One of the theoretical duties of the astronomer is to inform the public that something very big and horrible is about to happen: The sun will soon explode, a black hole has just entered Earth's path, hostile aliens have amassed an armada right behind the moon.
In the new film "Don't Look Up", Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence play astronomer who must spread the news when they discover a comet is headed for Earth.
It doesn't work out. The president of the United States is worried about her poll numbers more than anything. The scientists are ridiculed on a television talk show. Rich people want to exploit the comet. The End of the World has had some great films, but the most enjoyable has been Stanley Kubrick's 1964 black comedy, "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb."
It brought back my experience reporting Really Bad news. In March of 1998, I was the deputy science editor of The Times, and my audience was small but elite: The Times's top editors. I had only been on the job for a month. Nobody really knew who I was. The science editor took the week off, leaving me in charge.
I walked into the 4:30 news meeting late in the afternoon of March 11 and announced that we had a story by Malcolm Browne, who was a distinguished reporter. I said it was a good story. It is about the end of the world.
The astronomer who calculated that the asteroid 1997 XF11 would come within 30,000 miles of Earth was Brian Marsden.
The director of the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams is Brian Marsden, who is responsible for keeping track of comets and asteroids. He had just calculated that a mile-wide rock named 1997 XF11 would pass within 30,000 miles of Earth in October of 2028, and had a small but real chance of hitting our planet.
Dr. Marsden said that he had never seen anything like that before. He wanted to share this with the world in an I.A.U. Circular.
The front-page meeting turned into a pandemonium. I answered questions from my colleagues at work about whether or not they should continue to pay their mortgage, as well as questions from the top editors. The asteroid had a fuzzy dot in the dark. I was in the middle of a crash course in the scrutiny of a front-page story before it can be published.
I didn't want to go home that night, but eventually did. The next morning it was over. The pictures of the asteroid from several years ago were found overnight, and they showed that 1997 XF11 would miss the Earth by 600,000 miles. It was still close, but safe for civilization.
An image of the asteroid 1997 XF11, now a minor planet, was taken on March 11, 1998 by the astronomer Bernadette Rodgers of the University of Washington.
Dr. Marsden was reprimanded by his colleagues and the media as a "Chicken Little" for making "cockamamie calculations" without consulting other sceptics who already knew that the asteroid posed no risk. NASA told the astronomer to get their act together before they told the public about the apocalypse.
Dr. Marsden said that he helped raise awareness on the danger of asteroid strikes and extinction, but apologized for generating such a scare.
He later wrote in The Boston Globe that the incident was bad for his reputation and that they needed a scare like that to bring attention to the problem. If we had not made the announcement, it would have led to condemnation that science was being stripped of its essential openness.
I had known Dr. Marsden for 20 years and I felt bad for him. He died in 2010. I felt bad for myself. How often do you get to cover the end of the world after a month on the job? The New York Post ran a headline that said "Kiss Your Asteroid!" and I took it personally.
The New York Post had a cover of March 13 and the New York Times had a front-page article.
Amy Mainzer, an asteroid expert at the University of Arizona who served as a scientific consultant on "Don't Look Up," said that the incident was a kind of turning point.
Congress ordered NASA in 2005 to find and track at least 90 percent of all asteroids larger than 500 feet wide. They didn't give much money to pay for the search until later. We live in a shooting gallery.
$150 million a year is spent on NASA. Donald Yeomans, a comet expert at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, criticized Dr. Marsden back in 1998.
The work of sorting asteroids and comets has been done by computers, and they compare them with known objects to see how dangerous they are. Anything that comes within five million miles of Earth is considered a Potentially Hazardous object.
Dr. Mainzer said that they didn't have all that back then. We have learned a lot as a community.
Less than three weeks after NASA launched a mission to see whether asteroids could be diverted from their trajectory, Adam McKay will direct and co-written the film "Don't Look Up" on Friday. The film is not about asteroids, but about the tendency of humans to dismiss bad news from science. It was conceived as an example of the failure to act on climate change. Dr. Mainzer said that a lot of people don't want to hear it. This is frightening as a scientist.
The film was shot during the Pandemic and the parallels to the health crisis are hard to miss.
Dr. Mainzer said that scientists don't have the power to change anything. How do we get people to act on scientific information? She asked if they should work within the system if they have to deal with misinformation.
Dr. Mainzer said that humor helps. We don't have to go down that path.
