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