Things We Still Don't Understand About Interstellar

by the end of christopher nolan's interstellar the audience has fully versed on what happened to cooper brand and humanity in general however there are a lot of smaller details that are left up to our imaginations here are some of the biggest questions we have after watching interstellar it's obvious that interstellar takes place in the future although just how far in the future it's never clarified we do receive a few clues that the world of interstellar isn't tremendously ahead of our own the characters clothing and housing all seem to line up with current designs and while the robotics technology is certainly more advanced than what we have today it doesn't appear to be too far beyond where we are now in order for the lazarus missions to have departed 10 years before the start of the film humans must have made significant strides in space travel and cryo-sleep technology a decade before the movie started at the latest and cooper looks to be in his late 30s or early 40s at the start of the movie which means that his flashbacks his career as a nasa pilot must have taken place within the past couple decades before the movie began one theory referencing the book the science of interstellar extrapolates that the wormhole near saturn was discovered in 2019 placing the beginning of the movie around the year 2067 however this is based on supplemental material and not the film itself while this seems like a reasonable guess based on the information presented in interstellar we have no way of knowing for sure one of the most curious throwaway lines in interstellar happens early on when cooper mentions how mri technology could have saved his late wife and if we had any of those left the doctors would have been able to find the cyst in my wife's brain before she died and said afterwards no further elaboration is given about why mris would have ceased to exist and it's an odd piece of world building when you consider that other types of technology still appear to be just fine not only are cars trucks and large farming equipment still prevalent but the characters clothing and resources speak to a manufacturing industry that is still going strong and while colleges are now only open to the very top echelon of students that's probably because those students are going into highly educated fields and it's reasonable to assume medicine would be among them of course other forms of technology have been scrapped on purpose as part of the scapegoating of nasa explaining how the apollo missions were fake to bankrupt the soviet union in response to the blight that wiped out most of earth's crops the history books were rewritten to teach that the moon landing was faked and that space exploration was futile in an effort to keep humanity focused on fixing the problems of earth not dreaming of the stars but mri machines don't seem like they should have been lumped in with spaceships in that particular disinformation campaign since they're used to diagnose patients here on earth could one of the gravitational anomalies prior to interstellar have fried all existing mri machines simultaneously perhaps but in that case why not build new ones interstellar never offers any clarity in what happened to the life-saving technology so we're left to guess at the start of interstellar earth's crops have been largely destroyed thanks to a global blight that eventually wipes out every form of plant life it encounters nelson's torching his whole crop light they're saying it's the last harvest for okra ever corn is one of the only viable crops that humans have left but even that will eventually die out leaving humans with no food source at all professor brand mentions at one point that the blight seems particularly suited to thrive in earth's largely nitrogen-based atmosphere yet the film never provides much more detail on exactly what the blight is we don't know if it evolved naturally or if humans somehow caused it through our own actions the blight affects every last person on and off of earth but how it came to be is left entirely up in the air before cooper heads off into space we get a couple glimpses of what life is like in interstellar's dusty future version of the united states and it begs some interesting questions about the supply chain although the school principle mentions that most students will grow up to become farmers lots of other industries must still be up and running in order to create the world in which the coopers live basic utilities all seem to still exist and cars seem pretty common which means that the fuel industry must still be chugging along most meals are corn based but the koopas eat a variety of dishes requiring other ingredients that they don't seem to grow on their farm implying that at least a modest grocery supply chain is still up and running their clothes are dusty but intact so there must be a functional textile industry as well and perhaps most bafflingly there still appear to be professional sports teams with the money for new custom uniforms it causes us to wonder exactly how long the list of viable professions is in the world of interstellar and why everyone talks as if the vast majority of people are farmers when the world they live in tells a different story even in secret nasa is still an agency run by the american government so it's unsurprising that interstellar tells a pretty america-centric tale but what's going on in other countries while professor brand is spending decades solving his equation to save the world surely they're not just sitting around waiting for the americans to save the day but we never get so much as a hint as to what they are doing cooper does mention at one point that there are no more armies which implies that instead of the widespread famine prompting war it has instead incentivized earth's population to work on the problem together he also says that india's space program was disbanded around the same time as nasa delhi mission control went down same as ours 10 years ago the teacher at merv school mentions that the revised version of history claims that the moon landing was nothing more than soviet propaganda implying that there's still no love lost between the two countries although apparently not enough to warrant military intervention by the end of interstellar humanity has successfully escaped the dying planet we're meant to understand that this means that all of humanity was saved but it sure would have been nice to have some evidence of life outside of the future united states throughout interstellar the characters encounter various gravitational anomalies both big and small by the end of the film the source of many of these anomalies has become clear they aren't anomalies at all but intelligent acts designed to serve a specific purpose the humans of the future referred to only as they created the wormhole in order to give the humans of the past and escape route from earth cooper himself was responsible for the various anomalies in his daughter's childhood bedroom i figured out the message one word you know what it is stay it says stay down however there are a number of other anomalies referenced in interstellar that don't appear to have any clear purpose such as the one that caused cooper's instruments to malfunction when he was working as a test pilot we started detecting gravitational anomalies almost 50 years ago mostly small distortions to our instruments in the upper atmosphere what these anomalies were and why they occurred are never really addressed it seems reasonable to infer that they called the anomalies but for what purpose was it merely to get humanity's attention and thus put in motion a sequence of events leading to the film or that the past anomalies serve some sort of other unexplained function that we never learn about by the time cooper is finally able to finally collect and transmit the quantum data from the black hole gargantuar to his daughter murph back on earth only a few years have passed for cooper and brand but decades have elapsed on earth during that time professor brand has been tirelessly working on his gravity equation although murph later finds out that he'd known for years it was unsolvable and was merely trying to give the people on earth a glimmer of hope until they eventually suffocated to death in a degrading atmosphere however for that entire time professor brandon murth are working inside the massive space station orbiting saturn that we see at the end of the film once cooper station is in space we see that its inhabitants are able to use a space inside it to farm creating food for the human to have escaped earth so why weren't they using the stations for that purpose when they were still on earth granted they couldn't have used every inch of real estate for farming if they were tied down by gravity but it seems like they should have been able to figure out a way to use some of it especially given how much time they had when the endurance leaves earth it's only been 10 years since wolf edmunds and the other scientists first departed on the lazarus missions but by the time bran finally makes it to the planet where he'd set up camp nearly 90 years have passed and edmunds has died it's implied that he was killed when a rock slide destroyed the cryo chamber in which he was hibernating although it's also possible that he died due to a malfunction in the chamber itself and the rock slide happened afterward at edmonds didn't survive until bran was able to reach his planet isn't really surprising but what's interesting is the question of when he died although edmunds was only sent to his planet with two years worth of resources he could extend that almost indefinitely with his cryogenic pod so when brandon the endurance first emerged from the wormhole 12 years after edmunds first departed only a year or two would have passed for edmonds assuming his pod was still functioning even after brandon lost 23 years on the water planet edmunds could have still been alive it's possible that if cooper had taken bran's suggestion and headed straight to his planet they might have arrived in time to save edmonds although in that case cooper might not have gotten the data that saves the rest of humanity when the endurance departs on its mission they're heading to a system in a distant galaxy with three potentially habitable planets based on the data sent back from three of the astronauts on the lazarus mission however 12 astronauts originally departed 10 years earlier with a mission to each explore one of 12 possible worlds they all knew that the chances of their world being able to support human life were slim and that if their planet wasn't a good candidate for relocation but they'll be on their own for the rest of their lives however while it's implied that none of the other nine wells the lazarus astronauts visited were viable and that those astronauts eventually died we don't actually know that for sure it's possible that one or more of the planets was viable but something happened to the astronauts or their equipment before they could send back their thumbs up that would send nasa to them it's even possible that one or more of the astronauts are still slumbering away in cryosleep not really living but not truly dead either throughout interstellar humanity receives help from them mysterious beings that the scientists of nasa assume must be benevolent extraterrestrials however by the end of the film cooper realizes that they aren't aliens at all but actually they're humans of the future who have figured out a way to exist and to navigate in five dimensions this creates a bootstrap paradox in which the existence of the humans of the future depends on them already existing to help the humans of the past but that's easy enough to explain in the world of interstellar where time may not actually be linear at all what we don't know is exactly how far in the future these five-dimensional humans are or if they even exist in a specific time at all once merv solves professor brand's gravity equation it opens up a whole new world for humanity not only are they able to escape their dying planet but they're able to thrive in new ways that they never could unearth perhaps murph's breakthrough is precisely what lays the groundwork for these new future humans meaning that they're not as far ahead of the humans aboard cooper station as one might think then again it could take centuries or even millennia for humans to evolve to that point at the beginning of interstellar cooper's two children murph and tom function as pretty typical siblings neither best friends nor mortal enemies but simply two kids who mostly get along and occasionally get under each other's skin all that changes though when cooper leaves aboard the endurance merv spends the next few decades nursing a grudge against her father while tom does his best to remain in touch even long after cooper stops responding during that time tom marries and has two children but his oldest dies a few years later of complications due to the dust-saturated atmosphere murph meanwhile throws herself into a work with professor brandt and rarely visits home but eventually returns to try to convince tom to move his family out of their old farmhouse and underground with her when tom refuses murph decides to trick him throwing him away so she can essentially kidnap his family she doesn't actually manage to leave before tom returns and by then she's realized she has what she needs to solve the gravity equation and save humanity but while murph gives her brother a relieved hug upon his return tom doesn't look nearly as ready to bury the hatchet despite merv's great accomplishment for humanity the action she took with her brother's family significantly overshot the boundaries he'd set but we never see tom again after that making us wonder if the end justified the means for him or whether merv's actions damage their relationship permanently after cooper emerges from the black hole they drop him off near saturn right where a ranger from cooper station is passing by to pick him up while it's only been a few minutes for cooper since he jettisoned himself from the endurance in order to send brand onto edmonds planet it's been over 60 years for the people of earth due to the time slippage in gargantuar even if it took a while for merv to actually implement a solved equation and launched the space stations humans have had decades in which to find a new home and yet cooper station and others like it are still content to just float around near saturn despite never having received conclusive data about the world just on the other side of the wormhole we know the wormhole still exists since that's how cooper returns to brand at the end of the film as far as nasa knows one of those planets from the lazarus mission could still be a viable new home world it's understandable that they wouldn't want to send an entire station through as a guinea pig but why not send a few rangers after the endurance went silent it seems like by the time brand arrived on edmond's planet a whole human colony could have already been set up and ready to go and she wouldn't have had to be alone at all check out one of our newest videos right here plus even more looper videos about your favorite stuff are coming soon subscribe to our youtube channel and hit the bell so you don't miss a single one

Channel: Looper

Views: 116,546

Rating: 4.8481355 out of 5

Keywords: looper, looper movies, interstellar, interstellar movie, interstellar film, interstellar explained, interstellar ending, interstellar ending explained, interstellar confusing, interstellar science explained, interstellar movie science, interstellar movie science explained, interstellar movie ending, interstellar movie unanswered questions, interstellar movie unanswered, interstellar film ending, interstellar film unanswered questions, interstellar film unanswered

Id: hDpySR_SypI

Length: 13min 5sec (785 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 15 2020