History Fridge / Interstellar

* Saturn is the god of the harvest and visually impressive; it makes sense for the wormhole to be there thematically.

* Remember Cooper's son's insistence on keeping his family on the farm, even in the face of massive dust storms and crop failures? There was almost certainly a significant number of people who refused to evacuate Earth for exactly those reasons (at least partially as a result of the cultural anti-intellectualism), leading to a lot of self-selection against particular traits. Probably darker than Nolan intended it to be.
** Anti-intellectualism? You're expecting people to blindly trust a bunch of people that, until they are knocking on their doors saying they need to leave immediately, get on a spaceship, and permanently leave the planet, almost no one knew existed? They are to trust people from a government agency that was officially no longer in existence and are saying that the very government that they worked for has been deceiving the public for decades? Not trusting people that have continuously lied to you is anti-intellectualism? Apparently smart people are very good at outsmarting themselves if they expect everyone to trust them after intentionally going along with a conspiracy for a very long time. Also, Cooper's son seemed to be very much in the dark about the whole 'need to evacuate the planet' thing, just like everyone else. Cooper himself said that he didn't tell Murph the situation on Earth could not be salvaged. She found that out by being heavily involved with NASA. I'd wager Cooper didn't tell his son either. Said son was also not involved in the space program beyond sending messages to his dad. His reaction was against being told to abandon everything he had with nothing indicating something better. Had he seen ready-to-launch "arks" he might have had a somewhat different reaction. Seeing actual results from the space program that took his dad and, to an extent, his sister away from him might have given his sister a better argument for demanding he leave the last part of his life that hadn't disappeared yet behind than "living underground", as he put it. Having someone you're a bit distant from swooping in and demanding you completely turn your life upside-down, no matter how unpleasant that life might be, usually puts you on the defensive, especially when the alternative they're presenting doesn't seem any better.

** Anti-intellectualism? You're expecting people to blindly trust a bunch of people that, until they are knocking on their doors saying they need to leave immediately, get on a spaceship, and permanently leave the planet, almost no one knew existed? They are to trust people from a government agency that was officially no longer in existence and are saying that the very government that they worked for has been deceiving the public for decades? Not trusting people that have continuously lied to you is anti-intellectualism? Apparently smart people are very good at outsmarting themselves if they expect everyone to trust them after intentionally going along with a conspiracy for a very long time. Also, Cooper's son seemed to be very much in the dark about the whole 'need to evacuate the planet' thing, just like everyone else. Cooper himself said that he didn't tell Murph the situation on Earth could not be salvaged. She found that out by being heavily involved with NASA. I'd wager Cooper didn't tell his son either. Said son was also not involved in the space program beyond sending messages to his dad. His reaction was against being told to abandon everything he had with nothing indicating something better. Had he seen ready-to-launch "arks" he might have had a somewhat different reaction.

** Anti-intellectualism? You're expecting people to blindly trust a bunch of people that, until they are knocking on their doors saying they need to leave immediately, get on a spaceship, and permanently leave the planet, almost no one knew existed? They are to trust people from a government agency that was officially no longer in existence and are saying that the very government that they worked for has been deceiving the public for decades? Not trusting people that have continuously lied to you is anti-intellectualism? Apparently smart people are very good at outsmarting themselves if they expect everyone to trust them after intentionally going along with a conspiracy for a very long time. Also, you've got to remember that Cooper's son seemed to be very much in the dark about the whole 'need to evacuate the planet' thing. Cooper himself said that he didn't tell Murph the situation on Earth could not be salvaged. I'd wager he didn't tell his son either. Said son was also not involved in the space program beyond sending messages to his dad. His reaction was against being told to abandon everything he had with nothing indicating something better. Had he seen ready-to-launch "arks" he might have had a somewhat different reaction.

* Using data from inside the Black Hole, humanity managed to manipulate gravity enough to send enormous arks into space. But shouldn't the first option be to use this brand new technology to solve the Earth's problems, ''before'' abandoning the planet and traveling to an uninhabited planet in the same system as a '''black hole'''? How is leaving near a black hole safer?

* Remember Cooper's son's insistence on keeping his family on the farm, even in the face of massive dust storms and crop failures? There was almost certainly a significant number of people who refused to evacuate Earth for exactly those reasons (at least partially as a result of the cultural anti-intellectualism), leading to a lot of self-selection against particular traits. Probably darker than Nolan intended it to be.

Saturn is the god of the harvest and visually impressive; it makes sense for the wormhole to be there thematically.

* There's a bit of FridgeHorror in that even with multiple ships like that seen in the finale en route to Saturn, it's hard to imagine that more than a few million people made it off the planet before the end.
** Fight fridge horror with fridge horror. Maybe they got everyone, and a few million humans were all that was left.
*** Given that at one point a character finds the idea that there used to be 6 billion people on Earth unbelievable, this is definitely plausible.
* Remember Cooper's son's insistence on keeping his family on the farm, even in the face of massive dust storms and crop failures? There was almost certainly a significant number of people who refused to evacuate Earth for exactly those reasons (at least partially as a result of the cultural anti-intellectualism), leading to a lot of self-selection against particular traits. Probably darker than Nolan intended it to be.
* The film possibly starts in at least the 2060s or 2070s based on comments Donald makes about technology when he was a kid about it seeming that a new gadget was released almost every day which would put that in at least the late ought's to early 2010s at the very earliest based on current tech trends.
* Direct divine intervention depicted in Hard SciFi? The evidence: 1. A stable wormhole appearing in the Solar System in the same timeframe as the end of the world, leading to a place with an endpoint of the universe, close enough to be possible to visit and yet far enough away to be challenging. 2. Falling into a black hole leading not to being torn to highly energised atoms followed by nonexistence, but to an organised higher-dimensional form of his Humanity-saving daughter's bedroom? The atheist characters might have missed all that, but this troper didn't.
** Those events were not coincidental, but was humans from even more distant future closing the StableTimeLoop, not the God. It is explicitly stated in the movie.
** It's stated in the movie that the beings that opened up the wormhole and created the tesseract are humans that have evolved into a fifth dimensional existence, and have done so because they can't perceive of the proper "when" to give Murph the singularity data. It's also stated that the black hole is a very large black hole that is spinning near the speed of light..It would be theoretically possible to survive passing through the event horizon of such a black hole before you were spaghettified. Also, Saturn is the god of the harvest and visually impressive; it makes sense for the wormhole to be there thematically.
*** 'Fifth-dimensional humans' were the characters' interpretation, the audience can have different ideas on the matter.
* So, if Cooper is sending messages back in time through gravitational anomalies, does this mean that he's also the one who caused the anomaly causing the crash from his dream at the very start of the film? Why would he do such a thing? (Other than maintain the stable time loop).

*** 'Fifth-dimensional humans' were the characters' interpretation, the audience can have different ideas on the matter.

** It's stated in the movie that the beings that opened up the wormhole and created the tesseract are humans that have evolved into a fifth dimensional existence, and have done so because they can't perceive of the proper "when" to give Murph the singularity data. It's also stated that the black hole is a very large black hole that is spinning near the speed of light..It would be theoretically possible to survive passing through the event horizon of such a black hole before you were spaghettified. Also, Saturn is the god of the harvest and visually impressive; it makes sense for the wormhole to be there thematically.

** It's stated in the movie that the beings that opened up the wormhole and created the tesseract are humans that have evolved into a fifth dimensional existence, and have done so because they can't perceive of the proper "when" to give Murph the singularity data. It's also stated that the black hole is a very large black hole that is spinning near the speed of light..It would be theoretically possible to survive passing through the event horizon of such a black hole before you were spaghettified.

* Direct divine intervention depicted in Hard SciFi? The evidence: 1. A stable wormhole appearing in the Solar System in the same timeframe as the end of the world, leading to a place with an endpoint of the universe, close enough to be possible to visit and yet far enough away to be challenging. 2. Falling into a black hole leading not to being torn to highly energised atoms followed by nonexistence, but to an organised higher-dimensional form of his Humanity-saving daughter's bedroom? The atheist characters might have missed all that, but this troper didn't.

* The film possibly starts in at least the 2060s or 2070s based on comments Donald makes about technology when he was a kid about it seeming that a new gadget was released almost every day which would put that in at least the late ought's to early 2010s at the very earliest based on current tech trends.

* Remember Cooper's son's insistence on keeping his family on the farm, even in the face of massive dust storms and crop failures? There was almost certainly a significant number of people who refused to evacuate Earth for exactly those reasons (at least partially as a result of the cultural anti-intellectualism), leading to a lot of self-selection against particular traits. Probably darker than Nolan intended it to be.

** Remember Cooper's son's insistence on keeping his family on the farm, even in the face of massive dust storms and crop failures? There was almost certainly a significant number of people who refused to evacuate Earth for exactly those reasons (at least partially as a result of the cultural anti-intellectualism), leading to a lot of [[UnusualEuphemism self-selection against particular traits]]. Probably darker than Nolan intended it to be.

* There's a bit of FridgeHorror in that even with multiple ships like that seen in the finale en route to Saturn, it's hard to imagine that more than a few million people made it off the planet before the end.

* There's a bit of FridgeHorror at play towards the ending scenes [[spoiler:particularly Cooper Station, which is pretty much a slice of America orbiting Saturn and Brand's colony]]. As far as can be discerned, only the United States is shown [[spoiler:having withstood the turmoil on Earth long enough to go off-world]]. Though one has to wonder: where did everyone ''else'' go?
** It's mentioned that there are other self-sufficient ships also on route, but it's still hard to imagine that more than a few million people made it off the planet before the end, with the means shown in the final scenes.

* There's a bit of FridgeHorror at play towards the ending scenes [[spoiler:particularly Cooper Station, which is pretty much a slice of America orbiting Saturn and Brand's colony]]. As far as can be discerned, only the United States is shown [[spoiler:having withstood the turmoil on Earth long enough to go off-world]]. Though one has to wonder: where did everyone ''else'' go?

FridgeBrilliance: Some have questioned how future humans could have created the tesseract which permitted Cooper to speak to Murphy if humanity was a generation away from extinction. When Cooper and TARS sacrificed themselves to get the Endurance away from the black hole, they saved the human race - Brand was able to set up the colony using Plan B; frozen embryos, exowombs, etc. A couple of aeons from now, future humans realize that Cooper was in a unique position to create the key elements of their society fast enough to save an entire planet worth of humans, and decide to help him. Humanity had no future until Cooper decided to sacrifice himself to save it, and in doing so, turn he himself was saved. Kind of like [[Literature/LestDarknessFall The Apotheosis of Martin Padway]].
* Or just a stable-time-loop-within-a-stable-time-loop.
* It could be argued that helping Cooper save the people of Earth was simply how these Downstreamers' history ''went'' (yes we're calling them that). It wasn't any act of kindness or selflessness, but simply them setting in motion the events that led to their own existence.

* Or just a stable-time-loop-within-a-stable-time-loop.

FridgeBrilliance: Some have questioned how future humans could have created the tesseract which permitted Cooper to speak to Murphy if humanity was a generation away from extinction. When Cooper and TARS sacrificed themselves to get the Endurance away from the black hole, they saved the human race - Brand was able to set up the colony using Plan B; frozen embryos, exowombs, etc. A couple of aeons from now, future humans realize that Cooper was in a unique position to create the key elements of their society fast enough to save an entire planet worth of humans, and decide to help him. Humanity had no future until Cooper decided to sacrifice himself to save it, and in doing so, turn he himself was saved. Kind of like [[Literature/LestDarknessFall The Apotheosis of Martin Padway]].