Interstellar and the Timelessness of Hope in a Relativistic Universe

by Christopher Barr

“Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour.  Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.  That’s relativity.” 

- Albert Einstein

Sapere aude!

Warning: Light spoilers ahead.

Interstellar is a spectacular looking science fiction adventure film by director Christopher Nolan.  The film follows four astronauts, along with two refrigerator-sized robots, through a wormhole in an attempt to find a new habitable planet to save the remaining members of humanity, saving them from a dying Earth that has been ravaged by climate change.  The film audaciously attempts to not match or better but to breathe the same gravitational air as Stanley Kubrick’s unsurpassed masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey.   Its scope is colossal and beautifully effective, taking its audience to distant worlds by way of the blackness of space and an often hypnotic score by composer Hans Zimmer.

The three-hour somber film begins with a small family of corn crop farmers in the near future, where the earth can no longer feed and sustain humanity, and where a virus called Blight threatens to infect what little crops are left on the planet.  Dust storms scour the land as the few remaining inhabitants of the planet seek shelter from them.  Cooper, a widower, is a farmer in this gloomy dystopic agrarian society, where his immediate concerns circle around his two children, son Tom and ten-year-old daughter Murph along with his father-in-law Donald.  Cooper is a former NASA test pilot and engineer who as of late, helps local farmers with their farming technology while maintaining his own dust covered equipment.

While dealing with claims from Murph that their house is haunted by a ghost trying to communicate something to her, Cooper discoveries a curious gravitational anomaly altering the dust on Murph’s bedroom floor, just after one of many dust storms throughout the film.  The dust has formed little mounds of sand that Murph, his young precocious daughter observes as resembling Morse code.  Cooper discerns the pockets of dust lines as binary code and figures in coordinates on a map, leading them to a secret NASA installation at NORAD.  While there, they meet the facility’s chief scientist, Professor Brand who tells Cooper of a mission set in motion to save humanity by relocating them to another habitable planet.  Cooper needs convincing as he is given a tour of the facility by Professor Brand who asks him to pilot the mission.  The facility is itself a gigantic space station that is also part of the plan to launch the remaining population into space.

Professor Brand tells Cooper that a wormhole has been discovered in our solar system orbiting Saturn.  The mission is to enter the wormhole and to colonize a new world in another galaxy.  Cooper and the other astronauts are to inspect three specific habitable planets that have been discovered by an earlier expedition called the Lazarus Mission, where a series of manned capsules were sent through the wormhole to survey a dozen potential planets that could have long-term sustainability.  The data that NASA received back from that mission supports three planets as potentially new home worlds.

After teary goodbyes on Earth, Cooper, Professor Brand’s daughter Amelia, Romilly, Doyle and two robots named TARS (who is the film’s welcomed comic relief) and CASE blast off in Endurance, an experimental spacecraft designed for their mission.  NASA believes that Fifth Dimensional beings are responsible for the wormhole and the fate of the mission and thus the fate and future of the species.  Cooper is an evidence-based thinker and shrugs off these notions of help outside of humankind’s capacity to help themselves through knowledge, evidence, application and understanding.

At this point in the film is when the true space odyssey begins.  Cooper launches the Endurance into a conduit through space and time known as a wormhole or Einstein’s Rosen Bridge.  The ride through the throat of the wormhole is somewhat unstable and shaky as Amelia encounters a distortion, a presence of sorts in space-time that she believes is one of the extra-dimensional beings that she and NASA think are helping them save humanity. 

One can only assume that through the magic of cinema, they acquired the correct amount of negative energy, which is a bizarre kind of material known as exotic matter to hold open the tunnel between the two mouths of space-time long enough for them to slip through it. Endurance then travels to the candidate planet known as Miller, named after the astronaut that previously went there and ultimately discovered it, a planet that is bordering the gaseous mouth of a rotating black hole that they call Gargantua.  The surface of the black hole is sucking time and space into its darkness so the team circle around the gravitational pull and avoid getting swallowed up in its event horizon.  The group are presented with a problem when they go to explore Miller’s planet.  Time there slows down to such a degree that one hour on that planet is equivalent to seven years passing on earth.  Needless to say, they have problems on the inhospitable water planet and a couple decades pass by.  These relativistic effects in this kind of time dilation are quite a dramatic use of the science on time distortion.  Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity describes gravity as a geometric property and curvature in space-time, which is directly related to the energy and momentum of whatever matter and radiation are present.  Time moves faster there because of how quickly the gravity is being pulled toward and into Gargantua.

The film explores the cost of lost time but also reminds its audience about how precious time can be.  The problem of time loss has been a project for Christopher Nolan for the entirety of his career.  Whether its Leonard’s loss of time due to short term memory in Momento or it’s the group’s loss of time in various levels of the dream world in Inception, time is not finite, time moves forward as our brains dip in and out of it.  The relativity of time is a lesson one can ‘hope’ the audience takes from this film with at least a rudimentary understanding of it, and think about how it applies to their own lives and those others that they share their lives with. 

When Cooper and Amelia arrive back on the Ranger to Endurance, 23 years has passed for Romilly.  It’s an overwhelming concept executed perfectly in the film.  In a touching moment, Cooper views video recordings of his son Tom talking about his first date with a pretty girl, cutting to him older and getting married, cutting to him introducing Cooper to his grandchild, cutting to the news of that child’s death from lung failure resulting from the escalating dust storms devastating the planet.  Murph, now an adult finally makes an appearance on the last video recording to let Cooper know, that she now knows that he wasn’t coming back and that he abandon her.  On Earth, Murph is working alongside Professor Brand trying to solve the physics problem of gravity.  This problem is necessary to solve in order to launch the gigantic space station on earth, and carry the earth’s remaining population, which is far too heavy for conventional rockets to lift into space.

Professor Brand’s health deteriorates and on his death bed, admits to Murph that he solved his gravity equation a long time ago.  He suppressed that fact in order to motive Cooper and whoever else was fighting for the future of mankind to believe that they were doing so for their family’s survival as well.  The problem is the equation was lacking information to complete it.  It required the union of quantum mechanics with gravity but that data can only be quantified from a singularity behind a black hole, in order to fully complete the equation.  In other words, as far as Professor Brand was concerned, impossible, so he decided to put all his fertilized embryo eggs in one basket so to speak and focus on a repopulation project and start humankind over elsewhere.

Cooper learns as much from Mann, a physicist that was one of the marooned astronauts on one of the three potential planets.  This planet was an ice world that Cooper later learned was itself uninhabitable.  After trouble with Mann, Cooper and Amelia find themselves low on fuel and needing to get to the third and last hopeful planet.  They spin over the highly luminous accretion disk of gas and decide on a plan to send the robot TARS, along with a ship into the Gargantua black hole to retrieve the singularity data required to complete the equation.  In order to push themselves away from the event horizon’s massive gravitational pull, they employ Sir Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion that states that in every action there is an equal of opposite reaction.  So essentially TARS’ ship would push off of Endurance and as a consequence push Endurance away from itself, accelerating its speed enough to spring out of the event horizon.

“If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his/her love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or enlarged egotism.” 

- Erich Fromm

There is a theme that runs throughout Interstellar that suggests that there is something more.  Its right to avoid any direct religious connection, but the film reaches what we perceive to be beyond our grasp, as a potential answer to the fundamental question of why us?  We as a species are stuck with this notion of something looking out for us or watching over us.  In this film they focus more on love, stating the possibility that love could very well be other-dimensional and thus beyond our ability to understand it but never the less, it suggests that we embrace it anyway.  The film, being grounded in science, never the less wants us in the end to believe.  It wants us to reach as far as we can with what intrinsic knowledge we have and then take that one step further under the blind will of belief.  Now in some cases that’s not a bad thing.  Courage exists in that place beyond our knowledge for instance.  We can learn everything possible about climbing to the top of Mount Everest like its altitude, oxygen levels, its temperature, how many people successfully ascended the north face of the mountain, but actually doing it is a whole other matter.  Part of that courage that is required to climb it is grounded in the belief that we can do it.

If we are to go beyond the seemingly limitations of our knowledge we shouldn’t entertain it in hope.  Religions ground their mythology in the belief that human beings were created by an entity that was responsible for fashioning the entirety of existence.  This belief suggests that we are somehow at the center of this magical universe and we are watched upon and looked after by that creator.  This ‘belief beyond our understanding fallacy’ may help the simple minded sleep at night, but it doesn’t help with bettering life among all humans and animals alike on this planet, now during this time in our history, and for future generations.    

This notion of there should be, there ought to be, or there’s got to be, is a crutch that’s helped mankind limp along under the fallacy of ‘there has to be something other than us down here’.  None of these claims hold up in reality no matter how much we want to believe they do.  The idea of intelligent life on other planets falls under this very fallacy.  It’s often believed, without any hard scientific evidence, that alien life is out there hiding behind the stars, and even sometimes coming to earth to study little ol’ us.  The problem is most of these beliefs have been fueled by stories made up by storytellers.  Movies and books, comics and music have all contributed to this fantasy.  The problem here is not necessarily on the artist or storyteller but rather those that believe these fictions to be true.

What defines a great deal of our humanity is what we are emotionally driven by, but this drive to feel what’s right and believe what is real, is also the very proposition that could likely lead to our doom.  We are a species that believe we can swim with cement boots on because it makes us feel better, where in reality, in all its bitterness, tells us that it’s not possible or necessary.  Hope here is the driving force because we hope it will all work out without knowing all the facts.  Hope becomes the bridge that often leads some of us to survive this life.  Hope is the double edged sword though that often breaks us down and in some cases, finishes us off.

Interstellar is filled with melancholy, loss, sacrifice and death but it also wants us to feel a sense of hope.  Even though there was very little spent on the Earth and the global impact that was in such need of saving, neglecting to show the stakes outside of a couple of corn fields burning, and sand storms affecting the breathing of some of the towns people.  Our planet is under invasion and it isn’t from aliens from another dimension, it’s us.  We have been adrift for centuries with our heads in the clouds wondering what if something is out there, all the while our very planet, the only home we have, is under attack by the dominating species that claims that God is watching over us all, and heaven is where we go after we die.  We are killing this planet and we are killing ourselves and neither one of these are even cynical statements, it would be great if they were.  The supportable evidence that confirms this is staggering but yet most of us think that either Jesus will save those who believe or our heads are stuck in the sand playing video games.  When are we going to realize that leaving the world to make a fresh start is not the proper attitude for the future of mankind?  Our problems are our own so if we continue to dump millions of pounds of plastic into the oceans, melt the ice caps, pollute the air we breathe, and dumb-down the very population that requires this insight to do anything about it, watching a movie that makes it all better, isn’t going to make it all better.  The film’s message is for us not to stop wondering about what’s possible.  Its narrative was in some places as shaky as inside the wormhole but it wanted us to use this as a cautionary tale on an environmental level.

The end of Interstellar is convoluted and is often as dense as some of the theoretical physics that supports it.  There are certainly issues with some of the science but lest we forget that it is a movie.  In the end it’s a story about family on a small scale and then eventually on a much larger scale.  It’s about working together to save ourselves with the time we have.  Some might complain that it’s an awful idealistic approach but what is really the alternative?  The real idealism is that the audience has the brains enough to see what’s real about the film and what’s disposable about it.

“It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health.” 

- Erich Fromm