The Real-Life ‘Bart’s Comet’ From ‘The Simpsons’ Was a Wake-Up Call for NASA
With the news that an asteroid could potentially collide with Earth in 2032, some people may take this moment to quietly reflect on their own mortality and our planet’s precarious place in the cosmos. Others will just make a bunch of snarky references to pop culture.
While some folks have been referencing Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck’s ‘90s heroism, others have been comparing this news to an old episode of The Simpsons. Season Six’s “Bart’s Comet” found the eldest Simpson sibling discovering a comet, which turns out to be heading directly for Springfield (with Moe’s Tavern taking the worst of the damage in every possible scenario).
The episode’s resolution may be of some comfort right now. After Springfield prepares for the apocalypse, the asteroid ultimately burns up in our atmosphere, and, when it lands, it’s no bigger than a chihuahua’s head. While that isn’t expected to happen in real life, despite the anxiety-inducing media attention, scientists have stressed that the asteroid, very likely, will simply pass us by.
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“Bart’s Comet” was written by Simpsons legend John Swartzwelder, and, according to the episode’s DVD commentary, he took his cues from a real world event. Executive producer and Season Six showrunner David Mirkin hailed “Bart’s Comet” as “one of the perfect Simpsons episodes,” and recalled that the storyline was something that the writers came up with as a group. “It was actually on the cover of Time Magazine,” Mirkin explained, “the idea that comets might hit the Earth.”
He also pointed out that the episode predated similarly-themed blockbusters like Deep Impact and Armageddon. “This was all before those movies,” Mirkin noted, theorizing that the Time story may have been “the same thing that inspired those ‘comet hitting the Earth’ movies. But we got to it first because those movies took longer to make and develop.”
Seemingly, the Time issue that inspired the show was from a 1994 issue about a “shattered comet” that was “about to hit Jupiter, creating the biggest explosion ever witnessed in the solar system.” The magazine then asked and answered the ominous question: “Could it happen here on Earth? Yes…”
The comet-planet collision depicted on the cover was historic, not just in the world of TV cartoons, but in terms of planetary defense. Per NASA, after pieces of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL9) crashed into Jupiter, the incident became a “wake-up call that big collisions still occur in the solar system.” Scientists realized that, had the comet hit Earth instead “it could have created a global atmospheric disaster, much like the impact event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.”
Prior to this event, “Planetary Defense” wasn’t even a term. But after observing the “devastation” of Jupiter, four years later, Congress “officially directed NASA to find 90 percent of the asteroids in our celestial neighborhood 1 kilometer or larger.”
And now NASA is working on methods for deflecting any incoming asteroids — hopefully in ways that won’t set any local bars on fire.
