With some help from San Jose State faculty members and alumni, Washington Square magazine looks at what Hollywood gets right—and terribly wrong—in doomsday cinema.

1. Fall 2010
www.sjsu.edu
10 | Doomsday, deconstructed
Why the world isn’t ending
14 | The perilous internet
Education for a new frontier
18 | Spartan Football
Recruiting hits the highways

2. By Jody Ulate
Illustration by Andy Lackow
Cue the killer tomatoes!
Cue the virulent virus and
Texas-size asteroid!
Cue the new ice age
ushered in by tsunamis,
giant hailstones and
terrifying tornadoes!
For moviegoers, there is little that’s more thrilling than the end of
the world. From violent vegetables and toothy aliens to catastrophic
climate change, rabid zombies and epic asteroids, Hollywood has
been serving up mighty demises since it began. To be believable, big,
apocalyptic entertainment—complete with a colossal box of Junior
Mints and a tub of buttery popcorn—requires a kernel of reality. With
some help from San José State faculty members and alumni, Washington
Square looks at the tidbits of truth that allow us to suspend our disbelief
and revel in the end of the world again and again.
10 sjsu Washington Square fall 2010

4. “It’s one-billionth
our size and
it’s beating us”
Sometimes the smallest enemies are the
most frightening. Germaphobes beware: No
amount of hand sanitizer will save you from
the deadly viruses in Outbreak (1995) and I
Am Legend (2007). Outbreak’s lethal Ebola-like
Motaba virus will liquefy the innards of
anyone infected in just 48 hours. Brought to
the United States by a monkey from Zaire,
the virus is no match for the star power of
Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Spacey and Renee
Russo. At least the virus is contained in a quiet
California town. Military scientist Robert
Neville, played by hunky Will Smith, is not
so lucky. He may just be the only survivor of
I Am Legend’s virus, which was supposed to
cure cancer but instead turns the infected into
flesh-eating zombies.
Make no mistake, a pandemic could be the
end of us. But that’s unlikely, says Stephen
Morse, ’64 Microbiology, associate director for
environmental microbiology at the Centers
for Disease Control. With today’s transporta-
tion system, viruses can spread faster than
they did a century ago—but not as fast as they
do on the silver screen.
“When everything is squeezed into one
or two hours, it becomes scientifically inac-
curate,” says Morse. “Hollywood also tends to
compress the incubation period. It’s just not
possible for someone to be exposed to a virus
and have symptoms three minutes later.”
Morse offers some advice in case of an
Outbreak-like scenario: Listen to your local
public health authorities (unless they’re
already zombies) because they’re the first
line of defense in limiting the spread of virus.
Stay away from close personal contact with
those who are infected (especially if there’s a
chance they’ll try to eat your flesh) and avoid
crowded places like movie theaters. Seems
like common sense, but Morse says, “If it were
common sense, Hollywood wouldn’t make a
movie out of it.”
“Stupidity has a habit
of getting its way”
Common sense certainly doesn’t come into
play in nuclear war, a fact that’s apparent in
many films, including The Day the World Ended
(1955), Doctor Strangelove (1964), 20 Years After
(2008), and Mel Gibson’s Mad Max trilogy
(1979-1985).
Fans of doomsday cinema surely remem-
ber two 1983 flicks with very different
approaches to nuclear destruction: television’s
The Day After and War Games on the big screen.
The first was meant to be a true depiction
of a nuclear attack on the United States, and
the second was a more bubblegum approach
starring a baby-faced Matthew Broderick.
Both, however, convey a similar message of
the dangers of Mutually Assured Destruction
(MAD), says recently retired SJSU Professor
of History Robert Kumamoto, ’71 BA Social
Science and ’75 MA Education.
MAD was a popular concept in the 1980s
when the Reagan Administration was increas-
ing defense spending and reviving the idea
of the Cold War, says Kumamoto. “There
are those who suggest that the notion of
MAD is the number one deterrent to nuclear
exchange today.”
Setting the stage for the Reagan Admin-
istration, Kumamoto says former President
Jimmy Carter prepared for nuclear war by
developing the MX missile project—an
underground maze of tunnels in the Midwest
for hiding and protecting the missiles from
the Soviets. It was meant to protect against
the type of attack in The Day After. But subter-
ranean tunnels didn’t help Jason Robards or
Steve Guttenberg survive the attack or the
fallout and devastation that followed. Not
even Matthew Broderick’s computer wiz-
ardry would have helped to lighten the bleak
outcome. Red Vines, anyone?
“I think we’re on
the verge of a major
climate shift!”
But don’t all doomsday films warn us of our
eventual end? When compared to global
warming alerts carried by a new ice age in The
Day After Tomorrow (2004) and an overpopu-
lated world without natural food in Soylent
Green (1973), a realistic H-bombing seems so
ho-hum and unoriginal.
But it is refreshing when Hollywood gets
the details right, like the “sliver of science” in
the premise of The Day After Tomorrow, says
Eugene Cordero, professor of meteorology,
who shows part of the movie in his classes.
The gist of the movie is that global warming
leads to a change in ocean currents, which
drastically alters weather patterns around the
globe and triggers a new ice age. Cordero says
the bit about the changing ocean current is
accurate, at least partly.
“Part of the ocean circulation called the
Gulf Stream takes warm water from the
tropics toward northern Europe, keeping the
climate there relatively temperate. If global
12 sjsu Washington Square fall 2010

5. warming slows down or shuts off that warm
ocean current, the climate of northern Europe
might get a little cooler,” Cordero explains. “It
won’t trigger a global ice age, like in the movie,
but Europe might see a three or four degree
temperature decline. And that’s going to be
on top of global warming, so they’ll continue
warming, just not as fast as everywhere else.”
Looks like we’ll need SPF 500 sunblock
instead of snow parkas, but will we have
enough for all of the people who will be crowd-
ing the planet, like in Soylent Green? The movie
was made not long after that first Earth Day,
and is a look at life in 2022, when global warm-
ing has progressed to the point that the planet
only has limited agriculture, and a swarthy
Charlton Heston investigates the company that
manufactures synthetic food wafers for 40 mil-
lion impoverished New Yorkers.
Lynne Trulio, professor and chair of the
environmental studies department, says that
overconsumption will continue to be as much
a problem as overpopulation. Reaching a
point when the Earth can no longer supply
jumbo American portions of everything to
so many people is only natural. “We may not
view ourselves as overpopulated in the United
States, but Americans can have 20 times the
effect on the planet as someone living in a poor
nation because of how much we consume,” she
says. “As an ecologist, I know that when large
populations in nature exceed their carrying
capacity, there’s a population crash. The same
will happen with people.”
Soylent Green’s food wafers solve both hunger
and the overpopulation problem—in disturb-
ingly Hollywood fashion. Soylent green is
people! That’s just gross.
“What’s your
contingency plan?”
In some cases, people are not the cause of
their own doom by spreading viruses, starting
wars or destroying the Earth’s resources.
Sometimes we’re the last and best line of
defense—because, well, who else will save
us if an asteroid the size of Texas is going to
collide with Earth in 18 days?
Hold on now. Don’t choke on your Mike
and Ikes. The chances of a giant asteroid
colliding with the Earth are slim, says
Monika Kress, assistant professor of physics
and astronomy. There are very few asteroids
like the one in Armageddon (1998), and we
know about all of them. They stay in “nice
polite orbits that don’t intersect with Earth’s
orbit.” Promise. Kress once spent seven weeks
in Antarctica searching for meteorites, and
knows a lot about the stuff that can fall to
Earth. She even has a hunk of iron and a
fancy space rock in her office, and they’re not
scary at all.
Kress says an asteroid the size of the Lone
Star State wouldn’t boil the oceans, but
would definitely cause global devastation.
The asteroid that struck the Earth and caused
the extinction of dinosaurs 65 million years
ago was 10 times smaller than Armageddon’s
asteroid. Raise your hand if you’re glad that
Bruce Willis was available on short notice.
If for some reason an asteroid did jump
off its polite orbit and we had to send Bruce
Willis to take care of it, Kress has more
good news. She says that landing on an
asteroid is absolutely possible. In fact, the
Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency landed
an unmanned spacecraft on a near-Earth
asteroid, and the vehicle returned to Earth in
June. It would also be possible to drill a hole in
an asteroid, which Kress says is basically just
“a big rubble pile.”
The science in the sci-fi thriller Sunshine
(2007) is far flimsier, from premise to execu-
tion. To save Earth from the solar winter
of a dying sun, a team plans to “create a star
within a star” by exploding a massive stellar
bomb within the sun.
“In reality, a star like the sun gets very
bright at the end of its life—very, very lumi-
nous,” says Kress. “In another two or three
billion years the sun will be too bright for life
as we know it to exist.”
Even now, the surface of the sun is about
6,000 Celsius. Kress says no materials could
withstand temperatures that high—and even
if a spacecraft were able to get close enough to
release a bomb, the materials would vaporize
before it could explode. Guess there’s a reason
they call it science fiction.
The End
Realistic or not, there’s something
exhilarating about how Hollywood doles
out doomsdays. Perhaps it gives us a renewed
sense of immortality each time our heroes
cheat death and save the world at the eleventh
hour. When the booming explosions and
zombie shrieks fade (and our ears stop ringing),
we find our way out of the dark theater and
toss our empty popcorn buckets, and real life
becomes a little sweeter because the good guys
and gals kicked butt and saved humanity one
more time. v
Fall 2010 sjsu Washington Square 13