History Headscratchers / Interstellar

* Or "go to Edmunds first", or similar. Yes, stable time loop means it doesn't work, but if he's trying to make himself stay which breaks the loop anyway, so it is worth a shot. Since Miller's planet was the one that cost so much time and fuel, not visiting it means Cooper gets to go back to his family earlier, save Doyle and possibly Romily if Mann gets avoided, and they still accomplish the mission and save humanity.

Or "go to Edmunds first", or similar. Yes, stable time loop means it doesn't work, but if he's trying to make himself stay which breaks the loop anyway, so it is worth a shot. Since Miller's planet was the one that cost so much time and fuel, not visiting it means Cooper gets to go back to his family earlier, save Doyle and possibly Romily if Mann gets avoided, and they still accomplish the mission and save humanity.

[[folder: Is Nolan a climate change skeptic?]]

* Flying a tiny portion of Earth’s population off the planet is extremely implausible. Ok, the movie attacks the angle of implausibility head on. But, whatever this blight is, if they can make a space ark without the blight— a sealed environment— why can’t they far easier do that on Earth? Forgetting the magic anti-gravity thing, the energy needed to evacuate just one person out of Earth’s gravity well is several orders of magnitude beyond that needed to build and maintain a sealed environment on Earth.

* I can see that when the elder Professor Brand confesses his sins to Murph that she flips out and has a major crisis of faith. But a lot of time passes before she sends her angst message to the Endurance, and more before she shows up at Tom’s farm. Yet, she’s still furious. But this seems so insanely self-indulgent. She’s a brilliant lifetime trained scientist. She has to know that her father was not a rocket scientist, and probably didn’t know a fraction of the physics. And she bitterly attacks Cooper for abandoning her on Earth— she must understand that Cooper flew off on a mission that was darn near a 99.9% a suicide mission. She makes it sound like Cooper was flying off to Rigel to hang out with some green slave women.

[[folder: And Speaking of Plan A...]]

** Brand thought it was impossible to get the data he needed for the gravity equation. Romilly finds a way that might possibly work. Brand should have realized that someone like Romily might be able to do such a thing, if he had sufficient time to study a black hole. Even if Brand felt that he had to lie to everyone in order to ensure Plan B would happen, he should have changed his approach as soon as the Endurance had left the galaxy. He should've said "Hey everyone, this gravity equation would be a lot easier to solve if I had some black hole data", and then he could've gathered the brightest minds in NASA to figure out how to get that data (e.g. by sending another ship to Gargantua with that specific purpose). In 23 years, they might have come up with something! Instead he wastes everyone's time by deliberately pursuing a dead end. Deception may have been necessary in order to get Cooper to comply, but after he left there was no reason to keep up the facade anymore.

** Cooper stated to TARS while landing on Miller’s planet that the only time he crashed was when an AI decided to take over control while he was flying. It seems that is why he crashed, not from a gravitational anomaly.

* The ark appears to be a giant, self-sustaining ecosystem that the people inside have been living in for years. If you can build that, why do you even need to go into space? Why not just pack as many people as you can on board, seal it off, and live there indefinitely on earth? Odds are the blight would run it's course eventually and some kind of new ecosystem would establish itself, which means earth could probably even be reclaimed.

[[folder: ''Endurance'' and the Ranger]]

** It is also possible that they wanted the launch to be covert as in a [=VTOL=] orbiter would set off alarms that a satellite launch would not.

[[folder: ''Endurance'' and Mann]]

[[folder: The Decaying world on Earth]]

[[folder: Gravitational Slingshot Around Gargantua]]

** It is, in fact, utilizing the Oberth Effect (see "powered slingshots" above), albeit in a single pass rather than over several close approaches. The basic principle is that it requires less delta-v to change the eccentricity of the orbit (how stretched the ellipse is) when travelling at higher velocity (such as at the periapsis, or closest approach, of the orbit), and raising the eccentricity to 1.0 is what is required to escape a particular gravity well. (Conversely, plane changes are easier at slower velocities.) Cooper had inadvertently put the ''Endurance'' onto a close approach to Gargantua in his attempt to escape the atmosphere of Mann's Planet, so he utilized that to escape. Jettisoning the two landing craft ([[spoiler: along with Cooper and TARS]]) provided mass reduction through the Penrose Process, much like staging a rocket launching from Earth would, but the primary factor in play would be the Oberth Effect.

[[folder: Tom's son]]

[[folder: Earth and Humanity's Future]]

[[folder: The Blight and the Space Stations]]

* One thing I don’t understand is why escaping Earth helps humanity escape the blight. Presumably, any vegetation on the space station arcs sent into space would have contracted the blight as well. Meaning humanity is just bringing their problem with them to their new home planet. The only possibilities that I can think of are that there are pre-blight seeds in hibernation kept away from outside exposure or that there are greenhouse farms such as the one at NASA that are kept as far away from outside exposure as possible to prevent contamination. Did the movie address this at any point?

** Also, simple visual shorthand. The American flag on the moon is probably the most famous and evocative image we have of space colonization, and the average viewer isn’t going to stop and ask why they didn’t change the flag to something more universal now that the space race is over. Creating a whole new “Earth flag” to use in the movie would require at least a sentence or two of in-universe explanation, while using the American flag does not.

[[folder: Combine harvesters going wacko]]

[[folder: Communication through the wormhole]]

[[folder: TARS' decision-making]]
* [=TARS=] makes the autonomous decision to disable the auto-docking sequence on the landers and [=CASE=] knew about it, which basically falls under ZerothLawRebellion. If Mann had remained sane and this measure unnecessary, would they have ever told any of the humans that they did it or just activated again without informing them of it? What other safety precautions might they have taken to make sure the humans don't jeopardize the mission? And if Mann had been able to order them to do it, would they have had to comply or do their make their own judgements about who is in a mental state to make rational decisions?

[[folder: What Makes Miller's Planet a Viable Option At All?]]

[[folder: Never send a robot to do a human's job?]]

[[folder: On blights and oxygen deficiencies.]]

[[folder: How did they escape the time dilation planet?]]

[[folder: The Miller Landing]]

[[folder: Lazarus Landing Pods]]

[[folder: Why Saturn?]]

[[folder: Why visit the planet with heavy time-dilation first?]]

[[folder: No further ships]]

** There's no time-dilation on Edmund's planet, and there are no people there except Amelia. She's all alone until Coop joins here there at the end.[[/folder]]

[[folder: Lying about Apollo]]
* How could the lie about the Apollo missions being a hoax possibly be maintained? All it would take is a cursory examination of the video taken and a rudimentary understanding of physics to know this couldn't have been filmed on earth (the hammer and feather experiment done by David Scott during Apollo 15 and any of the footage of the lunar rover kicking up dust comes to mind). Such footage could've only been taken on a celestial body with no atmosphere (i.e. the moon) or in a vacuum chamber far larger than anything that existed at the time (or even today for that matter). And there's [[http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Moon_landing_hoax#Arguments_against_a_conspiracy far more evidence]] out there for anyone who cares to look. All this information could not be suppressed.
** Maybe the intention to suppress curiosity and exploration was so successful that the majority of people either don't care to find out or don't care to listen to those who find out. Who's got time to worry about a conspiracy when you're just trying to find enough to eat?
** You assume that (a) most of the people in the society depicted even have "a rudimentary understanding of physics" and (b) that they also have easy access to things like footage of the moon landings and the hammer and feather experiment and so forth. In (a), that's something that's a problem even today -- there's [[https://phystec.physics.cornell.edu/content/crisis-physics-education reportedly a drastic shortage of physics teachers in the US]] and already large numbers of people that already believe the Moon landing was a hoax, even with the evidence to the contrary easily available. With a repressive and anti-intellectual government actively ensuring that as many people as possible believe this, I imagine this would be even worse. With (b), it is heavily implied that the Internet -- and by extension, the easy availability of information we take for granted today -- is no longer widely available. It's easy to find evidence to prove the Moon landings when you can call up the relevant footage on Website/YouTube and the page at Rational Wiki at a moment's notice. If you can't, where's the place most people would have any kind of access to this information? School. And who decides what gets taught at many schools? The government. Which brings us back to point (a).
** The main character is a middle aged guy who holds a engineeer degree and flew for the NASA. The supression of knowledge at most has been going on for a couple of decades, and there are still plenty of people around who must know how things were before. Unless they are also giving some sort of amnesic drug to the population, that kind of information doesn't evaporate that quick.
** The information didn't fully evaporate. Cooper is incredulous the teacher doesn't believe the lunar landings occurred and angry about her attitude. It's explicit that the textbooks which noted the lunar landings were replaced with "corrected" ones that claimed it was an elaborate hoax to trick the Soviets into bankrupting themselves. The teacher is younger than Cooper and her college training probably was exactly that. Considering the severe condition the world has fallen to, it wouldn't be hard for people to believe it was a hoax if they are being taught that by the government.

[[folder: How can Edmunds' Planet be Habitable?]]

[[folder: No search for Cooper]]

[[folder: New York Yankees]]

Doctor “Mann”, played by a heavy environmentalist, makes up a complete story that a planet is far warmer than reality...

Bran asks what the social utility of loving people who are dead is. The answer is pretty obvious: it's a form of pain, and it's utility is the same as all pain: motivating liveforms to avoid that source of pain in the future. In the case of mourning death, it motivates us to attempt to prevent the deaths of those who either share our genetics, meaning preserving their genes preserves some of ours, or whose social alliance increases the chances of our own genes going into the future. Two scientific types should understand this.

Flying a tiny portion of Earth’s population off the planet is extremely implausible. Ok, the movie attacks the angle of implausibility head on. But, whatever this blight is, if they can make a space ark without the blight— a sealed environment— why can’t they far easier do that on Earth? Forgetting the magic anti-gravity thing, the energy needed to evacuate just one person out of Earth’s gravity well is several orders of magnitude beyond that needed to build and maintain a sealed environment on Earth.

I can see that when the elder Professor Brand confesses his sins to Murph that she flips out and has a major crisis of faith. But a lot of time passes before she sends her angst message to the Endurance, and more before she shows up at Tom’s farm. Yet, she’s still furious. But this seems so insanely self-indulgent.

She’s a brilliant lifetime trained scientist. She has to know that her father was not a rocket scientist, and probably didn’t know a fraction of the physics. And she bitterly attacks Cooper for abandoning her on Earth— she must understand that Cooper flew off on a mission that was darn near a 99.9% a suicide mission. She makes it sound like Cooper was flying off to Rigel to hang out with some green slave women.

*** The wormhole was artificially produced, this is actually mentioned in the movie. And Cooper theorizes that the 5th dimensional beings helping us are actually are our future selves.

*** An additional meta when contemplating extra dimensions and things like time slippage is that though we readily perceive the traditional 3 dimensions of left/right, forward/backward and up/down, and we can move along all three, it's MUCH more difficult for us to travel up than horizontally (or down). It's also worth noting that from our layman point of view on the surface of the spherical gravity well "Earth", up/down actually means away from/towards the center of the gravity well.

*** False Dilemma Fallacy! Any reasonable person would recommend that ALL possible strategies be implemented simultaneously.

*** It was explicitly stated during Cooper's briefing that getting data back through the wormhole was extremely rudimentary, mainly limited to very short binary blips. Presumably, an encoded timestamp would've been too complex to be readable.
*** Though, they are able to transmit audio and video in both directions...

*** Questionable. When asked what the fleeing people are hoping to find, she just says "survival." If they were headed for the arks - for which Murph is a senior official - it would've been a non-question. It's more likely that it's a re-enactment of the population movements during the original Dust Bowl: people unable to survive where they were, so striking out to find somewhere, ''anywhere'' they can make a living and survive. Thematically, it's also consistent with the film.

*** No "high-grade" solar cells smaller than a football field could power an entire town. Even given a 100% conversion rate (conversion of sunlight into electricity), and even if the ENTIRE surface of the drone were plastered with cells - those cells would be able, at best, to power a single household.

*** There were "consumer-goods" riots in the 1960s in America (at least, someone who grew up in the future being feed a constant stream of political propaganda might refer to them as such). And the "Zoot Suit" riots of the 1940s (which someone in a highly politicized future might think of as "clothing riots"). And yet America won WW II and won the Space Race. How was THAT possible?!

*** More likely they'd incubate ten ''female'' zygotes to maturity, then they'd act as surrogates for the next few dozen frozen ones.
*** Incubate the eggs using exactly what? Was Brand supposed to be the mother? NO: Artificial wombs!

*** It's hard see this as a ''desperate'' measure considering the realities of space travel (very slow) meant they had hours, days, maybe weeks to consider their plans. The movie trims away most of their between sleep periods after they are in the new galaxy, but the lengthy between sleep periods shown before they traverse the wormhole would be the norm. After awaking, they would check the status of this ship, messages from Earth, etc. And they certainly wouldn't be expected to have to make quick decisions about the mission objectives a few minutes after stumbling out of cryosleep.

*** And Miller didn't actually gave a thumbs up. She approached the planet, probably saw the water, and send an "OK" to show she was still alive and that the planet had water. Then, she landed, she died from the wave, and planetary seconds after, the main characters landed. It was all due to the time dilation that her first OK kept being repeated while going out of the atmosphere.

* Still don't know why Miller would attempt a landing at all on such a planet. It's scraping along the edge of where it would just join the accretion disk. It's gotta be throwing off all kinds of high energy radiation. The time dilation makes it such that even if you could live there you go for 365 days and find the rest of the universe went on for 61,000 years, so the humans there are just a time capsule and nothing else since they can't coordinate with the rest of the species. Liquid water or not, it's just not worth it.

*** It’s artistic license. Dipping in and out of that gravity well would cost thousands of Earth years, no matter how they did it. Also, Miller’s signal would have been Doppler shifted far beyond recognizably. If NASA had even tried to prepare for this signal, they sure as heck would know right away of the time dilation.

*** Possibly they ''could'' have put it near Jupiter instead, but Jupiter happened to be on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth at the time, making for a more problematic route with a lot of rocket-burst adjustments. Conversely, Mars happened to be in just the right place to permit a trajectory to Saturn that used a slingshot maneuver to save on fuel.

*** There's no time-dilation on Edmund's planet, and there are no people there except Amelia. She's all alone until Coop joins here there at the end.[[/folder]]

*** The main character is a middle aged guy who holds a engineeer degree and flew for the NASA. The supression of knowledge at most has been going on for a couple of decades, and there are still plenty of people around who must know how things were before. Unless they are also giving some sort of amnesic drug to the population, that kind of information doesn't evaporate that quick.
*** The information didn't fully evaporate. Cooper is incredulous the teacher doesn't believe the lunar landings occurred and angry about her attitude. It's explicit that the textbooks which noted the lunar landings were replaced with "corrected" ones that claimed it was an elaborate hoax to trick the Soviets into bankrupting themselves. The teacher is younger than Cooper and her college training probably was exactly that. Considering the severe condition the world has fallen to, it wouldn't be hard for people to believe it was a hoax if they are being taught that by the government.

** The movie physics In real world physics, yes, but in the film's physics the black hole instead acts as a gateway into the fifth dimension and exists outside time, altogether.

** With the gravity equation solved, humanity could use a planet around the black whole as a stepping stone to other planets. I feel like one of the astronauts very quickly mentioned this as a possibility. Either way, a habitable black hole system is better than a system that is quickly becoming uninhabitable.

[[/folder]]