I just got done watching the doomsday show on the SciFi channel (if you missed it, I heard it will be replayed on June 25th, so check your local listings). I think it was not too bad– I was expecting more cheese, and it was remarkably low in that, especially given that channel’s penchant for extra fromage.
It was pretty accurate for the most part, though I did wince once or twice. I really don’t think a robot uprising is anything we need worry about too much, for example. Maybe a little, but really, I don’t think military drones will get "a mind of their own".
The astronomy sequences were pretty good. I had some further comments on GRBs that I wish they had used. I really stressed the low probability of getting fried by one, as well as the low probability of a global killer asteroid impact. In general, the show was slightly alarmist, but it did a much better than usual job of showing what we can do about preventing a lot of these threats.
So overall, I think it was OK. It covered a lot of ground, wasn’t unnecessarily gloomy, had a lot of expert opinions, was fairly if not totally accurate, and did talk about mitigation.
One thing most people don’t know about filming something like that is the amount of time spent doing it. I’d guess it took about 5 hours to do all the interviewing… but that includes a segment of me looking through a telescope that was never used. That took over an hour to set up and shoot. Mrs. Bad Astronomer noted that I was on a lot, but never for more than about three seconds. I probably got more air time than anyone else (except Michio Kaku I suppose), but it was in really short segments. People who know me will laugh; it takes me three minutes just to state my name. I’m a little wordy sometimes. OK, all the time.
It was also cool to see so many friends on the show. Neil Tyson, Seth Shostak, and especially Barbara Thompson, who had an office across the hall from me when I worked at Goddard Space Flight Center. She is a very dear friend whom I love madly, so it was neat to be on a show with her.
All in all, it was a fun experience. I’d like to do more stuff like this in the future (maybe next time I’ll try to project more gravitas when talking about a GRB sterilizing our planet down to the base of the crust), so if any Hollywood types are reading this, my rates are reasonable, and I’ll guarantee you’ll have a more accurate and dramatic show. You know where to find me.
June 15th, 2006 at 1:25 am
Phil, you did a fine job.
Unfortunately, I’m not a “Hollywood type,” but I am a “media type” who thoroughly enjoys your web site and blog and am considering expanding your exposure in Statesboro GA by way of a column in our paper in the near future.
It may be a futile effort; if I remember correctly, GWB won this county in 2004 with 83 percent of the vote. And we all know how THAT’S turning out. I’m so just proud to be a redneck…. sigh.
Good job, and watch out for those danged robots.
And you really should check out David Attenborough’s “Life of Birds.” You often comment on the fact that the real universe is interesting enough without all the BS and RCH, and you’re right.
But there’s still a lot of cool stuff on this planet too.
And as usual, thanks for all your work.
June 15th, 2006 at 4:05 am
eddie, your election figures are wrong. In 2004 Bush had 51% of the popular vote and 53 % of the electoral votes (286 of 538).
Regarding the SF channel, considering that they have shows promoting “psychics” and “ghost hunters†it is a wonder that they even know whether it is raining or not.
BA: Congrats for the chance to “speak your pieceâ€, even if in 3 second bits.
June 15th, 2006 at 5:10 am
I found the program fairly cool, if sometimes over the edge.
I’m definately not too sure about the growth of machine AI to be as fast as was stated (though it’d be nice). And even when it happens, I don’t think we have much to worry about. Still, I think I better check on Ebay for any spare cybernetic parts…
I’m skeptical on the terrorist nuke part. It’s not THAT easy to get one and transport it, especially if it’s one megaton, like the example stated.
A dirty bomb is more probable.
As for the ecosystem part, I know there is a little good news in that area; such efforts to preserve species have begun in Florida with saltwater fish. The efforts date back to the initalizing of net bans in the early 1990s. Nowadays, fish populations are healthy. Goes to show some simple things can save our animals.
Hmm, maybe I’ve become a bit wordy in this post. I have a kindred spirit here!
June 15th, 2006 at 5:52 am
ellis said
Ellis, please read more carefully. I wrote “in this COUNTY,” not country. I was referring to local results, as I thought I made clear by including my city, which is Statesboro in Bulloch County GA.
But you do have a point about the SciFi channel and their usual programming. That’s why it’s so good to hear a voice of reason like the BA aired there, even if in such brief segments.
June 15th, 2006 at 6:00 am
Previous comment should have begun with “eddie said” rather than “ellis said.” My apologies to ellis.
Things are a bit wonky on the blog this morning. Must be the killer bots threatening to rain down killer comets on the SciFi channel, not to mention Phil’s fatal GRBs.
June 15th, 2006 at 6:02 am
Ellie – eddie was referring to his county in GA, not country (note the lack of an “r” in there).
June 15th, 2006 at 7:17 am
We don’t get sci-fi channel here in Norway, do you know if the program is or will be available for download at all or if it will be carried by discovery at all in the future?
Stuart
June 15th, 2006 at 8:06 am
I liked the “rogue assassin” bit, that was a nice touch. I’ve noticed the previews and thought it was going to be another stupid show a la Fox moon hoax, and was disappointed to see Matt Lauer stooping to that level, but I was totally surprised when I heard the familiar voice of everyone’s favorite BA. Silly me for not reading the entry about you being a media whore . . .
June 15th, 2006 at 8:16 am
Hey Phil!
I did not know you were going to be on the show. My significant and I were watching, I spotted you and blurted out (in a some what moronic fashion), “Hey! Hey! That’s the Bad Astronomer! The site I’m always telling you about!!”
I have to agree, I do not see the robot uprising any time soon. All in all it was quite interesting. Only caught myself doing a “Yeah, right” a couple of times.
You did a fine job by the way
They should have had you on more, in my humble opinion.
Congrats, none the less!
Heidi in Phoenix….first post, about time, I’ve been a regular reader for quite some time.
June 15th, 2006 at 9:30 am
I only caught the first hour, but I’ll be watching the rest tonight. The only one that seemed sensationalized to me was the ‘robot uprising’. Their mention of the Robonaut irratated me, because it’s a remote control robot. In one scene you can even see someone operating it in the background. Other than that, it was interesting to watch.
It was nice to see something with a little less fiction on SciFi. Whenever I watch that channel, it’s more for entertainment that reality. Although, after some of the programs I’ve seen on The Discovery Channel, I’ve started calling it The End of the World Channel. Granted, the things DS shows is in the realm of possibility, but sometimes it seems overly dramatic. I guess that’s how you get ratings, though.
Anyway, good show, and if it’s any consolation to Heidi, I blurted the same thing out to my wife. I knew he was going to be on, and was looking for him, though.
Berlie, on the 3rd rock from OUR Sun.
June 15th, 2006 at 9:45 am
The Bad Astronomer said:Mrs. Bad Astronomer noted that I was on a lot, but never for more than about three seconds.
Yeah, that was kinda funny. As soon as I was able to say, “hey, there’s the BA”, you’d be gone.
The BA also said:I really don’t think a robot uprising is anything we need worry about too much, for example. Maybe a little, but really, I don’t think military drones will get “a mind of their own”.
That whole sequence was ridiculous. The only reason I can think of for including it was so the Sci/Fi channel could “plug” Battlestar Galactica.
What really cheesed me off was the use of clips from the movie “I Robot” to drive home their point of the “killer robots”. Sadly ironic since Isaac Asimov’s robot stories (on which that movie was “based”) take the view that robots are simply tools, and if one builds tools well, then all of this killer robot “stuff” becomes pulp fiction non-sense.
June 15th, 2006 at 10:21 am
Sorry, Phil, didn’t realize you were on more segments than the aliens. Watched that bit and didn’t bother recording the rest. Also, the program implied that the Sun would end in a supernova. Yeah, right.
It was just a bit too cheesy for my taste.
Guess I’ll have to program the TiVo for the repeat so I can watch your bits and skim the rest.
June 15th, 2006 at 10:23 am
Yeah, the Frankenstein complex is still alive and kicking, more’s the pity. Repeat after me: “No robot may harm a human being, or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm. . . .”
June 15th, 2006 at 11:07 am
Overall, I thought the show was alright. I was a bit dissapointed in that not all of their “Doomsday Scenarios” were actual doomsday scenarios. The supervolcano bit is a good example of that. It would be a massive natural disaster that would claim the lives of perhaps millions of people, but it wouldn’t be the end for all life on the planet.
Another one I thought was less then a doomsday scenario was, actually, one of their most likely options. Well, I should be a bit more specific then that. While I think it is possible that there might one day be that horrific a virus, the one in particular that the show seemed to focus on, Bird Flu, isn’t that virus. I won’t go into reasons of why I think this unless someone wants me to.
I thought the astronimcal parts were good, though, BA, I might have to disagree with you a bit on what strategy aliens would take to kill us. It was neat to watch a show and see some scientists I knew of on it, like BA and Neil Tyson (he gave a guest lecture at my college about a year and a half ago).
One thing I need to mention about the gamma ray burst part. There was that one guy who, a couple of times, pitched the idea of storing DNA away somehow so we could reseed life. Did anyone notice that he mentioned buring some of it deep underground in case of a gamma ray burst only minutes after BA said that a GRB would melt the crust of the planet?
June 15th, 2006 at 11:32 am
I missed it!
I’ll have to see if it airs again on the 25th.
If there will be a robot uprising, I will be prepared. I got just the manual I need.
June 15th, 2006 at 12:08 pm
So Phil, did you have to sign any waivers saying that they could repurpose parts of your interview for future shows without your permission? I sometimes see little snippets of scientists saying stuff on these shows, and think, “hmm…. that sounds really out of context for that person to say. I wonder if they were actually answering the question that we heard, or something entirely unrelated?”
Anyway, I’ll have to catch the repeat as I missed it last night.
June 15th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
Brains and beauty…what a combination…
Dr Thompson…is she spoken for?…(pant snort drool)…
June 15th, 2006 at 1:32 pm
I only caught the last hour. Correct me if I’m wrong but I thought that Matt Lauer, in referenece to comets, stated that they were more difficult or impossible to predict because they come ‘from other galaxies.’ Hopefully my memory played a trick on me.
I thought that comets are generally defined as being part of the solar system so I wouldn’t expect to get hit by one from outside the galaxy until Andromeda gets a lot closer.
June 15th, 2006 at 3:49 pm
Given the quality of the rest of the SciFi Network’s output, outside of Friday nights, I thought the Doomsday documentary was much better than expected. It would not have been out of place on TLC or National Geographic these days.
I didn’t mind the sci-fi tie-ins, considering the expected audience, and it wasn’t overly dramatic or alarmist, which was a welcome surprise.
Now it remains to be seen if they got the ratings they wanted. I hope they do, as there is a huge overlap between science and scifi, and I would love to see more documentaries in this vein. It certainly would beat that craptastic TV movie drivel, like “Mansquito” and “Crocodile 2: Death Swamp”, they usually fill the air time with.
June 15th, 2006 at 6:14 pm
Obviously they need to do an entire show with the Bad Astronomer as the only speaker. Enough of this 3 sec at a time stuff. Then he could put the other nonsense to rest. Are you up for it Phil?
June 15th, 2006 at 7:37 pm
I yelled at the TV when the show said that the Sun was going to explode in 4 to 5 billion years. Um, no it won’t. It would have been more educational to note that would is really expected to happen: over the next several hundred milliion years the Sun will get more luminous, and become too much for Earth to support life. Then, it will be come a red giant and swallow the inner planets. I guess it was just easier to make up a fact that the Sun would blow up.
And it bugs me when shows seem to just throw together every piece of public-domain astronomical video they can find.
June 15th, 2006 at 8:00 pm
Taken individually, most comments by people interviewed were fine. However, the editors flayed it into mush.
For example:
1. If supervolcanos were a mass extinction threat, we would not exist. Maybe one big near-extinction, the Permian, was connected with volcanos.
2. At the end of the Sun’s evolution, it does not explode, it swells, and does not encompass the whole solar system.
3. Gamma ray bursts: maybe, within the last billion years, one or two have been close enough to seriously
damage the ozone layer. The odds of one being close enough to do the kind of heat and radiation damage portrayed in the show are so low as to be laughable. The fact that they followed this cartoon with mention of the Ordovician extinction (our work) gives the false and misleading impression that this kind of event is being seriously considered as having happened. The UV hazard due to ozone depletion is being considered, but this wasn’t mentined and has nothing to do with blowing off the atmosphere.
4. Nearby supernovae were not mentioned, and they are about as big a threat as GRBs.
All of this is because TV folk, without any scientific checkback, had final authority to construct the thing out of the comments they had compiled, making it as sensational as they could.
June 15th, 2006 at 9:53 pm
Hey, the Doomsday show made it on to the Daily Show on Comedy Central tonight! It was the middle segment (starting about 10 minutes into the show).
Nothing really exciting, just a gentle mocking of the apocalyptic aspect of the show. Some funny lines, and even a (weak) tie-in punchline with the Darryl Hannah story about being removed from a walnut tree they made fun of yesterday. (Don’t ask).
This edition of the Daily Show will be repeated a couple of times tonight and tomorrow. Sadly no BA sighting.
June 15th, 2006 at 10:10 pm
Well, Adrian, I did recommend they talk to you too!
(For those not in the know, Adrian is at Kansas U and studies the effects of GRBs on the Earth.)
In fact, I winced very hard at the comments about what happens when the Sun dies, and then totally forgot about them when I wrote my review. That was the one really big scientific screwup they made.
June 16th, 2006 at 7:54 pm
it was fun. my wife kept rolling her eyes everytime i yelled “there he is!”
but did you watch their movie the next night, about the black hole? now i bet that made you wince!
June 19th, 2006 at 9:20 am
Watched the program. A little too over the top. Robot uprising, indeed. I loved showing the DARPA Grand Challenge with the automated cars. They emphasized the Red Hummer – except that one was programmed by an army of engineers programming every detail of motion from GPS points along the predetermined path to how fast to travel in each location. The autonomy there was very low, compared to the Princeton team.
The comet comment caught me, too. He said something to the effect that comets are not predictable because the come from out in the galaxy and are not orbiting the Sun. Aren’t most comets either on a highly elliptical solar orbit (a la Comet Haley) or else perturbed from the Oort cloud? In other words, orbiting the Sun. Okay, the predictability can be lower because they either have long periods so we don’t know they’re coming, or they are disturbed by something to head inward.
I’m still not sure what we would do if Yellowstone blew up. Okay, maybe it wouldn’t end all life on Earth, but it sure would make our lives mighty unpleasant.
June 26th, 2006 at 10:25 am
Depressing show (sure, very alarmist, but still…)
I’m curious, Phil, do you really think that alien robots (slow, expensive, tiny) are more likely to be discovered prior to something like radio waves (fast, cheap, broadcast)? Or was that statement just an artifact of the show’s editing?