Comments on: Doomsday review

By: Phobos

Phobos — Mon, 26 Jun 2006 17:25:30 +0000

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?

By: Irishman

Irishman — Mon, 19 Jun 2006 16:20:15 +0000

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.

By: brent

brent — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 02:54:24 +0000

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!

By: The Bad Astronomer

The Bad Astronomer — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 05:10:53 +0000

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.

By: tacitus

tacitus — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 04:53:15 +0000

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.

By: Adrian Melott

Adrian Melott — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 03:00:34 +0000

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.

By: Eighthman

Eighthman — Fri, 16 Jun 2006 02:37:45 +0000

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.