The entire film is laughably unrealistic.
For example, we’re told the asteroid in the film is “the size of Texas.” Great. That’s about 1224 kilometers wide at its furthest east-west expanse. If we go looking for a comparable astronomical body we’re looking at the dwarf planet Ceres.
(Ceres. This is a rock roughly the size of Texas. And by “roughly” I mean Texas is substantially larger than Ceres. Around 20% larger.)
The thing is, humans discovered Ceres is 1801, and not simply by pointing a telescope at random parts of the night sky.
Astronomers had long predicted that something had to exist somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. It was just a matter of looking to confirm the predictions.
So, random asteroids this size don’t simply whizz through the solar system on unpredictable orbits. We would have noticed it literally centuries ago if it was up there.
In fact, Ceres is so huge, if you knew where to look for it and you had the advantage of a new Moon and no light pollution you might actually be able to to see it with the naked eye. And remember, Ceres is orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter and it’s visible unassisted under the right conditions. If it were on a path straight for Earth somewhere inside the orbits of Venus and Earth or Earth and Mars it would likely be the second brightest object in the night sky for months if not years before impact.
So it would come as absolutely no surprise to anyone. And it certainly would be observed by everyone on the planet far longer than 18 days before it hit Earth.
And slowing it down or breaking it in half with nuclear weapons is insane. Something the mass of Ceres would shrug off every nuke on the planet no matter how deeply you drilled them into it.
Because, again, we’re talking about a dwarf planet. Ceres is nearly as big as the moons of Jupiter or Saturn.
Could a bunch of oil drillers really stop one of those moons’ orbits if we could land them on one?
Of course not.
(The wrong stuff.)
These guys know absolutely zero about orbital mechanics, so even if you could get them to the asteroid, which would be in the top 30 largest rocky bodies in the Solar System, with every nuke ever made and all the time in the world, they’d never figure out how to change its velocity.
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