The Disaster Movie Bill Nye Said Was Painfully Accurate
Thinking about the end of the world isn't all that fun, but unfortunately, it remains an ever-present concern, and not just because Earth faces a variety of threats from space. There are plenty of homegrown disasters just waiting to happen, and one of the most salient and increasingly disturbing is climate change, which will have major impacts on Earth in the future.
Lamentably, getting the word out about how human activities are slowly going to kill us all has proven to be about as difficult as getting everyone to consider our collective fate in general. We don't like to think about it, but global warming is already wreaking havoc on our world, with heat waves increasing in intensity, extreme weather events becoming more common, and intense wildfires becoming an even bigger issue than they already were. Getting people to listen and, more importantly, act, however, hasn't been the easiest task, especially since there remains significant swathes of the global population who believe all of this climate change talk is nonsense.
Hollywood has even tried to do what it can to move the needle, with a 2021 movie that uses the allegory of a comet approaching Earth to dramatize the way in which scientists' warnings about climate change are being ignored, overlooked, or met with utter incredulity. And it turns out this particular movie just happens to be alarmingly accurate in its depiction of this issue — at least according to everyone's favorite pop culture science nerd Bill Nye.
Bill Nye credits a Netflix disaster movie for its accuracy
Back in 2022, Bill Nye launched "The End is Nye," a docuseries exploring cataclysmic events that might befall our planet. Ever since hosting the science education show "Bill Nye the Science Guy" back in the 90s, the educator has maintained a significant public profile, helping to spread awareness of science and its discoveries for decades. With his apocalypse-themed series, Nye tried to provide a scientific insight into how our world might come to an end, and during the press run, gave his opinion on which movies had best depicted such a scenario.
According to USA Today, Nye considers the Netflix movie "Don't Look Up" a "painfully" realistic portrayal of the frustrations faced by climate change scientists. The 2021 black comedy was written and directed by Adam McKay and starred Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as Dr. Randall Mindy and Kate Dibiasky, astronomers who discover a comet hurtling towards Earth. With humanity's survival hanging in the balance, Mindy and Dibiasky do their best to warn the world about their impending doom, but their pleas fall on deaf ears. It seems this last aspect is what struck such a chord with Nye, who claimed this allegory for the way in which large parts of society ignore climate change was spot on.
In the film, everyone from government officials to celebrities and media personalities are depicted as utterly indifferent to the looming catastrophe, which evidently was an all too familiar picture to Nye. As he told the outlet, "[The film] is preaching to the choir. I wouldn't be surprised if the irony of 'Don't Look Up' is lost on the people it was really intended for because it is so painfully close to what's happening right now."
Don't Look Up was made with the help of an expert
In "Don't Look Up," political in-fighting and indifference to the comet's imminent impact results in the comet hitting Earth off the coast of Chile, causing an extinction-level event. As it happens, Bill Nye was right to praise the accuracy of the film in that respect, as the comet and its impact are all scientifically sound. You might expect as much since the movie used Dr. Amy Mainzer as a consultant.
A professor in the Lunar and Planetary Lab at the University of Arizona, and principal investigator for NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, Dr. Mainzer provided expert advice to McKay on his black comedy disaster film. The comet in the movie is loosely based on a real 9-kilometer-wide (almost 6 miles) comet, and its eventual impact was based on Dr. Mainzer's expert advice. As she told Tudum, the VFX team was careful to base the visuals of this catastrophe on "scientifically based calculations" to the extent that, in the doctor's opinion, "you get a pretty good look at it — for dinosaurs, that's probably what it looked like."
Scientists have actually predicted the exact year all life on Earth will end, and it's a long, long time from now. But that's assuming none of the multiple threats to life on our planet take us all before then, which according to Bill Nye, might very well be the case.