re: The official Interstellar thread (spoilers)

I saw the movie yesterday. The screen was big enough; so, I won't complain about not seeing it on an IMAX screen.

It was an entertaining but stupid movie. I know that sounds like blasphemy, given the extreme praise heaped on it in this thread.

If the premise is that "THEY" put a wormhole out there as a target for the salvation of human life on Earth, then "THEY" are/were extremely powerful and intelligent beings. We are teased with the possibility that "THEY" are really "US" in the future. Either way, I submit that "THEY" or "WE" had the ability to do the following:

1. Reveal the answer to whatever equation that Michael Caine was working on. Heck, they could have simply told "US" what needed to be done;

2. I see no reason why such communications had to be vague, in binary language, or positioned in a "luck of the draw" location for discovery. For that matter, I don't understand why Cooper was constrained to be behind a bookcase the entire time. Couldn't he have found another location in Murph's life to provide the signals;

3. I see no reason why the saving communications could not have been delivered at a stage on Earth when conditions had not gotten so dire. "THEY" or "WE" would have known what was coming; there was no reason to subject "US" to all of that misery;

4. I don't understand why "THEY" or "WE" provided 12 possible locations for "US" to habitat. Dang, just point out the right ONE planet and help us get there. Not to mention, do I understand that each of the 12 explorers were on solo missions? Imagine the one who came down on the planet covered with water. Does she seek a dry place and, not finding any, abort? Or, was she, like the others, simply a dart thrown in the direction of that planet without ability to navigate out of danger. Why did Cooper's craft have the ability to get away from there but hers did not? If her craft was a dart, imagine an alien with such a meteoric craft splashing down on Earth in the middle of an active volcano, instead of a safe place. Well, that's the luck of the draw, I guess;

I don't understand why, when entering the black hole, Cooper's craft exhorted him to "EJECT". What was going to happen to the craft? Why would Cooper be SAFER outside the craft? That is, if the black hole was destroying the craft, then it surely should have destroyed the puny human who departed it. If we are left with the impression that Cooper actually "died" while entering the black hole but, like Lazarus, he came back to life, why did the black hole let him escape?

For that matter, why did it seem to collapse in on him; I'm not sure what was being portrayed as the place near Saturn at the end of the movie which rescues Cooper. I submit that if it is what I think it was, then it would have taken a heck of lot longer time to construct than would Murph have had left in her life; it would have involved availability of resources not shown to us in the rest of the movie. I guess the solution to the equation must have also provided a resurgence of resources;

What happened to plan B? Did Brandt jettison that plan after she landed with Freeman?

These are thoughts that have rattled in my head since yesterday. There are many others that could be shared. For example, I would think that Cooper and his family would be living a much better lifestyle than that shown in the movie if he were truly one of the last successful food suppliers on the planet.

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I read somewhere that the sound issues (music louder than dialogue) is actually some new form of technique that producers are using.

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My wife was actually covering her hears at several points. There went my only chance to find out what was said

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2. I see no reason why such communications had to be vague, in binary language, or positioned in a "luck of the draw" location for discovery. For that matter, I don't understand why Cooper was constrained to be behind a bookcase the entire time. Couldn't he have found another location in Murph's life to provide the signals;

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Because that is when she was the most perceptive to it. It was the only time she'd be able to make something of it.

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What happened to plan B? Did Brandt jettison that plan after she landed with Freeman?

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She carried out the plan. She has no idea of what happened back in our Solar System.

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I submit that if it is what I think it was, then it would have taken a heck of lot longer time to construct than would Murph have had left in her life; it would have involved availability of resources not shown to us in the rest of the movie. I guess the solution to the equation must have also provided a resurgence of resources;

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They said early in the movie that the facility they were working in WAS the floating facility shown later in the movie. Also based on Murphs age it was ~80-90 years from when she solved the equation.

An excerpt from The Science of Interstellar detailing the Blight and the general condition of Earth...


- Population of North America alone was reduced to a tenth of its current size via a combination of catastrophes

- Agrarian society but not necessarily a dystopia

- Most aspire to little more than just survival

- Kip was dubious of the setting, so he conversed with four Caltech biologists to flesh out how plausible the scenario is. Some thoughts/possibilities:

-- Small scale example of ecological catastrophe: no snow on Sierra Nevada for a few years (perhaps due to global warming) would destroy drinking water supply for Los Angeles. Ten million people migrate, agricultural output from CA plummets

-- Human immune system simply cannot keep up with rapidly evolving pathogens for a contagious virus (ex: ice caps melting release a dormant pathogen that we haven't experienced yet and it wipes out plants and/or humans before our immune systems can fully adapt)

-- As an attempt to halt global warming, we fertilize the oceans to produce algae that eats much of Earth's carbon dioxide, but an unintended side effect is new kind of algae that produces toxins that poison oceans. Aquatic plant and fish life is killed off, increasing reliance on agriculture (ex: early in Earth's history, cyanobacteria started making oxygen and radically changed composition of Earth; killed almost everything else on Earth. Oxygen was like a lethal byproduct)

-- Blight is any disease in plants caused by pathogens; there are generalist and specialist blights, for targeting many species of plants or just certain ones

-- Pathogen that attacks chloroplasts, something that all plants have in common. Chloroplasts are crucial to photosynthesis; pathogen could start in the ocean, wipe out life there, then move to land

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but it helps with the paradox.

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There isn't an ontological paradox if you consider what TARS told Cooper while they were in the tesseract.

"Time is being represented here as a physical dimension."

"They didn't bring us here to change the past."

There isn't a timeline, and there isn't a casual chain of temporal events. Time functions as a spatial, physical dimension in which all points in time occur concurrently.

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I think the beings were indiscriminately creating anomalies around the earth to alert whoever might understand that something is going on and further their drive to look into it. The reason they weren't able to get in touch with Murphy specifically is because they didn't know her on a personal level to send her a meaningful and purposeful message.

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So they/we didn't send Coop n TARS there to change the past, we sent them to help Murph change it?

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Oddly enough the ultimate solution to everything with Cooper sending the message to Murph validated Brand's emotional pleas about the potential significance of love, just not in a mystical way. Because of Cooper's connection to Murph, he was essentially an autonomous entity perfect for turning loose in the universe and seeking Murph out once he was in 5D space. In terms of setting up a time loop that would work, such a powerful connection between two people would dramatically increase the odds of a successful plan. Cooper would move hell and high water to contact his daughter.

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I see no reason why the saving communications could not have been delivered at a stage on Earth when conditions had not gotten so dire. "THEY" or "WE" would have known what was coming; there was no reason to subject "US" to all of that misery;

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Maybe for "US" to evolve into "THEM", that misery had to happen. What if they just saved us from the beginning, an alternate "THEM" might not have existed?

Maybe everything that can happen, will. I don't think it is by accident Murphy's Law was referenced multiple times.

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What happened to plan B? Did Brandt jettison that plan after she landed with Freeman?

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I thought it was pretty clear when she landed, the guy she was meeting there was already dead... There was a makeshift memorial and she had a camp setup.

Depending how big the station was (well multiple stations, since they reference Murph being transported from one to the other- which took 2 years. ), maybe they used Plan B to help bolster future humanity?

I think what's being missed here is the "love" reference. "THEM" or "WE" used the emotion of love, as well as other things, to communicate with the past. They used the connection MM had with his daughter to communicate. Why was it in that time? I think he made it clear that they weren't sure exactly in what time frame to communicate the message. The technology they used is so beyond our understanding, making judgments on why they did what they did and when they did it is impossible and irrelevant. We don't know what their capabilities were.

Well it kind of means time travel. In the 5th dimension time isnt linear. Everything that has ever happened or will happen is happening simultaneously. But its not like they can hop in a delorean and head to the old west.