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This doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The plan was to be there for seven years even though it would feel like a half an hour to the crew. Mann’s planet was 3 months away while Brandt’s boyfriend was a year away. If both of those fa
il, you can still arrive back at the water planet in time before the crew planned on returning in the movie. This is something that just doesn’t add up. The logical path was Mann’s (Mann being a coward chose this planet intentionally thinking they’d go to his first if he failed), then Brandt’s, and then the water planet as a last resort. Instead of that taking an estimated 10 years, they just blew it.

meh they had promising data that the closest planet could be suitable. They wanted the best shot at securing success of either plan A or B first, pretty simple.

the movie explicitly stated it would take more time/resources making the trip progression you suggest more arduous. it also gave romilly time to research, transmit data, and maybe have info on what the next best planet is.

also edmund's signal stopped transmitting a while ago so probably not a good sign for his planet and the love conflict with brand makes it a more skeptical argument to make. it would really make no sense to go to the furthest planet with the worst outlook before the water planet if you want to ensure plan A/B succeed. that really throws your logic for the planet order with millers being last resort.

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They correctly calculated how much Gargantua would warp time, so I don’t think they made this error.

they explicitly stated that the planet was closer to gargantua than they thought. they calculated 1 hour would take 7 years, turns out they spent 23 years. they didnt even intend to stay 7 years time there, just a scope it out and run type plan. maybe their calculation of time dilation was correct or incorrect. but there was 16 extra years so something was not calculated correctly or there was extra time taken to repair the ship damage and escape the planet that was not accounted for.

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Here’s the problem with Cooper sending the NASA coordinates to himself: he wouldn’t have been in the situation he was in if he was left to his own devices. You can narrowly push your past self in a direction you were going in already, but nothing to that extreme. Cooper would have gone regardless of the STAY or finding the constant in Gargantua, but it’s impossible for him to tell himself to go somewhere he wouldn’t have gone. The only path I can see is another Cooper from another reality gets into the Tesseract and then gives Cooper the coordinates which our Cooper then repeats himself years later. Interstellar follows LOST time travel logic on whatever happened happened. Like in LOST Faraday is able to influence his mother on events that would happen to him, but not directly himself.

i understand that paradox. but you completely ignored an explanation because its not LOST time logic which you arbitrarily assigned to interstellar. in lost they actually time travel in a linear fashion. In interstellar the tesseract is a dimension OUTSIDE of space-time. interstellar is always happening in the present, except in the tessaract or memory flashbacks. coop is using gravity/love which goes beyond space-time. interstellar cannot follow LOST's time travel logic because there simply is no time travel. im not sure the bootstrap paradox still applies when there is no time travel, just interactions with higher dimensions.