As you know by now because I am shilling it constantly, the SciFi channel is airing a show at 9:00 p.m. tonight on doomsday scenarios. The producers asked if I could travel to NYC to do some pre-show press stuff, but unfortunately I couldn’t get away (and I am such a media whore you just know that has to be true).
However, the show did sponsor a press conference in DC, and it was covered (not terribly seriously, of course) by the Washington Post. It’s a funny (and short) article, so take a look. Now I really wish I had gone on the junket; astronaut Ed Lu was there, and I met him at James Randi’s The Amaz!ng Meeting in January. He is a great guy, and I like him a lot.
Oh well, the obvious conclusion is: when offered a chance to travel on someone else’s nickel, take it.
Anyway, after I watch the show tonight I’ll post a review as soon as I can.
June 14th, 2006 at 3:19 pm
Do you know if the show is a critical look, or a “it’s all true!” show with you as the token skeptic? (And I’m not making any assumptions, even given the comments about who was at the press junket…)
June 14th, 2006 at 3:39 pm
Beats me. But it’ll be 9:00 on the east coast pretty soon, and we’ll find out.
June 14th, 2006 at 5:46 pm
Is this woman for real? She sounds like an easily-spooked 7th-grader:
BEWARE of the robot takeover…. ()-8~
June 14th, 2006 at 6:42 pm
They certainly are hyping the inevitable robot takeover, I’ll say that for them. We’re DOOOOOOMED.
And I have to wonder (well, no, I don’t wonder at all) about all the footage of SciFi’s Battlestar Galactica!
June 14th, 2006 at 7:28 pm
Wow, Phil – you look so … cheerful describing the destructive capability of a gamma ray burst!
June 14th, 2006 at 7:55 pm
They left out out the good doomsday scenarios. What about Cern accidentally making strange matter? There should be a warnining about self-replicating nanobots eating the surface of the planet. And my personal favorite, the False Vacuum Meta-Stability Tunneling Catastrophe. Those are real doomsday scenarios. (Gamma-Ray bursts are impressive also.)
June 14th, 2006 at 8:08 pm
Completely forgot about this until about ten minutes before it ended… I had SciFi on mute as I was working on the computer and looked up to catch a familiar face! Unmuted the TV just as you went off, though. So I called my fiance and had him tape the second airing.
Ahh, but Michael Crichton already wrote about that in Prey. And we all know how accurate and unbiased HE is, especially after State of Fear.
June 14th, 2006 at 8:14 pm
Re the CERN issue…what if someone at CERN made anti-matter, but that was later stolen by someone claiming to be working for the Illuminati and used to attack the Vatican and booster support for Christianity?
Oh…hang on…
June 14th, 2006 at 8:23 pm
There’s actually a rather entertaining website named Exit Mundi that has a few dozen End of the World scenarios. I especially like the one about strange matter.
June 14th, 2006 at 8:34 pm
For those of you who – like me – forgot to program TiVo in time, there’s another showing on the 25th. Until then, I’m just going to cover my ears and say, “la, la, la.”
June 14th, 2006 at 8:56 pm
I must echo Karen – You obviously enjoyed talking about the GRB. The good news: the odds of a Milkyway GRB being pointed at us – very low.
jbs
June 14th, 2006 at 9:51 pm
All I can say is the program needed more Phil and less sensationalism and credulity.
Many of the videos segments looked very familiar (of course with the movie clips), but for the non-movie clips, especially after they shown for the third, fourth, etc., time.
The narration contained numerous scientific errors, such as, “Solar flares get released when the Sun gets overloaded with the magnetic energy it’s constantly burning.”
On the plus side, it’s always good to see Kimberly Weaver.
And the BA really got into that GRB section, (with a big smile) “It could boil the oceans, it could melt the crust, this is real, you know, end-of-the-world kind of stuff!”
GRB: Grinning, but Realistic Badastronomer.
June 14th, 2006 at 11:05 pm
June 15th, 2006 at 5:13 am
Not just Phil, Seth Shostak and Michio Kaku looked positively cheerful, too. Well, Kaku, who I like a lot, is always the cheerful, telegenic physicist. The flip side is sounding dour or alarmist, which is better left to the more immediate doomsday scenarios such as how we are killing off species and raping the earth. I appreciated the lack of smiles there. Regrettably I fell asleep during the virus segment, so I’ll have to watch it again, but I hope some viewers thought, “Gamma ray bursts–yeah cool!” and do some online researching about them. Too, I liked the comment by Phil about aliens hurling a rock at us being a good way to cause general mayhem on our “mudball,” as Kaku calls Earth.
From a telegenic perspective, you did good.
Mak, I especially liked that segment (my electromagnetic storm-desire post never posted here, though admittedly I sounded like I welcome another Canada scenario), but I don’t think that’s a way-off comment. In the interest of time information gets sliced and diced and sometimes oversimplified, but to quote from the April Sky & Telescope by solar physicist Carolus Schrijver who works on the TRACE mission:
Earlier he says, that we “are gradually learning to appreciate all the ways in which magnetic activity within the Sun’s atmosphere spreads into interplanetary space…” So, how would you briefly sum it up into one sentence? And what were some other errors?
June 16th, 2006 at 6:18 am
Ok, other people mentioned it in the other entry–about the Sun “exploding.” Considering that the demise of the Sun is certain death for Earth, I don’t understand why this concept can’t be conveyed correctly. The Science Channel did a good visual representation of this. I see the word “explosive” so often regarding the Sun’s daily activities, and that’s OK, but it confuses the visual concept of it becoming very large and enveloping our planet. I guess they don’t let scientists vet the program before it runs?
June 16th, 2006 at 11:47 am
Don’t these shows that broadcast doomsday stories always get extremely high ratings?