Astrobiologist Breaks Down Apocalypse Scenes from Movies | GQ

Hello everyone, I'm David Grinspoon, I'm an

astrobiologist

and I study how planets gain life and how they lose it. Welcome to the collapse, well, let's start with a day after those are Minuteman missiles as a test, as a warning to everyone. the kind of post-disaster depictions to me that this is in some ways the scariest thing because it's a real thing that they tried to make a realistic movie oh but I actually remember when this aired and I'm watching this and I'm thinking where to go these people run, how is it really going to help. I mean, in theory, you know you go down to the basement and yes, you know you can avoid the immediate effects of nuclear fallout by sheltering in place and not reproducing. that outside air with the dust and if you get enough of it in a basement or something, you could escape the radiation if you're not literally in the blast zone, that's just it.

I'm also looking at these people and thinking, yeah, so what are you going to do? do a few days so that there is the immediate pulse of some of these short-lived radionuclides that if you manage to take refuge in a place and do not breathe that air and breathe the dust that falls for a few days and then come out, you are much better, that is the theory that there's something you can do to stay alive right away and then you know maybe that's the only city that was nuked and you can get to another one, you know that, but maybe not, okay, let's move on here, Yeah. boy, that doesn't look like fun at all, the first thing I noticed was that the electromagnetic pulse was represented.

If the glass doesn't reach you and the radiation doesn't reach you, the electromagnetic pulse will cause all our electrical machines to stop working inside. a certain radius and then the explosion itself is terribly convincing to me. You know, I'm not sure about that scene where all the people turn into skeletons, but even that I think is an attempt to represent the fact that there are these x-rays that are coming out of what's frying everyone and even it's conceivable that you'd see something like that in your last microsecond of consciousness before it happens to you too, yeah I think that's pretty well represented as far as I understand that first of all there would be a completely blinding flash of radiation so intense that everything would be white in every direction, even with your eyes closed, if that didn't blind you and you could still see, then yeah, there would be this huge mushroom cloud that's just... you know, the pulse thermal immediately expands this volume of air which is low density because it's very hot and it just rises like a giant bubble into the stratosphere and every time you release that much energy near the surface of the planet, you're going to get, you know, a bubble like that that inexorably it rises and forms that mushroom.

I mean, everything that's left would burn up, you know, the consequences of a nuclear explosion in the city is a firestorm, huge massive amounts of smoke and debris heading into the stratosphere and, by the way, that's why that we have a nuclear winter, which is the main real threat after nuclear war, after all those immediate effects and that's because of all that smoke that ends up in the stratosphere, so those firestorms don't actually come from the bomb nuclear itself, but from the fires created in all the burning cities collectively, produce enough smoke that circulates around the planet in the stratosphere and will block the Sun for two years again, the best.

The approach is not to let this happen, I mean the day after seems very real to me, it has this kind of heaviness that I still feel when I see it, although I also say that it was the 80s and we have survived until now, but that didn't happen and now this is the fifth wave, okay, so in Lake the broad strokes of this seem realistic to me, the earthquakes are kind of short and there's a kind of jolt and then they and I have been in an earthquake and that seemed pretty good fact and then the idea that the wave comes is realistic in general terms, that is what happens with the tsunami, the same thing comes some time later, but what I wonder is the concentrated pulse volume of water from a lake.

I'm not convinced it works in terms of size because the earthquake they seemed to have experienced seemed like it was a major earthquake, but it wasn't like Krakatoa or the ground level rising. into pieces and that was, however, it was a very, very powerful tsunami, that's how I imagine the tsunami. If you experience it, you know, it's like the first rush of water and then more and more in the morning, you know, we've seen images in Japan and Sendai, where you know what's the first really modern tsunami with that kind of images of how it crashed in these urban areas and you know it seemed pretty realistic to me, let's look at Waterworld, the polar caps have melted covering the earth. water, those who survived have adapted to a new world, so it is likely and unlikely that the polar ice caps could melt, which in the past melted completely and are now on the way to melting and that raises the level of the sea, but it does not raise sea level.

So much so that the entire Earth is covered in water, raising sea levels. So much so that the oceans are larger and the land mass is comparatively smaller. You know that many times, in reality, the Earth has been ice-free throughout its history. You don't know recently, not since humans appeared. I've been here so this is a realistic threat in a possible future where the Earth would be ice free and there would be many more oceans than there are now and it would surely change VIPRE on Earth, but it has been taken to an extreme that you would never see happen.

Interestingly, in my field of astrobiology we consider the possibility of life on many other types of planets that are like Earth but different in some ways and there is a type of planet that we call water worlds that is a planet like Earth, but that It initially receives much more water, so it never develops continents that rise above the oceans, it is completely covered in water and there are many interesting questions about whether life could evolve on such a planet, so our water worlds are probably out there, but this probably isn't a realistic future Earth, okay let's skip ahead, this is almost familiar when thinking about astronauts in a space capsule and having to recycle all their water and basically drink their own urine, although I know that it's well filtered and hopefully well conditioned, and I see it doing that at first.

I think it makes sense that it would hold water and filter it, but the difference between this and astronauts and their space capsules is that you are now surrounded by water. Drink it for the salt water, but what I'm wondering is if it's really that much easier to filter and recycle your urine than it is to desalinate salt water. In theory, you could do it. It takes some energy and some effort, but I'm not sure. that maybe the pea would be easier to recycle at times when it wasn't, it would have to make fresh water either from the ocean or from its own reused body fluids and yes the plant is the same, most plants can't Handle salt water like we need fresh water, so if you wanted the company of your plant companion, you would have to give it fresh water as well.

Okay, let's move on here through another part of Waterworld. Okay, here we see Kevin Costner breathing underwater or at least. Kevin Costner's character that begs the question: could people evolve with gills? I don't see this happening biologically naturally; In other words, the world is flooded. Some mutant humans will be born with gills and then survive better and give birth to a submarine. race of humans with gills. I don't see evolution really working that way, but in some ways our closest analogues in the ocean are whales and dolphins and they didn't develop gills, what they developed was the ability to hold their breath underwater and they dive and then they go to the surface to breathe and have lungs, if it were so easy to develop gills, why didn't dolphins and whales develop gills, huh, tell me that evolution, yes, yes, I think Kevin Costner should take a hit? or no, you don't have gills when they do Waterworld - okay, let's see 12 monkeys five billion people died in 1996 and 1997 you think 1996 is the present then no, 1996 is the past - listen to me, I think this is cool uh Bruce Willis is so good in this role that you can see that they have every reason to believe that he is crazy because he is telling this ridiculous time travel story.

I love the way it's set up and the depiction of the end of the world in this movie again. of scaring Lee is realistic in the sense that the notion of a global disaster that will end due to some biological agent against which humans are defenseless, you know it is not necessarily an imminent threat, but there is a logic to it and there are dire forecasts about a pestilence that, according to him, would end life. humanity approximately 600 years, obviously, this apocalyptic plague scenario is considerably more convincing when reality backs it up with a virulent disease, whatever the infecting agent, it is something that has been evolving on Earth with us for billions of years. years that is part of our biological system.

It's out of control, but if someone deliberately designs something that there are no defenses against, there's a chance that could happen. That's what's so disconcerting about the fact that biological engineering is becoming easier and easier because it potentially puts it in the hands of people. With less and less kind of institutional loyalty, you know people have private counterarguments about why that probably wouldn't happen and it's not entirely clear that it would happen, but it's certainly based on a premise that has a realistic scientific justification, yeah, here. We see New York City, it's obviously been overrun for a while, plants are growing in the streets and through some of the buildings and there's wildlife running through the streets.

Herds of deer. This seems quite realistic to me. I often wonder what is going to happen. cities when and if humans disappear and sometimes you will be in a place, a part of New York, you are part of some other city where for some reason there has been a small block or a lot or something has been abandoned and the city is still there, but it is reverting the forest slowly so the grass will grow tall and out of control and other willing species will come in and go wild this way the streets will take longer to turn into fields it doesn't.

This will happen overnight, the pavement will erode and be worn down by biology and things will grow and, you know, crack the pavement, so it will be several years before the streets look like fields. It's hard to tell from this clip how many years old all the cars are supposed to be still there on the streets looking pretty fresh, not rusty or anything, at least as I could see right there. I'm not sure the streets themselves will turn into fields so quickly, but eventually they'll be fine, let's jump here this is really scary and I think it's pretty well done in the sense that one can imagine that if there's a really widespread disease in a biological emergency in a modern, crowded city like this, it might be necessary The classification, which is that if you are going to save someone, you don't have to save some people.

It is a horrible thing to behold and represent here. You know, triage is a real response to certain types of emergencies and is depicted in sort of as brutal a way as you can imagine if the figs were on the brink of chaos and the authorities were fighting to maintain control and this was the only way to prevent everyone from dying, you could end up in a situation like this, the notion that we could lose whole grain staple crops has some basis, in reality the food system is possibly more vulnerable than it used to be because we are moving more towards this type of monocultures and any time you have a monoculture, things that you know are genetically similar form the entire basis of a food crop that makes it much more vulnerable than it would be if it had many, many strains where a disease, a pathogen, could infect you, but not to the neighbor's field, which is a different strain, the specific thing I think is happening in interstellar if I remember correctly is that the air is changing the oxygen content is decreasing and I thought that that particular detail was not so realistic because there are things that you can imagine that we can do, you know, increase the level of CO2, which we are doing now, and if continuing on the wrong course could cause our climate

apocalypse

, but actually reducing the oxygen in the atmosphere is not that easy and That's not really a threat that would take many thousands of years even if you stopped producing new oxygen, but the notion that we've changed the planet in some way that makes it harder to grow food.

It's certainly not that difficult to imagine how to save the world. We wanted to leave it. The idea that one day people will try to go live on planets outside our solar system. It's not entirely crazy, it's a challenge because the stars are so far away that you can't reach them with a rocketordinary in one human life or a hundred human lives, but science fiction is full of people who avoid that by inventing fantasy. physics, you know, Worf launches warp drives or generation ships where you have multiple generations of humans living and on the descent, the distant descendants of the people who leave, other people who arrive to that other world and one day what seems little to me could happen realistic.

This is that this will be an answer to the fact that we have ruined this planet. It's like, well, we have to go live somewhere else because we screwed up this one and that really seems like a cop-out if we can ever go on living. Another planet in any quantity where we can repopulate the human race and survive seems to me in the much more distant future than the much more immediate problem of figuring out how not to destroy the Earth's climate and overpopulate the planet. and cause a mass extinction, so if you ask me, will we ever live on planets around other stars?

I don't want to say that never, given enough time, that's something that could happen, but I don't see it related to our current climate. threats, but there is a type of space exploration of the space industry that is absolutely essential to the project of saving the planet, now this particular thing where you have a hidden compound and people are preparing to take off and try to save themselves when everyone else they die. I could see people objecting to that, you know, I could object to that and now, next on Mars, I have created 126 square meters of soil and each cubic meter of soil requires 4000 meters of water to be arable, so the idea of ​​cultivating on Mars is something that has been studied a lot by people at NASA and other agencies because we want to be able to send people to Mars and we want them to be able to live off the land because there is no way you can have any kind of long-term benefit. presence on Mars and you have to bring all the food from Earth, it's just too expensive, you're throwing away too much mass, so you want to be able to grow your food there, so it's an interesting question: could you grow food on Martian soil?

And people are trying. That actually uses Martian simulant soils and seems like something we could probably figure out. I think farming on Mars is realistic, they will eventually be able to do it, but as I understand this story, the premises are that they weren't actually planning to do this. was that they hadn't gotten to that point yet where they sent a colony that was really prepared to do this and he's improvising and it looks like he would have to eat, obviously, very smartly, but he would also have to be very lucky. because there will be many factors, I mean, there is a balance, many things can go wrong.

I think it might be harder to grow food on Mars than shown here, but I also think it's possible to use the hydrazine from the rocket to separate it into main and hydrogen and then use hydrogen to make water. I mean, it's realistic that the author of this has solved the chemistry, but I'm not sure the biology part is going to be as easy as him. As he thinks, I think humans will eventually live on Mars, but as a post-apocalyptic way to survive on Earth it doesn't make much sense. I mean, there's certainly nothing to look forward to because the idea that most people die and then a few. people are going to live on Mars, it's like, let's think it's a pretty depressing scenario, but also the post-apocalyptic world is probably not the best world to innovate and have the resources to figure out how to go live on Mars. so I think it's more likely that in a prosperous world, then you have the scientific expertise, the resources and the support on Earth and you make the effort to eventually build a sustained society on Mars.

I think it will be harder to live on Mars than Currently, people think I bet there will be failure before success, so it's easier for me to imagine that happening in a pre-apocalyptic world where there is innovation, industry and the support on the ground to do the trial and error that will be necessary. Well let's take a Look at Astra, there is this idea that you could build a space elevator using a tether that was attached to the Earth and extended to orbit and the physics works if you had the right material that had the tensile strength appropriate.

It won't be as heavy, but it would have to be very strong and people want to make it from these, you know, new types of carbon nanofibers and things like that. If they find the right material, you could build a space. elevator and then the idea is to go up this rope or essentially have elevators that go up and down and it takes a lot less energy to get into orbit than with a rocket, so it's actually physically realistic if you could make the right materials that the people are working on it they draw seeing an increase in energy in the seat post, what you are understanding is that if these guys are in space they won't hear anything coming through the air, there is no air, but they might hear that pulse, the electromagnetic pulse.

It comes for your radio sets and I imagine it would have that kind of wobbly wave sound. You know I've never heard an electromagnetic pulse, but it seems reasonable to me that you could have that kind of wave sound passing through your headphones. The uncontrolled release of antimatter could ultimately threaten the stability of all our sources. All life could be destroyed. Antimatter is real, and the notion that if you could isolate antimatter, you could use it for space propulsion is a real idea that, at least theoretically, people have. It's been played with and of course in Star Trek you have the matter/antimatter engines and that's based on something real, which is that if the antimatter encounters matter, it produces a tremendously powerful explosion, it would be a way to turn a small amount of mass to a huge amount of energy, which is great if you want to power a spaceship, you don't want to bring a lot of mass but you want something that will still give you energy, so it's a good idea, but we don't do it.

We actually know how to isolate antimatter and we can make atoms of antimatter, single atoms or even small molecules, and in the lab that lasts, you know some ridiculous nanosecond or femtosecond, but the idea that we could make a container full of that and then take it. aboard a spaceship is still a science fiction dream, but I see the premise here that they've figured out how to do it and that's how they're powering their deep space mission, that doesn't seem impossible. I don't believe it. I know what specific things would happen near Neptune, but one can certainly imagine things that would happen near Neptune that would affect Earth.

I mean, there are natural things happening in the galaxy that are powerful enough that if they were to shut down. super powerful flares with radiation that would sterilize all life and things like that happen in the universe and if you were within Earth to Neptune distance of one of those explosions or flares or something like that you would be in trouble, so if you imagine that something happened in Neptune that was so powerful, then yes, or if the Earth was in trouble, move quickly here. I don't see it being unreasonable that you could have some kind of city or colony of people. the moon, obviously it takes a lot of resources to build it, but there are people who want to do those things and there is nothing physically impossible.

I mean, you have to solve the problems, you will need energy, you will need water. You're going to need food, so there's nothing to do with seeing this scale of act of human activity and human habitation on the moon that seems physically impossible to me, it's just a matter of having the money and the political will to decide to do it right now. . We have to see Wally. I love this movie. Wall-e is a great movie and there are some things that are eerily realistic - you're descending through that layer of space debris, that's a real thing that can happen and it's a concern now that we're putting out so much stuff is that if you can get this cascade where if satellites get out of control and start crashing into each other, that creates more debris, which creates more collisions, so it's a real concern that you could end up with this kind of impassable ring of space debris that makes make it harder to do anything in orbit other than just hit the brief, you know this world, it's the worst case scenario, you see the windmills. and nuclear cooling tanks, so it looks like you're quickly seeing this planet where they tried alternative energy of various kinds to try to save themselves, but they got overrun by their own garbage and then they basically lost it and I know it's a cartoon, like this That you can get away with a lot of things, but the notion that we are threatened by simply doing too many things and piling them on is a wonderful way to sum up one of our real challenges for humans in the 21st century. century, realizing that the Earth is not infinite and that we can't just throw things away because there is no way to get them away, there is only one planet, you know, when we were much less numerous and didn't take up the entire Earth, they could be Throwing things away in the world was functionally infinite, but now we're realizing that it's finite and if we don't deal with it, the end result is Wall-e, so it's the romance between Wally and IVA.

It always moves me, you know? It is very, very difficult to completely eliminate life from a planet like Earth. The Earth has been through some mass extinctions before, where you know really horrible things happen and wipe out most of the life, but life is very, very tenacious and very entrenched on the planet, so most of the disasters. that would eliminate human civilization or even the human race would not even come close to eliminating the biosphere the biosphere would ignore us and move on I mean it has happened over and over again the biosphere is not fragile we are fragile our civilization is fragile but no you're going to wipe out all life on Earth, so yeah, bugs, asteroids, volcanoes, all that, all those things, all those threats, maybe they're not completely realistic like they always show in the

movies

, but there are real things about the ones to worry about and then there's the you know. the biological disaster the genetic engineering accident the mutant that comes out of the laboratory and wipes out all life and again there is a realistic component to that episode of concern, so all of these things maybe Hollywood takes them in directions that make scientists go away, you don't know enough but they are all real threats thanks for listening to me talk about post-apocalyptic worlds we may never see any of them come true