Don’t Look Up

The film, Don’t Look Up, is a most interesting film not only for how it relates science to political economy, but also in that images of wildlife—Nature, as it were—are interspersed throughout the movie, and it is Nature, rather than our circumscribed, petty, and yet economically successful species, that continues on after a large comet hits Earth and our species is wiped out. In fact, that impact-event in the movie cancels out the one that really happened 66 million years ago by returning dinosaurs to dominance. The last scene in the movie shows some of the political and economic elite waking up in their spaceship and landing on Earth more than 200,000 years in the future only to be eaten by dinosaurs that look "cute." two of those stupid people had been in charge both in the White House and in business before the comet hits, whereas the two principal astronomer-scientists who warn of the coming comet are repeatedly relegated and dismissed by the political and economic elite until the president realizes how she can use them politically—albeit just until the political winds turn again and comet-denial is more useful politically to the president. Does this sound familiar?

For a species to have reached such plenty economically as ordinary people could live better than medieval kings had in Europe and yet be so petty and reckless, essentially squandering what the species had built up, with indifference even to an upcoming cataclysmic event, is what the astronomer-protagonist in the film is left marveling at just before his life, along with those of friends and family sitting around his dinner table, is instantly ended. “We really tried,” he says. I suspect that climate-activists may be saying the same thing regarding the abject refusal of enough of our species and its power-brokers to take combatting carbon-emissions seriously enough.

“Most social life seems a conspiracy to discourage us from thinking” about “what, if anything, can we do about death—now, while we are still alive?”[1] Even so, “there is a rare type [of person] for whom death is present every moment, putting his grim question mark to every aspect of life, and that person cannot rest without some answers.”[2] So it is that in the Katha Upanishad, Nachiketa beseeches Yama, the king of death, to answer his burning question on whether there is an afterlife. “When a person dies, there arises this doubt: ‘He still exists,’ say some; ‘he does not,’ say others. I want you to teach me the truth. This is my third” wish.[3] Although the answer is beyond the reach of human cognition and perception, Yama reveals that the essence of a person, one’s essential self, or atman, survives the death of the body. Nachiketa’s undaunted urge to know the truth anyway points back to how much thoughts of death are part of life. That Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan is based on the assumption that the instinct for self-preservation is primary in human beings is yet another indication of how important it is to us to put off our own death for as long as possible.

So it is a “red flag” in the film, an indictment on human nature, that so very few people are thinking about the prospect of their own death even though the two scientists and then even the U.S. president have announced on television that a comet is hurling through space, heading directly at Earth in what is known as an extinction event. Initially, two television hosts dismiss the two astronomers who had calculated that the comet would hit Earth and be of such magnitude that our species would go extinct; those journalists are more interested in the romantic life of a young singer. Not even the U.S. President, or her chief of staff, are much interested, at least until after the midterms, for their party could lose control of both chambers of Congress. It is only when the political calculation changes that the White House decides to make a public announcement. This prudence is short-lived, however, as the president calls for the space shuttle to abort its mission to bomb the comet into a new trajectory that would miss the planet. An Elon-Musk-type, new-age CEO of a cell-phone company has so much influence on the president, no doubt from having made donations to her campaign, that she heeds his direction to abort the in-progress space-shuttle mission to bomb the comet to divert it from hitting Earth, and instead send risky, untested drilling machines to land on the comet in order to blow it into pieces, which would then presumably fall harmlessly to the Pacific Ocean to be harvested by the U.S. navy so tech companies using computer chips could profit wildly. The CEO is a businessman, even though he angrily rebuffs the astronomy professor for pointing out, “You are a businessman,” who thus has absolutely no formal education in astrophysics and spacecraft technology upon which to make the judgment to abort the mission that would probably have diverted the comet. Instead, his idea is to send untested drillers to land on the comet to dig holes in which to place bombs so the comet would blow up into profitable chunks. The astronomy professor is correct when he calls out the cell-phone techie, but the president sides with the latter nonetheless.

Regarding just how pathetic the president, her immature chief of staff, and the techie businessman are, at the end of the movie, the professor turns down the president’s offer to join her, the businessman and other elite personalities on a spacecraft that returns to Earth when it is again habitable. You enjoy your (obnoxious) chief of staff; I’m all set here, he tells the finally contrite president by phone. Faced with an imminent extinction event, the level-headed astronomer makes the judgment that it is better to die with friends and family then go on living with superficial comet-deniers for whom already having a lot of power and wealth, respectively, is not enough, and other people are to be used in line with power-aggrandizement and higher profits.

Science fiction is an excellent genre for bringing up contemporary controversies without setting off alarm-bells and thus having one’s message blocked by the opposition. The allusions to President Trump and Hilary Clinton, and the tech titan Elon Musk are hardly subtle. That the film was released in 2021 means that the relationship between the president and the techie CEO are not based on the later relationship between President Trump and Elon Musk. Instead, the president character is, I submit, based on Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton. The president in the film is engaged in “comet-denial” as a political slogan similar to how Trump was engaged in climate-change-denial during his first term, is a woman like Hilary Clinton in subsuming everything, even the destruction of the species, under political calculation, and easily forgetting to save her chief of staff in the end, perhaps as the Clintons left Brent Forster in their wake before Bill Clinton was president. The political-calculating, selfish president in the film is herself an indictment on American democracy, for presumably she was elected. At a certain point in the film, people need only look up to see the comet for themselves to realize that the U.S. president was lying. The comet in the movie, like climate change in our world, is real, and it is the political and economic elite that in both the film and real life drop the ball, even though the respective stakes are both huge. Of course, in both cases, the American people are to blame too.

It is strange, in watching the movie, how indifferent people generally are to even the possibility that they could die in a bit over six months. Even after Ivy League experts ironically favored by the White House confirm the calculations of the astronomy professor, the president decides to play political games rather than take the first possible opportunity to divert the comet. Then she decides to do the bidding of her techie billionaire donor and “turn lemons into lemonade” by recklessly (in terms of rocket technology) helping him to profit from the comet once it has been pulverized and felled to the ground. Lemonade cannot be made if the lemons are handled recklessly rather than rendered usable. Just before dies, the astronomy professor remarks on the species to his friends and family, “We had everything.” The implication is: and yet we blew it, because some powerful people in business and government wanted more. Even though the techie billionaire had developed a very advanced and financially lucrative cell phone, it is as if that man perceived himself as not having enough, and thus as needing more.

The desire for more is a good definition of greed. Even given declining marginal utility, there seems to be no base limit of wealth that is enough in terms of a person not risking even everything to profit more.  A rational person might realize that pushing the comet out of the way of Earth should be priority number 1, and that NASA and other space agencies around the world should be entrusted with that task, or else all current wealth could be lost, as you can’t spend it when you’re dead. It is as some powerful people in the business and political American elites dismissed even the 99.97% chance that the comet would smack into the Earth because greed and power-aggrandizement are instinctual urges that lie by distorting both cognition and perception. We “modern” humans may be so used to being so narrowly self-interested in accumulating money and power that we regard the indifference shown in the film to a catastrophic event to be surreal or even as too incredulous to even be believed in a film!

Even though the movie ramps up the explosive and sudden climax to keep viewers titillated in movie theatres, the same dynamic of indifference and denial applies as our species stews unabatedly in a hotter and hotter climate that one day may be very difficult or even impossible for our species to continue to live on Earth. This prospect having become realistic when the film was made, and definitely in June, 2025, when both parts of the E.U. and U.S. suffered from long heat-waves, should be enough to make resisting coal and other business interests and their captured politicians by making climate a high political and economic priority, but alas, too many people are like the people in the movie, who are taken in by the comet-deniers and profiteers, as if the masses of people were consisting of Nietzsche’s herd animals that are oblivious as they are being taken to the slaughter house. Presuming that we could just move to Mars or the Moon, and that we could even profit by doing so is the sort of thinking that does not work out in the movie, so the lesson is that it is reckless for us to deny climate-change and postpone cuts in fossil-fuel emissions under the assumption that we will be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat just in time when the time comes to pay the bill as species. To be sure, whereas the comet hitting Earth is a sudden event, the baleful effects of climate-change are gradual, yet accumulating, and thus human nature is less well-equipped to take immediate action rather than putting it off. Even so, the denial for partisan advantage and the proclivity of managers in companies to compartmentalize at the expense even potentially of the survival of the species even within a few generations are the same. Perhaps Nietzsche was correct in claiming that ideas are really instinctual urges, and reasoning is the tussling of contending urges—the most powerful of which reaches consciousness. Rather than being a check on passions, reason is itself a manifestation of instincts. The lesson of the film is that there is no guarantee that the instinctual urge that dominates others is in line with self-preservation and even the medium-term (and even short-term) survival of the species.

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1. Introduction to Katha Upanishad, in The Upanishads, trans. Eknath Easwaran (Petaluma, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1987).
2. Ibid.
3. Katha Upanishad, 1.1.20, in The Upanishads, trans. Eknath Easwaran (Petaluma, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1987).

The Challenger Disaster

Roger Boisjoly was a booster rocket engineer at a NASA contractor, Morton Thiokol. Boisjoly blew the whistle both within the company and to NASA regarding the danger of the rubber in the o-rings, which seal the connections in the shuttle’s rockets, being insufficiently elastic in cold weather. Although The Challenger Disaster (2019) is not a documentary, the film’s narrative, which centers on Roger, or "Adam," is oriented to understanding why the Challenger space shuttle exploded after being launched on January 28, 1986. In other words, although some names are different and the conversations are not verbatim in the film, the factors that contributed to the actual explosion are presented. In fact, the film leans too much on technical details before the disaster and legal arguments afterwards without adequate entertaining elements to make the film enjoyable. However, the film's political function in informing a mass market of why part of the government-business system was broken is valuable. In fact, this mission demonstrates that the medium of motion pictures is capable of aiding in social, political, economic, and religious awareness and education, and thus development.

Although some individuals can rightly be blamed for the explosion, the problem extended to the relationship that NASA had with its contractors, the encroachment, based solely on power, of management both at NASA and Mortan Thiokol, over experts (i.e., the engineers) on a technical problem requiring expertise, and the internal culture at Mortan Thiokol. In general terms, the problem extended to business-government relations, managerial presumption, and the expedient profit motive in business. 

On the individual level, immaturity played a substantial role in the disaster. Throughout most of the film, Adam, the outspoken advocate of delaying the launch, is yelling either at his superiors at Mortan Thiokol or at the launch engineer at NASA. Adam’s harsh demeanor, a lawyer points out, partly explains why Adam’s warnings did not have sufficient traction especially within the company. In spite of being right about the explosion, Adam has very little credibility inside the company because of his immaturity. In other words, he does not play well with the other children and this impedes his technical credibility. Human nature being what it is, it is susceptible to the fallacy that immaturity undercuts technical expertise. To be sure, Adam was not the only problem-child at the company. Its in-house inspector, Frank, perpetually shouts at Adam from the time he warns that the shuttle could explode. At one point, Frank even lunges violently at Adam. Similarly, NASA's flight engineer's harsh tone and shouting on the conference call with Mortan Thiokol exacerbated the problem. Why so much anger? It clearly impedes a solution whereby nine astronauts would not have died. 

All the shouting also makes the film difficult to endure. The bland office settings also do nothing to make the film enticing to watch. Almost all of the scenes are set in drab offices and a conference room in which grey is the basic color. To the extent that the arguments over technical details, which dominate the film, and legal arguments are boring, they are not adequately countered by entertaining devices. For example, scant attention is given to Adam's family life, other than to show him strangely well-adapted as a family man. His pathology apparently only shows up at work. His wife is a cut-board figure of an adoring wife, which is also strange. In short, the film’s value to American society in explaining to a mass audience what went wrong both at NASA and it having private-sector contractors could have been greater were the film more entertaining. 

This is not to say that the extent of arguing, like that of the technical details and even the drabness do not contribute to the film's ability to explain why the disaster occurred. The incessant arguments give the audience a good dose of the role of pathology in the disaster. Also, the extent of technical details, even repeated throughout the film, help the audience to understand why the o-rings failed. Even the drabness of the offices give the viewers a sense of the company's finances, which in turn play a major role in why the company's managers overrule the engineers on economic grounds (over technical objections). 

As for the technical explanation of the disaster, the expected temperature on the Cape at launch the next morning was 30 degrees F. The shuttle’s o-rings, which the contractor put into the rockets to seal connection points, were made out of rubber, which is less elastic, and thus effective, as the temperature decreases. The company’s data, however, only went down to 53 degrees, the previous lowest temperature on a launch. Also, the lower the temperature, the more exhaust passes by the o-rings, causing erosion. This is enough for Adam, who repeatedly says, “It’s too cold to launch!” He put his findings in a memo, but not even the company’s inspection person, Frank, bothered to read it. “The shuttle is made up of millions of parts,” Frank shouts at Adam, adding “The o-ring is just one of them.”  Adam shouts back, “Cold rubber doesn’t work well!” Notably, Frank does not spend as much time reminding Adam that the company needs the contract as reminding Adam and the others that they need their jobs. So much for loyalty to the company; what really counts is the employees’ personal affairs.

Frank takes the matter to his boss, Kurt. He wants a launch-delay because time is needed to get boats out to retrieve the rockets when they fall into the ocean. Adam argues that the company’s recommendation to NASA should turn on an engineering reason rather than a company-specific economic one. In essentially dismissing the consensus of the engineers regarding the technical problems, Kurt, a manager, disagrees. “We might lose our rockets. Besides, the DOD pays NASA’s bills. If they don’t get what they paid for, DOD and NASA might replace us. It is an economic problem.” Relative to this problem, a higher manager will later say before giving NASA the go-ahead on the launch, the safety of the astronauts “is not our concern” even though the astronauts have been relying on NASA and the contractors.

In the film, the company’s organizational culture is highly dysfunctional. The company’s upper management is focused only on keeping its contract with NASA even though the result is far worse for the company. The management has allowed the company to become too financially dependent on NASA. As a result, the upper management lied to NASA, telling the flight engineer that the company would be fine with the launch as set. Faced with an enquiry by the presidential commission on the disaster, the company’s management claims that Adam was a malcontent employee wanting to cause trouble. The extent of lying is itself a red flag concerning the lack of business ethics in the company’s management.

The relationship between NASA and the contract is also a contributing cause of the disaster. This is evident from the conference call that includes NASA and the contractor the day before the launch. NASA’s flight engineer, who is openly hostile toward the contractor from the start, begins by pointing out that the contractor (Frank in particular) is at fault for having taking the temperature problem off the reports submitted to NASA.  The company is so dependent on its rocket contract with NASA that the employee tasked with keeping NASA informed has removed a potentially dangerous problem from NASA’s radar screen.

The lack of communication is compounded by the adversarial relationship. On the call, for instance, Adam and the flight engineer at NASA reach the point of shouting at each other. The engineer orders Adam to “quantify.” Adam replies, ”I can’t.” In public policy as in business, not everything can be given a number. Sometimes when one is given, it brings with it false accuracy. With data only going down to 53 degrees, Adam cannot put a number on the percentage risk. Furthermore, how high of a percentage risk that the o-rings will fail on launch at 30 degrees could the flight engineer accept? The flight engineer wants a number to protect himself. Just as the managers at the contractor don’t want to lose their jobs, neither does the flight engineer. Meanwhile, no one is looking out for the human beings who will blast off the next day.

 NASA cannot go against the contractor’s recommendation to stop the launch. The flight engineer knows this, so he puts pressure on the contractor’s managers, who capitulate because the company cannot lose the contract. In bending NASA’s policy by pushing for a reversal from the contractor—and by the company’s management overruling the engineers on an engineering problem—the flight engineer is reckless (even as he tries to protect himself by demanding quantification).

In response, the contractor’s managers huddle. “NASA might find another contractor if we recommend delaying launch,” one manager says. “NASA might lay off people.  15,000 jobs here are on the line; we need this contract.” The manager then says to the entire group, “We need to make a management decision.” One of the engineers then shouts, “We cannot guarantee a good seal!” The manager appeals to the personal financial interests of all the engineers in the room.  “Don’t you have a mortgage? Don’t you want your jobs?” Adam chimes in, “There are nine astronauts; their lives are in our hands. The manager coldly replies, “they know the risks; that’s not our concern.” This brings Adam to a rage, “How dare you play with human lives like that. . . . You won’t give these poor souls a chance so we can make a buck or two. . . . This is not a management decision.”  That manager ignores this point and tells NASA it’s a go.

The philosopher Kant’s ethical theory can be formulated in terms of treating other rational beings not just as means, but also as ends in themselves. The contractor’s managers treat the astronauts unethically because they are just a means to the company getting paid for its rockets. NASA’s flight engineer does the same thing.  NASA has already delayed the launch, and avoiding the embarrassment of delaying again, even by hours, is motivating the flight engineer at the expense of the astronauts. Both NASA and the contractor’s management have lost perspective with selfish, skewed priorities.