Astrobiologist Breaks Down Apocalypse Scenes from Movies | GQ

hey everyone I'm David Grinspoon I'm an astrobiologist and I study how planets get life and how they lose life and welcome to the breakdown alright let's start with a day after those are Minuteman missiles like a test sort of like a warning of all the sort of post-disaster depictions to me that this is in a way the most actually frightening because it's a it's a real thing that they tried to make a realistic film oh but I remember actually when that this was on I'm watching this and I'm thinking where are these people running to how is it gonna really help I mean in theory you know you get down in the basement and yeah you know you can avoid the immediate effects of fallout if you shelter in place and don't breed that outside air with the dust and if you get enough in a basement or something you might let's escape the radiation if you're not literally in the blast zone that's just I'm also looking at these people and thinking yeah so what are you gonna do a few days so there's the immediate pulse of there's some these short-lived radionuclides that if you manage to shelter in place and not breathe that air and breathe the falling dust you know for for a few days and then you get out you're much better off that's the theory is that like there is something you can do to stay alive immediately and then you know maybe maybe that's the only town that got nuked and you can get to another one you know but maybe not okay let's skip ahead here yeah boy that doesn't look like fun at all the first thing I noticed was that the electromagnetic pulse was depicted if the glass doesn't get you and the radiation doesn't get you the electromagnetic pulse will make all our electrical machines stop working within a certain radius and then the explosion itself is frightening ly convincing to me you know I'm not sure about that scene where all the people sort of turn into skeletons but even that I think that's an attempt to depict the fact that there's these x-rays that are pouring out of the thing that are frying everybody and it's even conceivable that you would see something like that in your last you know microsecond of consciousness before it happened to you too [Music] yeah I think I think that is pretty well depicted as far as I understand it first of all there just be a completely blinding flash of just radiation so intense that everything would be white in every direction even with your eyes closed if that didn't blind you and you were still able to see then yeah there'd be this massive mushroom cloud which is simply - you know the thermal pulse immediately expanding this volume of air which is low density because it's so hot and it just it rises like a giant bubble into the stratosphere and whenever you release that much energy near the surface of the planet you're gonna get you know a bubble like that that just inexorably rises up and forms that mushroom I mean everything left would would burn you know the aftermath of a nuclear explosion in the city is a firestorm massive massive amounts of smoke and debris heading up into the stratosphere and by the way that's why you get a nuclear winter which is the real main threat of the aftermath of the nuclear war you know after all those immediate effects and that is because of all that smoke that ends up in the stratosphere so those fire storms is actually not from the nuclear bomb itself but from the fires created all the burning cities collectively they make enough smoke that it circulates around the planet in the stratosphere and it's going to block out the Sun for two years again the best approach is to not let this happen I mean the day after seems very real to me it's got this kind of heaviness to it that I still feel when I see it even though I'm also going like well that was the 80s and we've survived till now so but that didn't happen and now this is the fifth wave okay so thereby at Lake the broad-strokes of this seem realistic to me earthquakes are kind of short and there's a sort of jolt and then they and I've been in an earthquake and that seemed pretty pretty well done and then the idea that the wave comes that is realistic in broad terms that's the thing with the tsunami the same thing it comes a while later but what I'm wondering is the volume the concentrated pulse of water from a lake I'm not convinced that it works out in terms of the size because the earthquake they looked like they were experienced it seemed like that was a major earthquake but it wasn't like Krakatoa or the ground level going up to bits and that was yet that was a very very powerful tsunami [Music] that's what I picture tsunami looking like if you experience it it's you know that's sort of the first rush of water and then it more and more morning you know we've seen footage in Japan and Sendai which you know what's the first really modern tsunami with like that kind of footage of it crashing into these urban areas and you know that I looked pretty pretty realistic to me let's check out Waterworld the polar ice caps have melted covering the earth with water those who survived have adapted to a new world so both probably and improbable the polar ice caps can melt they have in the past melted completely that are on their way towards melting now and that does raise sea level but it doesn't raise sea level so much that the entire earth is covered with water it raises the sea level so much that the oceans are larger and the landmass is comparatively smaller you know many times actually Earth has been ice-free in its history you know not recently not since human beings have been here so this is you know a realistic threat in a possible future where the earth would be ice-free and there'd be a lot more ocean than there is now and I would change VIPRE on earth for sure but it's taken to an extreme that that you would never see happen interestingly in my field astrobiology we consider the possibility of life on a lot of other kinds of planets that are like Earth but different in some ways and there is a kind of planet that we call water worlds which is a planet like Earth but that it initially just gets a lot more water so that it never develops continents that push up above the oceans it's completely covered with water and there's a lot of interesting question whether life could evolve on such a planet so they're probably our water worlds out there but this is probably not a realistic future earth okay let's skip ahead here there's almost a familiarity to this from thinking about astronauts in in a space capsule and having to recycle all their water and basically drink their own piss although you know nicely filtered and hopefully conditioned well and I see him doing that at first I think oh that makes sense he's keeping his water and filtering it but the difference between this and astronauts and his space capsules that he's surrounded by the water now you can't drink it because of salt water but what I'm wondering is is it really that much easier to filter and recycle your piss than to desalinate salt water in theory you could do either it takes some energy and some effort but I'm not sure about that maybe the pea would be easier to recycle at times when it didn't he'd have to manufacture fresh water either from the ocean or from his own reused bodily fluids and yeah the plant same thing most plants can't handle salt water like us they need fresh water so he did if he wanted the company of his vegetable companion he'd have to give it fresh water too alright let's fast-forward here through another part of Waterworld okay so here we see Kevin Costner breathing underwater or at least Kevin Costner's character which leads to the question could people evolve gills I don't see this happening naturally biologically in other words the world gets flooded some mutant humans are gonna be born with gills and then they survive better and give you know birth to a sub race of humans with gills I don't see evolution really working that way but in a way our closest analogies in the ocean are the the whales and dolphins and they didn't develop gills what they developed was the ability to hold their breath underwater and dive and then they go to the surface to breathe and they have lungs if it was that easy to develop gills why didn't dolfe ins and whales develop gills uh-huh tell me that evolution yeah yeah I think Kevin Costner should have a blow be or not have not gills when they make Waterworld - all right let's check out 12 monkeys five billion people died in 1996 and 1997 you believe 1996 is the present then is that it no 1996 is the past - listen to me I think this is great uh Bruce Willis is so good in this role you can see that they have every reason to believe he's nuts cuz he's spouting this this ridiculous story about time travel I love the way that setup and the depiction of the end of the world in this film again sort of frightening Lee realistic in that the notion of a world ending disaster because of some biological agent that humans are defenseless against you know it's not necessarily an imminent threat but there's a logic to it and they dire prognostications about a pestilence which he said would wipe out humanity approximately 600 years obviously this plague doomsday scenario is considerably more compelling when reality supports it with a virulent disease whatever the infecting agent is is something that's been evolving on earth with us for billions of years than is part of our you know biological system is sort of out of whack but if you have somebody deliberately engineering something that there's no defenses against there's potential that that could happen that's what's so unnerving about the fact that biological engineering is sort of getting easier and easier because it potentially puts it in the hands of people with you know less and less sort of institutional allegiance you know people have counter arguments about private why that probably wouldn't happen and it's not totally clear that it would but it's it's certainly based on a premise that has a realistic scientific rationale [Music] yeah so here we see New York City it's obviously been overrun for a while the plants are growing up in the streets and through some of the buildings and there's wildlife running through the streets herds of deer this looks pretty realistic to me I often wonder about what's gonna happen to cities when and if the humans disappear and and sometimes you you'll be in a place a part of New York are part of some other city where for some reason it's been a little block or a lot or something has been abandoned and the city's still there but it's kind of reverting the forest slowly so you're gonna have the grass growing tall and out of control and other volunteer species moving in and it's gonna you know go wild like this it's gonna take longer for the streets to become fields it's not gonna happen overnight the pavement tastic erode and sort of be worn down by biology and have stuff grow up and you know crack the pavement so it's gonna be a number of years before the streets look like fields it's hard to tell from from this clip how many years it's supposed to be all the cars are still there in the streets looking pretty pretty fresh they're not rusted out or anything at least as I could see right there I'm not sure the streets themselves are gonna that quickly turn into fields but they will eventually okay let's skip ahead here [Applause] this is really scary and and I think pretty well done in that one can imagine if there's a really widespread disease in a biological emergency in a you know crowded modern city like this there might be a need for for triage which is that if you're gonna save anybody you have have to not save some people it's sort of a horrible thing to contemplate and to depict here you know triage is a real response to certain kinds of emergencies and it's depicted in kind of a brutal way that you can imagine if figs were on the edge of chaos and the authorities were struggling to maintain control and this was the only way to prevent everybody from dying that you you could end up in a situation like this the notion that we could lose whole staple crops has some basis in reality the food system is arguably more vulnerable than it used to be because we're moving more towards these sort of monocultures and anytime you have a monoculture things that are you know genetically similar forming the whole basis of a food crop that makes it much more vulnerable than it would be if it were lots and lots of strains where a disease a pathogen might infect one but not not the neighbor's field which is a different strain the specific thing I think that's happening in interstellar if I remember correctly is that the air is changing the oxygen content is is going down and I thought that particular detail wasn't that realistic because there are things you could imagine we can do you know raising the co2 level which we're doing now which if it continues on the wrong course could cause our climate apocalypse but actually lowering the oxygen in the atmosphere is not that easy and that's not really a threat that would take you know many many thousands of years even if you stopped making new oxygen but the notion that we've changed the planet in some way that's making it harder to grow food is certainly not not that hard to imagine to save the world we meant to leave it the idea that someday people will try to go live on planets outside our solar system is not completely far-fetched it's challenging because the stars are so far away you can't get to them at an ordinary rocket with in anything like a human lifetime or a hundred human lifetimes but science fiction is full of people getting around that by inventing fantasy physics you know Worf drop warp drives or generation ships where you have multiple human generations living and in the descend the distant descendants of the people that set out other people that reach that other world and it could happen someday the thing that seems unrealistic to me about this is that that's gonna be a response to us messing up this planet it's like oh well we need to go live on another one because we screwed this one up and that really seems like a cop-out if we are ever able to go live on another planet in any kind of numbers where we could you know repopulate the human race and survive it seems to me in some much more far-off future than the much more immediate problem with figuring out how not to destroy Earth's climate and over populate the planet and cause a mass extinction and so if you ask me will we ever go live on planets around other stars I don't want to say never given enough time that's something that could happen but I don't see it as connected to our current climate threats but there's a kind of space industry space exploration that is absolutely essential to the project of saving the planet now this particular thing where you've got some hidden compound and people are getting ready to launch off and try to save themselves when everybody else dies I could see people objecting to that you know I might object to that and now next up the Martian I have created 126 square meters of soil with every cubic meter of soil requires 4000 meters of water to be farmable so the idea of farming on Mars is something that's been studied a lot by people at NASA and other agencies because we want to be able to send people to Mars and we want them to be able to live off the land because there's no way you could have any kind of a long-term presence on Mars and have to bring all the food from Earth just it's too expensive you're launching too much mass so you want to be able to grow your food there so it's an interesting question could you grow food in Martian soil and people are trying that actually with Marcin Martian simulant soils and it seems like something we probably could solve I think farming on Mars is realistic eventually they'll be able to do it but as I understand this story the premises that they weren't actually planning on doing this it was they're not at that point yet where they sent up a colony that had was really prepared to do this and he's improvising and that seems like he'd have to eat obviously very clever but he'd also have to get really lucky because there's gonna be a lot of factors I mean there's a balance a lot of things that can go awry I think it might be harder to grow food on Mars than is depicted in here but I also think it is possible so using the hydrazine from the rocket to separate into majors in them and hydrogen and then using hydrogen to make water I mean that's realistic that he's worked out the the author of this has worked out the chemistry but I'm not sure the biology part is gonna be as easy as he as he thinks I think that humans will eventually live on Mars but as a post-apocalyptic way to survive on earth it's it doesn't make much sense I mean it's certainly nothing to hope for because the idea that most people die and then a few people go get to live on Mars it's like yay let's think that's kind of that's a pretty dismal scenario but also the post-apocalyptic world is probably not the best world in which to innovate and have the resources to figure out how to go live on Mars so I think it's more likely than in a thriving world then you have the the scientific expertise and the resources and the support back on earth make the effort to go eventually build a sustained society on Mars I think it's gonna be harder to live on Mars than people currently think I bet there's gonna be failure before their success so it's easier for me to imagine that happening in a pre apocalyptic world where there's the innovation and Industry and support on earth to do the trial and error there's gonna be needed okay let's take a look at at Astra there is this idea that you could build a space elevator using a tether that was attached to the earth and extended all the way into orbit and the physics work out if you had the right material that had the right tensile strength it couldn't be that heavy but it'd have to be really strong and people want to make it out of these you know new kinds of like carbon nanofibers and things like that that if if they come up with the right material you could build a space elevator and then the idea is you climb up this rope or you essentially have elevators that run up and down it and it takes a lot less energy to get into orbit than it does with a rocket so it actually is physically realistic if you could make the right materials people are working on it draw up seeing a power surge on seatpost you're getting that if these guys are in space they're not gonna hear anything coming through the air there is no air but they might hear that pulse the electromagnetic pulse coming over their radio sets and I imagine it would have that kind of a wave sound that wobble you know that I've never heard an electromagnetic pulse but that that seems reasonable to me that it could have that kind of a wave sound piercing through their headsets uncontrolled release of antimatter could ultimately threaten the stability of our entire sources all life could be destroyed antimatter is real and the notion that you if you could isolate antimatter that you could use it for space propulsion is a real idea that at least theoretically people have toyed with and of course on Star Trek you've got the matter/antimatter engines and that that's riffing off of a real thing which is that if antimatter encounters matter it makes a tremendously powerful explosion it would be a way to convert a small amount of mass to a huge amount of energy which is great if you want to fuel a spacecraft you don't want to bring a lot of mass but you want something that's gonna keep on giving you energy so that's it's a good idea but we don't really know how to isolate antimatter and we can make atoms of antimatter individual atoms or even small molecules and in the lab that lasts for you know some ridiculous nanosecond or a femtosecond but but the idea that we could make a container full of it and then take it on board a spaceship it's still a science fiction dream but I I see the premise here that they've figured out how to do that and that's how they're powering their deep-space mission that that doesn't seem impossible I don't know what the specific thing happening up near Neptune would be but certainly one can imagine things that would happen out near Neptune that would affect the earth I mean in the galaxy there are natural things that happen that are powerful enough that if one happened to put out super-powerful flares with the radiation that would sterilize all life and things like that things like that happen in the universe and if you were the distance from Earth to Neptune from one of those explosions or flares or something you'd be in trouble so if you imagine that there was something that happened out in Neptune that was that powerful then yeah or if Earth would be in trouble fast forward right here I don't see it as unreasonable that you could have some sort of a city or colony of people on the moon it would you know obviously take a lot of resources to build but there are people that want to do such things and there's nothing physically impossible I mean you have to solve the problems of you're gonna need energy you're gonna need water you're going to need food so there's nothing about seeing this scale of act of human activity and human habitation on the moon that strikes me is physically impossible it's just a matter of having the money and the political will to decide to do it okay now we have to check out Wally I love this movie wall-e is a great great film and there are a few things about it that are oddly realistic where you're descending through that layer of space debris that's a real thing that can happen and it's a concern now that we're putting so much stuff out there that if you can get this cascade where if satellites are out of control and start to collide into each other that creates more debris which creates more collisions so it's it's an actual real concern that you could end up with this sort of impassable ring of space debris that makes it harder to you know do anything in orbit other than just like it hit with the brief you know this world it's it's kind of a worst-case scenario you see the windmills and the nuclear cooling tanks so it looks like you're getting this quick glimpse of this planet where they tried alternative energy of various kinds to tried to save themselves but they just got overrun in their own garbage and then you know basically lost it and you know it's a cartoon so you can get away with a lot but the the notion that we are threatened by just making too much stuff and it piling up is is kind of a wonderful way to encapsulate one of our real challenges now of humans in the 21st century realizing that the earth is not infinite and that we can't just throw stuff away because there is no away there's only one planet you know when we were much fewer in number and didn't occupy the whole earth you could throw stuff away in the world was sort of functionally infinite but now we're realizing it's finite and if we don't deal with that then the end result is wall-e [Music] so touching the romance between Wally and and IVA I'm always moved you know I it's very very hard to completely wipe out life from a planet like Earth the earth has been through some mass extinctions before were you know really horrible things happen and wipe out most life but life is very very tenacious and it's very ingrained in the planet so most disasters that would wipe out human civilization or even the human race would not even come close to wiping out the biosphere the biosphere would sort of shrug us off and keep going I mean it's happened over and over again the biosphere is not fragile we're fragile our civilization is fragile but you're not gonna wipe out all life from Earth so yeah bugs asteroids volcanoes all that stuff all real threats maybe not completely realistic as depicted in the movies always but real real things to worry about and then there's the you know the biological disaster the genetic engineering accident the mutant that gets out of the lab and wipes out all life and again there's a realistic component to that worry episo-- so all these things hollywood maybe runs off with them in directions that make scientists go you know not quite but they're all real threats thanks for listening to me talk about post-apocalyptic worlds may we never see any of them come true

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Keywords: apocalypse, breakdown, the breakdown, apocalyptic, david grinspoon, apocalyptic scene, apocalyptic movie, apocalypse movie, apocalypse scene, movie breakdown, scene breakdown, i am legend explained, interstellar explained, wall-e explained, the day after explained, ad astra explained, waterworld explained, 12 monkeys explained, the martian explained, the 5th wave explained, the apocalypse, astrobiology, astrobiologist, apocalypse movies, apocalypse scenes, gq, gq magazine

Id: u2ivR5B1PVs

Length: 27min 1sec (1621 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 04 2020