center to place the nuke, and even if he did, it would just turn the comet into an unpredictable series of fragments, much of which would still hit earth and cause mayhem. Instead of a single large impact in the pacific maybe you get multiple smaller direct hits on all the cities in that hemisphere. Also the gravitational attraction of the two halves of a 10^16 kg impactor is several orders of magnitude larger than 0.346m/s per 0.5 years. If you wait until later gravity is less of a problem but then you need a much larger v to plug into mvv/2. Also most of the nuke's energy will be converted to heat rather than kinetic. So I think the energy requirement of mvv/2 for delta-v = 0.346m/s is several orders of magnitude too optimistic.
Nukes don't impart any momentum, all by themselves. A nuclear explosion is very different from a chemical explosion, in which a very large amount of very hot gas is suddenly generated and expands. A nuclear explosion delivers almost all of its energy as a big blast of X-rays and gammas. It's the interaction with the surrounding material (e.g. the atmosphere) that converts this heat to a blast wave, i.e. turns energy into momentum change. If you set one off in a vacuum, it's not going to deliver any push at all.
I mean, the Sun is the biggest nuclear explosion imaginable, going off all the time, and it doesn't push anything away (barring the solar wind and meager radiation pressure), because it's just delivering huge amounts of energy but very little momentum.
So all of your momentum change is going to have to happen from the rocket effect: that is, your nuke is going to have to heat the material of the asteroid/comet enough for it to ablate away, and it's the shove this impromptu short-lived "rocket" gives to the body that can change its momentum.
Perhaps, he's thinking of the specific strategy used by Bruce Willis in Armageddon, which was to split "an asteroid the size of Texas" in two with an H-Bomb so that the two halves just miss Earth on either side.
"The infeasibility of the H-bomb approach was published by four postgraduate physics students in 2011[28] and then reported by The Daily Telegraph in 2012:
A mathematical analysis of the situation found that for Willis's approach to be effective, he would need to be in possession of an H-bomb a billion times stronger than the Soviet Union's "Big Ivan", the biggest ever detonated on Earth. Using estimates of the asteroid's size, density, speed and distance from Earth based on information in the film, the postgraduate students from Leicester University found that to split the asteroid in two, with both pieces clearing Earth, would require 800 trillion terajoules of energy. In contrast, the total energy output of "Big Ivan", which was tested by the Soviet Union in 1961, was only 418,000 terajoules.[29][30] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armageddon_(1998_film)#Scientific_accuracy:
But Willis's particular strategy seems excessively showboat-y. Starting at any significant distance from Earth, you wouldn't think it would take too much energy to just ever-so-slightly change the trajectory of the thing to miss Earth.
That's for a Texas-sized asteroid, presumably about 1000km in diameter. This movie involves a 9km diameter asteroid, which would be about a million times less massive. Actually it's a 9km diameter comet, so maybe ten million times less massive. So we're talking a hundred Big Ivans, and we're back within the realms of being vaguely plausible-ish.
I see others have already started talking about this, while I was pulling up the notes from a conference presentation I gave six years ago. And I may add more detail tomorrow, but the bottom line is:
On a time scale of one year or less, there's realistically nothing we could do against anything big enough to be a real problem. We don't have the right specialized systems standing ready, our spaceship-building tools are all designed for one- to two-year lead times, and if you try to rush the process or use e.g. automobile-building tools to build spaceships, too much will go wrong to recover from in that short a time.
We might be able to deflect a *very small* asteroid or comet, the sort where only a single calibrated near-miss by a surplus hydrogen bomb shortly before impact is enough. But we're talking Tunguska Event here, not Dinosaur Killer. And if you're facing the Tunguska Event six months out, you basically just evacuate Tunguska and hire Michael Bay to film the fireworks.
On a timescale of two years, a maximum effort by the United States of America could probably divert a comet or asteroid of up to ~2 km diameter. A long-period comet of 2 km diameter impacting the Earth would lay waste to one average continent, or the coastal regions bordering one ocean, but it wouldn't be an extinction event.
That doesn't change much if the rest of the world tries to help; the US has more than half of the relevant capacity, and the management overhead of trying to cobble an international effort together would eat up most of the gains. You really don't want to rush your English-to-metric conversions when you're trying to build and launch interplanetary nuclear missiles.
On a timescale of 5 years, a global effort does become reasonable and at that point we could reasonably hope to divert a 10-kilometer dinosaur-killer class comet.
Also, our ability to detect long-period comets is limited to (coincidentally) about two years warning time if we use existing systems but dedicate them to that mission, or maybe five years if we build a large space telescope designed specifically for the job. Six months warning from a random astronomer happening to notice the comet is about right.
And since I have the notes, the probability of a 2 km comet impacting the Earth is ~5E-7 per year, and the probability for a 10 km comet is ~1E-8 per year.
> [...] and if you try to rush the process or use e.g. automobile-building tools to build spaceships, too much will go wrong to recover from in that short a time.
If you run enough efforts in parallel, you could cope with eg an 80% failure rate.
At the moment, one reason space flight has such long lead times is because people don't accept these kinds of failure rates, especially not for manned space flight.
The same parallel argument applies to international efforts. People mostly need to agree in which direction they want to deflect the asteroid, but otherwise much more coordination might not be necessary. Delta-v changes are additive.
Of course, perfect coordination would be more efficient. But I suspect parallel efforts with loose coordination would still be more efficient than a single effort.
Again, you're talking nine women making a baby in a month. You can get a baby in less than nine months if you're really desperate and not very picky about the quality of the baby, but you won't get anything worthy of the name in one month, not no way, not no how.
Absolutely agreed, and this tracks with the comments by the technical expert they hired - who suggested a ~9km body and a timeline of 5 years.
"And if you're facing the Tunguska Event six months out, you basically just evacuate Tunguska and hire Michael Bay to film the fireworks."
Well yeah, and hope to hell it hits Siberia again, not New York or wherever. Though damn it, Tunguska II: This Time We've Got Video sounds *incredibly* cool and makes me sort of want to see it happen. Yes, I'm an idiot.
"if you're facing the Tunguska Event six months out, you basically just evacuate Tunguska and hire Michael Bay to film the fireworks."
Would we be able to determine that it's just Tunguska that needs to be evacuated, rather than the entire thousand mile radius around Tunguska? What level of precision would we be able to have? I'd really like to have the film crew available (though I'd probably prefer the Attenborough crew to the Bay crew)!
That's the sort of situation where we probably would be able to do something useful, by sending a small probe to do a close flyby and get more precise trajectory data. That can be done by basically any vehicle designed for interplanetary flight, so just pick the probe that was scheduled to launch to Ganymede or wherever next month, make a few tweaks, and put it on the biggest rocket with the biggest kick stage you can find.
Back when 99942 Apophis was still considered an impact risk, I was part of a program at AFRL to figure out how to cheaply and quickly put a transponder in orbit around the asteroid so we could very precisely track it going forward. But it turned out in that case ground-based astronomy was good enough to rule out an impact, before we could get around to building the probe.
And, since I have some more time:
Assuming this is a 9-km comet of typical composition, "aimed" at a spot 70% of the distance from the midpoint of the Earth to its periphery, with Our Heroes having perfect knowledge of all of this, then deflecting the comet to barely miss skimming the Earth's atmosphere given six months' notice would require approximately 220 megatons of military-surplus thermonuclear weapons. You wouldn't want to use anything bigger than 5 megatons for this, and the biggest weapon in current US inventory is the 1.2 megaton B83, so call it two hundred of those just to be safe.
Detonate them 1.5-2 km from the comet to more or less uniformly irradiate and ablate a large area of the comet's surface; breaking off chunks makes the problem harder. And ideally do this at intervals of a couple of hours to allow the comet to settle down and precisely retarget follow-on shots; that will take a couple of weeks, but we've got six months. Each detonation will give the comet a slight nudge, and if you do it right that adds up to a very near miss of Earth.
Except, this assumes we can Thanos-fingersnap the warheads into existence right next to the comet as soon as Plucky Male Astronomer and Plucky Female Astronomer discover it. More realistically, assume we spend three months building the hardware(*), and two months flying it out to meet the comet with our clumsy slow rockets, conducting the diversion effort only one month before impact. Now we need 1100 warheads minimum. I don't think we've actually got 1100 B83's, but we can throw in enough 475 kT W88 warheads to make up the difference. We're not spacing these out by hours each, obviously, so cross your fingers and hope your models were right.
We could do somewhat better, maybe twice as good, with custom-built thermonuclear explosives, but any plan that involves designing a new hydrogen bomb from scratch in three months is a bad plan.
A B83 weighs 1.1 metric tons. In order to intercept the comet a month before impact, we're going to have to launch them with a hyperbolic excess velocity of at least 20 km/s past Earth escape. There's a slight problem that we don't have any rockets with enough performance to launch even their own burnt-out upper stage at that speed, never mind any sort of payload.
But, OK, let's assume I can design three optimized hypergolic upper stages using one, three, and nine Aerojet XLR-132 engines each and a mass fraction of 0.9, stack them one atop the other underneath the Falcon Heavy fairing, designed built and assembled in three months (*), and somehow the whole thing actually *works*, OK, that will boost a single W83 to 18 km/s hyperbolic excess velocity with 100 kg left over for the guidance, navigation, telemetry, and midcourse propulsion system. 18 km/s is not 20 km/s, but meh, close enough.
How do you feel about the odds of arranging eleven hundred Falcon Heavy launches, or the equivalent, on three months' notice?
* Narrator voice: six months later, they were still assembling the hardware
Thank you, this was the sort of calculation I was hoping for.
Could a Hubble image by chance capture a comet with a 5-year lead time? Perhaps two images of the same region days apart, taken for some other reason? Also, assuming either such a fluke 5-year-early detection, or a 2-year-early detection, how long would it take to achieve a high confidence of collision, for some definition of "high confidence"? I picture the actual sequence of events being the public announcement of a comet, followed by months of increasing concern as the chance of hitting earth grows. So no chance to make it classified. Does that sound right?
Hubble would get you about two years, if you either got lucky or devoted Hubble to full-time comet-watching status. Webb is pretty close to being the instrument you'd design for a five-year early warning system, but it's going to spend the next five-plus years looking at Not Comets and not likely to find comets except by extreme luck.
NASA launched an asteroid deflection mission on 24th Nov last year (https://www.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/dart), intending to make contact with the target in September this year. The NASA target is much smaller than the comet in the film (and I don't know if the fact it is an asteroid rather than a comet matters), but you'd surely be grasping at some rather weak straws to say that a thing which is literally happening right overhead as we speak is too ridiculous a concept to make an allegorical film about.
It's a case of magnitude, my dude. DART is aimed at a 160m asteroid, while the one in the movie is supposedly 9km across. Do even some cursory estimation, and you'll realise that the amount of energy needed is orders of magnitude more.
Worse, the delta-v needed to change a point in an orbit is a function of distance from that point. Moving an asteroid so that it misses the earth is exponentially easier and cheaper (in terms of delta-v) if the asteroid is years out as opposed to months out.
It's not that the concept is ridiculous, it's that there's no way it can be done given the setup provided by the film. That's the man's point.
I am not the original commenter, but I think they're pointing to something true in the case of the specific comet from the movie. From the fact that deflecting comets is theoretically very possible, it does not follow that deflecting that specific comet is possible.
The quoted Wikipedia article says (lightly edited):
"In 1994, Edward Teller proposed to design a one-gigaton nuclear explosive device, which would be equivalent to the kinetic energy of a one-kilometer-diameter (0.62 mi) asteroid. The theoretical one-gigaton device would weigh about 25–30 tons, light enough to be lifted on the Energia rocket. It could be used to instantaneously vaporize a one-kilometre (0.62 mi) asteroid, divert the paths of GCR-class asteroids (greater than 10 kilometres or 6.2 miles in diameter) within short notice of a few months."
The last sentence describes the situation in the movie more or less accurately - the notice is short, of a few months, and the best estimate of the comet size is 6-9km, with an asteroid-type composition (rock rather than ice). So far so good, if we got this gigaton bomb we could deflect the comet.
Problem is, we don't have the bomb. The nastiest nuclear explosive tested during the Cold War was the Soviet's Tsar Bomba (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba), and that 1961 H-bomb had a yield of 50 Mt - 5% of what would be needed. It could theoretically go up to 100Mt, but that would likely require some tweaking and research even if we had some Tsar Bombas lying around. This alone would likely take up more than the couple months available before launching. There's also the problem that even the strongest nuke ever made, at 5% of the necessary power, already weighs 27 tons, which is within the weight range estimated for the whole theoretical 100% power thing.
Of course, in ideal circumstances you could add up 20 bombs with 5% of the power each and get to the minimum required power to do the thing. Problem is, what we do have available is much weaker than 50 Mt. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TNT_equivalent#Examples (locate the row that mentions Hiroshima), "The modern nuclear weapons in the United States arsenal range in yield from 0.3 kt (1.3 TJ) to 1.2 Mt (5.0 PJ) equivalent, for the B83 strategic bomb". The 1980s B83 weighs 1.1 ton and a total of 650 were built. Even if all of these were still available and we were to take our chance with only 78% of the yield suggested by Teller, we'd still need to get 715 tons of bombs to the comet, and I doubt we even have 650 rockets capable of reaching deep space or the ability/resources to make those on short notice, especially when you consider the need for advanced guidance systems (the comet is about the size of San Francisco proper, so if you try to meet it even at the middle of the Bay Bridge you miss).
In short, I think the Wikipedia article you cite suggests that we don't have a large enough number of nukes, the ones we have are not big enough, we also don't have enough rockets, and we cannot make enough of these things in time.
Moving the comet is a great idea if you already have a comet-mover built and ready to go, and have four or five months of warning time to boot. If not, 'several months' is a really protracted time frame to both build a comet mover and also hit a sizeable object in time to deflect it. Though I admit this topic is far outside my knowledge domain. But considering we have no actual experience in comet deflection as a species, I'm going to discount the expected utility of any purely theoretical proposals that come down the pipe.
One of the more subtle points of the movie is that we can't help paying more attention to the message around a thing than to the thing itself. It's extremely exaggerated with the comet, of course. Now the fun part is that this is happening with the movie too! A lot of the messaging around Don't Look Up is about how the movie is poorly made, unsubtle, stupid, etc. But the correct attitude — and this is what Scott does here — is to engage with the points the movie makes about existential risk, dysfunctional institutions, politics and so on, *regardless of whether you think the movie is good/realistic/entertaining*.
As I wrote in another reply, this is a point about Don't Look Up specifically, not movies in general.
Surely the correct attitude you specify requires that people be able to overcome the problems they have found with the film. However worthy the intention of the piece, if it is badly presented it fails. If you make a movie and people are to busy bemoaning your use of heavy-handed symbology and partisan allegory, they're already using their thoughts on something other than your intended meaning. And that's what happens: you cannot control the reception of a piece of art, so however striking your message, however vital the correct attitude to take, if it is concealed behind other more obvious talking points it will fail.
Also, since when was the correct attitude to Hollywood movies to engage with the points the movie makes, rather than enjoy it? If you're going to try and get a message across through film, you know your film has to be good, and we're talking One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest good. People want entertainment from film, not moral lessons, hence successful films mostly reflecting contemporary morality rather than promoting alternatives.
Of course making a good, entertaining film is a better way to send a message than failing to do that. I'm not saying this should be a general rule for all pieces of media. Rather, it's a phenomenon that is specifically interesting in the case of Don't Look Up, considering its themes and the fact that the phenomenon itself was a major cause of the disaster depicted in the film.
Also, the fact that the movie is being discussed a lot right now is a sign that it touches upon something important in the zeitgeist. Thus the criticism about the movie as art (which is valid! I agree with a lot of it!) hits very differently than for virtually any other piece of media. In itself, that's interesting.
"everyone around you is a mouth-breathing idiot, and only *you, wise liberal viewer* can see clearly. (but sadly, there's nothing you can do anyway)" is not a particularly interesting thesis worth discussing
(the above synopsis is my own interpretation from seeing the movie, not anyone else's. i suppose there's a more charitable reading of the film's narrative but i found it condescending and not worth engaging with.)
There were definitely a lot of people on adjacent parts of the internet who took that perspective (though the crux wasn't liberalism, but instead something more like https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WQFioaudEH8R7fyhm/local-validity-as-a-key-to-sanity-and-civilization), and I found it pretty grating. I guess it seemed more important than that to me because I think it's likely that this kind of failure will *actually kill everyone*, and that's not such an obvious thing (plenty of people would have assumed that people would get their act together if enough was at stake for them personally).
I personally agree that it's more interesting to engage with the points about x-risk etc, but I don't know if "correct" is the word I'd use.
Sure, maybe “more productive attitude” would be more in line with what I was trying to say
Am I the only person who actually liked the film as as a piece of entertainment? It kept me interested, made me laugh a few times, the characters were interesting, etc. I was pleasantly surprised by it, was expecting it to be worse.
I liked it, too. If the movie is fun, I can forgive a lot of inaccuracy or inconsistency. I can still complain about that later on internet, though.
Scott's metaphor included a Gnostic God and a lion-headed demon. "Don't Look Up"'s metaphor is longer, but includes alien dinosaurs and goofy sci-fi spaceships. Both of these things are fine for the same reasons.
Don’t agree with this reading. I genuinely think it was also intending to make fun of the total incompetence of the “good guys”. They’re right, but ultimately all they’re capable of doing is organizing some ineffectual marches, throwing a benefit concert and interviewing celebrities. Clear allegory for climate activism. I think this was pretty heavy handed by the end.
I I I I am looking at the linked Metaculus page on mobile. Am I crazy, or are there no units whatsoever for the “amount of time” prediction to be made? I don’t see any mention of months or years. On either the chart showing the current value of the prediction market, or the chart where I am asked to make a prediction.
In fact, I don’t even see a clear statement of the question in a form like “how many (months/years) will elapse between creation of human level AI and super intelligent AI,” Despite the presence of a clearly marked “question” subsection on the page.
In the URL it says months, so I assume it's months? I also couldn't find it despite looking real hard.
There was a comment stating that it is months, but it drove me crazy as well
I wrote the question. The original title was "After an AGI is created, how many months will it be before the first superintelligence?" but it seems this text was at some point removed from the question body.
The movie is definitely not perfect. The probability of the comet hitting could have been 87%, the whole thing could have been 1 hour shorter, and there could have been less obvious super-easy political bashing. And I agree it rests on the paradox wherein we are told to Believe Science, but really we just believe the protagonists because they're, well, the protagonists.
However, if we broaden our scope from the obvious mappings (Female President onto Trump) and admit that pure satires don't make the best cinema, at its broadest, it's a movie about institutional failure. Across party lines (though it skewers one more than the other, sure). It's for this reason it felt fresh to me and that I liked it. Institutional failure, even human failure, is becoming more and more obvious, as it's undeniable that our institutions, from academia to the White House, are more sclerotic and incapable and, well, foolish, than they either were in the past or appeared to be. And to me this movie was like an expression of America's Id realizing that over the past several years.
Erik, I heard you on a podcast recently (won't say which one in case you're not intent on publicizing it), but you came across as very intelligent and reasonable. I didn't watch the movie, but I agree our institutions are sclerotic.
Thanks cdh, kind of you to say! And as someone who is probably going to make my living by writing and (sometimes) speaking online, I've learned it's necessary to embrace publicity, although it's not something natural for me...
Can you please link to the podcast then?
Not just institutional failure, although our institutions are captured, but also on how popular opinion is manipulated to support short-term factional goals, even at the expense of longer-term societal goals (in my feline experience, the distinguishing feature of a third world society).
In fact, we even do the manipulation ourselves, all so we can get a couple of clicks.
That, to me, was the point, not an physics problem concerning how big a nuke is needed to divert a comet.
But no institution actually fails in the movie. Every problem is caused by an obviously stupid bad guy (the president or the CEO) doing obviously stupid things with personal greed as their motivation. The movie has zero things that looks like e.g. the CDC mishandling of the early pandemic. Every institution in the movie is shown to be perfectly efficient at what it does, the only problem is that bad guys at the top wants it to do the wrong thing.
The initial causes are different, but where things go from there is pretty similar.
> But no institution actually fails in the movie.
Are you serious? Literally every institution fails in this movie. POTUS, the press, academia eventually too, as the main character notes how his colleagues critical of the BASH plan were being systematically fired and otherwise silenced.
The moral of Don't Look Up wasn't *about* Experts vs. Outsiders, it was about Substance vs. Fluff, and how the public is stupid enough to believe the Fluff every time. If you ask the writers if you should believe your grocery bagger about their pet conspiracy theory, they'll say "if they have good scientific evidence on their side, yes; otherwise, no - but you're probably too dumb to figure out whether the evidence is good, so you're kind of fucked." Which isn't too different from what you and I believe.
I like that frame.
I can't imagine they'd admit that you can't know. I'd expect them to say that you should know better than to believe in [elite-disfavored theory] or to disbelieve in [elite-favored theory], even if they can't coherently explain why.
I'd expect them to say you can know if you see the evidence in front of you, if you're a domain expert, or if you're competent enough to identify trustworthy domain experts. They'd say that, for climate change, we have very visible evidence (icecaps melting, extreme weather events) that should make even a rube support proactive climate policy, and that only right-wing disinfo is preventing those policies from being implemented. They also seem to take the cynical view that almost everyone is unmotivated to really find out the truth, so if you're asking these questions you're already ahead of the ballgame.
Small correction: we do see icecaps melting, but we don't see any extreme weather events yet that could directly attributed to climate change. A good climate expert will tell you that almost all extreme weather events could've happened without climate change. And even the probability of such events didn't go up by a lot yet.
This is a very very uncomfortable fact for climate change advocates but its nonetheless a fact.
Do you have a source for this? I'm interested to read more.
It seems like that's focused on the North Atlantic. There's a recent study https://www.pnas.org/content/117/22/11975 that says that major tropical cyclones worldwide have increased between 2% and 15% (95% CI) per decade between '82 and '09, and a meta-analysis https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/101/3/bams-d-18-0194.1.xml?tab_body=fulltext-display that finds a medium increase of 13% in category 4-5 tropical cyclones in a 2 degree warming scenario.
Obviously you can't pin an extreme weather event directly on climate change, but it seems (from my brief dip into the literature) that there's some controversy over how much climate change has affected and will affect their likelihood and intensity.
This comment seems to be directly falsified with some of the recent work on attributing, for example, the summer floods in Germany or the summer heatwave in the Pacific Northwest to climate change: https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2021/10/04/attribution-science-linking-climate-change-to-extreme-weather/
In particular, both events would have been extremely unlikely at the 1/200 - 1/1000 level to happen without human induced climate change.
Banned for a month, this is a bit too high noise-to-signal ratio for me.
For the record, I'm glad to see you're moving back toward moderating this space. +1 to you.
Agreed, but I am kind of confused, that he is moderating himself. Seems like that is not a good way to spend the limited recource of Scots time. Maybe you cole hire someone?
Check out the discord if you want to see how quickly the jannies Scott trusts turn to shit. Doing it himself is probably the least worst option.
I was once a mod, and then ran the mod team, for an extremely active forum. Once you have a mod or mods that aren't the "purpose" of the forum, a dedicated minority of the posters will try to troll them, bait bans, and otherwise cause as much trouble right on the borderline as they can, because they like trouble and they have no a priori reason to respect the mods. Few mods avoid becoming angry/frustrated/mind-killed by such, especially considering even great people make mistakes.
One possible solution is to pay disinterested mods and rotate them relatively quickly, so that personality, ingroup interest, etc., are close to irrelevant. Then again, the poor paid FB mods seem quite traumatized.
I think there is a real version of "trust science" that applies to some situations, where it's not too hard to know which side represents physical reality and which side represents social reality, and to take a step back and go "wait physical reality is important here, I should do that". Vaccines being safe and effective is probably a good example - old people in America are not generally more liberal or pro establishment than young people, but they do have much higher vaccination rates, presumably because they care more about the physical reality and the physical reality question here isn't actually that hard.
There are, though, also situations where people disagree about physical reality but are so convinced in their views that it's hard to imagine anyone genuinely disagreeing with you, so you assume they're all just playing a social role (e.g. where pro choice people are sure pro life people don't actually care about abortion prevention and just want to control women).
I think the elderly vaccination rates have nothing to do with caring more about reality and more to do with either being in poorer health generally, or caring more about the specific fact of their own looming mortality.
Yeah that's what I said. They have more stake in the real physical problem since their health risk is bigger, so they're less likely to die on the hill of "actually vaccines are bad".
Another interpretation of the age differences in vaccination rates is that almost everyone has a fairly good estimate of their risk from covid and from the vaccine, and the elderly correctly conclude their risk from covid is higher than their risk from the vaccine while young people correctly conclude their risk is higher from the vaccine. I admit this is contradicted by the innumeracy shown in answers to polls about these subjects, but perhaps people have better intuitive understanding than they can put into numbers.
I got the vaccine, but only to try to help my community achieve herd immunity back when people were saying that was possible. I didn’t believe it would help me personally as a young healthy person who probably already had covid in March 2020. I didn’t think it would harm me either, but in fact I had a very bad reaction that resulted in me going to the ER. Based on my best understanding of the current evidence I will definitely not get a booster myself, but would still encourage those most at risk to do so.
Any age difference in vaccination rates might be due to the older population being targeted first, before the dis-information campaigns ramped up. My mom is vaccinated but refuses to get the booster. If she could revert her vaccination she would. When I asked her why she had the entire list of misinformation we've all heard, starting with the vaccines editing her DNA. When she heard my children were sick she shared all her info about the various medicines and her story about obtaining and using ivermectin, lists of side effects from accepted medicine, etc. I think she cruised into the first two vaccinations under the momentum of a lifetime of accepting vaccines as critical and important.
100% agree. They probably have better instinctive understanding, and some collective intelligence: within age groups, there are people able to do the math and more or less convince other who trust them on those matters. Hell, even official experts told frankly that vaccine benefit is far higher for elders (hence all the talk about altruism targeted at young people), and (much less frankly, but recommendations talk for themselves) that risk is higher for young (cardiac and blood clots issues).
It's almost as if the risk-benefit calculation is different for someone with thousands of times higher risk.
It's interesting how the narrative has shifted.
"It's perfectly safe and effective"
became "It has extremely rare mild side effects, but the benefits vastly outweigh the risks"
became "Some people are getting blood clots and heart inflammation, but COVID is more likely to cause that, so the benefits still outweigh the risks"
became "Yes, in young men, heart inflammation is actually several times more likely from the vaccine than from COVID, but it's, uh, the mild type of heart inflammation. Also long COVID."
... became "The Vaccine is Perfectly Safe", again.
Back when they did the initial EUA, the FDA found the risk/benefit calculation was in favor of vaccines for the elderly, but comparable and even against the vaccines for young age groups. Even assuming a 95% efficacy, you'd have to vaccinate around 1 million kids to prevent 1 death. And dozens in that group would die from blood clots alone.
Then everyone forgot that it was a very tenuous risk/benefit balance and proclaimed that the vaccines are Perfectly Safe. Because the vaccines are Good, and anti-vaxxers are Bad, and anti-vaxxers say the vaccines are not Perfectly Safe, and so the vaccines are Perfectly Safe.
For young people, the actual physical reality is pretty clear - young male athletes are dropping dead left and right, and highly vaccinated areas are surging with COVID. And no one, even the most naive, actually behave like they believe the vaccines work - triple-vaccinated left-wingers are still double-masking, quarantining, and quaking in fear.
Except all of this is lies. Maybe you should try living in reality for a change?
The reality is that the initial EUA was for elderly people, but it was quickly expanded because it was obvious that it wasn't causing side effects at any significant rate for any group.
And that's correct. It still isn't.
The risk of dying from getting the vaccine is less than one in a million.
Unvaccinated people are an order of magnitude more likely to die from catching COVID.
Even amongst low risk groups, the odds of dying of COVID are roughly on the order of 1-3 per 1,000.
If you assume 70% of the population gets infected, then your odds of dying of COVID are about 700-2,100 per 1 million if you are in a low risk group and unvaccinated, and about 70-210 per 1 million if you are vaccinated.
The risk of death, meanwhile, is less than 1 per 10 million.
As such, you're reducing your odds of dying by somewhere on the order of 630-1900 per 1 million by getting the vaccine, or reducing your odds of death by somewhere on the order of 0.6 to 1.9 per 1,000.
Your make-belief narrative has zero relationship with reality. The reality is that the messaging has very consistently been "The vaccine is safe and effective", because it is. There has never been any other narrative.
You seem to be suffering from an inability to understand scope and scale.
Your false beliefs that "young athletes are dropping left and right" due to the vaccine is symptomatic of delusional psychosis. They aren't.
The number of young athletes who have died from being vaccinated for COVID is 0.
I don't agree with the poster you are responding to, but your information is also wrong.
The low risk groups are kids between the ages of 0-17. There have been under 700 deaths in that group from almost 8 million cases. That's far less than 1-3 per 1,000. That's less than 1 per 80,000. That's for all kids in that age range, and almost all of the deaths were from those with underlying health issues. Healthy young people really aren't dying from COVID and the risk of taking the vaccine truly is comparable (both numbers are very low, so the actual risk could be higher for either, due to low ability to determine true risk in low numbers). It looks like the risk of getting a blood clot is about 1/1,000 and there is a ~20% mortality rate from getting a blood clot (https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/study-sheds-more-light-on-rate-of-rare-blood-clots-after-oxford-astrazeneca-vaccine/) for AstraZeneca. That's 1/5,000 compared to less than 1/80,000 for COVID.
That's also the kind of conclusion I reached: benefit/risk is much much higher than 1 for older people. For young people, it's not clear at all. Both benefits and risks are very low, that's about the only clear thing. Another fact is that some vaccines are not given anymore to young women (clots) / men (heart inflammation), and non-RNA ones are basically phased out for all (too low efficiency with the new variants). So yes, while it's certainly not youngs dropping from vaccine-induced cardiac arrests left and right, for youngs the vaccination benefit/risk was unclear from the start (hence all the altruistic vaccination talks, which I never accepted and are now mostly false, at least from a transmission point of view, only maybe true from a hospital-saturation point of view), and Variants can only lower this already low benefit/risk. With an at-risk population massively vaccinated and mostly getting booster after booster as fast as they can get it, the talks around mandatory vaccination for all (directly or through vaccination pass) is lo longer understandable from a classic health decision point of view (based on individual benefit/risk) so it's at best linked to health infrastructure management, but more likely (given where we are in the covid waves/season, the practical effects of more vaccinations now will probably be super small) purely political.
Is it really not clear for people in their 30s and 40s? I take it that the cost/benefit analysis of the flu vaccine comes out clearly positive for people of this age range, and I haven't heard anything giving me any reason to believe that the cost/benefit analysis of the covid vaccine for people in this age range comes out any less positively.
For people in this age range, most of the benefit from both vaccines probably comes in the form of reduced likelihood of feeling sick for a week or two, not in the form of reduced likelihood of death. No one has so far said anything that suggests to me that the costs of the vaccine are larger than the costs of driving two miles to the drugstore to get the vaccine (apart from a day of fever and headache afterwards).
For 30-40 y/o women the mRNA vaccines are probably even or perhaps slightly positive vs getting COVID. For men in that age range the vaccines are probably worse. All of this assumes an otherwise-healthy person.
Previous infection both reduces the need for vaccination and (reportedly) adds to any complications of getting vaccinated, providing a pretty strong confounder on the numbers. It is likely that someone who has an existing level of immunity has significantly less reason to get vaccinated, changing the calculus.
My own impression is that people should get or at least seriously consider vaccination if they are above age 50 or have any of the known conditions that make COVID more dangerous for them. Under age 20, for healthy individuals, they probably should outright avoid the vaccination - but the risks are low enough to not worry about if they do want to get vaccinated. Between 20 and 50, it's pretty open and lots of factors can influence the decision. The closer a person is to one of the ends, and an honest evaluation of how "healthy" they really are should be important. Age 49 with a meh healthiness should probably get vaccinated anyway, as the gains seem to clearly outweigh the cost. Age 25 with a near perfect health? Probably better off not getting vaccinated.
Your math is off. Using your figures, it's not <1/80,000, it's 1/11000.
Thus I suspect the rest.
It looks like the mRNA vaccines have a higher rate of myocarditis than AZ, so the numbers are actually worse. For healthy young men, it's more likely they will get significant heart issues and die than that they will have complications from COVID. The chances go up significantly with each additional booster shot - doubling after each consecutive shot.
https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/more-bad-news-on-covid-vaccines-and/comments
You're correct. 1/11,000 is still less severe than the side effects of at least AZ (It was the first one I found with lots of relevant data, not necessarily representative of the other vaccines in terms of complications).
Care to comment on relative risk, even with the adjusted numbers? What about the fact that almost all of the deaths from COVID in the under 18 group are from individuals with one or more medical conditions, rather than "healthy" people, who would have significantly lower risks?
They don't want to face the reality that you are correct and their cherished mental models are wrong.
Nah. Ludex is correct. You display an issue that a lot of people here seem to share: certainty in a mathematical model even after reality has shown that model to be false over and over again.
Do you have a source for "in young men, heart inflammation is actually several times more likely from the vaccine than from COVID"? Last I checked the opposite was true, but there may have been new studies since.
https://unglossed.substack.com/p/reversal
"For this group, Covid-vaccination thus apparently increases the chance of myocarditis even if it prevents 100% of infections (which, of course, it does not), and if 100% of recipients would otherwise have been infected (a benchmark which, if it ever arrives, appears to still be several years away) - and effects are clearly compounded by multiple doses."
This study comes from a particularly legit source and is therefore much harder to dismiss than most skeptic studies.
thanks for the source! Still going to take it with a grain of salt, since I'm inherently suspicious of studies of incredibly rare things. Tbh just looking at the variation in the rates, seems to me like everything but second dose of Moderna is random noise; but (assuming that all the data and statistics are legit) I'll admit that's a relatively strong case for "about 1 in 10,000 males under 40 who get a second dose of Moderna get hospitalized or die due to myocarditis as a result of that vaccination"
Original paper https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01630-0.pdf
Follow-up pre-print https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.12.23.21268276v1.full.pdf
Commentary here
https://vinayprasadmdmph.substack.com/p/uk-now-reports-myocarditis-stratified
I don't know where you're getting your information, but you might want to look more closely at those sources. "young male athletes are dropping dead left and right"? You make it sound like all over the country people are dying from these vaccines, but I do not think that is the case. If it is, please link a source for that claim, because that would be very good information to know.
I think it's more because people evaluates risks/benefits more accurately than what they get credit for, especially when it is personal risks. Old people just have very different covid risk than young ones, and the vaccine risk is probably also different. I do not understand many things about covid, and it seems experts are not much better, but there is one thing that is crystal clear: when you are 70, the vaccine benefit/risk ratio is order of magnitude better than when you are 20.
When you have a very clear benefit/risk, and the risk is not vanishingly small, there is usually very little discussion and very little political posturing. That's the case for covid once you get to 60y and more, or for ebola or tetanos. But when you are 20-30-40 without specific risk factor, it's different: you are hit the worst by the NPIs, risk is very low (hence all the fuss around altruistic vaccine (protect the elderly, weak and the hospital), so it become a political marker, it has the perfect characteristics to become one
The main exception I have seen is for elderly that have an eternal youth complex. Those are at risk of refusing to get vaccinated because "they are still young and strong",
I think the claim is that when the risk/benefit ratio is exceptionally clear, people evaluate it well, but when the risk and benefit are both fairly small, people often evaluate it wildly incorrectly.
Indeed... But if both are fairly small, it's also likely to vary wildly along individuals... So using average (per age and sex, at best) is also widely incorrect. Maybe individuels adjust for factors unknowns (the benefits or risks include stigmatisation in their social circle, for example). Or more likely it's shooting in the dark both at individual level and on policy....my point is that in the second case, it's difficult to say how people are wrong in evaluating the ratio if the ratio is largely unknown
For what it’s worth Asian Scientist was found out to be a campaign backer with limited credentials. In any case I thought the movie was more of a musing on what would happen, given our limp responses to Covid and climate change. If you want to see what the filmmaker is really capable of, go watch The Big Short, where because it’s based on true events you no longer are caught up with suspending reality and can instead enjoy the absurdity of collective human failure. I agree that Don’t Look Up was pretty hamfisted at times and full of plot holes, but I still had fun watching it.
Haven't seen the movie, but thinking about the parallels to real life, there was concern early in the Trump administration about his nominee to lead NASA, Oklahoma congressman Jim Bridenstine. Bridenstine had been a pretty conservative Republican as a congressman with conservative statements about things like climate change. Lots of liberals and scientists opposed his nomination for those reasons. After he got confirmed, he turned out to be a solid administrator who supported all aspects of the agency's mission, including science.
I'd say the moral of that is that while political hacks or those seen as such can be incompetent or corrupt, sometimes they do good work. My take is that decent oversight needs to be maintained after confirmation for all administration appointees.
Another interpretation is that unless the political appointee has a lot of knowledge and a lot of strong opinions, he will simply be captured by the lifers in the agency.
Oh wow I wasn’t expecting that to be the result of that appointment.
Signalboosting this since it was surprising and makes me way more optimistic about political competence, since most of my opinions on it, in retrospect, was mostly evidence free doomerism.
Me too. Didn’t mind the hamfistedness ultimately because I just liked the movie.
Even better than The Big Short is Margin Call. The whole film can be watched for free on Youtube.
US scriptwriters, directors and actors are usually terrible at making "talk only - movies". (Unlike the British, who are the masters of the genre.) But Margin Call is different. Nothing happens in Margin Call except people talking to each other. Yet the tension is fantastic throughout the move.
Perhaps when very big money is at stake, this feeds into the US psyche, and US scriptwriters are for once able to write dialogue that keeps you at the edge.
Margin Call is brilliant, and such a contrast to The Big Short.
It's a realistic slice of life written by people who appear to actually understand finance, where The Big Short is a preachy sermon written by people who obviously don't. Everything about Margin Call feels real, from the dialogue to the characters. It trusts its audience to keep up with what's going on, where The Big Short very explicitly doesn't.
Most of all, it's the best depiction I've ever seen on screen of organisational dynamics. How problems arise, and how they get fixed. How power and information flow through about eight different layers of hierarchy. How organisations can do stupid or evil things without anyone within the organisation actually being stupid or evil.
It is also one of those rare movies that benefits from multiple watchings.
I haven't watched the movie (and probably won't) but when you say that
"the right answer is super obvious to you"
is the take-home message at the end of the movie, then it doesn't sound like there is much of a contradiction. The message isn't supposed to be "don't trust 'the man'" /or/ "trust experts", the message is "trust your people".
See which sub-culture the protagonist most closely aligns with and I think you'll have found the target audience for the movie. It doesn't sound like the movie is trying to teach that target audience (or anyone else) a lesson. Rather, it seems like the movie is trying to reaffirm the target audiences' faith in their own righteousness.
Can someone help me out with who "Hungarian women from third-tier colleges" might be? I did some googling but didn't come up with anyone that seemed to click like a particular "Swiss patent clerk" clicked.
Presumably it's Katalin Kariko who worked on the mRNA vaccines
ty!
(and couldn't get funding/tenure)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3#Early_life_and_education
Conspicuously absent from the movie was any criticism of government bureaucracies. Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan) was the only career bureaucrat and he was shown positively. The government screwups all came from the president and her cabinet and her Asian Scientist appointee.
Political appointees have very different incentives from career civil servants.
Political appointees are very different from lifers, and are certainly not the biggest problem. Political appointees generally do come in with some sort of agenda beyond just collecting a paycheck, whereas normal government bureaucrats have little to no incentive to accomplish anything. The people who end up in those jobs get there because they like them so much, and are generally so risk averse that they want to do everything by the manual as it's the safest way to avoid ever being fired.
Ah, this is probably the message then. Government = good, excepting whomever the crazy Republicans voted in.
Oglethorpe is portrayed as ultimately ineffectual, and the Air Force general (not Ron Perlman's character, the other guy from the beginning of the movie) is portrayed as somewhere between unhelpful and malicious. (I'm not sure how much it makes sense to call the military brass "career bureaucrats"; there are obvious cultural differences but their role in governance is pretty similar in important respects.) The movie doesn't spend as much time raking them over the coals as it does politicians and the media, but they don't come out looking good (nobody does).
There is something lacking though in that there were no bureaucratic obstacles to getting things done.
There ought to have been a bureaucrat saying "these rockets are not certified for the carriage of class 5 dangerous goods, which includes radioactive material. And a simultaneous launch has never been done, you will need to go through our process to approve it including noise and environmental impact surveys and community stakeholder consultation."
Incorporating that would have required so much of the plot to change that I can understand them not doing it. But I agree that it would have been, in an important sense, more realistic.
(Also, I think that before the pandemic, when the script was finalized, most of us would have overestimated the ability and/or inclination of the most powerful political figures to take decisive action in a universally-recognized emergency. By contrast, it seems reasonably clear what's going on with bureaucratic obstacles to climate change mitigation; the bureaucrats are carrying out the will of the people, who suck.)
What (especially fictional) movies, novels, media etc do you think best portray Science? I'm a fan of some interpretations of Sherlock Holmes (especially Elementary, which makes the case that Sherlock is not so special, and the way he thinks can be taught to some extent beyond his genetic genius).
Haven't seen Contact but with Sagen's involvement i could see it being more realistic, but perhaps not idealistic about 'the scientific process'.
John Barry's The Great Influenza did a very good job showing how scientific fields progress/get fooled by experimental artifacts etc. I was quite impressed, especially considering the author is a non-scientist.
Is it fictional?
Sadly not. Arrowsmith (below) is the one novel I could think of.
The Martian is pretty good.
Hooray, an Elementary fan! :) I also like that balance it strikes between the idea of the innate and the learned with regards to intelligence and ability.
And how often Sherlock gets information by just asking more people, rather than being a silod genius he is a genius who is decently aware of what he doesn't know.
And how the original stories often show him being a real detective! :)
yep!
I dislike "Elementary" because I thought it took a very American view of things (I had no problem making Watson a woman, or Asian-American, but very much a problem with 'Watson is so competent, she does Sherlock better than Sherlock does' and 'Sherlock is, after all, One Of Us with a set of problems that need therapy and 12-step programme to overcome" and 'You can learn this yourself').
I had different problems with BBC Sherlock, but that 's another rant.
Granted, the original stories often had Holmes chide Watson for "you see, but you do not observe" and saying that his method could be learned and applied by anyone, but this particular take just didn't resonate with me.
I suppose I'm a dyed-in-the-wool traditionalist when it comes to Holmes adaptations and pastiches!
imo the original holmes suffers from a very victorian view of society that has not borne out over the century since it was written. it (often) views the downtrodden with a malthusian sense of 'well it's just the way it is, too bad they're not geniuses like sherlock'.
there are implications even in the original novels that watson had a hand in breaking sherlocks addiction (which he describes as 'sleeping' not defeated). to me it is a more faithful adaption of a 'modern detective' who struggles with addiction than other interpretations. i like 'elementary' because sherlock seems to be rude not because he intends to hurt anyone, which i think is more faithful to the story. he has a very aggressive moral code that the BBC sherlock seems to lack.
perhaps i'll get annoyed with watson's competency too, but im only in season 2 and i prefer the relationship of sherlock teaching watson than i do watson being a sidekick or lackey. i have seen absolutely 0 indication thus far that she is *better* than sherlock, at best she occasionally sees things he does not because of her different experiences. Sherlock isn't god!
What are your favorite interpretations that are more traditionalist?
(1) I don't get the same impression of Malthusian sense of "too bad they're not geniuses like Sherlock", although I do agree about the Victorian views - after all, Doyle was a Victorian and the stories were written over the late Victorian - Edwardian-George V periods (1887-1917).
Holmes (or Doyle?) often shows the politicans, rich, and nobility in a poor light; since they come to him for help, naturally the dirty laundry gets aired and some of the laundry is very dirty. The Baker Street Irregulars are, I suppose, the example of Malthusian values you mean: these are very poor children, 'street Arabs' in the parlance of the day, and nobody seems to be doing anything it, just accepting that 'this is how it is'. But it's a bigger problem than Holmes can tackle, and he (or again, Doyle) has the sense of optimism that education is the way out for the working classes, or even - for the likes of the Irregulars - the way *into* the respectable working class:
"It's a very cheery thing to come into London by any of these lines which run high, and allow you to look down upon the houses like this."
I thought he was joking, for the view was sordid enough, but he soon explained himself.
"Look at those big, isolated clumps of building rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-colored sea."
"The board-schools."
"Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wise, better England of the future. — “The Naval Treaty”
(2) Yes indeed, Watson helps Holmes out of his addiction, but it's again something that is considered differently then from attitudes today. It was legal to buy such drugs as cocaine and morphine and dose yourself up, even if discouraged, and we see the attitude towards the illegal drugs like the opium dens of Limehouse ("The Man With The Twisted Lip"). Watson can't legally do anything to stop Holmes, but he does lecture him and remonstrate with him (and offer support and help).
I think - and again, I'm basing my view of "Elementary" on second-hand reports, reviews and excerpts from episodes but not watching episodes myself - that the view of Sherlock in that series is more in line with the modern one: that he is an addict, that intervention is required, that he needs the traditional 12-step programmes and sponsor to get him out of it. And that's not a bad view! But I think what Doyle was trying to achieve with his description of Holmes the opium-eater (as it were) was not so much a moral Victorian condemnation of addiction, as a trope of Bohemianism, of Holmes' deliberately distancing himself from conventional society, the artistic genius.
(3) And again with Watson's competency, the gushing over the sort of "strong independent woman" annoyed me because the people blogging about it did seem to make it that Watson was now the one, having mastered Sherlock's technique, making all the running while he was admitting his flawed humanity and reaching out to make connections with those around him (something that is very American, and exactly the sort of thing to grate on me as an introvert who would rather have my toes set on fire than sit around in a group therapy circle 'sharing').
It is a different take on a modern version of Holmes, and the BBC version which started out promisingly made such a mess (from the ridiculous Orientalism of only the second episode) that I'm not standing up and claiming "Sherlock" is better. Just that "Elementary" is not to my tastes 😀
(4) Traditional versions - well, Granada has to take the palm here. It went a bit wibbly at the very end, partly because of Jeremy Brett's increasingly bad health and partly because they had gone through nearly all the stories and were now branching out with their own interpretations of some of them - "The Last Vampyre" is very much *not* The Sussex Vampire and is not an episode I can re-watch.
But when they were good, they were very, very good. Most adaptations of the Holmes stories fall into the trap you talk about with Watson - the lackey, the side-kick. I love the Rathbone movies (they were my first introduction to the character) but Nigel Bruce's Watson is made into a bumbling old buffer which is not Doyle's Watson. Other versions do the same; in order to show off how much of a genius Holmes is, they have to make Watson an idiot by comparison. Granada didn't do this.
Also, the way Irene Adler is handled. Again, Granada is the only adaptation that is faithful to the original story. Every other version, including "Elementary", has to make her into a love interest of some sort. That's not what she, or Holmes, were about.
It is a rather mannered performance, and even they couldn't help making some vague hints in the direction of romantic attraction, but the ending with the king is very funny:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaDfTP7zohQ
Holmes being unnecessarily rude or dismissive. He can be, but generally he is sympathetic to his clients and is very capable of being charming when he puts his mind to it.
Take "A Case of Identity", where the client is a young lower middle-class/upper working-class woman, and isn't very sympathetically described, plus the younger (at this time) Holmes makes the general kind of remarks about women which are stereotypical at best. Yet he does his duty by her, and does feel a sense of personal injury on her behalf:
“The law cannot, as you say, touch you,” said Holmes, unlocking and throwing open the door, “yet there never was a man who deserved punishment more. If the young lady has a brother or a friend, he ought to lay a whip across your shoulders. By Jove!” he continued, flushing up at the sight of the bitter sneer upon the man’s face, “it is not part of my duties to my client, but here’s a hunting crop handy, and I think I shall just treat myself to—” He took two swift steps to the whip, but before he could grasp it there was a wild clatter of steps upon the stairs, the heavy hall door banged, and from the window we could see Mr. James Windibank running at the top of his speed down the road.
“There’s a cold-blooded scoundrel!” said Holmes, laughing, as he threw himself down into his chair once more. “That fellow will rise from crime to crime until he does something very bad, and ends on a gallows. The case has, in some respects, been not entirely devoid of interest.”
And of course there is the exchange in "The Speckled Band":
“I am Dr. Grimesby Roylott, of Stoke Moran.”
“Indeed, Doctor,” said Holmes blandly. “Pray take a seat.”
“I will do nothing of the kind. My stepdaughter has been here. I have traced her. What has she been saying to you?”
“It is a little cold for the time of the year,” said Holmes.
“What has she been saying to you?” screamed the old man furiously.
“But I have heard that the crocuses promise well,” continued my companion imperturbably.
“Ha! You put me off, do you?” said our new visitor, taking a step forward and shaking his hunting-crop. “I know you, you scoundrel! I have heard of you before. You are Holmes, the meddler.”
My friend smiled.
“Holmes, the busybody!”
His smile broadened.
“Holmes, the Scotland Yard Jack-in-office!”
Holmes chuckled heartily. “Your conversation is most entertaining,” said he. “When you go out close the door, for there is a decided draught.”
“I will go when I have said my say. Don’t you dare to meddle with my affairs. I know that Miss Stoner has been here. I traced her! I am a dangerous man to fall foul of! See here.” He stepped swiftly forward, seized the poker, and bent it into a curve with his huge brown hands.
“See that you keep yourself out of my grip,” he snarled, and hurling the twisted poker into the fireplace he strode out of the room.
“He seems a very amiable person,” said Holmes, laughing. “I am not quite so bulky, but if he had remained I might have shown him that my grip was not much more feeble than his own.” As he spoke he picked up the steel poker and, with a sudden effort, straightened it out again."
if you've mostly been basing your impression of elementary on tumblr i beg you to watch it, i avoided it for years for that same reason.
that being said there's a particular sensibility about victorian-era/1930s era adaptions in the dialogue that you might be craving from this detective, in which case they'll always fail. but on the 12-step thing - elementary is very very clever about how they show holmes absolutely detest the process and how they have to convince him of XYZ step being valuable. elementary is nice to me because there's just so much of it - most sherlock is either books or films, so a procedural TV show is nice. i also am a huge fan of depictions of platonic friendships and admire that the show so steadfastly resists shipping watson/holmes.
agree on irene, although i think elementary's take is alright. the book version is always funnier though - she basically treats holmes like a bug, puts him under a cup and slides him out of the way.
there's a sense in the first two-ish seasons of the show that we're watching a 'prequel' to the real show of holmes and watson working together, which maybe is baggage you're not interested in anyways.
so far Sherlock has not ceased to be an introvert, but he is inching towards something closer to the books characterization - able to understand when and how to be empathetic, and really mean it! i don't mind the idea that sherlock had to grow to be the character we met, and i think even in the books (though they aren't chronological) watson alludes to his softening over the years.
but yeah elementary is the only version that has watson not be an idiot and sherlock not be a dick, and still interprets him as a 'modern detective'. 'Monk', 'House', and 'Sherlock' are the competitors in this era and i find them all very very frustrating interpretations. it's not a purists tale, but i actually think elementary hews closest to the books of any adaption in my lifetime. it's also a show filled with the incredible and accurate diversity of new york city itself, and depicts it without pomp or circumstance, which i like a lot.
this is a VERY liberal arts kinda lefty analysis of sherlock vs elementary but it gave me some thoughts to chew on and i agree with chunks of it: http://www.alphavillejournal.com/Issue14/ArticleKustritiz.pdf
i'll check out the grenada version!
Oh, dear, that article gives me so many flashbacks to grad school. :) I disagree with the idea that Elementary says "Sherlock is one of us" - he's still enormously talented and gifted and trained beyond anyone else in the show - and I also disagree with the idea that hierarchy is inherently bad, that permeates the whole article. Ah, well, there's a reason I don't read a lot of academic English/film studies stuff anymore.
Yeah, I tend to go for the more traditional versions. I've been reading a ton of pastiches and continuations of the canon etc. over the years, everything from Nicolas Myers' "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution" to whatever I can scrape up on Amazon's recommendations list.
I do *not* like the Laurie King version with Mary Russell, the snippy little madam! Mainly because if you insult, belittle, or sideline Watson, you have made me your mortal enemy. I much prefer David Marcum's view on that character, as seen here (you'll need to scroll a fair ways down the page) "A Descent into Madness":
http://17stepprogram.blogspot.com/2018/08/
I've read Sherlock Holmes as time-traveller, the real Jack the Ripper (the Michael Dibdin novel, which is well-written but such an alteration of the characters that I can't thole it, even if the ending is slightly redemptive) and more. I haven't (yet) seen Basil the Great Mouse Detective.
While we're at the recommendations game, adaptations that poke fun at the canon -
(1) "Without A Clue", the film with Ben Kingsley and Michael Caine. Original twist, very funny, and ultimately respectful of the characters
(2) Roy Hudd's series of radio comedies "The Newly Discovered Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes". This one is vulgar, full of music hall jokes, and very much of its time. There are a lot of topical references that you'll miss if you don't recognise local references to London places and events in the British news of the time. Very much only if you can handle that type of humour, e.g. describing Holmes as "Sherlock Holmes - the brilliant detective, master of disguise, and toffe-nosed ponce".
Link to download the episodes here, where even the site describes it as "The Newly Discovered Casebook Of Sherlock Holmes (written by Tony Hare and also starring Jeffrey Holland & June Whitfield) ran for 6 episodes in 1999. Dreadful puns, risqué jokes and meta material, adrift somewhere between Round The Horne and The Burkiss Way."
https://fourble.co.uk/podcast/huddwinks
Wikipedia describes it as "The burlesque series was a comic pastiche of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. The series was recorded in front of a live audience and each 30 minute episode was broadcast on BBC Radio 2 at 1 pm, making some of the rude, and occasionally crude, jokes rather risqué for the time of day."
The funniest bits are the music hall song interludes.
The Bert Coules radio plays adaptations - again, generally very faithful to canon save now and again, as in the version of "The Lion's Mane" which scraps most of the original story and makes it mostly about Holmes and Watson, including the llama/lama joke!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherlock_Holmes_(1989_radio_series)
Downloads here and I thoroughly recommend them:
https://archive.org/details/SherlockHolmes-CliveMerrissonBBCAudiodramas
I would not ever say that Watson becomes better than Sherlock in Elementary. I do think that Sherlock being a human who has serious flaws, and one of those main flaws being addiction, is very supported by the original stories.
Elementary definitely didn't resonate with a lot of folks, but it did get 7 seasons, so it obviously resonated with some. Whether those some were Holmes fans, I don't know - but I definitely am!
I can understand the traditionalist take - I adore the Jeremy Brett series and the BBC radio series - but Holmes is a fascinating property that survives many different takes.
I made an effort to read "Arrowsmith", written by Sinclair Lewis with help from Paul de Kruif, but it's just too unpleasant and cynical for me, especially re: women. But it won lots of awards and is the best example of "great scientist helps great writer write novel about scientist".
Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters remains a classic, albeit more on the young adult level. "Charlatan", which is about J.R. Brinkley, Morris Fishbein, and the rise of evidence-based medicine is also a good read if not quite what you are asking for.
Timescape by Gregory Benford
Timescape has good science, but I find Benford's writing style a bit ponderous.
I think the important one is this cartoon: https://xkcd.com/683/
Isn't the tech CEO telling us we SHOULD worry about hostile AGI the same tech CEO telling us NOT to worry about the comet? At least I assumed Peter Isherwell was supposed to be Musk. So does that mean the point of the movie is we shouldn't trust Musk and therefore hostile AGI isn't a problem?
Eh, I guess I'll just believe whichever grocery checker looks most like Jennifer Lawrence.
Despite initially being inspired by Bostrom's Superintelligence, Elon Musk's concerns about AI safety are/were very different in character from MIRI's and I think pretty different from most of the rest of the field as well (or at least that part of it that EA considers itself aligned with). Eliezer in particular has accused him of being unduly influenced by the kinds of power-and-status dynamics that the movie portrays. In that respect, Isherwell was likely a more accurate portrait of Musk than the filmmakers knew.
> Eliezer in particular has accused him of being unduly influenced by the kinds of power-and-status dynamics that the movie portrays
To be fair, Eliezer's power-and-status dynamics are set up in a way that he _would_ do that. Elizer sees AI Safety as his own personal kingdom, and so if a more powerful higher-status man shows up and starts talking about AI Safety then that's a threat.
Yud's insecurities in that regard are made all the more glaringly obvious by his ridiculously fake arrogance.
I wasn't sure Isherwell was just supposed to be Musk - his soft-spoken personality seemed too opposite, and his cell phone empire felt more like Apple or something. I thought he was a vague mix of Musk, Gates, Jobs, and a few other people.
His personality and background are derived from a bunch of people, but as far as things go that are actually relevant to the plot, he's Musk. At least, that's my view.
SpaceX motivates its workers by saying "imagine there were an asteroid heading to earth; how fast could we build this and save everyone."
Source: https://youtu.be/9Zlnbs-NBUI
I'm glad they leaned away from a Muskian portrayal, as that would've been an insult to someone who will probably prove a key lynchpin of our actual asteroid deflection plan, if the need arises (by his founding and leading SpaceX).
Also, my impression was that Tech CEO wasn't involved with the first plan, only the second plan. The first plan, which would've worked, would likely be carried out by the company with the stockpile of reusable rockets.
I was not really thinking about asteroid deflection, which is not near the top of my list of X-risks to worry about (though I'm also a bit skeptical that SpaceX will be the difference between success and failure if an asteroid shows up). I was thinking about AI risk, wherein Elon Musk has played a role similar to that of the tech CEO in the movie.
Well, that gave me some homework! :)
Do you know of anyone who can corroborate Eliezer's public comments on this? For example, Eliezer said Musk didn't like Hassabis, and that's why he made OpenAI; but there's no evidence I can find of disagreements or anything other than friendliness between them. Also ... all the rest of it. A "spirit of collaboration" that was blown up by Musk's comments? It all sounds rather abstract, the kind of thing where I can't be sure how Eliezer could even know the counterfactuals... and I want to be careful with condemning a person on such evidence.
I don't know anyone who can corroborate Eliezer's public comments. I do know that Musk's original publicly-stated rationale for launching OpenAI, and OpenAI's original publicly-stated strategy, did not make sense on the merits as a reasonable way to prevent the kind of AI risk Bostrom describes in Superintelligence (which Musk publicly cited as a primary influence). This indicates that something bad along these lines must have happened, even if we aren't privy to all the relevant interpersonal dynamics. (OpenAI has since pivoted.)
I am a big fan of SpaceX. Musk did not found it. He did provide capital at a time when they would’ve died without it, though.
EDIT: I am completely, 180 degrees, wrong! I was thinking of Tesla!
Umm ... Musk absolutely, unequivocally, 100% founded SpaceX, and nobody disputes that. It was his idea, his money, his team. He was employee #1, and he hired employee #2, etc.
You are thinking of Tesla, where there was a spat over whether Musk was a founder or just an early investor. In that one, one could quibble semantics, but your description is certainly one accurate way to summarize it.
(disclaimer: name changed. I am also OG above)
Wow! I cannot believe how completely wrong I was. You are absolutely correct that I had swapped Tesla and SpaceX.
My futile, but perhaps interesting, explanation for this complete wrongness is that I give Gwynne Shotwell 99% of the credit for SpaceX being amazing, and Musk +10% for apparently inspiring people who work for him and -9% for being a crazy jerk, and so it fits my narrative for Musk to be an after the fact glom-on.
But, I think I may need to adjust upward my opinion of Musk: He can hire and retain brilliant people, and that is actually job number one of any leader.
I once had a boss who hired me, and we had a team of ~15 people 90% of whom thought the boss was an incredibly pompous dumb guy. Then we had a reunion 5 years later (old boss not invited) and noticed that almost of all the people he hired were now extremely successful people at our megacorporation, and I made a similar revision upwards: he may have been laughably inept operationally, but at hiring, he was a star.
I thought so too but ended up thinking the name was too much of a coincidence and also he's right wing, so probably Peter Thiel.
Also Thiel was a donor and an advisor to Trump. To me this character is basically a Musk/Thiel hybrid. Incidentally, both of them played important roles in the launch of OpenAI.
>I guess I'll just believe whichever grocery checker looks most like Jennifer Lawrence.
But not with that haircut
Virgin Airlines has (or had earlier this year) a flight attendant who was a dead ringer for J. Law with a much better haircut, but I'd be suspicious of a grocery checker with a decent fashion sense; might be CIA plant or something.
I was most reminded of Larry Page in terms of how he spoke, which almost felt a tad disrespectful, given Page's vocal chord paralysis
The absurdity would have been completed had the asteroid missed.
Followed up by another completely undetected comet hitting the earth a few hours later
Or something like a full scale Chinese invasion with 20 million soldiers being undetected.
More unrealistic than the comet.
Oh, brilliant. I would have watched it then. Eliminates the preachiness.
Or burned up in the atmosphere until it's no bigger than a chihuahua's head.
The "poor Jewish carpenter" is obviously Jesus The "Swiss patent clerk"is Einstein. But who are (is?) the "Hungarian women from third-tier colleges"?
See above. Katalin Karikó, who was critical in the development of mRNA vaccine but couldn't get NIH funding/university tenure.
Thanks!
The feeling I got is certainly *not* that this is a movie intended to push a "trust the science" message as Scott implies and criticizes it for failing at that. It felt like a tragicomedy - a comedy that's funny only until you acknowledge that despite the exaggerations the depiction of likely reactions and results is *so real* that it becomes a tragedy. Like, all the counterproductive things the society manages to do for various reasons sadly seem so plausible, I felt convinced that yes, in reality in similar situations we as a society actually fail in similar ways, instead of wrangling a happy end by protagonists heroism or some deus ex machina.
All the potential "morals of the story" that this review does not find in it are not in this movie because those morals are IMHO false wishful thinking that don't reflect the reality we live in. Yes, there are anti-establishment crackpots with bullshit theories - but it's also true that the scientific establishment will lie to us for all kinds of political reasons; IMHO the behavior of Fauci at certain points is the inspiration for some of the messages the Male Scientist pushes despite knowing better and intending well. Yes, you will most likely fail if you try to do your own science, however, all kinds of potential authorative sources will also be misleading (sometimes intentionally) in certain cases. That's not "contradicting itself", that's simply reality.
So I feel that the movie gets the proper message across properly - that truth is complex, determining the truth is more complex, convincing others and establishing consensus is yet even more complex, and in the face of political considerations it *will* get distorted - and IMHO that message is a far better reflection of reality than any simplified "trust *that*" morals, and thus accepting that message is valuable for viewers.
Well said.
Hear hear.
I would agree that 'tragicomedy' is the correct description - I enjoyed the movie, despite its many flaws (the confused message/moral element of which Scott has, I think, accurately pointed out).
I'm willing to recognise the possibility that the movie is *accidentally* better than the director intended; It's certainly possible that the director meant it in the smugly superior way it's often been received, but my general approach to art is that I feel no obligation regarding authorial intent.
The core message I got was that, even in a maximally obviously bad and straightforward scenario, we would not necessarily Take It Seriously and Band Together, and the people with the right idea might be incompetent and unable to make it clear why they're correct in a big confusing world. This is an important and not necessarily intuitive point!
An interesting take, although I'm worried that you might be conflating "trust science" with "trust scientists." The first is an excellent plan, the second, well, you probably want to make sure those scientists aren't really shills for Philip Morris or the moral equivalent thereof. Scientists are humans prone to the human things like wanting attention, respect, and somebody finding them sexy. I thought Don't Look Up did a nice job of illustrating that fallibility. There was also an Emperor's New Clothes aspect to it, where anyone could just take a look and realize that the talking heads and media darlings weren't really interested in the truth.
That's what I'm trying to say. My point is that this assertion is hard to square with contempt for the "deniers" and "conspiracy theorists" who also doubt the conclusions of the scientific establishment and want you to "do your own research".
I gotcha. Maybe there's an order of explanation distinction to be made. (1) Legitimate criticisms of 'experts' as not being real experts, or being compromised, or dishonest --> therefore I will withhold judgment about their conclusions, vs. (2) I deny the conclusions of your experts --> therefore they are compromised, dishonest, and not real experts. (1) looks pretty good, and it's why we don't sign on for the Philip Morris guys saying cigarettes are harmless. (2) is more the conspiracy mindset. Your example of Behind the Curve is a good illustration.
I think a real problem tho is that once you admit that scientists can be "compromised, dishonest, and not real experts", it's much harder to argue that that's not true of any particular scientist. There are (somewhat) plausible mechanisms by which anyone, on any side, could be compromised, dishonest, and thus not a 'real' expert.
I think that’s skepticism on the cheap. The default should not be “they’re all corrupt, I’ll believe whatever I want,” but “ok, is this purported expert legitimate? Are their positive reasons to think they are compromised? Is what they say within the mainstream of thinking by other domain experts or is this an outsider view?” That sort of thing. As nonexperts, we should generally default to believing mainstream experts because they are probably right. Every nutter believes he is Galileo fighting the church, but almost no one is.
I don't disagree that you've outlined a very reasonable 'social epistemology', but that still doesn't really help someone determine whether any particular 'positive reason to think an expert is compromised' is itself reasonable.
I think your explanation [2] is bad epistemology because it's backwards, but from the 'outside', i.e. learning of a supposed expert's claims or beliefs, it's not always obvious that their beliefs aren't formed via that avenue. (Of course, to be consistent, I should be skeptical of my own beliefs and reasoning along the same lines!)
But I also don't think it's unreasonable to be skeptical of experts, to varying degrees, based on _other_ expert knowledge, e.g. about experts themselves and the processes, mechanisms, and 'forces'/'pressures' involved by which they form beliefs. The replication crisis, the strong evidence of _extremely_ poor application of non-domain expertise by other experts (e.g. statistics), and, e.g. what seems like the poor performance of supposed domain experts in the current pandemic, all seem like good reasons to be somewhat skeptical of particular experts and experts in general (to a smaller degree). Even mathematicians aren't exempt from what I think is reasonable skepticism, especially of 'new' results/ideas/beliefs/supposedly-mainstream-views.
I also think there's a really big spectrum between 'mainstream expert' and 'nutter that believes he is Galileo fighting the church' too.
And all of this seems to rely on non-experts being able to reliably identify "domain experts". Should I trust the captions on television to identify these experts? Or do I need to perform a literature review every time I want to determine exactly what the 'mainstream' views are of any particular domain? Is it even the case that there _are_ experts on, e.g. astrology? What's a general algorithm for resolving disputes _between_ (or among) 'domain experts'?
A further complication here is that there are almost always plausible "experts" arguing on different sides of the same issue. Maybe they aren't completely contradictory opinions (climate change is real vs. no it isn't) but instead one adding enough nuance to the other to change some fundamental conclusions (climate change will kill us all in ten years vs. slow change with moderate results).
Well, I’m flattered that you believe me capable of producing an entire social epistemology monograph in a comment section! Sadly, this is a case of a man’s reach exceeding his grasp. Anyway, your point about how to distinguish between domains that have true experts (are real wissenschaften) and those like astrology and phrenology that only have people cosplaying experts is a very hard one. I don’t have a handy solution. However, I do want to say that I think expert disagreement is frequently overblown. It takes place against a massive backdrop of consensus. The cutting edge where disagreement takes place is a thin line, and we should acknowledge the rest of the blade that supports it.
Maybe it's just me, but I really loathe things purporting to be reviews that narrate the entire storyline (even if snarkily).
Regardless of whether I planned to see this film or not, I now feel like the entire plot line has been so contaminated and spoiled for me that I will not be able authentically to watch it as a virgin viewer.
I take this to heart when I post my own reviews on Goodreads and other places. And therefore I don't summarize (beyond the most cursory, one sentence description). Every other review of any book about which I'm curious includes an entire summary of the plot. What's the point?
If I needed Cliff notes I would buy them.
When I read a review I am trying to learn the reviewer's opinion of what works, doesn't work, makes it interesting, makes it boring, makes it scintillating. But, while I may be unique in this respect, I never read a review to preempt hearing (seeing) the story for a first time. The unnecessary summary has stolen that possibility. I wish I'd never read the stupid review.
The subtitle of the email was "contains spoilers". Was the problem that you didn't see this, or that you interpreted "spoilers" as less strong than "plot summary"?
Yes. The problem was that I didn't see it. But even if I had (I have already seen the previews, and read other reviews) I did not expect it to be a blow-by-blow narration of every single plot twist.
Hm, did you get this by email or through the website? What can I do to make it more obvious next time?
Email. I think you may need to bold, underline, bang,etc. "THIS TELLS THE WHOLE PLOT. EXTENSIVE SPOILER ALERT!". Yes, I am being hyperbolic. But, I think for those of us who read you with some degree of commitment and regularity, only that level of disclaimer would have kept me from reading it.
Another possibility would be to do what NPR does. Give a warning of what portion is spoiler and when it ends and the review begins. Eg: "To avoid spoilers skip to the 3rd paragraph".
I really enjoyed the commentary. I only wish I hadn't read the preceding paragraphs.
This sort of thing - "full plot summary in section 1, fewer spoilers, but probably not none, starting in section 2" - sounds like the best combination of helpful and easy.
FWIW (I saw the warning, and didn't care because I have already seen the movie) I think you just need to put it in the first sentence or the first paragraph in the main text rather than the subtitle. Your warning is in subtitle text and not in the main text, and that could
(a) lead to various HTML display quirks that lead to it not being displayed in a timely or prominent enough manner
(b) lead people to automatically or unconsciously gloss over it because it sticks out but is actually less prominent in some ways (like the color) than the text itself.
Your point (a) is particularly relevant to readers who use RSS. Many RSS readers can't, or do not normally, display Substack's subtitles at all. Mine doesn't, although I wasn't bothered by this.
(This is for hysterical raisins. The original RSS spec defined a "description" field for items; it was envisioned to contain a synopsis, but in practice was (and is) often used for the entire item content. A later extension defined "content" for explicit use. Substack puts the subtitle in the description and the post text in the content, which is technically correct—but because of the historical ambiguity, most RSS readers ignore description if content is available.)
This might be related to the confusion I and others have often had when a post is a guest post (often, with Matthew Yglesias's Substack, and quite often here during the book review contest, though the recent Georgism posts seemed to me to be helpfully-enough labeled).
The font for the subtitle is remarkably innocuous. Like others, I didn't register it at all.
FWIW, the post was exactly what I expected to see from the title, knowing the blog.
However, this blog's use of the term “review” is substantially different than I usually see, the content being _much_ more in-depth. Which is of course a good thing, but I feel like this is part of the disconnect.
Agreed with this point and was going to say the same. Book reviews on this blog are not 1-3 paragraphs vaguely discussing the likes/dislikes; they're a mix of summary, analysis and commentary that generally give the major points of the book. I expected the same from this post as a 'movie review'. It would perhaps be clearer to refer to both this and other 'reviews' more as 'analyses', but that might also imply an even more in-depth critique, especially for technical subjects.
Also from my experience as someone who also hadn't seen the film, it was around the point talking about the Scientists going on TV and then subsequently to the NYT that I got the feeling all the main points of the story were going to be covered. It was around this point I decided I wasn't interested enough in the film to put aside reading this post until I watched it who knows when, but if I were, this seems early enough to stop reading and not get upset that the "the entire plot line has been so contaminated and spoiled".
I missed the content of the subtitle too, though it did not matter to me; I did not plan to watch the movie anyway.
There is something inherently skipp-able about subtitles. They often contain some pithy but short message about the text you are about to read, and a hasty reader like me will often jump right over them to the "real stuff".
Why didn't you stop reading? Anyway, I like that he summarized it. I didn't want to watch it.
That's kind of the problem isn't it? You are now going to miss the movie because of Scott's summarization that may or may not be accurate, and certainly does not reflect what your own impression would have been. So, he ruined the possibility of your enjoyment of it too.
No. Film is my main hobby, and I'd already decided not to see it.
I think you can complain about the first *few* spoilers, but you certainly can't complain about him having spoiled the whole movie for you.
Agreed, I feel the summary really helped the review, fwiw.
Seconded. I saw the unread post in my RSS reader and decided to watch the movie before reading the post because I expected spoilers.
Totally get what you're saying here, if you were planning to see the movie and got spoiled that is annoying, but as a person who wasn't planning to watch, I wouldn't have read this review without a summary. I'd prefer good spoiler warnings to removing summaries all together
I agree. Scott confused "review" with "critique." Fortunately, I had never heard of this movie and have no intention of ever seeing it.
Good work to have avoided hearing about this movie for so long!
I don't watch TV, which I suspect helps a lot.
To provide an other data point, I hate when a review does not include a deep plot summary, because the object level of the plot is over determining for the meta level of the review and because I mostly read review either to decide if something is worth watching or to keep myself on point on movies who will have a strong mediatic impact but that I don't have the time to watch.
I can see that if you wanted to watch this movie, the "contains spoilers" bit wasn't prominent enough. But I've heard enough about this movie, even though I haven't sought out such information, to know I would never go to watch it.
It's more a case of "where *can* you avoid seeing information about a particular movie nowadays?" than "Scott ruined this movie for me". I do think that unless you avoid all social media, even the most innocuous, you are going to get bombarded with "this is the plot/these are the characters/I loved this/the ending sucked" from all angles.
It's a genuine problem in that I've now seen so much about particular movies or TV shows, I don't need to watch the actual thing itself, I already know all about it. On the other hand, some things have intrigued me and sent me to the movie/show, because it's "Okay, I have to see what is going on for myself".
I think this is a matter of degree.
Yes, of course I knew something of it. I have seen the preview, and I have heard about the movie and read other reviews.
I knew the basic plot: "Scientist discovers a comet is coming toward Earth. They warn the powers that be. The powers that be do not listen. (With a somewhat allegorical nod toward COVID 19 or climate change). That is what I knew. I did not need to know every turn in the plot.
It's also noteworthy that every person responding to my comment included a caveat that they never planned to see the film. IE, they have no skin in the game. I do.
I'm tempted to say that having "skin in the game" should have made you more cautious of potential spoiler warning. But my point was that some people (well, me, so that's n>=1) prefer to read a full summary before committing the time and money to watch a movie.
And my second point was that a review which does not refer to relevant part of the plot generally present no interest whatsoever.
This was 100% on you, friend.
Even if you missed the explicit spoiler warning in the subtitle, Scott *also* says, "But first, the plot in a nutshell" in the second paragraph, and then launches into summarizing the specific details that open the movie, with an obvious intention to continue in this vein.
He continues summarizing specific details for EIGHT PARAGRAPHS.
You should have reasonably recognized what he was doing by the end of the first paragraph and bailed out if you didn't want to see the rest similarly summarized.
I'm not sure if Scott does this deliberately or not, but his review avoided a solution for how Don't Look Up is perfectly consistent with human cognition. Let's just this: "I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup"
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
Using this lens, the both sides hollywood celebrities/media figures and Tech Ceo are of course the nearest of outgroups, hence hated the most. More than the Trump figure, or his supporters. But to be fair, it seems like the movie tries to spread the hate around a bit more. And to the extent it does this, it's a better movie.
I wrote a movie review of DLU here, which was much more positive than Scott's: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zJmrkaknRydhuKzeJ/movie-review-don-t-look-up
I think a major source of disagreement between Scott and me (and in general between people who hated DLU and liked DLU) is about whether DLU was trying to make some straightforward criticism but was self-contradictory, or whether DLU's criticism was actually intended to be more nuanced. E.g. when the scientists in DLU were portrayed as incompetent, or bad at communicating, or affected by political calculus, I took it as part of the message whereas Scott took it as undermining the message. Whether you thought it was unintentionally undermining itself or actually making a deeply nuanced point, I thought it was nevertheless pretty realistic and captured a lot of the complexities of navigating the informational environment during COVID.
I'm confused; it seems to me that, in the movie's universe, the plan to capture and mine the asteroid was doomed from the start, and that any unbiased domain expert would have concluded as such (obviously those don't exist but this is a hypothetical here), and it went forward because the tech billionaire was detached from reality and everyone else succumbed to a mix of wishful thinking and political pressure to play along. Some "midwit academics" would presumably have come to the wrong conclusion here, but that doesn't seem particularly relevant; obviously the people in charge would have gotten the most prestigious experts they could and gotten as much media focus on them as possible. And it doesn't seem unrealistic that they could have successfully done that.
I suspect that Adam McKay thinks of scientific peer review primarily as a procedural safeguard against corruption. If you have a lot of money, and you want to be able to tell the public "scientists have found X" for one reason or another, but in fact everyone who studies this question knows that X is false, then you can pay for a study that says whatever you want, but it presumably won't pass peer review. So in that situation, it makes sense to stigmatize "non-peer-reviewed" studies, assuming that the genuine scientific consensus (which we're stipulating exists here) is at all trustworthy.
This is obviously very, very idealized and most science failures don't look anything like this at all, but I could believe that something similar-ish sometimes happens in fields like climate science where there's lots of internal agreement within the field but it's been politicized by outside forces. Though even there, it's probably not a dominant dynamic.
Is your complaint that the movie should have been a metaphor for something different?
Yeah, I guess I don't object to that because I don't think that the quality of our scientific institutions is among the most important causes of the kinds of problems that the film is a metaphor for. (It does cause other problems.)
I can think of two critiques of scientific institutions from the movie:
1) The scientists in DLU were awful at science communication. I thought this was a realistic representation of the actual state of affairs -- sometimes it's hard to "trust the science" because the scientists are bad at saying what "the science" is.
2) Sometimes the scientists became politically corrupted, most importantly the astronomy professor. (This is the point I was trying to make in my original comment -- Scott took this as undermining the "trust science" message, whereas I mainly thought "yeah this seems realistic, good job movie.")
As someone who has done his fair share of peer review, it annoys me to no end when people seem to believe that peer review is a magical process that prevents falsehoods from getting published.
I am somewhat confident in my ability to catch glaring errors, rather unconfident in my ability to catch subtle errors, and one hundred percent confident in my ability to find a place where the author should have cited one of my papers and didn't.
I didn’t like the “but it’s not peer-reviewed!” part. The problem with the mining plan is just that it’s way more complicated than the deflection plan, and when you’ve only got one shot to get this right you want to reduce risk as much as possible.
Thanks, this is a good point.
Death of the Artist. I don't care what the writers actually intended, they created a masterpiece. I think they portray overall realistic reactions of people - if a bit exaggerated. There *are* many times when there is an obvious truth that is *deliberately* obfuscated by those with power. This doesn't mean that the people who don't have the information are idiots, but it clearly happens time and again. I don't think the movie was unsympathetic to the anarachist group who suggested it was a lie (before the comet became visible), because they were already being lied to on so many other levels. I don't think there was a clear moral that you should 'just trust the experts.' Maybe you could argue the moral was to trust 'scientific consensus', but definitely not the heads of any organization. I also think the escape space ship (which was WAY higher tech level than comet deflection) was mainly put in for comic effect and not to be taken as a thing we could seriously do now. I thought it would have been better if the thing had just been hit by a piece of debris and exploded, however I think that may have been too depressing given the earth was already destroyed. I also don't think you are supposed to take the last man on earth bit seriously.
Overall I thought it did a great job of capturing a lot of civilizational inadequacy and the way politics (both big P and little p) obfuscate the seeking of truth and problem solving. I also agree that it captured so many of the emotions of the last year so well. I think you are holding it to too high a standard by insisting it had a *specific* moral.
Great comment.
"I don't care what the writers actually intended, they created a masterpiece."
Making a movie is an artistic process. The original screenwriter may have been a Bernie staffer, McKay may have intended for the audience to come away from this movie more determined to fight climate change--none of that matters. It's a movie and all that matters in the end is its artistic value. McKay has been successful in this business because he is a very good cinematic storyteller who seems to be driven ultimately by his artistic instincts not his politics.
Reminds me of Gwern's review of They Live where he notes that even tho the movie was clearly intended as a critique of Reaganism, it's surprisingly easy to misinterpret as an antisemitic piece.
If there's one thing that everybody agrees on, it's that "they" secretly control everything, and that "they" are terrible. There's only the minor matter of disagreeing over who "they" actually are.
I think you misinterpreted the "Believe Experts" argument being made. It's not "Believe Anyone who is an Expert", it's "Believe (domain) Experts".
The only domain experts in the movie are the original scientists. Nobody else - the NASA guy is a political appointee, the tech CEO has no subject matter expertise, the politicians are politicians.
We're supposed to realize that we should be listening to scientists with specific domain expertise, like how for climate change there's almost complete consensus among domain experts but conflict among non-domain experts.
Male Scientist described himself as "an expert on trace gases in dead galaxies". It seemed like they incidentally discovered the comet when doing cosmology research. Neither of them is a domain expert in comets, and they're *certainly* not domain experts in quantum explosives, which turned out to be what Tech CEO's plan's failure hinged on. The domain experts in quantum explosives were the Nobel Prize winners who invented them and said they would work.
Also, a scientist who can't explain their work to anyone other than a certified "domain expert", needs to hand in their Ph.D.
Really, they shouldn't have a Ph.D. in the first place, because one of the standard rules is that your dissertation committee has to include at least one professor from a different field. Science done properly is not some medieval Guild system with everyone sticking to their narrowly-defined lane.
A cosmologist, an astrodynamicist, and a "quantum-explosives expert" should be able to come to a consensus. If they can't, the one saying "you are not a domain expert so shut up" is the one to be skeptical of.
The outside member on the committee isn't there to ensure that you can explain your research in a way that someone outside the field can actually understand - they're there to make sure that someone from outside the field can actually think there's something meaningful going on, and there's neither obvious abuse of the student by the supervisor nor obvious charlatanry by the student and committee together, even if they can't really follow what's happening.
I had a strange experience once as an outside member. The student's defense, and mastery of his field, was so appalling that I wondered how he was even admitted to the program in the first place. But it turned out he had done long and faithful labor for a very senior member of the department. (More or less, he did all the semi-science-skilled labor of running the lab.)
I recall the department members asking me "What would your department do with a student like this, given the fact that his advisor is so-and-so, very important?" And, being young and naive, I said "We would decline to give him a degree." They all smiled. The guy got his degree. It wasn't the most discouraging thing I ever learned about academia.
It felt to me like the movie didn't make those distinctions and didn't expect the audience to.
I think you're making too big a deal of Male Scientist's credentials. The movie is very clear that the President does not take him at his word: she even orders his findings to be triple-checked (by Ivy League scientists!) The movie doesn't dwell on this vetting process because it's dull, but I think we can assume that it does happen and that the scientists' message can be viewed as the consensus of domain experts.
(Otherwise this would have been a much shorter movie about a scientist at Michigan State who made a very foolish prediction and was immediately humiliated on Twitter and arXiv.)
The scene where Male Scientist was unable to object to Tech Billionaire's plan (due to his lack of domain expertise in "quantum explosives") actually did a great job capturing the limitations of modern science. In practice, domain expertise is usually very narrow and the number of true domain experts in a given field is very small. Modern science deals with this through radical openness. However, that process is extremely easy to disrupt: which is exactly what Tech Billionaire does in the film.
When people say "Trust Science", I think what they mean is "trust people with technical expertise".
I completely agree with this for non-controversial topics. Like "Gene X is a transcription factor for Gene Y", or something like that.
But for controversial topics, it can be a bit more complicated. Like, when we're making regulations about the financial system, should we listen exclusively to investment bankers and hedge fund managers, since they have the most technical knowledge about finance? Probably not, because in this case technical knowledge is tied to a vested interest.
I think this is also true of politically-charged topics, when the people with technical expertise in the field are heavily skewed towards one political side.
I don't think I understand the concluding paragraph (and maybe I wasn't meant to). Yes, if I know that a comet is coming, I should try to deflect it -- but the whole point is that I *don't* know. Are you saying that I should attempt to avert every potential risk, no matter how remote it seems to me personally, just on the off chance it might turn out to be true ? Doesn't this conclusion obligate me to exhaust all of my resources pretty much immediately, since there are very many risks, and only one of me ?
You might say, "no, you should only spend your efforts on obvious risks, like the comet", but maybe the risks are not obvious to me. I've got one astrophysicist saying one thing, I've got a team of Ph.D.s saying another, and I've got a grocery clerk saying something entirely different.
The suggestion to "collide the two narratives and integrate them" sounds great in principle, but I'm not an astrophysicist, nor an epidemiologist, nor a data scientist, nor a nuclear physicist, nor a geneticist, nor a climatologist, nor... So, how can I make a reasonably informed decision on any of these threats ?
I think I'm agreeing with you. I'm saying in real life these kinds of questions are hard without having competent authorities who we can trust to get the right answer for us.
(though I do think a bias towards responding to plausible existential threats is a pretty good idea)
Well, yeah, maybe a small bias. As I said, I don't want to be in a situation where I am compelled to save every cause, no matter how unlikely.
That said though, given that competent authorities are pretty much nonexistent by now, I guess all we can do is wait for the comet to hit :-(
It seems to me that Don't Look Up *is* pushing the progressive line on COVID, but it comes from the alternate universe where Donald Trump won re-election.
Cast your mind back to the political world of mid-2020. Anyone with any sense is saying that the only way to solve COVID-19 is strict lockdowns and mask policies. The President, on the other hand, is telling people that some new high-tech "vaccine" is just around the corner. We don't need to suffer the economic consequences of lockdowns, we just need to wait for this complicated new medical technology to solve everything for us. What a dangerous lie, and he even tried to compromise institutions like the CDC and the FDA to support it! "I certainly won't be putting anything Trump approves in my body," said my left-wing friends, "I only trust independent scientists not tainted by his administration."
Unfortunately for the filmmakers, Joe Biden won the election, so the vaccine is safe and effective and all the government agencies saying so are perfectly trustworthy. So now the movie has to try and awkwardly pivot away from its Trump-era narrative in editing (and PR to claim it's about climate change).
The only hole in this theory is that I don't know how long it takes to make movies. Anyone know if it's plausible for the script to have been written, and shooting started, in early-to-mid 2020?
The script was completed before the pandemic started (and Adam McKay has said that he intended it as a metaphor for climate change). However, principal photography occurred after the 2020 election, so the actors and director would have had it in mind and minor changes to the script could have been made. (The time in between was spent waiting for the pandemic to subside or at least for people to be okay with pushing ahead through it.)
Your second paragraph reads as a strawman to me. Support for anti-covid measures never had a necessary connection with vaccine pessimism. Once it became apparent that decent vaccines were pretty likely to arrive, the main pro-lockdown position was 'let's minimise suffering and death in the dangerous pre-vaccine phase of the pandemic, and then open up relatively safely once we've had time to get vaccinated'. Vaccine pessimists always had a harder time arguing for tough measures, because the obvious retort was 'what, forever?'
I don’t disagree with any of this really, but I still enjoyed the movie.
I haven't seen the movie, but FWIW, its plot is not unique. Most science fiction movies (or TV series) have a scene where our heroes discover some looming threat (incoming asteroid, Goa'uld mothership, robot uprising, etc.), report it to their superiors, and the superiors immediately quash the news because it would hurt their reelection campaigns. Although it does sound like *Don't Look Up* went a little further with the premise.
I think the point is that it shows what it would actually look like if something like that were attempted, instead of just posing it as a plot obstacle to make the heroes' lives harder.
I haven't seen the movie - but doesn't then DLU seem to be a direct descendant of Dr. Strangelove?
In the respect that it satirically illustrates a really dangerous sociopolitical dynamic that actually exists in real life and could very well get us all killed, then sure. Except of course that it's a completely different dynamic, and that a lot of what's good about Don't Look Up seems unintended, and also of course that it's something like 0.1% as funny.
0.1% as funny as Dr Strangelove is still pretty good.
Substitute a smaller number, then.
My main beef with the film, and I tried to be nice about it as I've worked with David Sirota in the past, is that it portrays the news media as uninterested in scaring people. I have worked in media for around a dozen years, if there was an actual comet heading towards the earth, CNN would probably have a Comet Tracker Hologram on screen at all times for six months. It felt like a very surface-level critique of our systems. https://www.inquiremore.com/p/dont-look-up-is-a-fun-movie-but-bad
I could see there being partisan warfare over the comet, but it would be more in the vein of the sides both blaming eachother for not doing enough about it, or something of that nature.
I'm not sure - a tracker sounds more useful than the things the media actually does. There are a bunch of media organizations that have covid trackers, but I've never seen one that actually does regular updates on traffic fatalities or global climate, let alone a tracker.
When China was welding shut apartment buildings to stop the spread of a new plague, did CNN have a Plague Tracker Hologram?
The entire CNN.com front page is fearful stories about COVID-19 including anecdotes about kids getting it (there is still very low risk to children from COVID-19). I guess the critique could always be that CNN should've dispatched reporters in December 2019 to tell everyone they're going to die...
My impression was that in February 2020 the media was ignoring COVID.
You can see for yourself: https://web.archive.org/web/20200229001836/https://www.cnn.com/ This is from Feb 29th, 2020.
Stories on the Diamond Princess ship carrying COVID, a report on the number of cases in the U.S., and a story on how masks won't help against coronavirus.
Going backwards in time will undoubtedly show fewer COVID-19 stories on the front page. The cruise ship was a major story in February because of its surreal fate sitting off the coast of Japan while doctors and supplies were helicoptered in.
It did take a couple of months for the U.S. media to go from "China reports they've seen a new virus" to full-blown panic, but once they were in, they were all in.
You are absolutely right, though I'm not sure how a more plausible media would look in a similarly satiric movie.
I believe that movie is poking at one problem-- the use of frivolity to ignore real risks. It isn't hitting all the ways a polluted information environment can go wrong.
Author, IMHO, really misses the point. Even though the satire bites and the allegory is spot on, Don’t Look Up is a COMEDY. Getting serious about the license it takes on characters and cliches is an error of over-thinking.
The problem is with a farce like this, you need to keep the humor coming and the pace fast, so the viewers don't have time to think about just how damned absurd the story you're selling them is (even as you're making jokes about it). This neither had enough humor nor a fast enough pace.
It's funny - 90 minute movies are being replaced by 120 and 150 minute movies, as their only way of keeping up with things like 300 minute or 600 minute TV seasons (and the movies often only work when you watch them in sequence as part of a whole "cinematic universe") - even as 10 minute videos are losing ground to 90 second videos.
I enjoyed it, but maybe minute 150 through minute 200 could've been cut and the total quality [1]would rise, as it takes out the parts where the movie-makers were worried their messaging was too subtle.
[1] not just average quality, but total quality over all
I liked the Bronteroc joke.
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but the joke didn't work for me since it doesn't make any sense for an algorithm so powerful as to predict a death that can only occur following the destruction of the planet, to be unable to predict the destruction of the planet.
Also note that the DiCaprio character didn't die alone.
Good point. Didn't even thought of that.
I wrongly predicted a post-credits scene where he's revealed to have survived somehow, based on this, and everyone correctly mocked me when that didn't happen.
That was a deliberate story-telling choice. He changed his future.
It’s not in the realm of comedy as belly laughs. Non the less it’s a comedy. Absurd broadcasters. Insane politicians. Megalomaniacal industrialists. All with their volume turned up to 11. Etc.
"Comedy isn't meant to be funny" is one hell of a take
Eh, there are plenty of comedies that are more likely to raise a smile than a guffaw, and some of them are even good. Though I would agree that not-LOL-funny satire usually relies way too much on eliciting the smug self-congratulatory kind of smile.
See Molière, Wilde, Beaumarchais, Ionesco, and many other classical plays.
Section II doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Why couldn't the movie be saying that mainstream institutions are frequently full of shit, but conspiracy theorists usually manage to be even wronger than the official truth?
The tone of the movie seemed to be that everyone was extremely stupid for not just doing the obvious thing and deflecting the comet correctly. This matches the tone of eg global warming activism where everyone is extremely stupid for not just doing the obvious thing and slashing carbon emissions.
But this only works if true things are obvious, which isn't right in a world where all the institutions are compromised and insane. In a world where all our institutions are compromised and insane, how should we know whether climate change is real or not? And if the answer is "we can't", then is our response really so irrational?
I think all these questions have answers, it's just that they're hard answers and I felt like this movie was trying to insist they were easy ones.
Yes, I agree here - time was of the essence - wasting time by forgoing the already planned opportunity to deflect comet is obvious insanity - if the 'mining' plan doesn't work, there is no time to make another one, and that is exactly what happened. Taking this level of risk with all of life on earth to bolster the economy is beyond irresponsible.
Also worth pointing out that Bash wasn't allowing the scientific community to see its research and make judgements of its own, because it was trying to keep it's technology to itself. It hired particular people to endorse it, but there couldn't be an actual scientific arena for discussion or disagreement given their secrecy.
This seems importantly relevant to covid as well. One thing I've been seeing from many commentators is that Australia and New Zealand may have made the right decision in keeping the covid-zero policy for classic covid and the alpha variant, but giving it up with delta, while China is clearly making the wrong decision in keeping covid-zero through delta and now omicron. If something like this becomes the consensus, then it becomes a real question, for future pandemics, whether they're the kind where full suppression is relevant for island nations and totalitarian regimes, for everyone, or for no one.
Thanks, that makes sense. This paragraph still seems illogical to me --
> Take this seriously, and the obvious moral of the story is: all conspiracy theories are true. If some rando bagging groceries at the supermarket tells you that every scientist in the world is lying, you should trust her 1000 percent.
-- but maybe I'm taking it too close to literally.
Yes, that paragraph was a joke.
I know it's tongue in cheek, but in context I read it as an exaggerated version of a real point, rather than random humour or sarcasm. I think I did take this part too close to literally though: "the obvious moral of the story is: all conspiracy theories are true".
That's the result of the movie, put into real life consideration (the checkout worker was spouting a known "conspiracy theory" and was accurate).
The rest of what Scott adds is exaggeration for effect, I think.
As someone who's probably more progressive than not these days (my friends think I'm a centrist making a deal with the right-wing devil but that's because everyone's gone insane), the biggest thing that bothers me about the progressive movement is the need to pretend that they are rebels fighting the power instead of...y'know, the power.
Don't get me wrong, they don't have *all* the power because power is a multi-faceted thing and there are lots of types of power you can have. But we currently have a left-leaning congress, a Democratic president, a media apparatus that's supportive of progressive aims, and an academic environment that's hostile towards conservative viewpoints. And everyone from my progressive social circle to Capitol Hill is still doing the "Viva la revolution" song and dance.
The issue appears to be that far-left progressive power isn't absolute. It does not have 100% support and sometimes they are therefore required to work with a person who does not agree completely with their goals. Occasionally they have to pass a bill that's only some of the stuff they want, or engage in debate to convince a local government to implement reforms they support. This is apparently an intolerable restraint on their freedom.
Here's the thing though. I think that if tomorrow we turned the whole country over to Ocasio Cortez as absolute dictator, the amount of the progressive agenda that would actually get passed is none of it. I think the idea of taking action, and having that action judged, terrifies this movement to the point of paralysis. They want to be the scrappy underdogs from the movies, and the second they get in charge they become the villains (because holding institutional power in movies always makes people evil). The magic "make everything better" button won't work, or will work with complications, and then they'll have to defend their choices and priorities.
Tl;dr: I don't think the progressive movement holds contradictory ideas about what "trusting science" looks like. I just think anyone who does anything is suspect to them, while people who know the truth and are prevented from acting on it are the good guys. Action, by itself, is evil.
The Disney Star Wars sequels are the perfect expression of this impulse — despite actually being in power, the Republic casts their soldiers as a scrappy “Resistance” against an upstart movement that holds no official power at all (but inexplicably possesses superior military might). The good guys are then relieved of power as soon as possible so they can go back to fighting the Man.
Or the way that certain regimes in certain countries that have been in power for decades still refer to themselves as "The Revolution" and any resistance that might arise as "Counter-revolutionaries"
FYI, the expanded universe established that the Republic had almost completely demilitarized and their "warships" were barely armed. The government made a choice to be helpless.
Because I can't help talking about Star Wars at any available opportunity: I interpreted the situation as a little more nuanced in The Force Awakens. It seemed clear to me that the First Order and the Republic were more or less two nations controlling different regions of space, existing in an official state of truce, but the Republic was secretly funding/supporting a grassroots insurgency in First Order space, called "the resistance" because they resist First Order rule. Presumably the Republic did this because they recognized the threat of the First Order but couldn't, or didn't want to, risk all-out war, or something like that.
I know they couldn't get Carry Fisher for The Force Awakens, but can you imagine how good a sequel it could have been if we'd seen her struggle with the realities of power? Opening crawl, pan down to some ominous looking building on Coruscant, cut to her, dressed in black, sitting in some high seat, giving an order that will obviously get people killed. The New Main Characters are never sure they can trust her. The public refers to her as The Emperor Reborn. Through dramatic irony we know she's just trying her best but there's still a danger there. Man, that would've been great.
> the biggest thing that bothers me about the progressive movement is the need to pretend that they are rebels fighting the power instead of...y'know, the power.
"Once you wanted revolution
Now you're the institution
How's it feel to be The Man?
It's no fun to be The Man..."
- Ben Folds, "The Ascent of Stan"
Eh, progressivism isn't a monolith. I think there are lots of people who actually, for real, want to enact the entirety of the progressive agenda without compromise, and they compose a lot of its volume and cultural influence, and they feel like the underdogs because they're not getting what they want. Not saying there's no pageantry or ingroup signaling, but that's not all of it.
Of course, the system is somewhat designed to marginalize those people at the expense of those who have to avoid angering a broad range of people (and whose most common incentive is therefore to do nothing). Also, those people's tactics tend to be totally unproductive, since they involve seeking power and influence in domains where progressivism is already dominant and ignoring domains where progressivism is sidelined (but not so sidelined as to be irrelevant).
"The system is somewhat designed to marginalize those people at the expense of those who have to avoid angering a broad range of people (and whose most common incentive is therefore to do nothing)."
This question is going to sound like a gotcha but it's not, and I'm genuinely curious.
Our current system tends to discourage action for lots of reasons, but foundationally it's because of a basic democratic ethos that if more than 50% of people don't want a thing done it doesn't happen. Would you/progressive folks you know prefer a system where sometimes minority groups get to pass policies even without a majority?
The Supreme Court is often cited as a positive example of this but the Supreme Court really only has the power to enjoin government from doing things - no matter how "activist" people may claim it is it can't levy taxes or raise the minimum wage. Should a true democratic ethos say "if you have 40% of the support, you get to pass 40% of the laws"? And if so any thoughts on how to make that a viable system?
Courts actually do have the power to raise taxes in some circumstances. The most important example was the Kansas City schools desegregation case. The judge found that the system had been illegally segregated, and as part of the remedy, required a substantial tax increase to remake the school system. This went up and down the appeals process and was eventually okayed.
The story has a sad ending. Even with lovely, well-equipped new buildings and a lot higher budget for the school system, student achievement stayed stuck at a low level.
I'm mostly just providing a descriptive story here of why people have the attitudes and perceptions that they do. For my own part, I do suspect that Congress and the federal civil service do a lot more nothing than is optimal, but I don't have any good ideas about how to fix that without making other things worse. If I did, I'd quit software engineering and start a think tank or something. But it seems like a hard problem.
That being said, some (not all) progressive policies have majority support among the electorate but still don't get enacted. The U.S. is constitutionally much more vetocratic than most democracies (which still don't let policies pass with <50% support!), and on top of that there are lots of additional factors gumming up the works (and I think there's a real argument that that's more true now than at most times in U.S. history). You probably don't want any given policy to instantly take effect whenever >50% of people are in favor, that's too much instability, but there's clearly room in between those extremes.
> Our current system tends to discourage action for lots of reasons, but foundationally it's because of a basic democratic ethos that if more than 50% of people don't want a thing done it doesn't happen. Would you/progressive folks you know prefer a system where sometimes minority groups get to pass policies even without a majority?
I think the American system goes a lot further than that - if more than 40% of people - or, more accurately, if pluralities of more than 40% of the states - don't want a thing done then, outside of certain fairly narrow categories, it doesn't happen. And there are a bunch of progressive policies which command more than 50% support, but less than 60%.
I think that some checks on the ability to radically change the status quo with a 50%+1 vote majority are probably a good thing, but I also think that the US is pretty clearly too far towards the vetocracy end of the vetocracy/bulldozer axis.
If progressives are "in power" when do I get to stop giving hundreds of dollars a month to some fuckhead in health insurance business? Would really appreciate some kind of timeline on this or literally any policy that would benefit me personally, since the progressives are supposed to be into that kind of thing.
The *Democrats* are in power (for another year and a few days after that). Sadly, they are no more progressives than Republicans are libertarians.
Depends what you mean by "they".
Right now progressives hold the presidency, somewhere between (about) 40 and (precisely) 49 seats in the Senate depending on who you count, and a near-majority or small majority of the seats in the house.
In order to actually implement most of a progressive agenda, in would be necessary for progressives to hold the presidency and a majority in the house, and either for progressives to hold 60 seats in the senate or progressives who support abolishing the filibuster (which is not a position which automatically follows from being a progressive) to hold 50 seats.
(You can implement a bigger chunk of a conservative agenda with less than that, because there's better overlap between "things on a conservative agenda" and "things the US political system allows you to do without a supermajority, but there's still a lot conservatives would like to do but couldn't if the numbers were reversed).
America is unusually far towards the vetocracy end of the vetocracy/bulldozer axis. The part of the statement "progressives are in power" that deserves close dissection and questioning isn't "progressives", it's "in power".
Let's put aside if the most right wing Democratic candidate in the primary is "progressive" or not, and look instead to a period when the Dems held unambiguous power: under Obama, who had 60 votes in the Senate, we got the ACA - which is what ultimately ensured I would keep sending money to insurance companies (as someone in a state that blocked the Medicaid expansion, it's particularly grotesque, as I spent my years under the poverty line giving 30+% of my income to such companies). He also enacted exactly zero policies that raised the federal minimum wage.
At what margin should we expect the following policies to be practically produced by the Democratic Party: some type of public option, single payer, or other thing that means I stop sending money to vampiric private insurance companies, or, a federal minimum wage hike? I don't think these are extreme far left progressive ideas, but fairly straightforward, popular ones - that are going exactly nowhere and look to continue to be going in that direction for the forseeable future.
I try to be a realistic person. The only way that I see these things happening is with significant pressure from below, a generational shift, or some other process that pushes the DNC to the left (i.e., if the current DNC held 60 seats it wouldn't do these things either because it does not want to do these things). If I were a right winger who similarly saw the sorts of obstacles to popular policies on the right, I would conclude that the government was not controlled by right-wingers.
I think you might be taking it for granted that insurance companies are the devil incarnate, and that a federal minimum wage hike would be great.
Re: minimum wage: I've always seen "higher minimum wage provides an incentive for businesses to automate more and hire fewer people" as a pretty strong argument from basic economics. Furthermore, cost of living varies wildly across the country, so even if a minimum wage was good, it seems to me like different levels in different places would be much more reasonable than a single federal value.
Re: health insurance: I typed up the below paragraph, then thought "eh I kind of agree with you." I'll keep it for posterity, but essentially my argument boils down to "eh it's complicated and there are some good features of a private system that many people would be incredibly hostile to losing." Don't think that necessarily invalidates the proposal to have a gov't funded *option*.
IIRC, insurance companies have relatively small (~10% I think?) profit margins. So, out of the 30% of your income that you're sending to them, 3% is going to their profits and 27% is going to pay for someone's medical bills (who knows whose). There are clearly problems with the current system, but I'd categorize many of them as overregulation--shit where you can't see a doctor one state over, or insurance companies can negotiate prices with hospitals but uninsured people have to pay full price, or tax benefits are given for employers providing insurance but not for buying your own insurance. I agree there's a problem, but I don't think it's clear that "single-payer system" is the best solution.
> I think you might be taking it for granted that insurance companies are the devil incarnate, and that a federal minimum wage hike would be great.
I'm not taking it as a given. Who knows? The world's unpredictable and complex. I *do* know it's broadly popular and signature progressive policy that has gone exactly nowhere. The specific efficacy of the policy is irrelevant.
It's like if Republicans held all three branches and couldn't pass a tax cut - are tax cuts good? It's unanswerable, since it's not a well-defined question. Do people like tax cuts, and are tax cuts core to the general Republican platform? Yes.
I would argue that Obama was not ever a "Progressive" and neither were the Democrats of 2008-2012 (when the voting mattered to Obama). Progressives grew significantly leading up to the 2016 election and even more so after that. Quite a few people responded to the election of Trump by going further left on key Progressive issues. AOCs career is altogether post-Obama, and she's one of the most well known Progressives. Bernie Sanders was practically sitting alone in a corner for decades before rising to national prominence for the 2016 election.
Not to say that Democrats are going to pass the entire Progressive legislative agenda if they had a bigger majority, but most of the very Progressive Build Back Better agenda would have been DOA in 2009, instead of coming within a few votes of passing in 2021.
I can't believe this is written in good faith. This is like Tucker Carlson calling Biden a communist. Your representation of who progressives are and how much power they have is nearly opposite from the truth.
The vast majority of the Democratic party that currently holds power and the major media apparatus could not be called progressive by anyone paying attention and intending to portray the truth. They don't even call themselves progressives. Honest libertarians/an-caps that think neoliberal Democrats are evil and dumb and Progressives are even dumber still wouldn't confuse the two.
As to your latter point, about progressives being afraid of action, there's no evidence one way or the other so you're making it up. In fact, people who don't like progressives usually like to compare what would happen if they actually had power to authoritarian communist examples such as the USSR and China, regimes not typically noted for inaction or paralysis.
I could have sworn I just read something about how claims of no evidence are themselves evidence of bad faith and evil… where was that now? Hmmm…
Yeah, admittedly we still live in a coalition democracy and even an historically successful election doesn't give them *absolute* power over the whole governmental apparatus.
A counterpoint to my main thrust is just that US democracy is bad at passing laws, and I'll own that. But also the progressive movement made it clear during the recent Building Back Better debate that they'd rather advocate for their perfect plans and pass nothing than pass imperfect compromises that can survive our process. Their failure to get major changes made at the local or state levels also bears my hypothesis out.
The only NDP premier of Ontario, Bob Rae, commented once that getting elected was hard on the Ontario NDP because governing turned out to be a lot harder than they thought.
He almost became leader of the federal centrist party some years later.
There is a big lesson there for NDP members, who mostly will never learn it.
I thought that “Don’t Look Up” joins “Dr. Strangelove” as one of the greatest and most important movies of all time … and yet I somehow also liked this post, bringing its narrative contradictions to the surface.
I’d propose the following, as a message that the movie is 100% clear and consistent about throughout: in general, trust experts insofar as they say that a problem affecting all of humanity is a real problem and we should come together and put in the hard work to solve the problem. Don’t trust the people—even ones with impressive credentials—who are more worried about politics and image than the underlying reality of the problem, or who advocate simply ignoring the problem, or who seek to profit from the problem.
I’m sure one could come up with counterexamples where even the above advice leads to the wrong answer, but broadly speaking, it’s a message that I strongly endorse, and I thought the movie conveyed it clearly and well.
> Don’t trust the people—even ones with impressive credentials—who are more worried about politics and image than the underlying reality of the problem, or who advocate simply ignoring the problem, or who seek to profit from the problem.
Great, but the problem is identifying those people versus the others. In the movie it's easy, they're the good-looking ones played by famous actors. In the real world it's much trickier, and you can't hope to resolve a tricky issue (like AGI or AGW) by simply identifying all the _bad_ people and then ignoring them.
<i>Don’t trust the people—even ones with impressive credentials—who are more worried about politics and image than the underlying reality of the problem</i>
But that's not a simple task at all. To take one example, are people who are concerned about climate and oppose nuclear power "more worried about politics and image than the underlying reality of the problem"?
Maybe we should turn the question on its head: which movies DO let us compute the mapping from its characters to who the good guys and bad guys are in a real-life situation, in a way that isn’t “hard” or prone to error? Is this a reasonable thing to ask a movie to do? Particularly when people really *are* polarized and the movies are trying to appeal to viewers from all sides, so they *have* to at least create plausible deniability about who’s who?
The Crucible is my go-to example of propaganda* done reasonably well, Ender's Game would also be on my short list (I've not seen the movie though) even though I disagree with the ideology being pushed in Ender's Game. Star Trek Tos and TNG I think are also solid outing even if they abandoned their ideologies with DS9 an everything after it. I would generally prefer for the propaganda to at least be decent fiction in its own right, and a bit subtle in its propagandizing.
*Propaganda has a negative connotation, but I just mean media that is intended to promote an ideological position. I am honestly not familiar with a neutral word for this? Advocacy maybe?
In "the golden age of Hollywood", they were called "message movies". One famous producers was reputed to have put them down, "If you want to send a message, call Western Union."
"I saw the phrase 'a constant impulse to overleap the process of becoming genuinely sure of something to get to the part where you're smug about it' somewhere and can't stop thinking about it."
It seems like there ought to be a five syllable German word to describe this tendency. Some reader in Germany want to try to coin one?
Anyway, nice review. Makes me want to go see Licorice Pizza instead.
Selbstgefälligkeitüberspringen?
Good suggestion. Looking at google's translation, it appears that the word for "skipping" itself has about five syllables in German, so it looks my original sentiment was well short of the necessary length. Kinda glad I studied French in high school.
I've had this similar sentence stuck in my head for decades, about a man who was a leftist radical in the 1960s and has been a right-wing agitator for decades [name redacted]: "He went from from being a Communist to being a right-wing propagandist without ever pausing for a moment of self-doubt."
Not quite one word, but: vorzeitige Anmaßung ("premature presumptuousness")?
Or Latin: praesumptio praecox
This movie promotes the progressive line on science issues, and that line is be afraid, no matter the issue or who is promoting it. Take the most economically damaging course of action, because that will keep us "safe". If anyone claims there is a shortcut, like geoengineering, mining asteroids, or that vaccines negate the need for lockdowns or masks, they are self-interested and wrong.
"be afraid, no matter the issue or who is promoting it"
No it isn't! That's part of the problem - fear would at least be a consistent heuristic!
You shouldn't be afraid of vaccines causing autism. You shouldn't be afraid of pedophile rings. You shouldn't be afraid of chemicals turning the frogs gay.
The problem is there are two separate narratives, "be afraid" and "don't believe the loony fearmongers", and without realizing that you have to deploy both at different points, people get excessively certain of whichever one they're applying to the current situation.
>You shouldn't be afraid of chemicals turning the frogs gay.
I thought the "chemicals are changing the sex of frogs" thing was scientific consensus. For example, see these papers: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=atrazine+frogs
Is it not real?
It's real, people just aren't especially alarmed about it.
This is my fault, I said "you shouldn't be" speaking in the voice of normal society, not as a personal assertion.
For context, read the first few paragraphs in section II of https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/04/respectability-cascades/
OK, be afraid as long as that would require expensive government action. And all chemicals as long as they aren't health related in which case they are all essentially government produced and should be free.
And progressives don't mind being afraid of chemicals turning frogs gay.
Or maybe the movie is not trying to push any progressive agenda, and is instead trying to entertain and make money by depicting the complexity of the world and the weaknesses of people's heuristics in a satirical way? Why was this interpretation not even considered?
It would be inconsistent with what the filmmakers have said about their agenda.
Also, because a movie that tried to depict the complexity of the world would probably have been a lot better.
We shouldn't necessarily trust the filmmakers about what their agenda is. It's much more acceptable in polite company to say you've made a film trying to push a political agenda than it is to say you've flattened some political issues because you figured out that's what sells.
If you interpret the movie as not being _primarily_ about science, but as being an arugment for 'the people' to overthrow the current corrupt system, it all fits together:
Science works, byut only if you have trustworthy institutions and elites, which we don't. The elites are all corrupted by money and politics, and any attempts to change the system are derailed by cranks who see marxist conspiracies everywhere.
When she says 'elites aren't that competent', this is meant to be showing how _wrong_ she is - yes they _are_ that competent, the paranoid conspiracy theorists in the crowds were basically _right_, but even the good guys weren't convinced that of the true problem.
I have not, and probably will not see this film. A lot of commenters seem to be saying that this film has a complex and nuanced message that Scott missed, so in that line of thinking I am curious about something from Scott's plot summary. As far as I can tell, the Trump analog president individually made two choices that collectively doomed the earth, first to ignore the comet, then to take the bad (profit motivated) plan instead of the good plan.
To what extent does the plot fall apart if Josiah Bartlett is president? If the plot falls apart with Josiah Bartlett as president, then surely the message of this film is anything but subtle.
I think "if we had smart good people in power instead of dumb bad people, things would go better" is consistent with a "our institutions suck and we are stupid" message.
It feels weird to quote you at yourself, but if people said the film was important, but hard to watch, made their 'blood boil' because it was critical of them and their peers, sure. So far, I've not seen a lot of comments that are both for the film and take that kind of tone. If 'our' and 'we' are the special formation of those words that does not actually include the person using them, well that seems to reduce back down to the same basic message.
For what it's worth, I mostly enjoyed the film, perhaps because I saw the message as much less nuanced:
Even existential threats may not be enough to overcome tribalism and perverse incentives. Also, Trump is bad. (And possibly, but not as clear a message: credentialism is bad, capitalism is bad, and being a scientist from a non-prestigious university is cool)
There are other people besides the president (most especially the media) whose screw-ups are portrayed as contributing to the problem, even though the pivotal decision was hers.
To what extent would the plot fall apart if a smart Trump stand-in written by people who like him was the President instead? Josiah Bartlett isn't real; he's a fantasy reimagining of Clinton by people who wish they were Monica Lewinski. If you wrote such a similarly fawning and fantastical version of Trump, stripped bare of any actual character flaws, I'm sure he would roll out Operation Warp Speed intended to utterly destroy the comet as fast as possible.
Instead of a border wall, we could have a linear accelerator, and Mexico will pay for it...
Perhaps the point was not to make a consistent message but rather to string together a series of outlandish gags for audience entertainment?
Also, by far the best Russell conjugation is idealism/idealist and ideology/ideologue.
What about popular/populist?
Interesting, but I've always seen that as part of a shift in language. So in classic Aristotle there are three forms of government, monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. Modern English contains the same three concepts, we just use new words for them: dictatorship, democracy and populism.
I'd definitely agree there's a Russell conjugation with the first two. The Saudi monarchy is our friend, the Russian dictatorship is our enemy. But the last two pairs don't work out so well. Referring to oligarchy as democracy is not to praise it but to obfuscate the reality. I don't think it's common for people to use democracy and populism as a Russell conjugate. But "politics" and "democracy" do fit the bill (and it gives us the most lovely nonsensical statements like "we have to get politics out of our democracy.")
There is tyranny too, monarchie and tyranny are two différent regime (the difference being that the king reigns using authority while the tyran use power).
I've also seen that distinction put as the difference between authoritative and authoritarian power.
I think you missed the point when trying to take a comedic film seriously and where a parody of our insane and inconsistent reality is what....going to be internally consistent? The tone and style played towards our real experiences of experts and institutions screwing us around and over. It is abundantly clear the elites are playing their own games with no real regard for the general populace. As every group of elites all through history in every nation and culture have collectively done in every single moment of jostling and vying for more power.
The depiction of confusing, contradictory, and every shifting messaging from the experts and people you're telling us to 'trust' is the main reason people don't trust them. That was delivered beautifully and painfully in the film and at moment comedically.
The changing messaging on climate change and on covid have not been science led, they have been deeply political messages and all the actually good points of criticism are continually ignored. The media's main ability here is picking and choosing which critiques of them they will respond to and they always choose to make themselves look right and good. Through labels like 'anti-vaxx'er and propaganda terms like 'pandemic of the unvaccinated' and continually lying to us about how hospitals are full...they continually seek to control the narrative and avoid asking any meaningful questions.
Never questioning the profit motives of newly minted billionaires, never acknowledging corruption, never noticing that the chairman of the board of Reuters who has been appointed the high priesthood and ministry of truth and fact checking also personally sits on the board of Pfizer. Never ever questioning anyone powerful or challenging them, because the people asking the questions are powerful or work for the powerful.
A few fringe or uncertain ideas are endlessly fixated upon, while the real solutions and ideas felt and desired to people are ignored. The poor see a chimera of advice which changes daily and monthly. 6 months ago you were excommunicated and banned for the Wuhan lab leak idea as if you were a catholic eating meat on Friday before they changed the rule. Now it is an OK thing to think....but just like the damned souls of those horrible non-fish eating Catholics...those lifetime bans against those who brought up those ideas 'too early for offical acceptability'/before they lost control over that story...they remain forever banned for thought crimes which are no longer illegal to think!
The truth-agnostic and self-serving nature of each person in Don't Look Up was the main point. There are no 'adults in the room'...just an endless string of selfish elite jackasses pushing for what they want. With the quasi-placeholder of 'the truth' in the two scientists were also corrupted by that very environment where the truth cannot be said.
Many empires and civilisations and governments have collapsed and the people always suffer from the incredibly poor choices of their 'leaders'. In one breath they care about our health and in the next they say you're not allowed to have healthcare if you're poor. In one instance they want the vaccines to be taken, and in the next moment they refuse to make the vaccines publicly owned, even though governments invested all the money. Then they gave them full legal immunity, and guaranteed purchases of the vaccines.
Trust us, we've guaranteed profits for no reason and created a context of highest bidder 4th jabs for the rich nations while Africa has a less than 10% vaccination rate. Can't you see the need for the new variants and total lack of science or rational thought involved....we NEEDED to create more billionaires much much much more than we needed a public vaccine platform. Not a SINGLE ONE is publicly owned, all private. That's not an accident. But yea...trust them. Anyone who knew enough and thought about it for 30 minutes would see this would lead to many many more variants and an endless source of booster profits.
Is that a crazy idea or is that the exact idea spoken by the CEO of Pfizer on an investor call a while back? Even quoting their own words to them and how much money they planned on making due to the highly foreseeable consequences of their choices is....well you're a crazy person for even knowing that! You need to shut up and think the thoughts the media tell you to think and don't worry about that investor call where they promised booster based profits due the hoarding of vaccines by.....themselves.
They want you to isolate and stay home, but they refuse to give people the money they need or laws guaranteeing paid sick leave in order to do so. They want the world vaccinated, and yet they refuse to do anything to compromise Big CEO donor's profits to actually make that happen.
The world itself is insanely contradictory and inconsistent, so it makes sense for art depicting and making fun of our inconsistent world to itself be internally inconsistent. That's incredibly consistent in its own way.
The people who get it right (though without the power to do any good) are ordinary people who aren't very interested in politics.
I thought it was funny. Is that enough, or do I have to digress eight different ways explaining why a work of fiction is wrong?
Next up: Jonathan Swift. Verdict: he’s good!
I confess I did not see the inconsistencies above although they make sense. I saw it as a parable about attention economics and low trust. I guess in a sense I expected everyone to be irrational. Though I think I have a much more sour opinion of the corporate press that prevents me from seeing clearly. So many things are going on that are interesting no one has the ability to focus on the things that matter in any way that was effectual. Trust is so low that no one could just say “well I haven’t paid very much attention to it but Hank over at NASA is taking care of it and I’ve sent him enough resources to do so.” Similar paradigm happened with Afghanistan. Many reports produced stated exact problems and boots on the ground tended to know what would happen (this is colloquial of course) but none of that knowledge was connected to any kind of circuit that could power any sort of sensible action. Carry that for decades and you have a debacle. Same with climate change, somewhat the same with COVID, etc. I think they felt the problem well enough to make the movie, although maybe not explicitly or even intentionally, and to your point they didn’t really have an answer to it. Agree with you on AI, but try not to talk about it as it makes me feel like a lunatic (which is one of the biggest problems) and also (this is very insane) I sort of think there should be a group of people who don’t ever leave records of what they think about AI so that it can’t read them when it gets turned on.
I feel like I've been seeing this movie mentioned in my RSS feeds for months now (despite it only being a few weeks old) and this is the first time I've bothered to read something past the summary blurb. Something felt off about the amount of attention it was getting from my admittedly-left-biased news sources. After reading your summary, I don't feel as bad for choosing to watch anime instead of it when it got to Netflix.
This also feels like it hits extra close to home after reading the chapter of The Scout Mindset about the importance of identity in decision making.
I don't expect parodies to necessarily be realistic or even internally consistent.
Sort of like why it's not necessary to make Superman adhere to the laws of physics.
The plot, setting, and character decisions of parodies don't need to be realistic or internally consistent. Dr. Strangelove depicts an absurd world full of incredibly unlikely contrivances, where people make absolutely insane choices, and yet it still works as an excellent work of satire that holds up even decades later.
But I'd argue that the actual *message* of a parody needs to be internally consistent, or else there's no point in making it at all. Don't Look Up absolutely fails in that regard.
The terrifying part is that Dr. Strangelove was not so far away from reality.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/almost-everything-in-dr-strangelove-was-true
> A former Deputy Secretary of Defense dismissed the idea that someone could authorize the use of a nuclear weapon without the President’s approval: “Nothing, in fact, could be further from the truth.”
(...)
> we now know that American officers did indeed have the ability to start a Third World War on their own.
(...)
> Eisenhower agreed to let American officers use their nuclear weapons, in an emergency, if there were no time or no means to contact the President.
(...)
> President John F. Kennedy was surprised to learn, just a few weeks after taking office, about this secret delegation of power. “A subordinate commander faced with a substantial military action,” Kennedy was told in a top-secret memo, “could start the thermonuclear holocaust on his own initiative if he could not reach you.” Kennedy and his national-security advisers were shocked not only by the wide latitude given to American officers but also by the loose custody of the roughly three thousand American nuclear weapons stored in Europe. Few of the weapons had locks on them. Anyone who got hold of them could detonate them. And there was little to prevent NATO officers from Turkey, Holland, Italy, Great Britain, and Germany from using them without the approval of the United States.
(...)
> American control of the weapons was practically nonexistent. Harold Agnew, a Los Alamos physicist who accompanied the group, was especially concerned to see German pilots sitting in German planes that were decorated with Iron Crosses—and carrying American atomic bombs. Agnew, in his own words, “nearly wet his pants” when he realized that a lone American sentry with a rifle was all that prevented someone from taking off in one of those planes and bombing the Soviet Union.
(...)
> Despite public assurances that everything was fully under control, in the winter of 1964, while “Dr. Strangelove” was playing in theatres and being condemned as Soviet propaganda, there was nothing to prevent an American bomber crew or missile launch crew from using their weapons against the Soviets.
(...)
> George’s novel about the risk of accidental nuclear war, “Red Alert,” was the source for most of “Strangelove” ’s plot. Unbeknownst to both Kubrick and George, a top official at the Department of Defense had already sent a copy of “Red Alert” to every member of the Pentagon’s Scientific Advisory Committee for Ballistic Missiles. At the Pentagon, the book was taken seriously as a cautionary tale about what might go wrong.
(...)
> Although the Air Force now denies this claim, according to more than one source I contacted, the code necessary to launch a missile was set to be the same at every Minuteman site: 00000000.
(...)
> A decade after the release of “Strangelove,” the Soviet Union began work on the Perimeter system—a network of sensors and computers that could allow junior military officials to launch missiles without oversight from the Soviet leadership. Perhaps nobody at the Kremlin had seen the film. Completed in 1985, the system was known as the Dead Hand.
It's a satire, not a parody.
And as a satire, it certainly seems to _think_ it's elucidating an important truth about the world, so it seems fair to point out all the ways in which it isn't.
Also, it's not very funny, so if it doesn't do that then it's got nothing going for it.
I don't get all the love for the movie. I would give it a 5/10 (too long, some good ideas but it didn't do much interesting with them). But it seems to spark conversation and most people have their own takes. Most of whom I don't share, but that's conversation.
I saw its primary message as a pretty basic left-wing revolt-of-the-public thing: "Our current leaders are stupid - kick these losers out of power, and replace them with anybody who had the common decency to press the miracle button!" (direct Scott quote from the book review). Most badness is actively caused by Trump and the tech CEO (aka. enemies of the left). Their supporters are irredeemably stupid and overall bad people. There are some fleeting notion of news and social media being bad somehow (by distracting the "good public", to which you dear viewer surely belongs) but it's never in a direct, active way.
Here's a fun game when some group of scientists says "just trust the science!" — ask them to trust the economists on economic policy. If we look back at the history of science, it becomes clear how silly "just trust the science" narratives are. They'd be wrong across most fields most of the time. Science has loads of philosophical difficulties (e.g. demarcation between pseudoscience and science, skepticism vs denialism) that the majority of scientists are not taught and don't care about. Thanks for the post — I think this review is one of my favorite pieces of yours.
Economics involves a heavy amount of sociology and non-controllable variables that many branches of science don’t have to worry about. I wouldn’t say that your two directives are equivalent, as there’s a lot more inherent uncertainty in economics.
Due to other replies, I’m beginning to think that it was a mistake to pick at the equivocation of “science” and “economics.” “Science” means too many things!
"Economics [has] non-controllable variables that many branches of science don’t have to worry about" — I think you're narrowing your definition of science arbitrarily here. Neuroscience, developmental biology, ecology, etc. are all areas where you can't control for things. Even if you could control for things, it's a complexity problem; the only realistic dynamics happen when numerous things interact in a way you cannot control. Heck, even mechanics becomes difficult when the gravity of a few things interacts. Economics has a lot in common with many fields of science full of people that smugly believe their field is on a more sure foot. Clearly economics is far from a good science; I think it had a groupthink markets-are-perfect culture for many years and is only recently on slightly better empirical foundation (at least for micro).