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Interstellar spoiler thread. All spoilers go in here.

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pantsmith said:
How does he comprehend a fourth and fifth dimension so readily when his brain has been stressed as far as it has? How does love, something you cant quantify in any real way, give him the power to navigate the very fabric of time and how can we begin to accept that his communications held up when his own ship stopped working?
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The tesseract is a fifth-dimensional space but it's deliberately constructed as a three-dimensional structure for Cooper so that he can understand it. And it's not as simple as "the power of love transcends dimensions" -- that's kind of what it boils down to, but the mechanics of that scene are that Coop is able to distinguish one moment from the next in his daughter's life because he knows and loves her and has a concept of her personal timeline. The 5D beings see the past, present, and future as one amorphous stream of events, so they can't really tell apart one moment from another.

pantsmith said:
How does he get out of the center of a black hole, one tiny body at the end of life support, right in front of a ship that happens to be passing by. Providence? That just leaves a really gross non-sciency taste in my mouth, for a movie that seems to really like science.
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Providence, as in the work of far-future hyper-evolved humans.
 
MikeRahl said:
I keep thinking two things... the water planet. I think they should have picked up that the data would only be for a maximum of 90 minutes or so, and not very useful, but I could see how they would not think of that in a high stress environment like that. Although they probably should have mentioned that when they got back and the guy had aged his 20 years or so, but this is more nit-picky.
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Don't forget in their minds they were also picking up another crew member.

Des0lar said:
Also 23 years of solitude on a space station would have driven anyone insane.
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That's why he took a few "naps".

Blader said:
The tesseract is a fifth-dimensional space but it's deliberately constructed as a three-dimensional structure for Cooper so that he can understand it. And it's not as simple as "the power of love transcends dimensions" -- that's kind of what it boils down to, but the mechanics of that scene are that Coop is able to distinguish one moment from the next in his daughter's life because he knows and loves her and has a concept of her personal timeline. The 5D beings see the past, present, and future as one amorphous stream of events, so they can't really tell apart one moment from another.
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Right. From what I gathered, they knew that Murph was essential, but they didn't know her. They didn't know how to communicate the information to her.
 
I saw a couple of guys asking about Cooper's name (or if he was actually named Cooper) Isn't in the original script mentioned that the Space Station is called Joseph Cooper after him?

Corgi said:
made me chuckle.
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AvkehFH.png


Good ol' Nolan the farmer. He knows how to make a profit.
 
Blader said:
The tesseract is a fifth-dimensional space but it's deliberately constructed as a three-dimensional structure for Cooper so that he can understand it. And it's not as simple as "the power of love transcends dimensions" -- that's kind of what it boils down to, but the mechanics of that scene are that Coop is able to distinguish one moment from the next in his daughter's life because he knows and loves her and has a concept of her personal timeline. The 5D beings see the past, present, and future as one amorphous stream of events, so they can't really tell apart one moment from another.
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Does this support the whole idea of a closed time loop? (i.e., Cooper does what future humans designed for him to do to ensure the future humans' existence, at which point he is jettisoned out of the blackhole and the wormhole itself supposedly closes?)
 
DiipuSurotu said:
They never survived without the wormhole. The wormhole was always there. It's a closed time loop. For the 5-dimensionals beings, time is just an ordinary dimension like the space ones. You don't look at a 2D circle and say "WTF where are the beginning and the end of this circle on this piece of paper, it makes no sense".

It boggles my mind that 30 years after The Terminator, people still can't accept a concept as simple as that of a closed time loop.


Not black hole. Tesseract.
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Because a time loop without alternative timelines makes no sense. I can accept traveling back in time and basically doing the same thing again in a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of thing. What I can't accept is superhumans from future, who would have never lived if it wasn't for themselves?!

There needs to be a cause and effect: Humanity survives the blight -> superhumans exist in the far future

Humanity dies on Earth because there is no wormhole -> Superhumans never get to be
 
pantsmith said:
How does he get out of the center of a black hole, one tiny body at the end of life support, right in front of a ship that happens to be passing by.
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Well, he was floating at where the wormhole used to be by Saturn, right? The black hole seemed to sling him back to where he started.
 
Des0lar said:
Because a time loop without alternative timelines makes no sense. I can accept traveling back in time and basically doing the same thing again in a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of thing. What I can't accept is superhumans from future, who would have never lived if it wasn't for themselves?!

There needs to be a cause and effect: Humanity survives the blight -> superhumans exist in the far future

Humanity dies on Earth because there is no wormhole -> Superhumans never get to be
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Right, exactly. This is what I'm trying to figure out. In Terminator, humanity survives long enough to achieve time travel. In Interstellar, humanity would not have survived without the wormhole in the first place.
 
Des0lar said:
Because a time loop without alternative timelines makes no sense. I can accept traveling back in time and basically doing the same thing again in a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of thing. What I can't accept is superhumans from future, who would have never lived if it wasn't for themselves?!

There needs to be a cause and effect: Humanity survives the blight -> superhumans exist in the far future

Humanity dies on Earth because there is no wormhole -> Superhumans never get to be
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or superhumans aren't superhumans.

you also have things like them being 5th dimensional were time and gravity are not what we think of them as.
 
Jarmel said:
Landslide apparently. There was a scene of Brand digging either him or the beacon out of a bunch of rocks.
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I think she was just burying him.

Des0lar said:
Because a time loop without alternative timelines makes no sense. I can accept traveling back in time and basically doing the same thing again in a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of thing. What I can't accept is superhumans from future, who would have never lived if it wasn't for themselves?!

There needs to be a cause and effect: Humanity survives the blight -> superhumans exist in the far future

Humanity dies on Earth because there is no wormhole -> Superhumans never get to be
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The 5D humans are outside of space-time though, so the cause of their existence being tied to a paradox doesn't really affect them.
 
Anton Sugar said:
Right, exactly. This is what I'm trying to figure out. In Terminator, humanity survives long enough to achieve time travel. In Interstellar, humanity would not have survived without the wormhole in the first place.
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And to add to that, it was clearly shown in the movie, that while you can travel through time in the 5th dimenson, you cannot change the past.
Else why would the superhumans not just change history before the blight? Save the earth and still enable space travel? Why just help humanity to survive (in order they can even exist) just in it's last crucial moments?

Blader said:
The 5D humans are outside of space-time though, so the cause of their existence being tied to a paradox doesn't really affect them.
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Just because they live in another dimension doesn't exclude them from general logic:
If the earth is destroyed by a comet just before Cooper launches and everyone dies, do these superhumans still exist?
That's what I mean. Even if you can percieve past and future and whatever, you cannot change it. At least not these beings as they could have saved the Earth multiple times over if it was so easy.
 
Anton Sugar said:
It's not that I can't accept it, I'm just having trouble rationalizing it (which is probably the point).

Like, with The Terminator, you can say, "Humanity existed long enough to invent time travel, and went back to the past."

But, in Interstellar, humanity would die off without first having the wormhole. Without a wormhole, we have no hope. So I think where others and I are getting caught up is "how did the wormhole FIRST get placed there?"

Please be gentle, I am but an ignoramus trying to understand.
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there's nothing to understand. those self-fullfilling-time-loops are a trope and nothing else. a twist that one sci-fi writer came up with and has been copied ever since. it just comes down to whether you like (or at least, accept) it or not.
me personally, I'm fine with it in comedies that are called "Back to the Future", but in Interstellar... let's just say I could follow everything else in that movie. IMHO pretty much everything got explained, but that shit comes out of nowhere. It feels cheap.
 
Lol at Nolans quote about the Nolan/Anti-Nolan folks. It read like "why the fuck are my movies held to such a standard that people feel the need to try and find plot holes when they aren't there?"
 
Des0lar said:
And to add to that, it was clearly shown in the movie, that while you can travel through time in the 5th dimenson, you cannot change the past.
Else why would the superhumans not just change history before the blight? Save the earth and still enable space travel? Why just help humanity to survive (in order they can even exist) just in it's last crucial moments?
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Well, for that, I think what Brand said was right. Time is a physical space that they can go to, but they can't PHYSICALLY occupy it or change it.

However, gravity transcends space/time, so they could go back and alter gravity. So, they could just walk along the tesseract until they find that spot near Saturn and create the wormhole there.

I think.
 
Anton Sugar said:
Well, for that, I think what Brand said was right. Time is a physical space that they can go to, but they can't PHYSICALLY occupy it or change it.

However, gravity transcends space/time, so they could go back and alter gravity. So, they could just walk along the tesseract until they find that spot near Saturn and create the wormhole there.

I think.
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Well then they could have sent messages like Cooper did. They could have saved humanity a lot of time if traversing through it is so simple for them.
 
Anton Sugar said:
It's not that I can't accept it, I'm just having trouble rationalizing it (which is probably the point).

Like, with The Terminator, you can say, "Humanity existed long enough to invent time travel, and went back to the past."

But, in Interstellar, humanity would die off without first having the wormhole. Without a wormhole, we have no hope. So I think where others and I are getting caught up is "how did the wormhole FIRST get placed there?"

Please be gentle, I am but an ignoramus trying to understand.
Click to expand...

Des0lar said:
Because a time loop without alternative timelines makes no sense. I can accept traveling back in time and basically doing the same thing again in a self-fulfilling prophecy kind of thing. What I can't accept is superhumans from future, who would have never lived if it wasn't for themselves?!

There needs to be a cause and effect: Humanity survives the blight -> superhumans exist in the far future

Humanity dies on Earth because there is no wormhole -> Superhumans never get to be
Click to expand...

Here's how I see it. We're 4-dimensional beings. We can look at 2D space (for example, a photograph) just fine. We can't look at time like a photograph though, because we're part of space-time. 5-dimensional beings, however, are "above" or "outside" of space-time. They can look at time as if it were a mere photograph. Time doesn't change for them, it's just a single state, just like what a 2D photo is to us.

Anyway my point is that there's no "How did humans survive without the wormhole?". There's no point in the timeline "without the wormhole". The wormhole was always there because the chain of causes and effects is a closed loop. When you look at a circle on a piece of paper, there's no beginning or end for that circle. You can't ask where the circle starts. It just doesn't "start"; it just goes round and round on a closed loop. You have to "look" at time as if it was a spatial dimension for it to make sense.
 
Des0lar said:
The filmography was beautiful, but I couldn't like it in the end because of all the Nolan Logic you had to just accept in order to understand.

The time dilation on the first planet I can accept, but the endurance should have felt something of that as well, just not to the same amount. No way I can believe that there is this kind of dilation on the surface and none just in orbit of the planet. Also 23 years of solitude on a space station would have driven anyone insane.

Then there was the tesseract part, which made me groan (not out loud) because of how mind boggling crazy it is.
So humans from the future made the wormhole and the tesseract to make humans from the past survive and get off Earth.

But how did the humans from Earth ever survive without the wormhole? There are no multiple timelines in this movie. The humans of the past could only survive because future humans helped them which makes literally zero sense.

Oh and Cooper and Grant can't possibly be the same age at the end of the movie. Cooper is said to be 120 years something, because he entered the black hole / tesseract, but she never experienced that amount of time dilation since she was cruising at the edge and just using it to slingshot.
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Brand is 120 because of the slingshot effect. The mention that even slingshotting it going to put them in the dilation zone. Cooper got time-transported somehow. That's the "magic" part.

As far as timelines, it's the notion of everything that is, will be. There's no causality, everything is simultaneous.

Basically, everything with the external intelligence (future humans or not) has to be taken on faith, and that included ejecting him at a point and space in time.
 
raindoc said:
there's nothing to understand. those self-fullfilling-time-loops are a trope and nothing else. a twist that one sci-fi writer came up with and has been copied ever since. it just comes down to whether you like (or at least, accept) it or not.
me personally, I'm fine with it in comedies that are called "Back to the Future", but in Interstellar... let's just say I could follow everything else in that movie. IMHO pretty much everything got explained, but that shit comes out of nowhere. It feels cheap.
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I'm hesitating to call bullshit just because I don't understand it, especially considering the scientific backing that this film had.

Admiral Woofington said:
Lol at Nolans quote about the Nolan/Anti-Nolan folks. It read like "why the fuck are my movies held to such a standard that people feel the need to try and find plot holes when they aren't there?"
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Except that part where he says he's very aware of the plot holes in his movies.

He's probably referring to most of the crap in articles like this and this.

2. There’s a reference to land wars having come and gone, but still: Wouldn’t the starving hoards of desperate humanity kill the farmers and take what was left? Are we really supposed to believe, in a society where the military has collapsed, they’d just slink away in their dusty cars to die? Or are the very least, wouldn’t they raid the corn fields for all the food? Clearly Nolan has never worked in a restaurant — you put suburbanites on a 40-minute wait for a booth and by the end of it they’re ready to claw your eyes out. Even the nice hobbits stole from Farmer Maggot.
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4. Why are the watery vacuum-seal sleep chamber containers so filthy? Did Murph leave the window open on the space station during a dust storm? And did Nolan lift that the paper-and-pencil explanation of wormholes from Event Horizon?
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6. So you can receive depressing videos from your loved ones about how you’re a crappy father on the other side of the galaxy and through a wormhole, but nobody could send Earth back any detailed information about the habitability of the prospective planets that mankind is depending on? And would Murph really continue being so angry with her dad for participating in the save-humanity project when she’s spending her life devoted to the exact the same project?
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^ They even explain in the movie that they can only receive and not send through the wormhole, once they get through it.

11. Where is the robot when Cooper is in the library den of the fifth dimension tesseract? Because he’s talking to it but the robot doesn’t appear to be in the same place. And what sort of radio works inside a black hole anyway? I guess the answer is “because the fifth dimension makes everything everything.” And do we buy that brilliant scientist like grown-up-Murph decide that the answers for solving humanity’s crisis all reside in her childhood’s poltergeist bookshelf?
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1. The film implies that corn is the USA’s final crop. But if there's no wheat, where, exactly, does the beer that Matt McConaughey's and John Lithgow’s characters drink come from?
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8. The elderly Murphy Cooper spends two years in a space-travel cryo-freeze, apparently two of the very last years or her life, to finally be reunited with her father — and she more or less chases him out of the room after a couple minutes.
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Des0lar said:
Just because they live in another dimension doesn't exclude them from general logic:
If the earth is destroyed by a comet just before Cooper launches and everyone dies, do these superhumans still exist?
That's what I mean. Even if you can percieve past and future and whatever, you cannot change it. At least not these beings as they could have saved the Earth multiple times over if it was so easy.
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yeah, if a comet were to hit the Earth before Cooper left and humanity was wiped out before they ever reached the wormhole, the 5D humans would still exist. They live outside of time, so events in time like a paradox can't affect their existence.
 
I don't think the show suggests that it is impossible to "change" the past. I mean if you think about it, it falls apart. Cooper's messages telling himself to STAY didn't work because he didn't believe them. It wasn't because it was literally impossible for it to have an impact. Otherwise, there would be no reason why Murphy who believed in the messages could use the solution to solve gravity. That is in effect Cooper in the far future changing the past. What Brand said was that it is impossible to travel back to the past. That much is true. No matter what Cooper does, he won't be able to go backwards, he can only go forward. All he was doing in the 5D space was sending messages back in time, he can't actually go back there.

It's all movie scifi theory anyway. :P

Edit: Regarding the "5D humans" (lol), I think it's easy to just think of them as one possible future for one possible humanity which transcended into godhood essentially. So out of countless possible parallel dimensions, in at least one humanity survived on their merits and eventually transcended beyond time and space and became omnipotent things. These beings then have the potential to influence any other realities - and this story is one such reality. It's corny as hell, but so's the script!
 
Anton Sugar said:
I'm hesitating to call bullshit just because I don't understand it, especially considering the scientific backing that this film had.



Except that part where he says he's very aware of the plot holes in his movies.

He's probably referring to most of the crap in articles like this and this.







^ They even explain in the movie that they can only receive and not send through the wormhole, once they get through it.
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Must've misread the quote duckroll posted. Still it read like a "give me a break" with how many plot holes and complaints people are trying to find to justify calling the movie bad.
 
Anton Sugar said:
I'm hesitating to call bullshit just because I don't understand it, especially considering the scientific backing that this film had.
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there's no science supporting the loop. there's also no science calling it bs. it's just scifi.

Blader said:
yeah, if a comet were to hit the Earth before Cooper left and humanity was wiped out before they ever reached the wormhole, the 5D humans would still exist. They live outside of time, so events in time like a paradox can't affect their existence.
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the problem is that they didn't evolve "outside of time". and the past cannot be altered, not even in Interstellar. So humanity's extinction was always there and the wormhole shouldn't.... yeah, I know, time loop. starting out of nowhere.
 
Blader said:
yeah, if a comet were to hit the Earth before Cooper left and humanity was wiped out before they ever reached the wormhole, the 5D humans would still exist. They live outside of time, so events in time like a paradox can't affect their existence.
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Then let me call it space magic because that shit makes no sense.

I can even accept the idea of 5d humans living in another dimension etc, but the idea that humans from the future can exist without humans from the past to ever get to that point is simply space magic.
 
duckroll said:
?????? What did I post?
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LOL, Admiral is on some strong shit from the looks of it. It was actually Maninthemirror that posted the series of quotes and here is the exact quote about Nolanites/Anti-Nolan

To be honest, I haven’t read whatever holes people are trying to poke so I can speak to the validity of it. My films are always held to a weirdly high standard for those issues that isn’t applied to everybody else’s films—which I’m fine with. People are always accusing my films of having plot holes, and I’m very aware of the plot holes in my films and very aware of when people spot them, but they generally don’t. But what were some science issues people had with the film? That was Kip’s domain.
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"Where did the beer come from" is really stretching. 1) the whole thing with beer is it lets you keep wheat for longer without it spoiling 2) Budweiser is made with corn anyway; you can make corn beer.
 
One thing I am not clear on is this:

Does Murphy's solution to the gravity equation pay dividends later in allowing humanity to evolve into the Bulk? Is that how we got there? So the Bulk (our future selves) used Coop as a vessel to pass on the solution to our past selves and this is what ultimately lead to the survival of the human race? The Bulk also created the wormhole through gravitational manipulation? Fuuuuuu?????
 
Des0lar said:
Then let me call it space magic because that shit makes no sense.

I can even accept the idea of 5d humans living in another dimension etc, but the idea that humans from the future can exist without humans from the past to ever get to that point is simply space magic.
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"I don't understand it so I'm mad!" lol
 
Admiral Woofington said:
Lol at Nolans quote about the Nolan/Anti-Nolan folks. It read like "why the fuck are my movies held to such a standard that people feel the need to try and find plot holes when they aren't there?"
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He should realize the reason people give his movies extra shit is because of how much of a twat he comes off as in interviews, how pretentious he is towards making movies, and how he is held up as some auteur from a different age trying to show people how to make FILMS instead of MOVIES.
 
Anton Sugar said:
Were people this upset over Kyle Reese sending himself back in time to impregnate Sarah Connor with himself?
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Well considering people still bring it up to this day, I would say that at the very least it's criticized, just like this film can be criticized for using the same plot device.

JB1981 said:
One thing I am not clear on is this:

Does Murphy's solution to the gravity equation pay dividends later in allowing humanity to evolve into the Bulk? Is that how we got there? So the Bulk (our future selves) used Coop as a vessel to pass on the solution to our past selves and this is what ultimately lead to the survival of the human race? The Bulk also created the wormhole through gravitational manipulation? Fuuuuuu?????
Click to expand...

This is what I took away from the film as well. The work Murphy does is the first step towards the 5th dimension.
 
Let's analyze for a moment what causality mean:

- for every event, there's a cause that explain it

For a linear timeline, which is the way we interpret the current time to be, this mean that an even in the future can't cause an event in the past (note that this is NOT necessarily true under some interpretations of entaglement).
However, in a circular timeline, every event come after AND before every other event. So any event cause each other, and in a sense, everything cause everything and nothing can be different because if so causality would be violated.

You can't say "but something caused the timeline to be circular" because it doesn't make sense. Causality regulate how events happen in a timeline, but say absolutely nothing about the shape of timelines, there's nothing to prevent a future event to cause a past event. It's a limitation of percieving time as a 1-dimensional existence, which may or may not be.
General Relativity accept closed timelines, and even if Hawking is a staunch defender of the chronology protection conjecture, as of now it's all plausible.
 
But aren't we 3-dimensional beings living in a 3-dimensional world? Wouldn't a 4-dimensional world (with time as the geometrical fourth dimension) be enough?
 
JB1981 said:
One thing I am not clear on is this:

Does Murphy's solution to the gravity equation pay dividends later in allowing humanity to evolve into the Bulk? Is that how we got there? So the Bulk (our future selves) used Coop as a vessel to pass on the solution to our past selves and this is what ultimately lead to the survival of the human race? The Bulk also created the wormhole through gravitational manipulation? Fuuuuuu?????
Click to expand...

not just that. they also created a black hole, or at least modified it, to spy into a little girl's bedroom.
 
raindoc said:
not just that. they also created a black hole, or at least modified it, to spy into a little girl's bedroom.
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They did not. Don't believe they had anything to do with what Coop saw. Coop's emotional attachment to his daughter is what lead him to that moment in time. He went back to that moment before he left because that is the last thing he would think of before he died, leaving his familiy behind and never seeing them again. The Bulk didn't select that moment in time for him.
 
Faith said:
But aren't we 3-dimensional beings living in a 3-dimensional world? Wouldn't a 4-dimensional world (with time as the geometrical fourth dimension) be enough?
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you'd still be constrained by time (like we are with space) the 5th goes beyond time so you'd interact with time like we view 2d space
 
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