Stories that reflect our oldest fear
So when Clarke published his novel The Hammer of God, about just such an effort, in 1993, he did not consider it merely science fiction. “It was my duty to show what could be done about the asteroid menace,” he wrote. “By creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, I might even save the world – though I’d never know.” The following year, 21 fragments of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with Jupiter, giving NEO-watchers a preview of what one might do to us. One of the impacts was equivalent to six million megatons of TNT, creating a cloud of debris as wide as Earth.
Steven Spielberg optioned The Hammer of God, which was then merged with When Worlds Collide to form the basis for the 1998 movie Deep Impact. Although neither novel was ultimately credited, their influence is undeniable. A comet is expected to cause an Extinction Level Event. The world’s governments make plans to nuke it or, if that fails, to preserve a few thousand survivors in underground caves (“Our new Noah’s Ark,” says the president) until the surface is habitable again. In reality, blowing up a NEO rather than deflecting it would be very risky, because it would likely create a fusillade of shrapnel. As Arthur C Clarke writes, “Which is better – a single mega-catastrophe in one place, or hundreds of smaller ones?”
Deep Impact coincided with Armageddon, a similarly themed movie about the effort to stop an asteroid which is, absurdly, “the size of Texas”: more than 100 times bigger than the K-T object. “It’s what we call a global killer,” Billy Bob Thornton’s Nasa executive tells the president. “The end of mankind. Doesn’t matter where it hits, nothing would survive, not even bacteria.” It sounds like a brag.
While both movies precede the ultimate success of a mission with enough failure to allow for spectacular CGI mayhem, their approaches could not be more different. Deep Impact is a deeply sentimental picture, primarily concerned with how a handful of individuals process doomsday. It is really about mortality and grief. Michael Bay doesn’t care about any of that. Armageddon is a boy’s own apocalypse: glib, bombastic, chauvinistic, and blithely uninterested in most of the world’s population. Armageddon outperformed Deep Impact at the box office by more than $200m, which tells you a lot. It’s obvious which one Don’t Look Up’s movie-within-a-movie, Total Destruction, is parodying with its tagline: “When the asteroid hit us, he hit back.”
