The popular Netflix movie Don’t Look Up is a satirical send up of two astronomers’ attempts to warn an indifferent world to the civilization-ending threat of an imminent asteroid impact. After its release, the film generated the most Netflix viewing hours in a single week.
At the heart of the movie is the question of what to do in the face of a threat from a 10-kilometer diameter asteroid heading straight towards us. That’s a similar size to the asteroid that that killed off the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. If we had only 6 months warning, how could we save civilization?
Now we have an answer thanks to the work of Philip Lubin and Alexander Cohen at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who have worked out how the world can defend itself in such a situation and in what circumstances this defense would be futile.
The bottom line is that Earth could probably defend itself against a 10-kilometer asteroid given 6 months’ notice but anything much larger would be beyond hope.
