![]() It’s also a brilliantly scripted, wonderfully acted, and depressingly realistic satire of the environment America currently finds itself in, and the threat it poses not just to the country, but to the future of humanity. Their efforts to warn humanity of this extinction-level event end up stalled by a parade of polling-obsessed politicians, traffic-hungry news outlets, greedy corporations, and a populace willing to ignore science and their own eyes in support of their ideological leaders.īasically, it’s a recipe for disaster made entirely of all-too-familiar ingredients. Written and directed by Academy Award winner Adam McKay ( The Big Short, Vice), Don’t Look Up casts Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence as a pair of astronomers - professor and student, respectively - who discover a massive asteroid on a collision course with the Earth. For Isherwell, the comet-busting mission is not just about precious materials he insists that nothing less than “the evolution of the human species” is at stake.What might be surprising, however, is how funny the end of the world can be. When a character accuses him of being a “businessman,” he becomes gravely (and hilariously) offended, proclaiming, in seeming earnestness, that his interests are solely virtuous. Rather, he is portrayed as a starry-eyed true believer, prone to waxing rapturous about the poverty-eliminating potential of the comet’s heavy metals. In this way, the film’s depiction of Isherwell is extremely savvy, resisting lazy villainizing: The BASH CEO is not presented as some fast-talking cynic who knows the Earth is doomed and doesn’t care. How the Playground Slide Defeated the Boston Cop A Visit to the Doctor Changed Everything. Why The Retrievals Is the Most Satisfying Serial Yet Here, McKay both highlights the existential risk inherent to a nation that devalues scientific expertise-leaving us vulnerable to threats like climate change, COVID, and comets-and demonstrates how difficult it can be to separate a genuine desire to do good from the desire to turn a profit.Īt This Point, Zoom Could Use Another Pandemic It is precisely this scenario that Don’t Look Up imagines, a warning that gets lost if we view the film only as a climate change allegory. That argument sounds good, but it also sidesteps a critical question: What might happen if the interests of the human species don’t line up perfectly with those of big business? In Elvis’ view, asteroid mining will create a “virtuous cycle” in which the desire to strip-mine the cosmos will drive comet research, and comet research will keep us safer from extinction by identifying those big bad space rocks that might snuff us out. Some, like Martin Elvis of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, have argued that profits and planetary defense need not be mutually exclusive. The goal? To “study” a massive asteroid chock-full of profitable heavy metals. As for Musk himself, he has remained cagey regarding his plans for space mining, yet as always his actions speak louder than words: In 2020, his company SpaceX won the lucrative contract for NASA’s Psyche mission. ![]() Google co-founder Larry Page has recently pumped money into an asteroid-mining startup named Planetary Resources, while the Winklevoss twins have taken to arguing that cryptocurrency is a better long-term investment than gold since the latter will become devalued once Musk gets his asteroid mining operation up and running. Like McKay’s character Isherwell, a growing number of tech titans not only view the cosmos as the final frontier for their fortunes, but are particularly enthusiastic about the promise of the kind of asteroid mining that Don’t Look Up mines for laughs. To be clear, I am not against billionaires throwing money at existential risk research-I’m glad someone is! Indeed, this Silicon Valley enthusiasm for preventing human extinction would be all well and good were it not for the fact that it is often hard to disentangle Musk’s and Bezos’ go-to-space-to-save-the-race schemes from their desire to profit from them. As for Bezos, his interest in saving the human race stretches all the way back to his 1982 high school valedictorian speech, during which he professed that “space is the only way to go” if we are to give our species a chance for a long tenure. Open Philanthropy, the brainchild of Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, has recently pledged to donate more than $10 million to the Future of Life Institute, another human extinction think tank situated in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Musk is not the only Silicon Valley slickster obsessed with human extinction: Jaan Tallinn (formerly of Skype) co-founded the CSER alongside the world-renowned astronomer Martin Rees. ![]()
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