Earth should have been fine. PLOT HOLE
Near the end of the movie they say that the meteor will arrive a week early.
Pretty much means it's going to miss us. How the hell does the meteor still hit us?
Learn to science, hollywood.
The miscalculation could be made if the meteorite was aligned with earth elliptical orbit or atleast some section of it's orbit was aligned and it was heading at/chaising after earth. If object is heading right at you from such a big distance as you intuitively should know, it's very difficult to tell where it is and how fast it's going. To get all parameters of elliptical orbit you need multiple points of observation. The observations we made about general planets in solar system weren't made in one nice evening in observatory, some of them took centuries to collect and process. If that asteroid was aligned with earth orbit and it arrived earlier, it would still hit.. surprise surprise. What's interesting is that only 16 hours was left till impact, and it would take at least 17 hours to fly to England in that tiny plane, if it had enough fuel. She would never got to see her parents... Anyway, i don't care even if it was incorrect, i didn't watch this movie to learn about astronomy, i have a heavy thick book for that purpose, i watched it to learn something about humanity, and it looks like you have something to learn yourself on the matter, or you will spend the rest of your pity life finding "giant plot holes" in movies.
shareYou're not accounting for the time it took him to drive home in calculating the flight to England. From Delaware to NYC (one assumes, since they crossed NJ on the way) at a leisurely drive would add on enough time, especially since it's not entirely clear how long after he arrived home the newscast announced the revised timetable.
As far as the elliptical thing, if it arrived earlier, it would depend on the arc of the ellipse. A week is a *huge* amount of time for an object traveling at the normal speeds of something moving in ellipse since it would necessarily be caught in a gravity well of some sort to be moving in that kind of pattern. What the source of such a gravity well might be is...really hard to guess. If it's the sun, then its arc is broad and it's unlikely to be in an intersecting path with earth's orbit for a week. If it's a closer body...the only one that could conceivably create such a predictable ellipse is Jupiter and there are far too many alternate sources of gravity (see: Sun) to make this exactly within the realm of remote probability, especially since Jupiter's gravitational influence wouldn't come close to creating such an orbit. All this assumes it's moving in a contradistinct orbit from Earth. If it's moving in the same orbit, then arriving a week early means it would get there before Earth does and miss entirely.
Don't get me wrong, it's a clever attempt. But it has gaping flaws as large as the original post discusses. Also, measuring a straight-on impact with a month to spare wouldn't be that difficult...for an object that close, they can establish parallax just using the Earth's orbit and deduce the velocity.
Also, it didn't ruin the movie for me either. It's just nice when filmmakers take that extra effort to make certain everything hangs together. Nothing wrong with deriving intellectual pleasure to go along with the emotional pleasure.
I don't really think the science behind the meteor really matters, it was a love story.
"Sam that was beautiful...hold me"
"The Official Cas!Squad"
Rest in Peace Andy
The film is a love story (or companionship story), so its not important anyway, but the conspiracy explains away the arriving early.
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RIGOLETTO: I'm denied that common human right, to weep.