Netflix’s “Don’t Look Up” has been praised for its eerily realistic portrayal of a Michigan State University professor trying to warn the world about a crashing asteroid that will end civilization. In fact, there are many organizations inside and outside the U.S. government whose job it is to detect and prevent these impacts. And the best way to teach them how to do that is to run scenarios and try to figure out what actions to take.

That was the idea behind the fifth Planetary Defense Interagency Tabletop Exercise, which took place at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in April. NASA recently released a preliminary report on the results of the exercise, with a full report to be released in August.

This is the fifth in a series of exercises that have been ongoing for the past 11 years. Each exercise focuses on different potential impact scenarios to determine what actions need to be taken immediately or over a longer period of time.

In one of these exercises, international personnel participated in the discussion for the first time. More than 100 people attended the meeting, including representatives from the UN, Great Britain, ESA and JAXA. Notably absent were the other two space powers (Russia and China), who would clearly influence any decision-making in a realistic asteroid impact scenario.

In this case, the scenario some participants developed would not directly affect China or Russia. However, both could have been affected by the tidal wave if the target asteroid had landed in the Pacific Ocean. The scenario involved an asteroid a few hundred meters in diameter with a 72% chance of hitting Earth in about 14 years.

The asteroid’s predicted path past Earth would have taken it from the Pacific Ocean through northern Mexico and the southern United States, directly over Dallas and Washington, D.C., across the Atlantic Ocean and over Portugal, Spain (including Madrid) and North Africa. It’s likely that the participants didn’t forget that this scenario could directly impact their city.

The calculations showed that there was a 45% chance that the impact would not affect anyone, a relatively high chance that it would affect 1,000 to 100,000 people, and a 0.04% chance that it would affect more than 10 million people if, for example, a direct attack on the Dallas metropolitan area was indicated. This uncertainty and the extended timeframe presented planetary defense officials with the greatest challenges in these exercises.

As with Look Up, political considerations were at the forefront of participants’ minds. Many echoed the sentiments of an anonymous participant in an earlier report: “I know I would rather [зробити]“Uncertainty about the impact, and specifically whether it would affect anyone, was a major factor. In this scenario, the asteroid passed behind the sun, so additional observations that would refine these estimates were not possible for the next seven months.

The availability of resources was again critical to both tracking a potential attacker closely enough and designing and executing a mission that would potentially divert it. Participants did not believe that there would be sufficient resources to accomplish either mission and indicated that this was one of their main concerns going forward.

They also agreed that the tabletop exercises were a great success because they allowed decision-makers involved in deciding what to do in a real-life potential asteroid impact to think through the steps they would need to take and what the political and public reactions might be.

Plans for additional exercises are already underway, and the session’s final report, with specific action items to be assigned, is scheduled for release on August 5. While an asteroid impact is not expected for decades to come, exercises like this will continue to hone perhaps one of the most valuable skills of any space agency: how to defend against one of our greatest threats.