View on the waterfront

S.S.Lau

may 30,1998

The follwing is an excerpt of Dr. Morrison's (NASA scientist) review on another IMPACT TPYE movie. I have not see this movie, nor "Deep Impact" ...

Armageddon, staring Bruce Willis and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer for Disney, is quite another story, and one suspects that it was never concerned about technical accuracy -- perhaps more of a spoof like Independence Day or Men in Black. No one from the comet/asteroid community was consulted, and the only technical advice that is credited is from former NASA employees Joe Allen and Ivan Beckey. In this case the threatening NEO is an asteroid "the size of Texas", which is about a million times larger (in mass and energy) than any Earth-crossing asteroid, but the warning time is just a few weeks. Instead of entrusting planetary defense to trained astronauts or the military, a bunch of amateurs is recruited, given a week of training, and blasted off in two Space Shuttles to intercept the asteroid. Apparently no one told the producers that the Shuttle is limited to low Earth orbits. The job of the astronauts is to drill down about 200 m and plant nuclear explosives. Unlike the sets of Deep Impact that try to portray the surface of a comet accurately, the asteroid set for Armageddon does not look at all like an asteroid, and strangely the hole they drill glows orange as if there were magma just below the surface. The world may be saved in Armageddon, but the credibility of the movie is a casualty.

The reason I find this movie interesting, even though I have not seen it, is because I remember Prof. Luis Alvare's theory of extinction of dinosaurs.I have had the pleasure to listen to his lecture on the Pyramids in Egypt, a subject quite different from this movie.

The following is an excerpt from the one of the dinosaur sites.

Two US Geological Survey scientists have identified a 25 mile-wide crater in Iowa as the possible site where an asteroid or comet may have crashed into the Earth 65 million years ago, causing the extinction of dinosaurs.

The scientists, G. Izett and C. L. Pillmore of the US Geological Survey office in Denver, say they have found evidence that supports a theory first proposed by physicist Luis Alvarez, Nobel prize recipient,and his son, geologist Walter Alvarez. The theory, published in 1980, holds that an asteroid or comet slammed into the Earth at the end of a geological period called the Cretaceous - the age of the dinosaurs. This explosive impact sent so much dust and soot into the atmosphere, the theory says, that sunlight was blocked and temperatures plummeted. Plants withered, and animals either starved or froze to death. The dinosaurs died out, making room for mammals and eventually for man. Although many details are still being debated, the theory has achieved wide acceptance, according to many scientists gathered here last week for the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. A special session devoted to the extinction theory produced several new pieces of evidence to support the idea that an extraterrestrial cause - showers of comets or asteroids - may have played a crucial role in the rise and fall of Earth's life forms.

A brief story of Prof. Luis Alvarez will be provided in a future date.