However, Isherwell’s innocuous bearing also obscures his inner cunning: He has discovered that the doomsday comet contains “$32 trillion worth of materials” necessary to produce smartphones and computers. Sporting the vacant stare of a man who just chased three hours of hot yoga with a couple of bong rips, Isherwell speaks in a squeaky mix of tech jargon and New Age chakra-chatter. In Don’t Look Up, this dynamic is brilliantly spoofed in the form of a Silicon Valley tech guru-and “third richest human ever”-named Peter Isherwell. It also shines a spotlight on the danger of allowing politicians and businesses, rather than scientists, to run point when it comes to threats to the human species. One of the strengths of McKay’s film is not only that it draws attention to how unprepared we are-both institutionally and culturally-to confront existential risks. Like Don’t Look Up, it’s a fact so scary it might make you laugh if it doesn’t make you cry. As Ord likes to point out, that operating budget is smaller than that of the average American McDonald’s franchise.

Yet, unlike climate change, most existential risks are understudied, underpublicized, and underfunded: Toby Ord, an Oxford ethicist and one of the leading scholars on human extinction, often notes that the Biological Weapons Convention-the international body whose job it is to prevent human extinction through biological warfare-has an annual budget of less than $2 million. In academic parlance, we call threats like these “existential risks”: disasters that carry with them the possibility of human extinction or global social collapse from which we could not reconstitute civilization. In the case of Don’t Look Up, insisting that the film is just an allegory for global warming blinds us to the fact that in addition to satirizing our climate inaction, the film draws attention to the fact that the human species is threatened with extinction on multiple fronts: climate change, yes, but also renewed tension among nuclear powers, the possibility of malevolent artificial intelligence, supervolcanoes of the sort lurking beneath Yellowstone, pandemics for which COVID may be a mere dress rehearsal, and, of course, comets.

Skype ceo parody