Amy Mainzer, one of NASA’s lead asteroid hunters, and the director Adam McKay chat about ways to neutralize an oncoming comet (explosives!) and the likelihood of an apocalyptic collision (low!).
In 2002, Amy Mainzer was finishing her doctorate in astronomy at U.C.L.A. when an astronomer colleague discovered an asteroid. A few years later, she got a nice surprise: he had named it after her. Asteroid nomenclature is regulated by the International Astronomical Union, based in Paris, and vanity naming, Mainzer said recently, is “one of the perks” of her field. The asteroid, 234750 Amymainzer, is about seven and a half kilometres in diameter.
In the movie, directed by Adam McKay , a punky Ph.D. student, Kate Dibiasky , discovers a comet, christened Comet Dibiasky, which she and her professor Dr. Mindy calculate will hit Earth in six months and fourteen days. What happens next is eerily familiar. The President , a venal nincompoop, worries about her poll numbers. Dr. Mindy becomes a nerdy sex symbol. A denialist movement springs up.
McKay and Mainzer first connected two years ago, when McKay was writing the screenplay. One issue was Comet Dibiasky’s size, which McKay had imagined at thirty-two kilometres in diameter. “I said, ‘No, no—if it’s too big, people just throw up their hands,’ ” Mainzer recalled. They settled on nine kilometres: big enough to wipe out humanity, but small enough that there was a chance of stopping it.
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