"Don't Look Up" brings to the fore two astronomers, who discover a comet hurtling toward Earth and try to warn the government, media, and everyone that something must be done to prevent a collision with our planet. The scholars’ desperation grows by the day, because no one takes them seriously - the president, under a strong influence of an oligarch, is in the heat re-election, journalists who have promised coverage are more concerned with high ratings, and common people feel it’s about a new conspiracy.

Deja vu

Does this story sound familiar? We saw something similar during the pandemic: leaders swearing there was no cause for concern, media mixing fakes with facts, and high school graduates explaining the role of vaccines through the lens of genetic mutations.

A comet heading towards a planet at a speed of tens of thousands of kilometers per hour should be a very serious thing, but screenwriters Adam McKay and David Sirota inserted funny moments into the movie. Some comic sequences make viewers forget for a few moments that it’s actually about the apocalypse.

The nation’s president, for example, enjoys the margin of error of about 1% of astronomers' calculations and overlooks the other almost 99% of the certainty that the impact will occur. The oligarch who sponsored her election doesn't mind that a third of the rockets and robots he had sent to collect ore from the comet have gone out of commission prematurely.

The hosts of the TV show, who are in a constant exchange of cheap jokes, are bothered by the guests’ look, but don't care for what they say.

In essence we get a cocktail of chiseled linguistics, twisted mathematics, distorted reality.

The freedom to choose what to hear and see has allowed people to select the channels of communication that are suitable for their own beliefs, expectations and fears, that are the least disturbing, and this informational comfort causes them to lose their sense of reality and state of alert to external dangers.

It is that state of alertness that our ancestors had developed for more than hundreds of thousands of years and thanks to which we have survived as a species.

Ancient Greeks on anticipatory thinking

As an example, we will refer to global warming - another overlooked disaster. One of the problems that’s been largely ignored is the role of humans in climate change. The first debates about the impact of people on climate were documented in Ancient Greece in 1200 BC – 300 AD. Greek philosophers wondered if drying up swamps and cutting down forests had anything to do with the timing and intensity of rainfalls. 

More recently, in 1896 the Swede Svante Arrhenius became the first scientist to imagine how humans can modify the climate on a global scale. He published a paper with figures and arguments how carbon dioxide emissions could warm the planet. 

The first article in the media about rising temperatures as a result of burning coal was published in the American magazine Popular Mechanics in 1912. 

And in 1957, scientist Roger Revelle told the whole world - after completing two major experiments - that the oceans would be unable to absorb the entire volume of carbon dioxide emitted by world industry. 

Scientists rang the alarm bells at the Conference on Atmospheric Change in Toronto, Canada, in 1988.