Neil deGrasse Tyson recently appeared on SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Show to promote his new book, To Infinity and Beyond.
But he had more on his mind than the book. In the interview, deGrasse Tyson explained the scientific inaccuracies behind movies like Armageddon and Moonfall.
“Armageddon, you say, violates more laws of physics per minute than any other film ever made,” Cagle began.
‘Moonfall’
Lionsgate
DeGrasse Tyson agreed, adding, “That’s what I thought until I saw Moonfall. It was a pandemic film that came out, you know, Halle Berry, and the moon is approaching Earth, and they learned that it’s hollow and there’s a moon being made out of rocks living inside of it and the Apollo missions were really to visit, to feed the moon being, and I just couldn’t, so I said, “Alright, I thought Armageddon‘had a secure hold on this crown, but apparently not.”
Cagle brought up a key moment involving an asteroid.
Moonfall
“All you gotta do is just nudge it, and if you do that early enough, if you nudge it like one centimeter per second to the right, in space, there’s no friction, so it’ll just keep drifting to the right. If you do that early enough, then you can have the asteroid pass in front of the earth rather than hit the earth, or you can slow it down so that it’ll pass behind the earth. Two ways you can adjust it. So, yeah. You know what it’s like? It’s like The Terminator thing where I want to kill your parents so that you’re never born. Really? All you have to do is prevent your parents from meeting each other or have them have sex 20 minutes later than the other one. That will create a different zygote and you won’t be born, so the movies go, in some cases, they get hyperbolic on their solutions to problems.”
‘Moonfall’
Lionsgate
Co-written, directed, and produced by Roland Emmerich, Moonfall follows two former astronauts (Berry, Patrick Wilson) alongside a conspiracy theorist (John Bradley) who discover the hidden truth about Earth’s moon when it suddenly leaves its orbit.The film, released in January 2022, was a boxoffice flop.
You can watch a trailer below:
