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What sustains this common narrative? Is it rooted in real events? What effect, if any, have these stories had on public perceptions of actual aster- oid impact hazards? This chapter considers these and other questions while describing the common elements of this narrative of destruction and explor- ing why it has become so popular.
Although examples prior to the 1990s exist, that decade featured the majority of mass-media storylines showcasing asteroid impact threats. This seemingly exponential growth was likely driven by reactions to a real-world event that was followed the world over, the impact of Comet Shoemaker- Levy with Jupiter in 1994. As examples from the first two decades of the 21st century attest, this narrative is still alive and strong. Two unrelated events on 15 February 2013—the predicted close approach of asteroid 2012 DA14 to Earth and the unpredicted explosion of a meteor over Chelyabinsk, Russia—
brought asteroid impact hazards into sharp focus once more and likely gave renewed force to this storyline.
What does the recurrence of this narrative say about public attitudes toward this issue? Popular narratives often reflect deep-rooted societal fears and beliefs.4 The prevalence of this narrative is suggestive of public concerns about asteroid impacts. Yet what little empirical research exists on the sub- ject, specifically two national polls and a formal survey discussed later in the chapter, contradicts this assumption, showing that people do not see a catastrophic asteroid impact as a real threat. What can explain this sharp contrast between sensational media depictions akin to Chicken Little’s famous assertion that “The sky is falling!” and a general public response of
“Who cares?”
By referencing the work of Paul Slovic on risk assessment and look- ing at examples of the impact narrative spanning three decades, I contend that the way that catastrophic impacts are repeatedly represented in fiction (predominantly in film) is, in fact, consistent with the degree of public con- cern. That is, fictional asteroid impact threats are predominantly a mode of entertainment. I also contend that this enduring fictional narrative does not reflect advances in scientific understanding of asteroid impact hazards. This
4. In a previous paper, I argue that a dominant narrative tying space commercialization to a capitalist dystopia reveals deep-rooted fears of the loss of individuality as a result of the disappearance of the state. I suggest that policy-makers need to be aware of conflicting nar- ratives like this that may affect public opinion about real policy issues, such as the commer- cialization of space. See Laura Delgado, “The Commercialization of Space in Science Fiction Movies: The Key to Sustainability or the Road to a Capitalist Dystopia,” presented at the AIAA Space 2010 Conference and Exposition, Anaheim, CA, 30 August–2 September 2010.
situation may be a product of the gap between the public and scientific per- ceptions5 and understanding of asteroid impact risk.
A LONG, EXPLOSIVE HISTORY
Contrary to what some may believe, the impact threat narrative began much earlier than the Hollywood blockbuster Armageddon, with some authors developing the narrative in fiction as far back as the 19th century. (See the chapter’s appendix on page 203.)6
The 1890s saw the publication of La Fin du Monde,7 a French novel that pondered on the end of the world in the face of a comet striking Earth in the
5. This is not to suggest that scientists are not part of the public or audience. The line is drawn rather loosely here to demarcate the sharp contrast between science’s understanding of the issue and how it is commonly depicted in fiction.
6. This table, while incomplete, particularly considering narratives that may have developed in other languages, serves to show that the draw of the asteroid impact scenario is not new.
7. Camille Flammarion, La Fin du Monde (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1894).
Artist’s concept of the Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact on Jupiter. (NASA/Don Davis: ARC-1994-AC94-0182)
25th century. This story reappeared in the 1930s as a film by the same name8 and was republished as Omega: The Last Days of the World in 1999.9
In 1933, Edna Muldrow’s article, “The Comet That Hit the Carolinas,”
was published in Harper’s Magazine. While not fiction, it was rather poetic in evoking the end of the world following a hypothetical massive collision and in articulating the alarming thoughts of some who saw a threat in both asteroids and comets, even the well-known ones:
We have no assurance that on its next trip Halley’s comet10 may not side- swipe us or that it may not be disintegrated by that time and have become a steady stream of meteors, so that each year we may plunge into its path and be pelted by falling stars of greater or lesser size.11
Examples of the asteroid impact narrative in the first few decades of the 20th century appeared as interest in the topic grew following scientific inves- tigations into the Tunguska impact event. Hundreds of fiction and nonfiction accounts have explored what happened in Siberia in 1908—and interest has not died down. As recently as 2010, the National Research Council (NRC) cited the latest research on the Tunguska event in a report on asteroid impact mitigation strategies.12
Since Tunguska, other events have renewed interest in the subject of asteroid impacts, producing a flurry of media content. Interest in the sub- ject exploded after 1980, when Luis and Walter Alvarez published their now- famous hypothesis linking the extinction of the dinosaurs with a massive asteroid impact 65 million years ago. Another critical event was the impact of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet on Jupiter in 1994. With solar system research confirming the role that impacts have played in transforming not just the
8. La Fin du Monde, film, directed by Abel Gance (1931).
9. Camille Flammarion, Omega: The Last Days of the World (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press and Bison Books, 1999).
10. Fear over the approach of Halley’s comet was part of a general concern over the effects of comets coming into close proximity with the planet. As a nonfiction example, consider Ignatius L. Donnelly’s Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel, in which he posited that a comet hit the planet 12 years earlier with globally disastrous effects. In an interesting exception in fiction, H. G. Wells offers a positive storyline in his 1906 novel In the Days of the Comet, where a comet changes the composition of the atmosphere and humanity is
“exalted” as a result.
11. Muldrow, “The Comet That Struck the Carolinas,” Harper’s Magazine (December 1933): 82.
12. Committee to Review Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies, Defending Planet Earth: Near-Earth Object Surveys and Hazard Mitigation Strategies (Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2010) pp. 13–14.
face but even the composition of planetary bodies, it became clearer not only that our own planet had been shaped dramatically by continuous impacts, but also that these events were not just a thing of the past.
By the 1990s, this expanding understanding of the impact history of the solar system prompted Congress to task NASA with surveying near-Earth objects (NEOs) and led to a golden era of mass-media treatments of aster- oid impact threats, with extinction-level events appearing in over 25 differ- ent works of fiction in that decade. Short films, movies, TV programs, and computer games all subjected characters to different versions of the asteroid- impact scenario.
In a survey of 90 “cinematic film, video, and television productions” about asteroids or comets between 1936 and 2004, William Hartwell found that 30 percent addressed impact hazards.13 Between 1994 and 2004, he noted a marked increase in threat scenarios, with more than half of the produc- tions he surveyed emphasizing impacts. Hartwell claimed the increase was
“a direct result” of the Shoemaker-Levy incident.14
Interest in the impact-threat narrative has continued into the 21st century.
Although not as visible, debate over the non-negligible possibility of asteroid impacts with Earth—and some initial predictions of possible impacts by the asteroids Apophis in 2029 and 2011 AG5 in 2040 (later dismissed)—helped sustain this narrative. In addition, mass-media coverage of predictions of
13. William T. Hartwell, “The Sky on the Ground: Celestial Objects and Events in Archeology and Popular Culture,” in Comet/Asteroid Impacts and Human Society, An Interdisciplinary Approach, ed. Peter T. Bobrowsky and Hans Rickman (Heidelberg, Germany: Springer, 2007), pp. 71–87.
14. Ibid., p. 82.
Four images of Jupiter and the luminous night-side impact of fragment W of Comet Shoemaker- Levy 9 taken by the Galileo spacecraft on 22 July 1994. (NASA/JPL: PIA00139)