It’s been a long-debated topic: Could Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack have fit on the door and survived at the end of James Cameron’s “Titanic?”
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, however, is less concerned with whether he could’ve survived and more about why he didn’t even try.
“Whether or not he could’ve been successful, I would’ve tried more than once. You try once. ‘Oh, this is not gonna work. I will just freeze to death in the water.’ No, excuse me. No!” deGrasse Tyson told HuffPost. “The survival instinct is way stronger than that in everybody, especially in that character. He’s a survivor, right? He gets through. He gets by.”
DeGrasse Tyson added, “And I’ll tell you this, if that character was Matt Damon from ‘The Martian,’ he would’ve made an outboard motor and saved everybody. This is how science can help you!”
Earlier this year, Cameron himself debunked the popular “Titanic” theory that Jack could have survived if Rose (Kate Winslet) had just made a little room. “Jack’s always going to die, folks!” he said. “There’s no other version of reality.”
Last year, Winslet admitted to Jimmy Kimmel , “I think he could have actually fitted on that bit of door.” However, Cameron had previously debunked a “MythBusters” theory that the door was big enough to save both their lives.
DeGrasse Tyson actually had reached out to Cameron via email about another aspect of the film that really bothered him, but he said it’s “water under the bridge.”
“He had the wrong sky over the sinking ship, and we know where it sank and what time. […] We know there was no moon interfering with he sky. So we knew this,” deGrasse Tyson explained. “He sinks the ship in the movie and … the sky wasn’t even just the wrong part of the sky, it was a made-up sky. And worse than that, the left side of the sky was a mirror reflection of the right side of the sky, so there’s just no excuse for that.”
The ship sank in the early morning of April 15, 1912 after colliding with an iceberg during its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City. More than 1,500 people died.