Fall 2010www.sjsu.edu

10 | DoomsDay, DeconstructeD Whytheworldisn’tending

14 | the perilous internet Educationforanewfrontier

18 | spartan Football Recruitinghitsthehighways

byJodyUlateillUstration 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.

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“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

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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

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