The Science, Technology, and Law of Don’t Look Up
The number 1 movie on Netflix right now (and hence America) is Don’t Look Up, Adam McKay’s new comedy meets disaster movie about an armageddon scenario from an inbound comet. While Roger Ebert hated the “disastrous” movie, it has already been a cultural success. The movie is clearly a climate change allegory and multiple people have pointed out it is a bad one. Others highlight that the movie also satirizes the COVID-19 response. Personally, it is just an enjoyable dark comedy that captures the essence of 2021 as opposed to any specific disaster.
Nevertheless, the movie has a lot of interesting themes, including charismatic mega-disasters, space resources, space law, privatization of space technology, and even a brief foray into deep sea mining. These are worth diving into, particularly planetary defense, space resources, and space law.
Caution: plot spoilers ahead but no real comedy ones.
The General Plot
It is 2020 or 2021 (probably). Jennifer Lawrence is a PhD candidate in Michigan State’s excellent astronomy program and accidently discovers a comet while studying supernovas. Working with her advisor, Dr. Leonardo DiCaprio, the team discovers the comet is going to hit Earth with a 99.78% probability in 6 months and change. Alarmed, they try to present the information to the White House, where they are stonewalled by the President’s Son/Chief of Staff Jonah Hill. They finally get to meet with President Meryl Streep but she tries to dismiss the danger until the midterms. When the political blowback arrives, she comes up with an alternative plan to deflect the comet by hitting it with a bunch of nuclear weapons, led by a screaming Ron Perlman on a somehow refurbished space shuttle.
When Dr. Dicaprio calculates the impact probabilities of Planet Killing comets, he eschews fancy computers. Credit: Netflix
However, the weirdly uncharismatic billionaire Mark Rylance intervenes, convincing the President to cancel the mission because the comet could contain valuable space resources, worth “trillions.” The billionaire’s company, Bash, then comes up with its alternative plan to blow the comet into 31 pieces (again with nuclear weapons), saving the planet from destruction and making the pieces easy to extract from the ocean seabed where they will fall.
The world goes into a culture war about whether the comet is real and, if it is, whether the economic benefits of mining it are worth the risk of the impact. Eventually the comet is visible in the sky, leading to the movie’s title as the denialists form the motto “Don’t Look Up” as everyone else can see the danger with their own eyes.
Ultimately, the mining plan fails because the billionaire team’s Silicon Valley ethos of “fail quickly and learn” does not work when failure is not an option, with not enough mining robots getting their nukes into place to break up the comet.
The comet impacts and the world is subsequently destroyed.
8.5/10, would watch again. Now the fun part…
Planetary Defense
As the movie notes, Planetary Defense is an actual real thing that NASA does. Planetary impactors are a real danger to humans and the environment.
A massive impactor is believed to have been responsible for the 5th great extinction event in the history of life, the one that killed the dinosaurs. In 1908, a meteor burst in the atmosphere over Siberia with a force equal to the strongest nuclear weapons, destroying over 800 square miles of uninhabited forest. In 2013, the cosmos targeted Russia again near Chelyabinsk, where a relatively small meteor burst injured 1,500+. Extinction-scale events are a primary motivation for Elon Musk’s drive to make humans a multi-planetary species.
But going to Mars is not necessary to stop the threat of meteor impacts.
The basic goal of Planetary Defense is to identify potential threats to the Earth from asteroids and comets before they hit us. Once threats have been identified, policymakers and the public can be warned, presumably leading to action to mitigate the threat.
So far, Planetary Defense is going okay. NASA gets $150 million a year for Planetary Defense activities, with a focus on identifying near-Earth objects that could pose a threat. In 2005, Congress directed NASA to find 90% of Near-Earth objects greater than 140-meters by 2020. Per the Planetary Society, these are about 1-in-100 year type events, with effects similar to the Siberia impact. Based on science we can estimate how many such objects exist and then slowly catalog the vast majority of them.
As described by the NASA OIG, NASA did not meet that goal, with a lack of funding a main cause.
That does not sound great, but here is the good news. It is easier to find the largest and most dangerous space objects. Even though we have not yet found half of city destroying near-Earth objects, scientists estimate we have found all of the “planet killers” greater than 1-kilometer, and the majority of those greater than 500-meters. So that means we have a pretty good handle on the ultra-rare extinction-level impactors.
The movie, astutely, gets around this success because its ~9 kilometer impactor is a long-period comet, probably from the Oort Cloud (which is waaaaaay far away, measurable in up to single digit light years). There is a lot of material out there and every now and then it can come into the inner solar system and mess things up. So Planetary Defense will need to be around for a long-time, even if the chances of something very severe are low.
What happens if we find a threatening asteroid or comet? The easiest way is to divert it to miss us and usually that means as soon as possible considering delta-v and time requirements.
Barely a month ago, NASA launched the Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission to crash a small spacecraft into an asteroid to see if we can divert future in-bound threats. It’s a pretty cool mission that takes advantage of two asteroids that orbit each other to measure how effective slamming into one of them is. Basically, the impact would impart so little delta-v that we would not be able to tell if it did anything from a distance. But, by measuring how the two asteroids orbit each other and how that changes, we can pick up whether DART was successful, showing that diversion is a viable pathway.
It’s going to cost hundreds of millions of dollars to hit that small asteroid on the left so hard that it moves several more millimeters per second. Source: NASA
In the movie, the protagonists decide to pursue what is currently the only real plan if we find a planetary-scale threat with too short a time frame – divert with the force of a nuclear weapon. That would probably work.
Space Resources
When President Streep decides to scrap NASA’s Planetary Defense plan in favor of the billionaire’s space resources plan, she embraces the most common misconception about space resources: assuming its market value is based on the commodity prices you can get in a terrestrial commodity market. The comet is said to be worth something like $42 trillion or up to $130 trillion because it contains precious metals that can be used for things like electric vehicles and the energy transition.
Here the movie is satirizing the ambitions or fantasies of space billionaires while also making a very specific dig at space resources. When talking about space resources, there are so many articles that claim a certain asteroid (Psyche-16) is worth $10,000 quadrillion because it has a lot of precious metals.
This is wrong wrong wrong. Basic economics for a transaction requires a seller and the collective wealth and GDP of humanity through all history would not even come close to paying $10 billion trillion. More on this in a future post but using this type of valuation method actually says the most valuable and mineable celestial body in the solar system is the sun.
Even then, Psyche-16 is very far away, we don’t actually know the composition of the asteroid (just its mass), and it’ll take most of a century to be able to get anything from it. Even then, if we bring a substantial amount of precious metal back to Earth from it, it would crash metal markets, destroying the economics.
That said, we can use the emerging discipline of space resources to actually interrogate the billionaire’s claim about the value of the comet. One frame to conduct such an analysis is a Space Resource Utilization Plan. Basically, we identify a resource, identify a customer, and figure out how to get that resource to said customer using technology.
The potential resource here is the comet that is coming to destroy the world. Billionaire Mark Rylance needs to fire whoever gave him the resource assessment. He claims that the metal value of the comet is in the trillions because of rare metals and other things that we can use for the energy transition. Yes, we do need metals for the energy transition and yes, we are looking in crazy ways like deep sea mining or space mining. So there is a customer here on Earth and the comet impacting Earth is a ‘good’ delivery method.
But comets are likely a terrible source of metals. According to science, comets are leftovers from the formation of the solar system. This means they are relatively high in volatiles like water, which makes sense to mine on the Moon but not as a resource on Earth.
Comets, asteroids, meteors, and meteorites are same, same but different. Kinda.
Comets are undifferentiated bodies, meaning that they have very low concentrations of metals. The ore grades would be tiny and much less than other types of space resources. Asteroids are a mix of things, some primordial and some leftover from failed planets. As an example, Psyche-16 is thought to be so valuable because it could be the core of a destroyed planetesimal, which would mean it would have very high concentrations and ore grades of metals, potentially higher than anything on Earth’s surface.
So the resource plan here is probably bad. Even if the comet fragments could be recovered from the seabed, they would probably be less valuable than other things you can get from the seabed, like polymetallic nodules or methane hydrates. If anything, the comet would be highly valuable because of its scientific value, not for its resources.
Ignoring this, we reach a key part of any space resource plan: is any of this legal? Time for some law!
Meteorite, Ocean, and Resource Law
The legal issue at question is whether a company or country can claim ownership of the resources of a celestial body that falls to Earth, landing in the ocean, and settling on the seafloor, if the company or country breaks apart the celestial body with nuclear weapons detonated in outer space.
The answer is that it does not matter because blowing up a 9 kilometer comet into 31 pieces does not substantially changes its kinetic energy and it will destroy Earth anyways. But, ignoring that inconvenient truth, the answer is it depends on an interesting confluence of meteorite law, ocean law, space law, and nuclear law.
Meteorite law is actually a distinct thing. Meteorites have very high values due to their rarity and scientific value. Establishing ownership of them is important. There is no special treatment under general international law but there are specific laws for most countries. The United States, inheriting from English common law, holds that a private landowner owns any meteorites that are recovered from or actively fall onto their property. However, anything that falls onto public land is owned by the government and commercial permits for public lands are very hard or impossible to get.
Basically, a meteorite is like any other resource. The landowner owns it, with the special proviso that it becomes a resource when it falls (i.e. when it transitions from a meteor to a meteorite). Before that it is a celestial body subject to space law.
This precedent is for land-based meteorites because meteorites are small and unlikely to be found in the ocean, assuming the salt water does not immediately destroy them (which it probably will). But what about meteorites found in oceans?
Ocean law is relatively straightforward and dates from customs and practices that are thousands of years old. The most relevant portion here relates to resource law. I’m going to make a minor jump and say that when the meteor transitions to a meteorite it becomes a seabed resource since that is where it settles.
Under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), there are three types of zones relevant to seabed resources:
The Territorial Sea, which extends out to 12 nautical miles from a state’s coast
Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ), which generally extend to 200 nautical miles and sometimes up to 350 nautical miles specifically for seabed resources
The “High Seas”, which is everything outside of the first two and about half of the world’s oceans
A state has complete sovereignty for its territorial seas, including seabed resources. That state also has control over seabed resources in its EEZ. However, under UNCLOS, seabed resources in the High Seas are controlled by the International Seabed Authority, an international organization that is responsible for exploration and exploitation permits of seabed resources.
The green zones are Exclusive Economic Zones, where a comet crash would confer mineral rights on the relevant state, and the blue zone are the “High Seas,” where the ISA would determine mineral rights. Source
Statistically (excluding Antarctica because it has even more novel legal questions regarding meteorite ownership) a meteorite falling to Earth thus has:
A 1/3 chance of falling onto land and thus becoming a national resource
A 1/3 chance of falling into an EEZ or territorial sea, thus becoming a national resource
A 1/3 chance of falling into the High Seas, becoming an international governed resource
Now the U.S. has not signed UNCLOS because of opposition to global collective ownership of resources. In practice, however, the U.S. likes every other part of UNCLOS and so acts like it signed it and that it is customary law.
Every few years some crazy American company (or D.C. think tank) thinks it can mine in the high seas because of this “not having signed UNCLOS loophole” but government agents and lawyers quickly put the kibosh on that. If such an American company did illegally mine deep sea resources, they would not be able to process it since the countries with processing capacities would be quite mad - the U.S. does not have any. Even if would-be illicit miners could process metals in the U.S., they would taint any supply chains they touch in terms of international markets.
But in this case, it doesn’t matter.
If I am remembering right, PhD candidate Lawrence said the comet was projected to land 62 (imperial) miles off Ecuador. This is firmly in Ecuador’s EEZ and if the meteorite becomes a seabed resource, a U.S. company mining said meteorite would violate international law. Ecuador might not be able to enforce it, but they could just write a contract for China for the meteorites and then things get spicy.
“What does an EEZ have to do with any of this? There won’t be an EEZ if the comet lands.” Image: Netflix
Interestingly, 62 miles is 100 kilometers, which is the commonly held boundary for outer space. And that’s because the billionaire’s space resource utilization plan could technically make the meteorites into owned space resources, making it legal to recover in another country’s EEZ (albeit if it’s the territorial sea it becomes a legal nightmare). Its time for SPACE LAW!
Space Law
Unlike UNCLOS, the Outer Space Treaty does not clearly establish an international regime for the governance of space resources. There is an active and intense ongoing legal debate about whether countries and/or their nationals can own resources that they gather in outer space and sell them for a commercial profit (national ownership via scientific sampling like the Apollo or Chang’e missions is widely accepted).
The base argument (example here) stems from Article 2 of the Outer Space Treaty, which prevents the appropriation of the Moon or other celestial bodies by any state (and by extension in Article 6, a state’s nationals). A state cannot claim to own the Moon or an asteroid because someone plants a flag there or if they do other things like live there. The celestial body itself cannot be owned and many scholars argue that gathering and using space resources is thus forbidden.
The counter argument put forward by the U.S., and increasingly embraced globally as seen by interest in the Artemis Accords, is that ownership can be established when a resource is taken from the celestial body. NASA has a contract with several private companies to go and scoop some lunar regolith and then sell it to NASA. Effectively, this moon ‘soil’ is not owned until the company grabs it, then the company owns it, then NASA owns it. Like a fish you get from the sea.
When a celestial body is small enough, there is a question of whether a company could mine all of it and then own it, without technically appropriating it. It’s a novel question not relevant for near-term space resources, but it is relevant for Don’t Look Up.
The billionaire’s plan and legal strategy is to go to the comet, station robots there with nuclear weapons to place them into the regolith, then detonate them, breaking apart the comet, and making each fragment into an owned space resource.
Its not clear that this would work legally. Unlike the distinction with meteors and meteorites, where the completion of a fall transitions it from an unowned celestial body into an owned terrestrial resource, current legal theory is not fully established for space resources. Sure, scooping a sample or regolith is straightforward - you have actively gathered it and it is now in your physical position.
But do other, less direct activities create ownership? If the DART planetary defense mission described earlier is successful, does the U.S. own the impacted asteroid? Absolutely not. The U.S. is not making that claim and such a claim clearly violates the non-appropriation clause, or else the U.S. could claim the Moon from past impactors and Mars from future ones.
This case would be like blowing the Moon up and then claiming that you own the fragments. Ownership implies at least a physical control of a material. Even though the billionaire’s mining plan involves activities to make the resource accessible, it does not create physical control of the celestial body.
Regardless, it might not matter anyways. Because the mining plan relies on the use of nuclear weapons. Private ownership of such weapons is not possible, even in President Meryl Streep’s America. The Outer Space Treaty forbids the stationing of such weapons on a celestial body and the use of nuclear weapons for peaceful purposes is arguably banned by international law. Whereas nuclear weapons for planetary defense are clearly tied to security motivations, nuclear weapons to create a space resource are probably illegal.
Petroleum engineers played a key role in the movie where the world survived. Just saying…
Image source: Touchstone Pictures/IMDB
To sum, the arguably illegal act of using nuclear weapons to break apart a celestial body then claim complete ownership of it in violation of the non-appropriations clause to allow you to circumvent Ecuador’s clear ownership under meteorite and ocean law is not a good idea.
And no, the U.S. can’t get around this by saying, we have a Navy so we can do this and no one can stop it. Because the U.S. doesn’t have the processing capabilities for the metals anyways…
A final space law point – even if the ownership question is ambiguous, the liability question is not. Under the Outer Space Treaty and a subsequent space liability treaty, any damage resulting to Earth from a nation’s space activities is subject to strict liability. Meaning that, in this case, the U.S. nuking the comet turns it from an act of god into a U.S. space activity, and makes the U.S. liable for the end of the world.
The only monetary liability I can think that is anywhere near that is…. Oh….
Climate change.
