The new movie by Adam McKay on Netflix called “Don’t Look Up” has many people talking.
The all-star cast that features Leonardo DiCaprio, Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Tyler Perry, and Cate Blanchett is about a comet on a collision course with Earth, set to destroy our planet in six months.
It’s a scary premise. The question is, could it happen?
Dr. Amy Mainzer is an astronomer and was an advisor on the movie. She told Yahoo Canada that you shouldn’t lose any sleep worrying about such a calamity. It’s very, very unlikely.
“The good news is a really major event like what’s portrayed in the movie, we know that, that can’t happen very regularly…because we’re here. If that sort of thing happened on a regular basis in our time span, compared to the span that humans have been on the planet, well, we wouldn’t be here.
“The last such major event was the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. So we know that this is a very infrequent event, that said, smaller events can happen more frequently. So that’s why we go out and we look for the objects and try to figure out where they are.”
Mainzer has some credibility in the matter. Her team discovered a brand new comet called NEOWISE last year. She worked with Jennifer Lawrence, who plays a scientist in the movie, to help her look and come across as believable.
McKay used the comet destroying the earth as a metaphor for what he and others believe is a looming catastrophe of equal proportion. Global warming. Lawrence and Leo’s characters try to alert the public and government officials about the looming catastrophic event, only to be met with pushback and comet deniers.
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