time travel in interstellar

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Interstellar's time dilation explained: why time moves slower on miller's planet.

Interstellar's depiction of time dilation on Miller's planet encompasses complex scientific theories and terms, which require a detailed explanation.

• Miller's planet's extreme time dilation in Interstellar causes an hour there to equate to seven years on Earth for Cooper and his crew.
• Miller's tragic death on the ocean world is made even more heartbreaking due to the time dilation effect caused by the nearby black hole.
• Hans Zimmer's clever use of music in Interstellar 's Miller's planet scene symbolizes the complex time dynamics in the film's narrative.

Cooper and his crew's arrival on Miller's planet is one of the most pivotal and jarring moments in Interstellar . In pursuit of finding an exoplanet capable of supporting human life, Cooper and his crew travel through a mysterious wormhole after setting their eyes on three planets. Their first destination on this journey is Miller's planet, an ocean world where explorer Laura Miller was the first to set a base camp. Hoping that Miller's planet will be capable of sustaining human life, they make their way to it.

In Interstellar , Miller and the crew reach their destination and find three planets orbiting around a supermassive black hole, Gargantua. While one crew member, Romily, stays in orbit to study Gargantua's gravity, others head to Miller's planet's surface, hoping to find answers. Things take a grim turn when not only do they not only face the threat of giant tidal waves but also experience extreme time dilation . Here is a breakdown of what time dilation means, what causes it, and how it makes Miller's death sadder in Interstellar .

'Interstellar' Ending & Space Travel Explained

Miller's planet's time dilation is caused by the nearby black hole, the giant stellar object warps the flow on time.

The science of Insterstellar , including the time dilation on Miller's planet, is based on the work of Albert Einstein. According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, mass and energy warp or "bend" the fabric of space and time . This curving of spacetime is gravity. Since time is directly affected by gravity, according to Einstein's theory, the passage of time is relatively different in regions that experience different gravitational fields. When a planet is closer to the strong gravitational field of a massive star, planet, or black hole, time passes slower compared to an object that experiences a weaker gravitational pull.

In Interstellar , Miller's planet is close to a supermassive black hole, Gargantua. Since the black hole creates a massive curvature in spacetime with its gravitational fields, Miller's planet experiences extreme time dilation. Because of this time dilation from Gargantua's gravitational fields, time on Miller's planet moves relatively slower than Earth's.

For every hour on Miller's planet, seven years pass on Earth for Cooper.

Specifically, for every hour on Miller's planet, seven years pass on Earth for Cooper and his crew. Interstellar reveals that Cooper and his team spent twenty-three years, four months, and eight days in Earth time on Miller's planet , suggesting that they were roughly down there for only three hours and seventeen minutes.

5 Small Interstellar Details That You Only Notice On Rewatch

How the planet's time dilation makes miller's death more tragic, decades passed before miller was discovered.

Laura Miller landed on the water planet years before Cooper and the team . However, because of the time dilation effect, she died only a few minutes before Cooper and his crew landed on the planet. This relativity makes Miller's death all the more tragic because she barely spent any time on the planet before her death. However, everyone she ever knew lived several years without her on Earth.

The mere thought of the relative isolation she experienced by spending years on the planet in Earth's time, putting a significant portion of her life into futile research when she could have done so much more on Earth, is simply tragic.

Dark Interstellar Theory Reframes The Entire Reason Humans Leave Earth

How hans zimmer's mountains symbolizes the planet's time dilation, the music of interstellar perfectly fits millers planet.

Hans Zimmer's original score for Christopher Nolan 's Interstellar , "Mountains," which plays during the Miller's planet scene , has a constant ticking sound in the background. A theory suggests that each tick in the soundtrack seems to represent the passing of a day on Earth (via Reddit ). Even the math of this theory seems to add up, suggesting that Hans Zimmer must have intentionally orchestrated the soundtrack to ensure that it is in tandem with Interstellar 's complex depiction of time.

The ticking sound also gradually speeds up the closer Cooper and his crew get to the planet, reflecting how the gravitational field increases as they reach the surface. While no official confirmations have been made surrounding this theory, it is in the realm of possibility that Hans Zimmer was extremely calculative about the ticks in the score. After all, this would not be the first time the music composer manipulated his soundtracks to fit into Christopher Nolan's complex portrayal of time in movies .

For instance, before Interstellar , Hans Zimmer and Christopher Nolan used music as a narrative device in Inception 's opening scene by featuring a slowed version of Edith Piaf's "Non, Je ne Regrette Rien" to highlight how time runs slower in dreams compared to real-time.

Interstellar

From Christopher Nolan, Interstellar imagines a future where the Earth is plagued by a life-threatening famine, and a small team of astronauts is sent out to find a new prospective home among the stars. Despite putting the mission first, Coop (Matthew McConaughey) races against time to return home to his family even as they work to save mankind back on Earth.

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How do 'Interstellar' Characters age?

(Warning: The following contains major spoilers regarding plot points in Interstellar .) While Interstellar is perfectly enjoyable on its own accord, a bit of homework might be necessary to fully understand and appreciate all the tenets of science fiction woven throughout. Questions amount as we watch Matthew McConaughey blast through a wormhole to the other side of the universe, spend an hour on an alien planet that amounts to seven years on Earth time, and take one fateful journey inside the most mysterious of constructs in known science: the black hole.

Since the Nolan brothers’ dry-as-store-brand-Matzo exposition can be tough to permeate at times, it doesn’t hurt to brave some extracurricular research into the aforementioned concepts. Just in case David’s index card diagram, Wes Bentley mathematical estimates, and a trippy montage of dark blurs and white specks didn’t clear things up for you, here are some broad strokes explanations of each of the sci-fi concepts entertained in Interstellar and how and why they had the effect that they did on the characters.

(Note: In the spirit of Interstellar , I wholly endorse eschewing all scientific explanation of light, time, space travel, gravity, wormholes, black holes, et al in lieu of the simple, “It’s all about love.”)

Though wormholes are probably the easiest of Interstellar ’s sci-fi concepts to grasp. You find a wormhole in outer space — in the case of the film, right outside the rings of Saturn. You enter. You come out the other side in a different place entirely — another point in space, one that may have taken you years, centuries, eons to reach via traditional travel.

Simple enough to imagine, but it’s the physical illustration of the wormhole that is a little more complicated. If you take a step outside of the universe (just for a second, I’ll save your seat) and view the whole thing head-on as a tangible substance — for the purposes of this explanation, a thick fabric might be most conducive to easy visualization. Identify one point in/on the fabricverse. Now find another one, with miles and miles of sweet velour separating the pair.

Now, there are two ways to get from point A to point B — one: you can hoof it, but the universe is less permitting to this style of travel than a textile scale model might be. So go for option two: pick up the felt surrounding A, ditto that around B, and bring the two points together so that they touch. To the tiny denizens of your makeshift universe, nothing will have seemed to change… until you poke a hole straight through the unified points, connecting them via quick leap through this veritable tear in the universal material.

A personal favorite analogy: Mario Kart 64. Everybody knows that there’s a secret shortcut in the Wario Stadium level of Mario 64 that allows you to jump directly from one part of the course to another. Well, a wormhole is kind of like that. (Hey, it helps me.)

RELATIVE TIME

There are two mentions in Interstellar of specific conditions that render time “slower.” The first, as described by McConaughey to his weeping daughter in a misguided effort to comfort her, involves an observer traveling near the speed of light. First off, this doesn’t mean that time feels or appears any slower to the traveler in question — to him or her, the minutes, hours, or days would pass normally during travel; once the traveler slows down, however, he or she will notice that far more time has passed for those of us ambling about slowly. In short, the hot rod in question might have only felt a few days pass (and will have aged only as such), but would recognize years to have gone by for friends and family members, all of whom would be accordingly older.

Here’s why: Light is essentially our gateway into all comprehension of the universe and everything that happens therein. All conceivable information — everything we see and experience — is dictated to us by light. As such, imagine that light is an impossibly chatty friend explaining the details of a movie about your life to you over the phone: “Okay, so, right now, you’re sitting in your office. You’re reading a long-winded article about Interstellar . You’re blinking. You’re wondering how long you can go without blinking.” Every inconsequential detail is reported to you by this friend of yours, so you can only experience the movie as fast as your friend will recite its story. Furthermore (and this is an important detail), you are so enrapt in the description of this film that it seems like nothing else exists outside of your conversation.

And light is a dutiful friend — one who speaks quickly and constantly. In fact, since your entire understanding of everything and anything that might be happening in the universe/your incredibly boring biopic relies entirely on light’s narration, and there are no windows to the world outside of your own experiences under the regime of light/your endless phone call that it seems like light is always moving at a speed with a consistent distance from your own.

Light is also a bit of a showboat, never letting you think you’re closing in on its verbal illustrations in any way. In other words, no matter how fast you travel, light always seems to be traveling the same amount faster than you are. So, you can begin jogging, or sprinting, or piloting jets, or flying rockets at impossible speeds, but light will always seem to be zooming by as it always has. You can never “catch up” to light, or even gain on it. (Or so it seems.)

But give it a try and you’ll notice an oddity upon your return to normal speed. When traveling near the speed of light, you’ll feel yourself covering so much ground in so little time, blasting almost instantaneously from one point to an incredibly distant destination. But the casual observer won’t be able to see you reach your goal until light permits.

This is when that phone call metaphor comes back into play. No matter what some may deem “objective reality,” the only gateway of the whats and whens and wheres of the universe that your have is your chatty narrator, light. You can only see yourself reaching the finish line when light tells you such as happened; on the same token, your friends can only see you crossing the finish line when their respective narrators clue them into the happening.

But while you were traveling so fast as to, again, cover so much ground in so little time, your friends were patiently waiting for their perceptions of light to catch up. As you were traveling so much closer to the speed of light than any of them were, all light got a chance to show you was a quick race from one point to another. But back at normal speeds, far away from that of light, your friends got to see plenty more: light showed them all sorts of things in the interim period; it had more time to do so, since they weren’t riding its tail and pressuring it to stay on point. Time managed to show your friends a few hours worth of their lives; yours only showed you a few seconds.

Now, apply this on a grander scale: years to days, decades to weeks. We see this phenomenon take place in Interstellar when McConaughey and co approach the vicinity of a black hole — the second means by which relative time comes into discussion in the movie. Considering everything mentioned above about light’s dictation of all time and space, this one should be a quick explanation.

Heavy things are a pain in the ass to deal with. Picture the fabricverse from the wormhole passage again: light has to travel along this fabric to bring you the lot of your informational intake. But when there’s a tremendously heavy object sitting on the colossal fabric, light has to slink down into the resultant grooves and then skulk back up again just to reach you on the other side. A black hole is basically the biggest, heaviest, most obnoxiously intrusive object that can delay light’s progress. For all of the reasons explained prior, this delay of light results in a slowed passage of time in relation to those experiencing light and life outside of the black hole’s immediate neighborhood. As such, McConaughey’s trip to the outer banks of the dark nightmare costs him a whole lot of Earth years for just a few precious black hole hours.

BLACK HOLES

So what is a black hole? A theoretical doozy, for one. Basically, a black hole is the utmost pull of gravity in the universe: nothing can escape a black hole’s grasp, not even light (imagine light being too heavy for something, go figure). While this might not seem like a significant entity in a vacuum, the implications of a plane with no perceivable light — or a perception of light that we, as a race that cannot see inside a black hole, have never observed — are vast. As mentioned, light dictates time, life, everything. So what can exist inside a field where time, life, and everything are not dictated?

That is the question.

Images: Paramount Pictures (5)

The Entire Interstellar Timeline Explained

It's been about a decade since visionary director Christopher Nolan released "Interstellar," and it still instills in its viewers just as much absorption, awe, and pauses to ask what exactly is happening. The movie is half a beautiful piece of emotional drama, brought to life by a cast that includes Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, and Jessica Chastain, and half a sweeping sci-fi saga that extends from a simple corn farm to a five-dimensional tesseract built by indescribable humans from the far future. It's that second aspect of "Interstellar," the time-bending, existential riddle aspect, that we'll focus on here.

Nolan is no stranger to confusing audiences with his mind-bending, physics-heavy stories, and he seems to have a particular fascination with time. Like "Interstellar," both "Inception" and "Tenet" make time-dilation and time travel significant aspects of their plots. However, only "Interstellar," goes so far forward through the future of humanity — and once there, so far backward. If you didn't pick up on every little detail of the events in "Interstellar," you're not alone, as fan discussion about the timeline (or according to some, multiple timelines) has remained a universal constant ever since its release. We'll weigh in here by explaining the entire "Interstellar" timeline and its complicated time loop.

The Earth begins dying

The initial time period in human history that "Interstellar" explains in detail is the first half of the 21st century. According to a series of dialogue bits throughout the movie, those few decades were wracked by one global catastrophe after another, which according to schoolteacher Ms. Kelly, came about largely because of the "excess and wastefulness of the 20th century."

Alongside economic collapse, an unnamed form of blight arose in this period, killing off some crop staples entirely and leading to devastating food shortages worldwide. As a result, Earth's many nations went to war, one important enough to become almost all-consuming economically and socially, as evidenced by Cooper's (Matthew McConaughey) lament that "people were too busy fighting over food to even play baseball" and question to Professor Brand (Michael Caine) regarding NASA: "I heard they shut you down, sir, for refusing to drop bombs from the stratosphere onto starving people."

Despite the overall crisis in which humanity remained for roughly three decades, it also made a series of important scientific breakthroughs that ultimately led to its survival. In 2019, NASA discovers the wormhole near Saturn (via the Christopher Nolan-approved " The Science of Interstellar "). Following that, the military invents the first A.I. and when the food wars end, donates the remaining A.I. to NASA — three of which we meet: TARS, CASE, and KIPP. Most importantly, NASA sends probes through the wormhole and discovers 12 potentially habitable exoplanets, causing them to begin preparations for crewed exploration missions.

The age of farming

In one of the opening scenes of "Interstellar," Cooper and his kids chase a wayward malfunctioning drone, hoping to salvage its valuable solar cells. During the chase, Cooper identifies it as an Indian Air Force surveillance drone that has likely flown aimlessly for a decade because, "Delhi mission control went down, same as ours, 10 years ago." Through that and other dialogue, we can confidently place the end of the food wars roughly a decade before the present year when the movie starts. After that, nations rededicated the vast majority of their resources to growing what crops still remained, leading to an age of farming. For Cooper and his family, like so many others, this decade was uneventful, aside from the increasing dust storms and blight.

Some of those few who weren't farming, however, made massive jumps forward on behalf of all of humanity. The secret remnant of NASA (or SNASA , predicted by the legendary Barney Stinson back in 2009) launched the first crewed missions beyond our solar system, and in fact our galaxy: the Lazarus Missions. Acting on information relayed from past probe missions, 12 NASA astronauts left Earth and entered the wormhole, each headed toward a different, potentially habitable planet, their fates unknown for years.

Present day

Given Christopher Nolan's confirmation that the wormhole was discovered in 2019, which Romilly (David Gyasi) cites as "48 years ago," the present year when "Interstellar" begins is 2067. At this point, a decade into the age of farming, the surviving human population is in dire straits. As Professor Brand tells Cooper, the blight permanently destroyed "wheat seven years ago, okra this year. Now there's just corn."

The situation is so bad that the United States's many universities have been reduced to a few, small academies for the most gifted children only, hence why the school principal tells Cooper that his son Tom (Timothée Chalamet as young Tom) is destined to become a farmer, and a farmer only. Tom's sister Murph (Mackenzie Foy, as young Murph), on the other hand, is a gifted young woman with a passion for science, which helps her detect and decode the anomalies that occur in her room — the messages from Cooper in the future, which you might have noticed are the beginning of the movie's (potential) time-travel paradox.

The anomalies, perturbations of gravity, and time sent backward from Cooper manipulate and move objects in Murph's room, using Morse code to send English words and binary to send coordinates. Thanks to these messages, Cooper and Murph find themselves at the nexus of their fate — NASA's headquarters in the abandoned bunker that formerly housed NORAD.

NASA launches the Endurance

At some point in 2067, Cooper agrees to join NASA, mainly due to Professor Brand's persuasion and Cooper's longstanding dissatisfaction with a life devoid of progress. He receives a tour of their underground laboratories from Brand (Anne Hathaway), the daughter of Professor Brand and an exceptional scientist herself. Cooper eagerly jumps at their offer to pilot the Endurance, a ship whose mission is to travel through the wormhole, review the data gathered by the 12 astronauts of the Lazarus Missions, select the single best candidate for the next human home, and transmit the data back (as well as rescue any surviving Lazarus astronauts, if possible).

It only takes days to weeks after Cooper's agreement to pilot the Endurance that the ship launches. Its crew is comprised of Cooper, Brand, Romilly, and Doyle (Wes Bentley), as well as the A.I. robots TARS and CASE. The first stage of their mission is to reach the wormhole, which is still located near Saturn. With the thruster technology they possess in 2067, the journey only takes about two years, though it is long enough to warrant hyper-sleep for the human crew.

Upon waking in 2069, the crew of the Endurance enters the wormhole, only the 13th-16th humans to do so. Though the occasion is momentous, the trip through the singularity takes only about a minute. Once through, the crew assesses their options and chooses to investigate Miller's planet first, the journey to which only takes the crew a few hours or days.

Miller's planet

The expedition to Miller's planet is the first time in "Interstellar" that the crew and their loved ones back on Earth experience time dilation, in all of its grandeur and horror. Before Cooper, Brand, and Doyle decide to investigate the planet in person, Romilly warns them that its close proximity to the black hole Gargantua means that "every hour we spend on that planet will be seven years back on Earth."

The crew lands on the planet seeking Lazarus astronaut Dr. Laura Miller, whose signal is still active, transmitting data that the world contains liquid water and organic compounds. They discover the source of the signal is merely the wreckage of Miller's ship, with the explorer herself nowhere to be found. It isn't long before the Endurance crew discovers the reason why: the planet's intense gravity, brought about by Gargantua, ensures the water world is constantly wracked by skyscraper-sized tidal waves. The crew's desperate escape incurs complications, resulting in Doyle's death and leaving their overall time on the planet at around three hours.

Thanks to relativity, three hours on Miller's planet equals 23 years on Earth, bringing the date on Earth to 2092. Young Murph is now 35 (played by Jessica Chastain) and works with an aging Professor Brand at NASA working on an equation to harness gravity. Tom, meanwhile, is 40 (played by Casey Affleck), married, has already lost a child to Earth's increasing dust storms, and is on track to lose another.

Mann's world

In terms of the amount of time that passed, regardless of which planet we focus on, the Endurance crew's expedition to Mann's world is one of the least important pieces of the entire timeline. In terms of the magnitude of events that occur within that brief window, however, the expedition is easily one of the most significant. The Endurance crew spends only days on Mann's world, and because the time dilation factor between it and Earth is insignificant, only days pass on Earth, as well.

On Mann's world, the crew finds Mann (Matt Damon), wakes him from hyper-sleep, and begins preparations to establish a permanent colony on the planet's surface. Succumbing to loneliness, selfishness, and an overwhelming survival instinct, Mann betrays the crew. He reveals to Cooper that the planet isn't actually habitable and attempts to leave Cooper for dead on its surface. Romilly is killed trying to access Mann's booby-trapped A.I. and Mann attempts to hijack the Endurance. Mann fails, killing himself and destroying a large section of the Endurance.

On Earth, Professor Brand passes away, leaving Murph the last member of NASA still attempting to solve Brand's gravity equation in order to evacuate humanity en masse from the dying planet. Murph begins a relationship with NASA coworker Getty (Topher Grace), who will presumably father the many children she is later shown to have. Tom continues farming through the dust storms, all the way until (and potentially after) his second child is nearly killed by the cough the storms lead to.

Slingshot around Gargantua

Following the loss of Romilly and the irreparable damage to the Endurance, Cooper and Brand are left alone in the craft with too little life support to return to Earth. The ship is also slipping dangerously far into the unsurpassable strong gravitational pull of the black hole Gargantua, forcing Cooper to improvise with their lives (and unbeknownst to him, the future of humanity) on the line.

After assessing his options, Cooper realizes that the only way forward is to abandon any hope of returning to Earth and instead slingshot around Gargantua, using the added momentum to reach the third of their three candidate planets, Edmund's. The slingshot is successful, but only after Cooper enacts his secret plan to jettison himself and TARS from the Endurance, because as he says, "We have to shed mass if we're gonna escape that gravity." Cooper bids Brand a tearful farewell as he detaches and begins falling toward the black hole, granting Brand and CASE enough momentum to escape the gravitational pull and fly off toward Edmund's planet. Cooper clarifies the time dilation by exclaiming that it "cost us 51 years," which puts the date on Earth at 2143.

In those 51 years, Murph successfully cracks the gravity equation, allowing massive space stations to be constructed on Earth, filled with its remaining population, and easily launched into space. By the end of Cooper and Brand's slingshot, humanity has become a spacefaring civilization and Murph's central role in their salvation has made her a hero.

Into the tesseract

Though the first 2 hours and 20 minutes of "Interstellar" are undoubtedly science-fiction, they stay within relatively basic physical boundaries and are therefore easily digested by audiences at large. Then, Cooper and TARS enter the center of the Gargantua black hole, falling into the tesseract, and the simple space exploration narrative becomes, as Dr. Who famously explained it, "a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey stuff." To many fans and critics, the sequence veers a bit too far off course . Still, whether you love it or hate it, it plays with time in some interesting ways, and ultimately closes the loop on the "Interstellar" plot, both literally and figuratively.

Cooper and TARS survive their fall into the black hole and reach a kaleidoscopic space known as the tesseract. TARS describes it as a "three-dimensional space inside their five-dimensional reality" in which "time is represented here as a physical dimension." Nothing in the tesseract works the way an average person would expect it to, but Cooper and TARS are smart enough to begin unraveling its mysterious mechanics. Cooper manipulates the "strings" that line the space's physical surfaces, and in doing so, is able to send messages to both young Murph and adult Murph. The anomalies that young Murph encountered when she was 10 were the result of Cooper's time manipulation in the tesseract, as was the data that adult Murph received which allowed her to finally crack the gravity equation.

Cooper Station and the future

After being ejected from the tesseract, transported back to our home solar system, and left adrift in space near Saturn, Cooper passes out. He wakes up on Cooper Station, which he is amused to find out is named not after him, but Murph. The doctor at his bedside informs him that he's "124 years old," which puts the current year (by Earth reckoning) at 2156. By this point, humanity is completely spacefaring (aside from Brand's fledgling colony), having left Earth and filled the solar system with an array of space stations, all of them apparently containing thousands to millions of people, and all of them built as massive, rotating tubes in order to simulate gravity.

On the station, Cooper gets a glimpse of modern human life, which has time again for baseball and no longer suffers from ever-intensifying dust storms. Cooper and Murph are finally reunited, him just a few years older biologically and her around 90 years older. Unfortunately, their reunion occurs just as Murph is about to pass away, but not before the two share a heartfelt exchange in which Murph leaves Cooper with one final purpose: to find Brand and bring her back home.

We're given only the briefest glimpse of Brand before "Interstellar" ends, but it's clear that Edmund's planet is ideal. The air is breathable and the temperature acceptable, allowing Brand to set up a series of buildings, presumably nurseries to raise the thousands of fertilized ova kept onboard the Endurance for the purpose of population seeding.

After the events of "Interstellar" end, we can make some assumptions about the timeline's future. Likely, in 2156-2157, Cooper will reach Brand on Edmund's planet and bring her back to humanity. Many, many years beyond that, humanity will evolve to a point in which they can manipulate time as if it were a physical dimension, and at some point beyond that, create the wormhole and tesseract to help their past selves survive. If we look backward, however, there are a number of points in the timeline we can know without assumptions, all thanks to simple math.

We know the wormhole was discovered in 2019, and that 48 years later, Cooper joins NASA, making it 2067. We know that Murph is 10 in 2067 and that, when Cooper returns from the time dilation on Miller's planet, Murph is the age Cooper was when he left; since that is 25 years later, Murph is 35 and so Cooper was 35 when he left. If he was 35 in 2067 and 124 when he woke up on Cooper Station, he must have woken up in 2156. However, since we know his slingshot around Gargantua began in 2092 and lasted 51 years, thereby ending in 2143, we have 13 missing years to account for. One plausible explanation is that Cooper spent years inside the tesseract sending out all the morse code necessary to transmit enough gravitational data to Murph to solve her equation. Whether true or not, we present to you the timeline of "Interstellar" explained, give or take 13 years.

Interstellar Ending Explained: Time Travel and the Real Science

Your questions about the Interstellar movie are answered, with the help of numerous theories, a handy visual aid and Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Whether you love him or hate him, filmmaker Christopher Nolan has continued to find new ways to challenge his audience, and paradigms of filmmaking as a whole, throughout his remarkable career. His breakout hit Memento shattered audiences' expectations of a traditional narrative story, while The Dark Knight trilogy redefined the superhero genre in ways nobody even knew they wanted, until they saw it with their very eyes. Inception proved that one does not need to induce hallucinogenic drugs to get the head trip of a lifetime, and even his more straight-forward films like Insomnia and The Prestige are exceptionally bold. Regardless of what you might think of his latest offering Interstellar , most will likely agree that Christopher Nolan has outdone himself, offering truly outstanding visuals coupled with a mind-shattering narrative that still has filmgoers talking weeks after opening day.

With all that being said, Interstellar , all 169 minutes of it, isn't exactly the easiest cinematic pill to swallow, with several questions still lingering about different aspects of this incredibly complex story, which we'll try to answer for you right here. But first, let's go through the basic plot of Interstellar .

Be warned , there will be SPOILERS after this point, so read on at your own risk.

The story centers on Matthew McConaughey 's Cooper, a former NASA pilot turned farmer, who discovers mysterious coordinates to a top-secret government project. He is recruited by his old colleague Professor Brand ( Michael Caine ) to lead a journey into the nether regions of space to, essentially, find a new home for humanity. While it's somewhat glossed over in the film, the reason for this mission is because the Earth's resources are dwindling rapidly, with the "blight" rendering the planet incapable of yielding any crops except for corn, although that will be over soon as well.

At any rate, despite the protests of his young daughter Murph (Mackenzie Foy), Cooper joins this all-important mission aboard the Endurance spacecraft alongside Brand's daughter and biologist Amelia ( Anne Hathaway ), physicist Romily ( David Gyasi ), geographer Doyle ( Wes Bentley ) and two androids known as TARS (voiced by Bill Irwin ) and CASE (voiced by Josh Stewart ). Their mission is to enter a wormhole and explore the three planets orbiting the black hole Gargantua, which are named Miller, Mann and Edmunds, after the astronauts who explored them in the previous Lazarus missions.

With the fundamentals all laid out, let's explore some of the more puzzling and intriguing aspects of Interstellar 's ingeniously complex story.

[1]Plan A vs. Plan B - The Classic Misdirect

As complicated as Interstellar 's plot is, Christopher Nolan and his co-writer/brother Jonathan Nolan employ a classic trope, where the government or the powers that be essentially "trick" the protagonist into participating in a mission, by either not telling said protagonist the entire truth, or offering empty promises that cannot be fulfilled. The one example of this trope that immediately comes to mind is Predator , where Arnold Schwarzenegger 's Dutch isn't told the whole truth about his supposedly simple "rescue mission" by his old friend Dillon ( Carl Weathers ).

In Interstellar , Cooper wrestles with the decision to join the Endurance, since he knows he will be separated from his young daughter Murph ( Mackenzie Foy ) and son Tom ( Timothée Chalamet ) for an unknown amount of time. He doesn't know then that years upon years will pass, with Murph ( Jessica Chastain ) and Tom ( Casey Affleck ) growing up never knowing if and/or when their father will come back. It's Murph's undying faith that Coop will return that provides a heart-wrenching payoff, but we're getting sidetracked here.

It breaks down like this. Plan A centers on Coop's mission succeeding in obtaining data from the planets surrounding the black hole Gargantua, to find a suitable place for humanity to call home. However, this plan largely rests on Professor Brand's ability to solve a physics equation that would allow for humans to access the "fifth dimension" physics, enabling an enormous space station carrying all of humanity to travel through the wormhole and to their new home. Plan B would be enacted if Plan A fails, with the Endurance team settling on the most habitable planet and raising harvested human embryos that NASA has been secretly fertilizing, to ensure humanity's survival.

What Professor Brand didn't tell Coop before embarking on this mission is that Plan A was never expected to succeed. He had already solved the physics equation and deemed it impossible for humanity to be saved. Plan A was only championed to get world leaders to rally around this idea together to build the infrastructure for both plans, even though Brand was the only one who knew Plan A wouldn't work. Regardless, even after learning that Plan A was never expected to work, Coop still presses on with the mission at hand, which leads to the jaw-dropping and perplexing reveal of the "tesseract," the true nature of "they," while proving that Brand was wrong all along.

[2]Tesseract, Fifth Dimension and "They"

First off, the tesseract in Interstellar does not have any Marvel implications whatsoever, but it does play an integral part in the story. The Tesseract is where Cooper lands after ejecting himself from the ship into the black hole, a.k.a. Gargantua. While he meant to sacrifice himself to ensure the success of Plan B, Cooper doesn't die, but instead lands in this area where all of time is laid out in front of him. Coop uses the Tesseract to communicate with his young daughter Murph in her room, essentially becoming the "ghost" Murph thought she saw at the beginning of the film, as Coop relays the data collected by TARS to young Murph for her to use in the future, making "Plan A" a success and inevitably saving the human race.

The Tesseract was constructed by "they," which are initially thought to be some sort of alien race giving humanity little hints at how to survive before being annihilated. As it turns out, "they" are actually future humans, using their knowledge and mastery of "fifth dimension" physics to construct the Tesseract in the future, while leaving it in the past for Coop to communicate with Murph, who are both later seen as the saviors of humanity.

While it is never explicitly stated what this "fifth dimension" is in Interstellar , Christopher Nolan used another well-worn plot device in new and unique ways. The trope is known as a "bootstrap paradox," where objects or information are passed from the future to the past. The most notable example of this in film is The Terminator , where John Connor sends Kyle Reese ( Michael Biehn ) back in time to protect his mother Sarah Connor ( Linda Hamilton ). Since Kyle ends up becoming John's father, John essentially creates himself from the future, which also rings true for Skynet, since the Terminator's arm from the future that was discovered at Cyberdyne, essentially lead to Skynet's creation. A "bootstrap paradox" is also prevalent in 12 Monkeys and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure .

[3]Time Travel Relativity In a Nutshell

One of the most fascinating aspects of Interstellar is how the passage of time differentiates exponentially between Earth and the vast outer reaches of space. In the first planet visited by the Endurance, for every hour spent on the planet, seven years pass on Earth, which explains how Coop's children Murph and Tom become full-grown adults while their father is on this mission, and why Coop wants to get off this planet as quickly as possible.

The reason for this massive time discrepancy is due to the first planet's proximity to the black hole known as Gargantua, whose gravitational anomalies makes time pass exponentially slower. Ironically, it's this anomaly that makes this trip to the first planet, Miller's, a bust, since what was perceived as years of positive beacon readings were actually just minutes, since she was killed by a wave shortly after landing on the planet. This is also shown by Christopher Nolan 's decision to leave Romily on the Endurance, far from the black hole. In the three hours the rest of the team was gone, he had lived 23 years, and we also see video messages from back home of Coop's children as adults.

What's most interesting is Coop's ejection from the tesseract only takes a few seconds for him, but over 50 years have passed for the rest of humanity, and conversely, while Coop and TARS were believed to be floating in space for 90 years, that only spanned a few seconds as well for the astronaut and android.

The film ends with Coop, after seeing his now-elderly daughter Murph ( Ellen Burstyn ) on the enormous space station, setting off on a new journey to reunite with Amelia, who is on Edmonds planet setting up the aforementioned "Plan B." Even though nearly 100 years have passed on Earth since the first Endurance mission, Coop knows that time moves much slower on the other side of the wormhole, which means that he could reunite with Amelia shortly after he sacrificed himself and was dropped into the tesseract.

To wrap everything up, we have an incredibly comprehensive timeline by Dogan Can Gundogdu that explains what happens to the main characters in a thorough and visual manner. We also have a video with astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson offering his own explanation regarding the ending of Interstellar , which you can check out below.

Is there anything else that left you scratching your head after watching Interstellar ? Chime in with your thoughts below.

November 28, 2014

Parsing the Science of Interstellar with Physicist Kip Thorne

In an earlier blog post about Christopher Nolan's latest blockbuster movie, Interstellar, I lauded the film for its ambition, its visuals     and the strong performances of its cast.

By Lee Billings

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

In an earlier blog post about Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster movie, Interstellar , I lauded the film for its ambition, its visuals and the strong performances of its cast. However, I also criticized it for its depiction of interstellar travel and a plot filled with details that didn’t seem to make much sense.

Perhaps because I called some of its science “laughably wrong,” my post drew the attention of Kip Thorne , the Caltech physicist who served as science advisor on the film. Thorne sent me a copy of his new book, The Science of Interstellar , and encouraged me to read it and reconsider my criticisms. The book tells the story behind the film’s creation, and provides deep, thorough explanations for many facets of Interstellar that might otherwise seem nonsensical.

Thorne is even-handed in his treatment of the film’s science, admitting where artistic license was substantial and where it was used barely at all. If you enjoyed the film, but found parts of it confusing or puzzling, The Science of Interstellar and the perspectives it provides might be for you.

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Thorne and I discussed Interstellar and his book in a telephone interview. A transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity, follows.

I want to begin by saying how much I enjoyed your book. It’s given me a deeper appreciation of just how much work has gone in to legitimizing the plot of the film.

Let me just say as we start that I was doing a lot more than simply justifying the science in the film. The story was built from the ground up on the science to a very great extent, through brainstorming sessions I had with the Nolan brothers. There weren’t a great many times where I had to go in and explain things after the fact.

Well, correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me that not all of the science is treated equally in the film, with the science behind its visual components being favored. Take Gargantua, the supermassive black hole the astronauts visit in the film. It’s a thing of beauty, not only aesthetically but also quantitatively, because as you’ve shown in the book, it looks like the real thing. That happened through a painstaking back-and-forth process between you and the filmmakers. But in your book you also mention that Christopher Nolan came to you with a “non-negotiable” and rather far-fetched idea for the astronauts to visit a planet orbiting Gargantua where relativistic effects make an hour there equate to seven years back on Earth.

You know, Chris also considered traveling through space faster than the speed of light as “non negotiable” back then, and that’s something that was changed and is not in the final film. He used that phrase in our brainstorms, but in the end after in-depth discussions he came around. We’d always find some way to make things work together, though in this one instance of faster-than-light travel I gave him a series of reasons why we were quite certain the laws of physics prevented it. We went back and forth for several hours on and off over two weeks about it, until he reached the point where he appreciated intuitively that the problems I was pointing out were insurmountable. Then he simply abandoned the idea of faster-than-light travel and moved in another direction.

This business of the enormous time differential between one of the planets orbiting very close to Gargantua and the flow of time back on Earth – the problem seemed to be that no planet could endure the resulting gravitational forces. This was something that even I thought was impossible, intuitively, until I went and slept on it and did a few hours of calculations. I came to the conclusion that in fact it is possible. The black hole needs to be spinning very fast, but is possible for the spin to be fast enough for a planet in the necessarily close, stable, circular orbit to not be ripped apart. I can’t fault anyone for saying, “Hey, that’s not possible,” without having first having the benefit of my book! Unless it’s someone who is very deep into general relativity and who I would’ve expected to go do the calculations!

This highlights, I think, just how much gnarly number crunching you’ve done for this film, whether you’re brainstorming ideas or reverse engineering plot points. Was this a frustrating process for you at all?

The only frustration in the creative process might’ve been the faster-than-light discussion, just in searching for ways that we could speak the same language. My interactions with Chris, and before him with his brother Jonah, the screenwriter, were really quite joyous. It was brainstorming in the best sense of the word, an artist and a scientist coming at a complex issue together, trying to generate ideas in the context of a story that is just coming into being, searching for interesting scientific ideas that would take the story in certain directions. Finding that common ground between two people of very different backgrounds—an artist that has a tremendous intuition into the universe and the laws of nature from self-education, but no real training, and me, a scientist with much more formal training—it was just a heck of a lot of fun.

Other than that, my main frustration has been that we were unable to make my book available earlier, and that so many people in the first week or two were commenting about the science of the film without having the benefit of the book.

That sounds familiar. One of the main criticisms I had of the film when I first saw it was that the accretion disk around Gargantua was energetic enough to provide light and heat for its orbiting planets, but not so hot and bright that it would bathe the astronauts in fatal x-rays and gamma rays. But you’ve explained in your book how this isn’t as implausible as it may seem.

Gargantua’s disk is anemic, meaning it’s not as dangerous as the black-hole accretion disks astronomers can see and study. It has the temperature of the surface of the sun. With our current technology, astronomers can’t really see an accretion disk of that temperature if it’s around a very massive black hole at the center of some galaxy. Instead, the accretion disks astronomers see are much more energetic and emitting lots of x-rays.

I worked out the relativistic theory of thin accretion disks with Igor Novikov back in the early 1970s, so I know this very well. For those energetic disks astronomers see, the accretion is a steady state where the gas is flowing onto the disk and on down to the black hole. You can work out the temperature distribution and where it is emitting hard and soft x-rays. In the film, the disk is orbiting the black hole, not accreting onto it. There is a reason you don’t see any flow of gas onto the black hole in the movie, because if that flow were there it would fry the astronauts. Gargantua’s disk is a remnant of what was in the past an accreting disk. It’s in a quiescent state and cooling down.

This was a crucial detail that actually dovetailed with Chris’s filmmaking point of view. What Chris wanted was something that was visually impressive in optical wavelengths that the astronauts could see. So that’s what he got – something that glows in the optical but isn’t so hot it pours off a lot of dangerous higher energy radiation. Let me say, though, that this particular quiescent and cool disk wouldn’t be in this state for an awfully long time. But, ha, all that the movie needed was a safe, bright environment around the black hole during the crew’s visit, and this disk meets that.

Were there other examples where scientific plausibility dovetailed with what the filmmakers wanted?

There’s one I discuss in the book, where this one planet—Miller’s planet, the same one so close to Gargantua—has these giant ocean waves that threaten the crew. I don’t use this word in the book, but the waves appear to be solitons, solitary waves. They don’t break, and they are probably coming in from a region where the water is somewhat deeper. One possible explanation for them is that they are similar to tidal bores that can run up the long, gentle channels of rivers with the rising of a tide.

As I describe in the book, I imagine this planet is tidally locked, keeping the same face toward the black hole so that tidal forces don’t rip it apart. But it hasn’t been tidally locked for all that long, it was deposited in its orbit relatively recently, so it’s actually wobbling back and forth slightly relative to the tidal-locking position, and as a result huge tides are created in the ocean at the planet’s surface. And these tidal forces are so great that they create the huge waves you see in the film. The fortuitous thing is, in the film’s dialogue we learn these waves come about one hour apart from each other. It just happens to turn out that the planet’s period of oscillation back and forth to make such big waves in the first place also needs to be one hour. I have to confess I didn’t realize this until after the waves’ size and hour-long period was set in stone in the script.

Is there any science-based criticism you’ve encountered or that you have of the film?

I have said this elsewhere, but there was one item in the film that troubled me in terms of the laws of physics, and that was the strength of ice not being sufficient to support the structures seen on one of the visited planets. Most places that have mentioned this, though, tend to leave out the second part of my statement, which is that if the strength of ice is the most egregious error in the film, we’re doing pretty good!

Right. In some ways, it could be seen as a badge of honor of sorts, that some viewers have taken this movie seriously enough to even worry about whether or not parts of its science are correct. But do you think people getting upset about the film’s scientific basis are missing the point?

I think there are a variety of points of view you can take on a film like this, and I think it’s perfectly valid if someone wants to go in and search for scientific flaws.

What I maintain, and what I believe Chris would maintain as well, is that to a very great extent real science can give rise to wonderful ideas for a film that can in most cases be better than what was created from whole cloth out of the brain of a screenwriter. You know, this is the first time Chris has ever aspired to make a film that has real scientific accuracy. His films have always had their own internal logic. He always lays down a cohesive rule set for each one about what can and cannot happen, and this is part of his pact between himself and the viewer. But this is the first film where that rule set closely corresponds to the known laws of nature, and some truly wonderful things came out of this. Real science can be an absolutely fabulous foundation for great filmmaking.

I should add that there are some portions of the film for which the science is beyond the frontiers of our present knowledge. The issue of time travel is one. There’s been a lot of research that’s been done on whether the laws of physics permit travel back in time or not, and we’ve got interesting results but no firm answers. In that area Chris made his own rule set, which we discussed at length when he described it to me early last year. And it’s a rule set for which I then could find a scientific rationale, but it was a rule set that was much less constrained by the laws of physics because we don’t understand the laws of physics in that domain yet!

You know, the point of my earlier piece on Interstellar wasn’t to attack the science at all, so much as it was to say that wormholes and warp drives and other exotic ideas might not be our best path to the stars. And, in fact, some very august scientists seem to think interstellar travel is so difficult as to be effectively impossible. What do you think? Do you think our descendants or we will ever leave the solar system, and how would we do it, if so?

I’m quite sure we will, if we live that long as a species. I have this chapter in the book on interstellar travel and give far-out examples of how one could undertake interstellar voyages. Nuclear-pulse propulsion, laser-powered light sails, binary black hole slingshots, things like that. And as crude and far-out as they may be, they convince me that the time will come when humans travel between the stars. But it’s a long time off, a very long time – centuries away, at least.

So, for these kinds of far-out proposals, is it fair to say they’re more plausible or even easier in some ways than the notion of wormholes or warp drives?

I think the laws of physics very probably forbid warp drives and traversable wormholes. The research that has gone on over the past 25 years trying to determine whether its possible all point in negative directions, but it’s not a firmly closed door. So there are two issues here. One is that the laws of physics probably forbid it, but, gee, if they don’t, it would be great to have! The other is that the technology required to make a warp drive or a traversable wormhole is so far, far, far beyond the technology needed for a laser sail or a nuclear-pulse rocket that I would not be in favor of putting any significant resources into trying to develop it.

Now, you may have small amounts of money—tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars—spent on this, but nothing is wrong with that. Peer-review, at least in the United States and in Europe, is too strong for there to be any danger of millions or billions of dollars being spent on these things. The technology required for wormholes is so far removed from our current and plausible near-future capabilities that to throw lots of money at it would almost certainly be a total boondoggle.

So why focus on wormholes at all if they’re so out of reach? What should someone do if they’re really inspired by the film and want to personally contribute to bringing something as wild as interstellar travel closer to reality?

To a great extent, my motivation here was to try to use the movie as a lure to get people who might otherwise not have much interest in science curious about it, by exposing them to strange, exotic phenomena like wormholes. The film is the bait, and the book is the hook I want to use to draw them in even further, to get them to dig in and learn something new. If they are young, maybe they will consider careers in science rather than in finance or law. If they are older, I still think it’s tremendously important that larger fractions of our citizenry possess enough understanding of science to appreciate its powers and its limitations.

What this is really about is inspiring others to learn enough about the laws of nature and about engineering and technology so that they might take advantage of those laws in order to make some real contribution to our society, perhaps ultimately toward interstellar and, for the moment, interplanetary travel. The central thing is to get people excited by this so that they focus on real science and technology and on making a big difference in our world with those tools.

Den of Geek

Interstellar Ending Explained

With Christopher Nolan again on the mind, we revisit the ending to his most ambitious movie to date...

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Interstellar has completed its journey through the heart of pop culture, and with that landing comes the inevitable fallout of all Christopher Nolan films. What did it mean? How visually stunning was it? Did that ending make sense?

For my money, Interstellar is a beautiful experience that operates on the grandeur of David Lean, with the sentimentality of early Steven Spielberg, and in the same ambitious, high-concept headspace of Stanley Kubrick. Yet, it still remains irrevocably a Christopher Nolan film through-and-through, including in its twisty (and expository) third act finale. This is an ending that will undoubtedly leave some viewers thrilled and others thoroughly frustrated. But first and foremost, let’s all get on the same page by trying to figure out exactly how the film ended, as well as what wormholes it opens on its own—with pathways yet untraveled.

Time is a Circle

The third act of the Interstellar plot kicks into high gear when Dr. Mann (Matt Damon) proves to be as fallible as his surname would suggest by leaving Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) for dead in the hopes of commandeering his and Ameilia Brand’s (Anne Hathaway) Endurance spaceship. Whether he intended to pilot it back to Earth or attempt to find another habitable planet for “Plan B” remains a mystery. However, it ultimately proves inconsequential when he fails to properly enter the Endurance and gets himself sucked out into the cold vastness of space.

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But that is not the real climax of the movie, despite the blaring Hans Zimmer score and crosscut-heavy editing with the secondary subplot, here involving adult Murph (Jessica Chastain) saving her sister-in-law and nephew from the backward/anti-science hick her brother (Casey Affleck) grew up to be. While this knotty mise en scene trick marked the point of highest tension in Nolan’s last five films, it is merely the appetizer before the main course of hard science fiction weirdness: partially destroyed due to Mann’s meddling, the Endurance has neither enough fuel to travel home to Earth, nor the lightness needed for Brand, Cooper, and TARS to reach planetary option three. Thus in a Hail Mary play by Coop to save Brand and their mission, he jettisons first TARS into the omnipresent black hole leering over their new solar system, and then himself. As a result, Brand is left to finish the mission—and Cooper is forced to enter what can be safely described as Nolan’s cosmic hotel suite/star child moment.

But unlike 2001: A Space Odyssey , this ending is fairly straightforward and self-explanatory, even if it is the definition of bizarre.

Once Cooper is falling through the black hole, he is forced to escape into the darkness of space as the ship around him collapses in on itself. But instead of being crushed by any manner of unknowable forces while trapped in a void so dense that even light cannot escape, Cooper enters a “tesseract,” or what can best be described as a giant archive center for dark-colored polyester chords clinging to the walls. It is not an actual space that Cooper has entered, but rather a projection of a human being’s lifespan from the fifth-dimension, which has been “simplified” for his (and our) fourth-dimensional thinking. Also, the space he’s trapped in is actually a physical representation of a bookshelf that watches over an entire lifespan: his daughter Murphy’s to be exact.

The first and most important question people might still have after only a single viewing of Interstellar is how did this happen again? As it turns out, the beings that sent Cooper and NASA on this quest across the stars were not the hinted extraterrestrial (or divine) life that the characters all expected them to be, but rather human beings from the future. While we never see the fifth-dimensional “they,” it is helpfully (perhaps too much so) explained via telecommunication between Coop and TARS that they are humans from our very distant future who will one day master the use of gravity and the quantum mechanics needed to time travel with the ease that you use your phone to jump around your musical library.

Through whatever gravitational method imaginable, they have built for Cooper this visual representation of a “library” with only one special collection: the life of his daughter Murph.

The purpose? So, that he can pass along the data required for Murphy to save humanity. She realized earlier on Earth that Professor Brand’s equation was flawed, but the schematics that TARS took on the internal quantum mechanics of the black hole—when he first plunged into darkness—will fill in the gap. With this missing information, Murph will have what is necessary for mankind to technologically master gravity (and presumably time travel one day). Cooper shares this intelligence with her via Morse Code first through her bookshelf and eventually in the watch he gave her before he left Earth.

Thematically, the real importance of this scene is Cooper realizing, much to his belated sorrow, that he has become a true “ghost” in his daughter’s life and that in his drive to do something important, he missed his daughter’s childhood, not to mention everything else. In a sort of nifty reversal of the “third dream state” in  Inception —the endless dream space where Leonardo DiCaprio and Marion Cotillard spent an eternity in the blink of an eye—Cooper in a few days missed decades of his daughter’s life. Whether as a husband or a father, the rules of time always end up seeming to devastate the best intentions of Christopher Nolan male protagonists.

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Still, Interstellar is a far more hopeful movie than his previous work, as it is implicitly a validation of the power of love between a father and daughter. This mission was never about finding another habitable world, at least not fully. The futuristic humans knew that it was Murphy Cooper who saved them with an equation, and they made sure that she could do it by communicating with her in the only language that is universal: a parent’s love. Cooper was brought here, so that he and TARS could traverse the black hole, and share its secrets with the brilliance of his daughter.

Granted, there is a time travel paradox in this, like so much with science fiction, which ultimately suggests that humanity only survived because Cooper was sent by future beings into this black hole to communicate with Murph, thereby necessitating Cooper having already made the journey before “ they ” first summoned him with gravitational anomalies, but…does your head hurt yet? In the end, another Matthew McConaughey character from premium cable may have been right all along: time is a circle.

Where This Interstellar Voyage Didn’t Go

The actual ending of Interstellar is a fabulous concession to sentiment and familial good tidings on the part of Nolan when Cooper is released from his daughter’s timeline (and his own) somewhere by the rings of Saturn about a century after he left our solar system. Why did “ they ” force him to return over 120 years after he left? Because as Kip Thorne and the movie explains, we who live in third-dimensional space can never travel backwards in time; only forward. Cooper was allowed to enter fifth-dimensional space to communicate with Murph, but not to break through it and hug her.

He is found floating in space by the descendents of his success when space station-living humans bring him in from the cold. He is soon accorded a teary-eyed reunion with his daughter who he came just in time to keep his promise for (barely, as she apparently had to be cryogenically frozen for the last few years to ensure she’d be there for his arrival), but too late to actually be part of the family. After a bittersweet reunion, she sends him off on a new mission to find Brand and their new home.

Of course, this raises many more questions about the movie and where the humans of Interstellar are headed. As helpfully relayed via more expository dialogue that’s courtesy of old Murph (played by the invaluable Ellen Burstyn), we know that Brand is alone—as lonely as Dr. Mann was in his desperation—and waiting for Coop in mankind’s new Garden of Eden…we think.

How Interstellar completes Christopher Nolan’s personal filmmaking trilogy

Interstellar is the closest thing to christopher nolan’s superman you’ll ever see.

It is never actually explained if the third planet in this wormhole-accessible solar system is inhabitable for sustained human populations. Amelia Brand’s lover who scouted out/willingly marooned himself there for a decade apparently could not survive the environment, as we see during a montage with Amelia burying her long-lost lover. What exactly killed him, and is it safe for humanity to move in across the street?

Further, if this planet is habitable enough to be our new Earth, then why has no other expedition traveled through the wormhole to inhabit it? This is not really a plot hole so much as a mystery. The way that Murph sends her father away, much like a parent pushing a child out of the nest in a nice bit of role reversal, may suggest there is some sort of disagreement amongst humans (as there always is) about where we could be headed next. After all, the last 13 space missions that flew into that wormhole never came back, nor did the Endurance ask anyone to join them. Once again, it’s called upon Cooper to push us forward. Yet, when he gets there, will he find Brand in cryo-sleep or awake (it’s only been a few years Brand time) and with a colony of babies being homegrown from test tubes around her like she had reached the second stage of General Zod’s Man of Steel schemes?

Much like the fate of the other nine explorers who went to planets that the Endurance blew right by, it is a mystery that we will never know the answer to. Instead, our minds must wonder just where the next evolutionary step begins, and where the time traveling benevolence of “ they ” ends.

I have my own theories about what this story means or aims to say about its genre and our species, but that is a feature unto itself—which you can find my thoughts on by clicking right here —but for the moment, I just want to stare up at the stars. That is perhaps the true intended ending of Interstellar.

This article was first published on November 7, 2014.

David Crow | @DCrowsNest

David Crow is the movies editor at Den of Geek. He has long been proud of his geek credentials. Raised on cinema classics that ranged from…

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Let's talk about the plot of 'Interstellar'

Warning: Major 'Interstellar' spoilers lie ahead!

Interstellar is the most and least confusing movie that Christopher Nolan has ever made. The most confusing because the spacefaring odyssey takes the filmmaker's usual Rubik's-cube narrative structure and blends in a hearty dose of upper-level astrophysics. Some of the astrophysics is real; all of it is really confusing. But Interstellar is also the most straightforward story of Nolan's career—more emotionally clear-cut than the story-within-a-story nesting-doll epics The Prestige and Inception and unencumbered by the globo-metropolitan sociopolitics of his Dark Knight trilogy.

Spoilers from here— but if you feel like you need a roadmap going into Interstellar , then all you really need to know is this: The fifth element is love.

Prologue and Epilogue: The Fifth Dimension and the Bookshelf at the End of the Universe

Interstellar begins on a farm somewhere in America, USA, where a pilot-turned-farmer named Cooper lives with his important daughter Murph and his unimportant son Tom. Murph believes that their house is haunted by a ghost, which constantly pushes books off of Murph's insanely well-maintained bookshelf. Cooper assures Murph that there is no ghost.

But then there is a gigantic dust storm. The dust storms are caused by the Blight, a plague of general horror that has killed Earth's crops. The Blight is never explained; certain theories persist that the Blight is caused by Sauron.

During the dust storm, Murph accidentally leaves her window open…and the dust begins to accumulate on her floor in a pattern that resembles morse code. Cooper decides that what's happening inside of Murph's room isn't supernatural; it's just a curious gravitational anomaly. An anomaly that writes the coordinates of the local top-secret NASA headquarters in morse code.

When Cooper shows up at the local top-secret NASA headquarters, the scientists completely believe his story about a weird gravity ghost in his daughter's bedroom. This is because the top-secret NASA scientists believe that they have discovered, indirectly, a new alien race. This alien race is not located in outer space, but rather, in the Fifth Dimension: A semi-theoretical place located above, below, and beyond our own reality. NASA scientists believe that Fifth Dimensional beings are communicating with humanity. They communicate with humanity in two ways: By opening up a wormhole nearby Saturn, and by pushing books off a bookshelf in the bedroom of a young farmer's daughter.

By way of visual explanation, here's what the plot of Interstellar looks like in our third dimension:

And now imagine that there is a fifth-dimensional being who floats above everything that happens in Interstellar . From that being's perspective, everything that happens in Interstellar is happening all at once. Indeed, everything that has ever happened from our three-dimensional perspective is happening simultaneously. Here's a rough outline of how time looks from the fifth dimension:

For the sake of argument, let's assume that the fifth-dimensional being looks exactly like Mr. Mxyzptlk, the fifth-dimensional prankster who often taunts Superman, shown here in his original purple-suited incarnation because Christopher Nolan loves three-pieces.

Before Cooper departs on his mission to the wormhole, Murph tells him that she has decoded more morse code communicated via her magic bookshelf by Mr. Mxyzptlk. The message reads: "STAY." Cooper assures Murph that ghosts aren't real, even if fifth-dimensional beings are definitely real, and leaves.

Interstellar happens. Then, on the far end of the galaxy, Cooper goes into the black hole Gargantua. Once he is inside this black hole, Cooper finds himself in a "tesseract," which is essentially the back side of his daughter's bookcase. But it's the back side of every single moment in time that his daughter's bookcase has ever existed. Cooper is told by helpful robot buddy Tars that Mr. Mxyzptlk built this magical Infinite Bookshelf, so that Cooper could communicate with his daughter at the start of the movie. Cooper: "I was the ghost all along!"

The first thing that Cooper communicates to his daughter is the coordinates of the NASA space station—which means that the plot of Interstellar is a closed-circle time loop, like this:

Interstellar gilds its version of time travel with a lot of chatter about gravity and relativity, but on a pure plot level, this is time travel by way of Terminator . In the first Terminator , John Connor sends his father back in time, so that his father can meet his mother and thus give birth to John Connor. In Interstellar , Cooper sends messages to his past self so that his past self can become his own future self.

While he's inside the Tesseract, Cooper also has an epiphany. The fifth-dimensional beings are not aliens; the fifth-dimensional beings are humans from the far, far, far future, who have evolved beyond the limits of the third dimension. These far future humans are now helping to create themselves by giving humanity the wormhole to a new galaxy. So, the history of humanity after Interstellar looks like this:

Cooper uses his new powers of bookshelf-based intergalactic telecommunication to tell Murph how to solve an unsolvable equation. More on this later; for now, all you need to know is that the fifth-dimensional beings shut down the tesseract and send Cooper back through the wormhole; we know this because, along the way, he meets up with his past self when the Endurance was coming through the wormhole and shakes Anne Hathaway 's hand.

The fifth-dimensional beings then deposit Cooper back in our solar system. This is because the fifth-dimensional beings are really swell people and want Cooper to see his daughter again. You might ask yourself why the fifth-dimensional beings are nice enough to bend the rules of space and time for Cooper when most of the other people in the movie die pointless deaths on the far side of the universe from their loved ones. The simple answer: Mr. Mxyzptlk doesn't give a f--- about Wes Bentley .

Love is Science and Vice Versa

"Love is the one thing that transcends time and space" is something that Anne Hathaway says in Interstellar . It's a nice thought, and it's also the thing that explains everything that happens in Interstellar . Hathaway gives her "love" monologue when she's explaining why the Endurance should go to Edmunds' world instead of Mann's world. Hathaway's character, Brand, happens to be in love with Wolf Edmunds, and her gut tells her that the mission should follow her heart and go to his world, even though Dr. Mann has been broadcasting that his (much closer) world is perfect for human life.

Brand is, it turns out, completely correct to throw aside all her years of scientific training on a love-hunch. Dr. Mann has been lying: A victim of Space Madness, he was only broadcasting good results so that someone would come to save him. At the end of Interstellar, Brand arrives on Edmunds' world, which is much better than the other worlds visited by the Endurance . (The first world they visit is a planet covered by a one-foot-deep ocean and skyscraper-sized waves; the second world they visit is Hoth, basically.)

And Love appears to be the main reason why, when Cooper falls into the black hole, the fifth-dimensional beings put him directly in contact with the person he loves most in the universe: His daughter. (The fifth-dimensional beings do not put him in contact with Tom, his useless son, because Mr. Mxyzptlk doesn't give a f--- about Casey Affleck .) In fact, you could argue that Cooper's love for his daughter is what makes him special; we're told early in the movie that none of the other astronauts sent through the wormhole had any family, and certainly no attachments as strong as Cooper's attachment to his daughter.

Essentially, Interstellar 's time travel is from The Terminator and its astrophysics is from The Fifth Element , where it turns out that the fifth element is love. I'm being silly but not really: As far as Interstellar is concerned, love is a literal potent physical concept, strong enough to bend the elaborate cosmic architecture of wormholes and black holes and far-flung star systems.

Solving Gravity

While Cooper and his merry gang of astronauts are marauding around the furthest reaches of the galaxy, Cooper's daughter Renesmee grows up into brilliant astrophysicist Jessica Chastain . Chastain spends her entire life under the tutelage of Michael Caine , attempting to solve an apparently unsolvable equation. This is Plan A: If NASA can solve this equation, then they will be able to launch awesome space stations into space and save all of the humans who are still on Earth. (Plan B is bleaker: The Endurance carries a flock of human embryos, which will be unfrozen and brought to term on a new Earth, thus creating a whole new human race led by Anne Hathaway.)

There's a lot of physics involved in this mysterious equation—most of which gets reduced, in the movie, to the notion that they have to "solve gravity." At one point in the movie, Chastain expresses some skepticism about Caine's equation, implying that he has been making the job of solving the equation more difficult. Then Michael Caine starts dying, and with his dying breath, he reveals that he already solved the equation, and it didn't offer any salvation.

At least, I thought he said that he solved the equation. A couple of my fellow moviegoers claimed that he never solved the equation, because of a lack of evidence. And one of my editors insists that, in fact, Caine believed the equation could never be solved: That Plan A was always a complete sham.

There's only one way to get the information required to make Plan A possible: Go into a black hole and record everything inside of the black hole and then transmit information from inside that black hole to your daughter using morse code on the minute hand of the watch you gave her during the movie's neverending prologue.

At this point, Brilliant Astrophysicist Jessica Chastain tells her boyfriend Topher Grace that the only way to solve this equation is to return to the bookshelf in her old family home and wait for the gravity ghost from the fifth dimension to communicate with her. Miraculously, this happens. (See above.) With the information recorded from the black hole, Jessica Chastain is able to solve gravity. Decades later, Brilliant Astrophysicist Jessica Chastain has aged into Dying Sassy Grandma Ellen Burstyn . When Cooper wakes up back in Earth's solar system, he's on a space station orbiting nearby Saturn; it's strongly implied that there are many other space stations like this one, all of them designed to look like the small town from a Norman Rockwell painting crossed with the Halo from Halo .

Intriguingly, based on what we see at the end of the movie, it would appear that the humans in our solar system have not crossed the wormhole yet; as Dying Sassy Grandma Ellen Burstyn dies, she tells Cooper that Anne Hathaway is waiting on the far side of the wormhole, on Edmunds' world, with a lot of human embryos.

Basically, if Brilliant Astrophysicist Jessica "Murph" Chastain were to attempt to create a quantum physics proof of Interstellar on her chalkboard, it would look something like this:

IMPORTANT QUESTION: If several decades have passed since Brilliant Astrophysicist Jessica Chastain "solved" gravity, why is it that Anne Hathaway is still all alone on Edmunds' world, with her beautiful embryos and her bad haircut?

One theory is that time is still moving slower for Hathaway, either because of close proximity to the black hole, because time moves slower in general on the other side of the wormhole, or because that pesky Mr. Mxyzptlk is up to his old tricks again. It's also possible that Dying Sassy Grandma Ellen Burstyn is speaking more generally: Like, Hathaway discovered Edmunds' world decades ago, then went into suspended hibernation, and now she's waiting for a dashing pilot with Matthew McConaughey 's face to come to her world and help her raise her little embryos into the people of the future.

Stray Theory Time

Interstellar is the story of a daughter telling her widowed father to start dating again.

Consider: Cooper never expresses any romantic interest in anyone ever, which is especially noticeable because Cooper is played by Matthew McConaughey, who usually appears to be flirting with every human onscreen and also some of the plant life.

Cooper meets Brand, who is suffering from her own romantic problems: She's still in love with an old boyfriend who she hasn't seen in a decade and who might be dead. In the entire movie, Cooper is focused on his daughter, and Brand is focused on her old boyfriend.

But at the end of the movie, Cooper's daughter tells him that he doesn't have to worry about her anymore. What he needs to do is get back out there into the dating game. Meanwhile, Brand has finally made found closure with her old boyfriend, because her old boyfriend is dead. Like, the last line of Interstellar is basically: "Hey dad! I love you, but I'm fine. You don't need to worry about me anymore. Maybe you should go meet up with your super smart, very attractive, currently single co-worker!"

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Researching Time Travel for ‘Interstellar’ Helped Prepare Jonathan Nolan for Prime Video Series ‘The Peripheral’

When it comes to tackling time travel on the big screen, one could say Jonathan Nolan is something of an expert. The “Dark Knight” screenwriter spent years researching the practicalities of time travel for his 2014 film “Interstellar” (directed by his brother Christopher Nolan), to the point that he became something of an expert on the subject through the project’s lengthy development.

Which is why, when he read William Gibson’s 2014 book “The Peripheral,” Nolan was both excited and annoyed.

The story, which is now a Prime Video series produced by Nolan, concerns a young woman living in near-future America named Flynne Fisher (Chloe Grace Moretz) who, when plugged into an AR device that looks like a video game, is able to transfer the data of her mind to a distant post-apocalyptic future and pilot a host robot body.

“It was galling, because I spent a lot of time for [‘Interstellar’] thinking about time travel, we always wanted to do a time travel project,” Nolan told TheWrap. “And so I spent years, honestly, thinking about multiple worlds and feedback loops and wormholes and all of the different mechanisms by which time travel could work, because in part — I mean ‘Back to the Future’ is one of my favorite movies, I think it’s one of the very few perfect movies, but time travel movies are inherently problematic. Because on some level, and this might be true of all quantum mechanics, your mind rejects the idea. It feels inherently problematic.”

Also Read: ‘The Peripheral’ Review: Chloe Grace Moretz Shines in Gamer-Friendly Sci-Fi Series From ‘Westworld’ Team

When Nolan read “The Peripheral,” he realized Gibson got around the problem.

“Having spent years and put up my own best efforts on the film, to read Gibson’s book was an inherently galling enterprise because as usual, here Bill turns his vast imagination towards the subject and frankly, nails it. Hole in one,” he said.

“How do you combine the many worlds theories with a plausible theory of time travel? Well you just combine them. You just say that every time you travel — and I was always interested in the idea that you could travel with information and yes, on some level matter is information, but it’s not, right? It’s a big difference between Michael J. Fox and an email, right? So this idea that you can travel with information, but also critically that every time you do that, you calve off a fresh universe, a stub. It’s simultaneously plausible and heartbreak, which are the two ingredients for drama that are kind of kind of essential. So, the second we read it and realized what he was suggesting, yeah it was simultaneously very irritating and also very exciting as a possibility for a series.”

The idea of turning “The Peripheral” into a show actually originated with filmmaker Vincenzo Natali, who serves as executive producer and director of half of the first season’s episodes. Having worked with Nolan and Lisa Joy on “Westworld,” he suggested they team up on a “Peripheral” adaptation.

It was an easy yes – Nolan says he became a Gibson fan when he read “Count Zero” at the age of 14 – and Natali says Nolan and Joy were the ideal collaborators.

“I think the extraordinary thing about this, certainly from my perspective, was the good fortune of getting Jonah and Lisa involved,” he told TheWrap. “If you read the book, it’s intentionally difficult – it’s like being dropped into a foreign country without a guidebook or without speaking the language, and you as the reader must find your way through that world. It’s intentionally difficult as a reader, and I think only people like Jonah and Lisa who truly understand and appreciate him and the genre could see beyond that and see that this is a story that translates to an exciting narrative, visual, and dramatic experience that is incredibly human.”

Natali credits Nolan and Joy for suggesting they focus the first season on Flynne’s character, whereas the book bifurcates the narrative between Flynne and Wilf (Gary Carr). He also singles out series creator and writer Scott B. Smith’s “beautiful scripts” for nailing the humanity at the heart of the show.

As Season 1 winds down, are there hopes for a second season? While Amazon hasn’t officially renewed the series yet, work had begun conceptually on what Season 2 might look like when we spoke with Nolan and Natali.

“On the conceptual stage Scott and the writers are working away [on Season 2],” Nolan revealed. “We’re excited to see what the audience makes of it and excited if there’s an opportunity to make a second season.”

New episodes of “The Peripheral” are streaming on Prime Video on Fridays.

Also Read: ‘Westworld’ Canceled by HBO After 4 Seasons

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Interstellar

When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans. When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans. When Earth becomes uninhabitable in the future, a farmer and ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, is tasked to pilot a spacecraft, along with a team of researchers, to find a new planet for humans.

• Christopher Nolan
• Jonathan Nolan
• Matthew McConaughey
• Anne Hathaway
• Jessica Chastain
• 5.7K User reviews
• 488 Critic reviews
• 74 Metascore
• 44 wins & 148 nominations total

• Murph (10 Yrs.)

• Murph (Older)

• Tom (15 Yrs.)

• School Principal

• (as Francis Xavier McCarthy)

• Professor Brand

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

Jessica Chastain Through the Years

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Did you know

• Trivia To create the wormhole and black hole, Dr. Kip Thorne collaborated with Visual Effects Supervisor Paul J. Franklin and his team at Double Negative. Thorne provided pages of deeply sourced theoretical equations to the team, which then created new CGI software programs based on these equations to create accurate computer simulations of these phenomena. Some individual frames took up to one hundred hours to render, and ultimately the whole CGI program reached to eight hundred terabytes of data. The resulting visual effects provided Thorne with new insight into the effects of gravitational lensing and accretion disks surrounding black holes, and led to him writing two scientific papers, one for the astrophysics community, and one for the computer graphics community.
• Goofs Two characters sustain a fall from an ice plateau, on a steep ice ramp, onto a shadowy ice platform. A moment later, a panoramic shot shows them fighting on a very different place.

Cooper : We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we just look down, and worry about our place in the dirt.

• Crazy credits The Warner Bros, Paramount, Syncopy and Legendary Pictures logos are brown and dusty, representing Earth's arid dry state in the film.
• Alternate versions The 70mm IMAX version is two minutes shorter than the regular 70mm, Digital IMAX, 35mm, and digital projection versions. This is because the end credits are played in an abbreviated slide-show form (rather than scrolling from bottom to top), due to the size capacity of the IMAX platters, which can hold a maximum of 167 minutes of film.
• Connections Featured in Trailer Failure: Interstellar (2013)
• Soundtracks Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night (uncredited) Written by Dylan Thomas

User reviews 5.7K

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• Apr 13, 2016

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• November 7, 2014 (United States)
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• $165,000,000 (estimated)
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• Nov 9, 2014
• $733,202,212

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• Runtime 2 hours 49 minutes
• Dolby Digital
• IMAX 6-Track
• Dolby Surround 7.1

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Interstellar, Causal Loops, and Saving Humanity

Using philosophy to make interstellar an even better movie.

Posted November 18, 2014

Spoiler alert: I will be revealing plot points of the movie Interstellar. In fact, I’ll be assuming the reader has already seen it.

Given my deconstruction of Christopher Nolan’s movie Inception at Google in promotion of my book Inception and Philosophy: Because it’s Never Just a Dream , a few people have asked for my take on Nolan’s latest cinematic endeavor: Interstellar . But I’m not sure how useful I can be for making sense of the whole movie; if Inception was a philosophic thriller, Interstellar is a scientific one – and I’m only a philosopher. Although my study of the philosophy of science has made me very familiar with a number of scientific theories referenced in Interstellar – quantum mechanics, relativity, etc. – much more informed minds have already spoken on the topic. For example, the famous physicist Kip Thorne served as the scientific advisor to the film and wrote the book “ The Science of Interstellar .” If you’re interested in understanding the science behind the film, I highly recommend it.

However, I have to admit that what I saw as scientific inadequacies in the film initially detracted from my enjoyment of the film. Many of the same “flaws” bothered astronomer Phil Plait as well. But it turns out, like me, many of the “problem areas” he identified weren’t problems all. For example, he failed to take into account that Gargantua – the black hole that sits at the center of the new solar system – is not an ordinary black hole, but a supermassive rotating black hole even larger than the one sitting at the center of our galaxy. So, for example, it turns out there can be a one hour/seven-year time dilation outside the event horizon of such a black hole. (Notice the similiarity to the 1 hour/10 year dream-time dialtion in Inception ) Plait had to offer a retraction correcting most of his scientific complaints.

Plait had other complaints about the movie that weren’t grounded in scientific inaccuracies. For example, the notion that love is somehow an extra dimensional force yet to be explained is not only unscientific – but is just downright silly. I would agree – and the movie could have done without it. Thankfully, that makes me able to ignore it. But another complaint I’ve heard centers around an essential plot point in the movie: the salvific actions of the five-dimensional beings. And if it sticks, it doesn’t seem to be something I could ignore.

Why Make It So Difficult?

Early in the film we learn that five-dimensional beings have taken action to try to ensure the survival of the human race. Earth is dying and will soon be incapable of supporting life, but the five dimensional beings place a wormhole next to Saturn that leads to a planetary system that could potentially support human life. By the end of the film, we learn that these five dimensional beings are us. In other words, the human race does survive and eventually evolves into beings capable of ascending beyond our four dimensional universe, and existing in the “bulk” – a realm that contains multiple universes, including ours. The power this affords them makes them able to create things like the wormhole; they may even be responsible for the creation of the planetary system as well.

But this raises a perplexing problem for the film. If these five-dimensional beings are so powerful, and their intent on ensuring the survival of the human race, why did they make it so hard? Why did they put the wormhole by Saturn, where it would take 2 years to reach? Why not a little bit closer? Why didn’t they just put one obviously habitable planet around Gargantua, instead of giving the humans 12 planets to choose from? Or why didn’t they just tell the humans which one was habitable? Why did they rely on Cooper being able to convey information about the interior of black holes back in time to his daughter via Morse code? Why not just give them the information?

But in the same way that a better understanding of science can help circumvent scientific problems with the film, I believe a better understanding of philosophy can help us circumvent this criticism as well. Specifically, what philosophers have said about time travel and “causal loops” is particularly helpful.

The Trials of a Time Lord

If time travel is possible, it seems that backwards causation is possible. For example, if time travel is possible then my pushing of the go button on my Time Machine now can cause the past event of me appearing in 1950. But since it is generally held that causes precede their effects, many philosophers suggest, time travel is impossible.

The reason that causes are thought to always precede their effects is because effects can’t exist without their causes. If X causes Y, then X brings Y into existence. But X can’t do that unless it exists before Y; how can X bring Y into existence unless it already exists? How could my pressing go on my Time Machine cause the event of my appearance in 1950 unless my pressing of the button existed before my appearance occurred? Since clearly it did not, it can’t—and time travel is impossible.

Likewise, philosophers have suggested that time travel makes paradox possible – like the grandfather paradox. If time travel is possible, I can travel back in time and kill my grandfather before he sires my father. This would prevent my own existence and thus prevent the very action I just took to prevent it. Paradox. Paradoxes are impossible, so too must time travel be impossible…or so the argument goes.

Time Travel Made Possible

To resolve these problems, philosophers have tried to describe time travel in a logically consistent way. For example, some suggest that, to travel into the past is not actually to travel into one’s own past; my time machine would simply send me to a different universe (timeline) that has a similar past---one that is the same up to the past moment to which I traveled. So, if I traveled back in time to kill my grandfather, it’s not my grandfather I would kill – but the grandfather of some other version of me that would have existed in some alternate timeline. Paradox averted. This was the theory of time travel used by J.J. Abrams when he rebooted Star Trek .

Other solutions however are more faithful to the traditional conception of time travel – to the idea that, by traveling to the past, I will be traveling into the past of my own universe (i.e., into my own past).

For example, to avoid objections based in backwards causation and the grandfather paradox, some suggest that our universe is a four dimensional object. “Block world” it’s often called. Normally we think of our universe as a progressive series of events. The past existed, the pressent exists, and the future will exist. And we observe this progression as time passes. On the block world theory, this is inaccurate. Our perception of the passage of time is an illusion; in reality, all moments in time exist, past present and future. We think we are moving in time and the future does not yet exist. But in reality, it exists just as much of the present moment – and so does the past. When the universe came into existence, it was not a disorganized agglomeration of matter that over billions of years eventually coalesced into stars and galaxies that would eventually culminate in a heat death. Its past, present and future came into existence as a whole – as a unit – a “block” in which that entire progression takes place. On one end of the block, so to speak, is the big bang and on the other is the heat death. But it’s not like the latter happened and the former will happen – they’re all just there.

This isn’t just philosophical theory. This view regarding the name of time and the universe is entailed by Einsteinian relativity. And if it is true, backwards causation is not problematic at all. Recall, it seemed problematic because it would suggest that effects could exist before their causes. But if the block world theory is correct, nothing exists before or after anything else. There is a temporal order to events, for course—or, more specifically, everything has space-time coordinates—but all those events simply exist in the block. My appearance in 1950 in my Time Machine does have an existing cause: the event of my pressing the start button in my Time Machine in 2014. And that event exists in the block just as much as my appearance in 1950. If the whole universe exists as a block, there seems to be no reason in principle that the causal arrow can’t point both directions within that block.

Likewise, the block world theory solves the grandfather paradox by making such paradoxes impossible. If I set out to try to kill my grandfather before he sires my father, I will necessarily fail; since my existence is “already” a fact of the block, so too is my father’s existence a fact on the block. Indeed, since the entire universe came into existence as a whole, whatever action I will take while in the past was “already” a part of the past “before” I traveled there. In fact, if I indeed attempt to kill my grandfather but fail, it never was the case that I could’ve done anything but that – for those events came into existence with the entire rest of the universe (i.e., with the block). So, while the block world theory does make time travel possible, it does entail that changing the past is impossible. Whatever did occur, must occur. And, whatever will occur, must occur.

(As I have argued elsewhere , this view is not very friendly to the idea of libertarian free will . If the entire universe exists as one whole complete block, the future cannot be any different than it is. There are no alternate possibilities. But free will is already on shaky ground ; many lines of evidence stand contrary to its existence. So this really isn’t an objection to the Block World theory.)

‘Round and ‘Round She Goes—Where She Stops….

Interestingly, this theory also makes “causal loops” possible. A causal loop is when something brings about its own existence – it has no definite origin spot in the timeline. For example, suppose you come across a Time Machine in an old abandoned mine. You then use the Time Machine to travel back to the past where you give it to someone and leave instructions for burying it in the mine – right where you found it in the future. Question: who invented the Time Machine? Where did the idea come from – who figured it out? It seems no one – and yet time travel would seem to make such a thing possible. This fact in itself is used by some as an objection to the possibility of time travel.

But the block world theory avoids any such objections; on it, the Time Machine causal loop is not problematic. Sure, there is no moment in time in which the Time Machine comes into existence; but on the block world theory, there is no moment in time in which anything comes into existence. Everything comes into existence “at once,” as the block comes into existence as a whole. If the block contains a causal loop, like the non-invented Time Machine, then it came into existence with everything else. The block came into existence with the loop “already” intact; the block’s existence is the explanation for the loop’s existence.

The possibility of causal loops has been successfully defended by Richard Hanley. In his fascinating article “ No End in Sight: Causal Loops in Philosophy, Physics and Fiction ,” he identifies many different kinds of causal loops – such as object loops and information loops. Some loops are “easier” to account for than others – physical objects that exist in a loop will require some way to ensure that their matter is replenished. But at worst, causal loops only require grand coincidences. They are not logically incoherent. It’s even possible to be one’s own father and mother. What’s more, since the actions of conscious agents can easily make grand coincidences occur, causal loops are much more likely in a universe like ours – one that has conscious agents in it.

Solving Interstellar : It Had To Happen

Which brings us back to Interstellar ; it involves a causal loop caused by conscious beings. The five dimensional beings are only around to save humanity because humanity was saved; they exist only because of the very actions they are taking to save humanity—their own race—from extinction. So why didn’t they do it differently? Why didn’t they make it easier? Why didn’t they place the wormhole closer to earth and make it a gateway to a new yellow star with multiple habitable planets—instead of one with a massive black hole and one barely habitable one?

Because they couldn’t do anything different than they did. Not only do they already know how the human race was saved, but they know that its salvation cannot happen any other way. As five dimensional beings, that exist outside our timeline, they view it—the entire block—as a whole. They can see its events, including (for example) the existence of the wormhole, where it leads, and the fact that they caused it, as determined properties of the block. Its events can’t be any other way. Even if they are responsible for the entire block—and thus humanity itself is responsible for its own existence—they could not have created it any other way. In fact, since their actions are a part of the block, we might even think of the five dimensional beings existing in a six-dimensional block in which their actions regarding the block—including the creation of the wormhole and everything else they did to save humanity—are determined properties.

One of the conceptual difficulties with causal loops – that make them seem impossible – is people thinking of them as happening over and over again in a repeating loop. Five dimensional beings save humanity, and then humanity grows up to be the five dimensional being, and then those beings save humanity again – and on and on. With that kind of understanding we might ask questions like, “Who put the wormhole there the first time? Where did it come from? If it wasn’t there to begin with, the loop couldn’t get started; but unless it’s started, the wormhole couldn’t be there.” But on the block world view, this question doesn’t make any sense. There was no first time. Causal loops don’t repeat; they’re just there. In the case of Interstellar , when the block came into existence, the wormhole was “already” there—as one fact among many, “already” written on the timeline.

There are still some other problems with the movie; it’s not perfect. When they said they had found planets orbiting a black hole, I immediately wondered where the light and heat necessary to make the planet habitable was going to come from. Black holes don’t emit light – that’s why they’re black. Now, the accretion disk surrounding the black hole generates x-rays and heat, and some visible light – I don’t think it would be enough to make an orbiting planet habitable. But, if that was the intended explanation, I’d be happy to overlook this and just enjoy the movie – but it would’ve been good to at least hear this hand waving explanation. Or at least see Gargantua in the sky of the habitable planet at the end, providing light – instead of the somewhat confusing voice over suggestion that the heroine of the story was “under the light of her new sun.”

(Update: It turns out that, apparently in the original 2008 screenplay, there is a neutron star orbiting Gargantuan called Pantagruel . This is never mentioned in the movie, but could have been the intended solution to the light and heat problem.)

Regardless, I hope I have shown that the causal loop that involves the five-dimensional beings saves the movie from reasonable, but erroneous, objections rooted in questions regarding why the five-dimensional beings didn’t make the salvation of the human race easier to accomplish.

Copyright 2014, David Kyle Johnson

Teaser Image: A screenshot from the new "Interstellar" trailer. PARAMOUNT

David Kyle Johnson, Ph.D. , is a professor of philosophy at King's College in Pennsylvania.

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Is Interstellar Travel Really Possible?

Interstellar flight is a real pain in the neck.

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at The Ohio State University , host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio , and author of " Your Place in the Universe. " Sutter contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights . 

Interstellar space travel . Fantasy of every five-year-old kid within us. Staple of science fiction serials. Boldly going where nobody has gone before in a really fantastic way. As we grow ever more advanced with our rockets and space probes, the question arises: could we ever hope to colonize the stars? Or, barring that far-flung dream, can we at least send space probes to alien planets, letting them tell us what they see?

The truth is that interstellar travel and exploration is technically possible . There's no law of physics that outright forbids it. But that doesn't necessarily make it easy, and it certainly doesn't mean we'll achieve it in our lifetimes, let alone this century. Interstellar space travel is a real pain in the neck. 

Related: Gallery: Visions of Interstellar Starship Travel

Voyage outward

If you're sufficiently patient, then we've already achieved interstellar exploration status. We have several spacecraft on escape trajectories, meaning they're leaving the solar system and they are never coming back. NASA's Pioneer missions, the Voyager missions , and most recently New Horizons have all started their long outward journeys. The Voyagers especially are now considered outside the solar system, as defined as the region where the solar wind emanating from the sun gives way to general galactic background particles and dust.

So, great; we have interstellar space probes currently in operation. Except the problem is that they're going nowhere really fast. Each one of these intrepid interstellar explorers is traveling at tens of thousands of miles per hour, which sounds pretty fast. They're not headed in the direction of any particular star, because their missions were designed to explore planets inside the solar system. But if any of these spacecraft were headed to our nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri , just barely 4 light-years away, they would reach it in about 80,000 years.

I don't know about you, but I don't think NASA budgets for those kinds of timelines. Also, by the time these probes reach anywhere halfway interesting, their nuclear batteries will be long dead, and just be useless hunks of metal hurtling through the void. Which is a sort of success, if you think about it: It's not like our ancestors were able to accomplish such feats as tossing random junk between the stars, but it's probably also not exactly what you imagined interstellar space travel to be like.

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Related: Superfast Spacecraft Propulsion Concepts (Images)

Speed racer

To make interstellar spaceflight more reasonable, a probe has to go really fast. On the order of at least one-tenth the speed of light. At that speed, spacecraft could reach Proxima Centauri in a handful of decades, and send back pictures a few years later, well within a human lifetime. Is it really so unreasonable to ask that the same person who starts the mission gets to finish it?

Going these speeds requires a tremendous amount of energy. One option is to contain that energy onboard the spacecraft as fuel. But if that's the case, the extra fuel adds mass, which makes it even harder to propel it up to those speeds. There are designs and sketches for nuclear-powered spacecraft that try to accomplish just this, but unless we want to start building thousands upon thousands of nuclear bombs just to put inside a rocket, we need to come up with other ideas.

Perhaps one of the most promising ideas is to keep the energy source of the spacecraft fixed and somehow transport that energy to the spacecraft as it travels. One way to do this is with lasers. Radiation is good at transporting energy from one place to another, especially over the vast distances of space. The spacecraft can then capture this energy and propel itself forward.

This is the basic idea behind the Breakthrough Starshot project , which aims to design a spacecraft capable of reaching the nearest stars in a matter of decades. In the simplest outline of this project, a giant laser on the order of 100 gigawatts shoots at an Earth-orbiting spacecraft. That spacecraft has a large solar sail that is incredibly reflective. The laser bounces off of that sail, giving momentum to the spacecraft. The thing is, a 100-gigawatt laser only has the force of a heavy backpack. You didn't read that incorrectly. If we were to shoot this laser at the spacecraft for about 10 minutes, in order to reach one-tenth the speed of light, the spacecraft can weigh no more than a gram.

That's the mass of a paper clip.

Related: Breakthrough Starshot in Pictures: Laser-Sailing Nanocraft to Study Alien Planets

A spaceship for ants

This is where the rubber meets the interstellar road when it comes to making spacecraft travel the required speeds. The laser itself, at 100 gigawatts, is more powerful than any laser we've ever designed by many orders of magnitude. To give you a sense of scale, 100 gigawatts is the entire capacity of every single nuclear power plant operating in the United States combined.

And the spacecraft, which has to have a mass no more than a paper clip, must include a camera, computer, power source, circuitry, a shell, an antenna for communicating back home and the entire lightsail itself.  

That lightsail must be almost perfectly reflective. If it absorbs even a tiny fraction of that incoming laser radiation it will convert that energy to heat instead of momentum. At 100 gigawatts, that means straight-up melting, which is generally considered not good for spacecraft. 

Once accelerated to one-tenth the speed of light, the real journey begins. For 40 years, this little spacecraft will have to withstand the trials and travails of interstellar space. It will be impacted by dust grains at that enormous velocity. And while the dust is very tiny, at those speeds motes can do incredible damage. Cosmic rays, which are high-energy particles emitted by everything from the sun to distant supernova, can mess with the delicate circuitry inside. The spacecraft will be bombarded by these cosmic rays non-stop as soon as the journey begins.

Is Breakthrough Starshot possible? In principle, yes. Like I said above, there's no law of physics that prevents any of this from becoming reality. But that doesn't make it easy or even probable or plausible or even feasible using our current levels of technology (or reasonable projections into the near future of our technology). Can we really make a spacecraft that small and light? Can we really make a laser that powerful? Can a mission like this actually survive the challenges of deep space?

The answer isn't yes or no. The real question is this: are we willing to spend enough money to find out if it's possible?

• Building Sails for Tiny Interstellar Probes Will Be Tough — But Not Impossible
• 10 Exoplanets That Could Host Alien Life
• Interstellar Space Travel: 7 Futuristic Spacecraft to Explore the Cosmos

Learn more by listening to the episode "Is interstellar travel possible?" on the Ask A Spaceman podcast, available on iTunes and on the Web at http://www.askaspaceman.com . Thanks to @infirmus, Amber D., neo, and Alex V. for the questions that led to this piece! Ask your own question on Twitter using #AskASpaceman or by following Paul @PaulMattSutter and facebook.com/PaulMattSutter .  

Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook . 

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute in New York City. Paul received his PhD in Physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011, and spent three years at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, followed by a research fellowship in Trieste, Italy, His research focuses on many diverse topics, from the emptiest regions of the universe to the earliest moments of the Big Bang to the hunt for the first stars. As an "Agent to the Stars," Paul has passionately engaged the public in science outreach for several years. He is the host of the popular "Ask a Spaceman!" podcast, author of "Your Place in the Universe" and "How to Die in Space" and he frequently appears on TV — including on The Weather Channel, for which he serves as Official Space Specialist.

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Christopher Nolan's 'Interstellar' is getting a 2nd theatrical release

The release of the science fiction masterpiece is to celebrate its 10th anniversary. Paramount Pictures says the release will be in IMAX 70 millimeter format as well as digital screens this September.

A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:

Good morning. I'm A Martínez.

Christopher Nolan's science fiction masterpiece "Interstellar" is getting a second theatrical release to celebrate its 10th anniversary. Paramount Pictures says the new release will be in IMAX 70-millimeter format, as well as on digital screens this September. The movie stars Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway as astronauts traveling across space and time, searching for a new home for humanity. Do not go gentle into that good night. I know, I'm no Michael Caine.

It's MORNING EDITION.

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Contact restored with NASA’s Voyager 1 space probe

Contact restored.

That was the message relieved NASA officials shared after the agency regained full contact with the Voyager 1 space probe, the most distant human-made object in the universe, scientists have announced.

For the first time since November, the spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems, NASA said in a news release Monday.

The 46-year-old pioneering probe, now 15.1 billion miles from Earth, has continually defied expectations for its life span as it ventures farther into the  uncharted territory of the cosmos .

More: Voyager 1 is 15 billion miles from home and broken. Here's how NASA is trying to fix it.

Computer experts to the rescue

It wasn't as easy as hitting Control-Alt-Delete, but top experts at NASA and CalTech were able to fix the balky, ancient computer on board the probe that was causing the communication breakdown – at least for now.

A computer problem aboard Voyager 1 on Nov. 14, 2023, corrupted the stream of science and engineering data the craft sent to Earth,  making it unreadable .

Although the radio signal from the spacecraft had never ceased its connection to ground control operators on Earth, that signal had not carried any usable data since November, NASA said. After some serious sleuthing to fix the onboard computer, that changed on April 20, when NASA finally received usable data.

In interstellar space

The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between the stars).

Voyager 2 continues to operate normally, NASA reports. Launched  more than 46 years ago , the twin spacecraft are standouts on two fronts: they've operated the longest and traveled the farthest of any spacecraft ever.

Before the start of their interstellar exploration, both probes flew by Saturn and Jupiter, and Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune.

More: NASA gave Voyager 1 a 'poke' amid communication woes. Here's why the response was encouraging.

They were  designed to last five years but have become the longest-operating spacecraft in history. Both carry  gold-plated copper discs  containing sounds and images from Earth, content that was chosen by a team headed by celebrity astronomer  Carl Sagan .

For perspective, it was the summer of 1977 when the Voyager probes left Earth. "Star Wars" was No. 1 at the box office, Jimmy Carter was in the first year of his presidency, and Elvis Presley had just died.

Contributing: Eric Lagatta and George Petras

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Signal from interstellar space: What Voyager 1's latest data tells us

Engineers hear from the longest-operating spacecraft for the first time in five months.

An artist's impression of the Voyager 1 spacecraft entering interstellar space. Photo: Nasa

Scientists are hopeful of collecting fresh data from the Voyager 1 deep space probe after it beamed back its first signals in five months.

The pioneering craft, which launched in 1977, was the first to enter interstellar space , the region beyond the solar system.

But Nasa engineers at mission control in California lost contact with it on November 14 due to a fault with one of its three on-board computers.

The technical issue caused Voyager 1 to send indecipherable messages for months, rendering the engineering and scientific data unusable.

Sounding a little more like yourself, #Voyager1 . For the first time since November, Voyager 1 is returning useable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. Next step: Enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again: https://t.co/eZyqo7uERu pic.twitter.com/6YZM33Mp48 — NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) April 22, 2024

But now, after receiving readable signals from the craft, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) believe they may be able to recover the data entirely so that scientific operations can resume.

"For the first time since November, Nasa’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its on-board engineering systems," JPL said in a statement.

Voyager 1 has travelled 24 billion km since it was launched, making it and its twin Voyager 2 the two longest-serving spacecraft in history.

What do Voyager 1's latest signals mean?

The problem occurred in the flight data subsystem (FDS), which is responsible for packing the science and engineering data before it is sent back to mission control.

But the chip that stores the memory from the subsystem, including some of its software code, was not working.

Because that code was lost, it caused the spacecraft to send back unreadable data.

Last month, engineers came up with a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store these separately in the FDS.

The plan worked and Voyager 1 sent readable signals for the first time in five months.

Resuming operations

"During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software," JPL said.

"These include the portions that will start returning science data."

Scientists are interested in learning about interstellar space to better understand the universe and possibilities of life beyond Earth.

Nasa has been studying exoplanets – those outside the solar system – for decades, using telescopes.

But no spacecraft has entered interstellar space apart from the Voyager probes.

The spacecraft are providing direct measurements of the mysterious environment, which should help the scientific community study cosmic rays and radiation levels outside the solar system.

Data as such could prove useful when technology is advanced enough to send more spacecraft or even a human mission to interstellar space.

While it was an incredible achievement by the Voyager probes, still no technology can reach our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light years away.

With power supplies weakening, it is impossible for Voyager 1 to reach Proxima Centauri, which would take the probe almost 73,000 years.

Nuclear fusion propulsion, a way of powering a spacecraft using high-energy particles created by fusion reactions, could help in making such missions more time-efficient and therefore possible.

America's new space race with China: in pictures

Nasa's Orion spacecraft will carry astronauts to the Moon. It orbited the lunar surface in 2022 as part of an uncrewed test flight. Nasa

The best time travel movie ever isn't 'Back to the Future,' based on data. Find out the top 25.

Posted: April 27, 2024 | Last updated: April 27, 2024

Best time travel movies

Many films come with an escapism element, the ability to separate ourselves from our current timeline and reality to imagine an alternate time or place. It is a common feature in entertainment, which can serve as an outlet to explore our fears, dreams, and hopes for the future. Many movies take their characters on a journey to the past or future in hopes of teaching profound lessons, offering new perspectives, or simply presenting a challenge or a solution to a problem that they are facing in their current timeline. They expand the reach of what we think is possible in our current lives.

To celebrate these innovative and time-twisting tales, Stacker compiled data on the top time travel movies to come up with a Stacker score—a weighted index split evenly between IMDb and Metacritic scores. To qualify, the film had to involve some sort of time travel (be it literal, like "Back to the Future," or metaphysical, like "Donnie Darko"), have a Metascore, and have at least 5,000 votes. Ties were broken by Metascore and further ties were broken by IMDb votes. These films are some of the most memorable and culturally significant time-travel adventures in American cinema.

#25. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

- Director: Leonard Nimoy - Stacker score: 82.3 - Metascore: 71 - IMDb user rating: 7.3 - Runtime: 119 minutes

The famous space travel franchise's fourth film takes well-known USS Enterprise crew members Captain Kirk (William Shatner), Spock (Leonard Nimoy), and others into an interesting mission. The crew, living in 2286, must travel back in time to 1986 to find humpback whales. The extinct animals are the only species that can understand messages from a foreign probe threatening Earth.

#24. Predestination (2014)

- Directors: Michael Spierig, Peter Spierig - Stacker score: 82.3 - Metascore: 69 - IMDb user rating: 7.5 - Runtime: 97 minutes

Ethan Hawke plays a time traveler who races against time to keep a foe from killing innocent people. The film spans through several points in the 1960s and 1970s, taking its protagonist on a twisty trip that brings up surprises until the last minutes. "Predestination" is based on "All You Zombies," a science-fiction short story by Robert A. Heinlein, about paradoxes that happen due to time traveling.

#23. Pleasantville (1998)

- Director: Gary Ross - Stacker score: 83.4 - Metascore: 71 - IMDb user rating: 7.5 - Runtime: 124 minutes

This comedic film takes brother and sister duo David (Tobey Maguire) and Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) on a strange trip. David's love for 1950s television leads to him meeting a man who is able to put him and his sister inside an ongoing program. Jennifer stirs up drama among the cookie-cutter people to the chagrin of David.

#22. Source Code (2011)

- Director: Duncan Jones - Stacker score: 85.1 - Metascore: 74 - IMDb user rating: 7.5 - Runtime: 93 minutes

A military pilot (Jake Gyllenhaal) sees the last minutes of a man's life during a mission that takes him back to that point in time. He's supposed to deduce who the responsible party is in the train accident to bring him to justice. But, the pilot takes things to the next level, going against the clock to attempt to prevent things from going awry in the first place.

#21. Time Bandits (1981)

- Director: Terry Gilliam - Stacker score: 85.1 - Metascore: 79 - IMDb user rating: 7.0 - Runtime: 110 minutes

Kevin (Craig Warnock) is a preteen history lover who meets dwarves in his room. The tiny beings work for a Supreme Being and are slipping through holes in time to take treasures. Kevin goes with them as they hop around and meet famous historical people while trying to stay two steps ahead of the Supreme Being.

#20. Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

- Director: Doug Liman - Stacker score: 85.7 - Metascore: 71 - IMDb user rating: 7.9 - Runtime: 113 minutes

Tom Cruise stars as William Cage, a military officer who dies and ends up in a time loop. He continues to relive his terrible (and deadly) final moments until he levels up his knowledge and skills. Cage slowly moves towards the initial mission to fight aliens threatening Earth. Emily Blunt stars opposite Cruise as a sergeant who understands what he is experiencing and works with him.

#19. Evil Dead II (1987)

- Director: Sam Raimi - Stacker score: 85.7 - Metascore: 72 - IMDb user rating: 7.8 - Runtime: 84 minutes

Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) continues his battle against demons as his girlfriend Linda (Denise Bixler) becomes possessed by an evil spirit. He realizes that he may be stuck in this remote cabin in the woods and must fight foes who arise from a mysterious audiotape. Towards the end of the film, Ash and his car travel through a portal and end up in 1300 A.D. for a bizarre ending that no one could predict.

#18. Groundhog Day (1993)

- Director: Harold Ramis - Stacker score: 86.9 - Metascore: 72 - IMDb user rating: 8.0 - Runtime: 101 minutes

What would you do if you had to live the same day over and over again? This is what happens to Phil Connors (Bill Murray), a TV weatherman covering Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney who ends up in a time loop. He begins to realize some things about himself, and others, while stuck in this seemingly endless day. The film's popularity led to the term "groundhog day" becoming synonymous with being stuck in a time loop.

#17. Run Lola Run (1998)

- Director: Tom Tykwer - Stacker score: 87.4 - Metascore: 77 - IMDb user rating: 7.6 - Runtime: 80 minutes

Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu), a Berlin criminal, brings stolen goods to his boss and loses money he owes him. The boss gives him 20 minutes to conjure the funds, leading Manni to enlist his girlfriend Lola (Franka Potente) to come up with the money in a race against the clock, which keeps running through that same period as she makes choices.

#16. Superman (1978)

- Director: Richard Donner - Stacker score: 87.4 - Metascore: 80 - IMDb user rating: 7.3 - Runtime: 143 minutes

Based on the iconic DC Comics character, this film follows Kal-El's (Christopher Reeve) journey from his home planet, Krypton, to becoming Superman, an all-American hero. He goes from being adopted by Midwestern farmers to discovering his powers and fighting an evil force while working undercover as a reporter. At one point, Superman flies around the world so quickly that the Earth spins another way, making time go back so he can undo events with tragic consequences. 

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#15. 12 Monkeys (1995)

- Director: Terry Gilliam - Stacker score: 88 - Metascore: 74 - IMDb user rating: 8.0 - Runtime: 129 minutes

Bruce Willis plays James Cole, an incarcerated man living in the 2030s. Humans live underground after an apocalyptic event nearly kills everyone. He's given a chance to travel back to the '90s and gather information about a plague that will have big future consequences. The goal is to find out more information about the Army of the Twelve Monkeys, who may have been responsible for this earth-shattering event. But things don't go as expected, a classic trope in time travel tales.

#14. X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

- Director: Bryan Singer - Stacker score: 88 - Metascore: 75 - IMDb user rating: 7.9 - Runtime: 132 minutes

Wolverine, played by Hugh Jackman, goes back in time to 1973 to gather past X-Men to change a moment in time to help save them from the Sentinels. The latter group is a killing collective eradicating anyone who possesses a mutant gene. The film gained an Oscar nomination for its visual effects.

#13. Palm Springs (2020)

- Director: Max Barbakow - Stacker score: 89.7 - Metascore: 83 - IMDb user rating: 7.4 - Runtime: 90 minutes

Two strangers meet at a wedding in Palm Springs and end up stuck in a time loop. They relive the same day over and over again with weird circumstances taking over while they eventually fall in love with each other. The pair have to find a way to get out of this wedding day circle so they can resume their lives once again.

#12. Midnight in Paris (2011)

- Director: Woody Allen - Stacker score: 90.3 - Metascore: 81 - IMDb user rating: 7.7 - Runtime: 94 minutes

Writer Gil Pender (Owen Wilson) is on vacation in Paris when he decides to traverse around the city. Gil runs into a strange collective who take him back in time every night at midnight. He meets iconic people from yesteryear and starts to reevaluate his life, and romance with his fiancée.

#11. Looper (2012)

- Director: Rian Johnson - Stacker score: 90.3 - Metascore: 84 - IMDb user rating: 7.4 - Runtime: 113 minutes

In this film, time travel is a commodity that only certain people can afford. People like Joe, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, capitalize on it by using their hitman skills to complete jobs for a crime group. Set in 2044, Joe goes back several times in the past before his employer aims to stop his loop by sending future Joe (Bruce Willis) to kill his younger self. "Looper" is written and directed by Rian Johnson of "Star Wars" and "Knives Out" fame.

#10. Planet of the Apes (1968)

- Director: Franklin J. Schaffner - Stacker score: 90.9 - Metascore: 79 - IMDb user rating: 8.0 - Runtime: 112 minutes

A group of astronauts crash onto a planet in the far future where apes have the upper hand over humans. The primates can walk, talk, and have a complex social system that includes enslaving humans. The group finds themselves having to switch roles and become the "lesser" species. "Planet of the Apes" sparked a film franchise years later and was inducted into the Library of Congress' Film Registry in 2001.

#9. Interstellar (2014)

- Director: Christopher Nolan - Stacker score: 91.4 - Metascore: 74 - IMDb user rating: 8.6 - Runtime: 169 minutes

Set in 2067, this film shows Earth on the brink of destruction from storms and farming woes. Professor Brand, played by Michael Caine, plans to save the planet by sending people into a wormhole to another place. A few researchers test this travel plan and end up in different places and times to see where people can possibly inhabit.

#8. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

- Director: James Cameron - Stacker score: 91.4 - Metascore: 75 - IMDb user rating: 8.5 - Runtime: 137 minutes

Linda Hamilton returns as Sarah Connor, who aims to protect her young son John (Edward Furlong) from yet another (and more dangerous) Terminator. The cyborg intends to kill John, thereby preventing him from his future role in a resistance movement. Sarah, John, and T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) work together to keep John, and the future resistance, alive.

#7. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004)

- Director: Alfonso Cuarón - Stacker score: 92 - Metascore: 82 - IMDb user rating: 7.9 - Runtime: 142 minutes

Titular hero Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) continues his studies at the magical Hogwarts School. He realizes Sirius Black, an escaped prisoner, wants to kill him. Harry and his friends Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint) must work together to defend the school while Harry realizes his true connection to Black.

#6. Star Trek (2009)

- Director: J.J. Abrams - Stacker score: 92 - Metascore: 82 - IMDb user rating: 7.9 - Runtime: 127 minutes

A modern take on the classic space traveling series, this film goes back in time to show James T. Kirk, Spock, and Uhura's (Zoe Saldana) journeys in their younger days. Kirk, portrayed by Chris Pine, inadvertently makes his way onto the USS Enterprise and rises to power while they fight dangerous threats. Spock's (Zachary Quinto) future self makes an appearance to aid him in making a sage decision.

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#5. Avengers: Endgame (2019)

- Directors: Anthony Russo, Joe Russo - Stacker score: 92.6 - Metascore: 78 - IMDb user rating: 8.4 - Runtime: 181 minutes

Five years after Thanos eliminated half of the living beings across the universe, the remaining Avengers band together to bring everyone back. The film includes the Quantum Realm, where time does not pass as it does on Earth and time travel is possible. Things end with a battle royale between the purple genocidal titan and all the super beings on Earth. The film marked the penultimate offering from the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Phase Three of its release/storytelling schedule.

#4. The Terminator (1984)

- Director: James Cameron - Stacker score: 93.7 - Metascore: 84 - IMDb user rating: 8.0 - Runtime: 107 minutes

The current year is 2029. A killer cyborg known as a "Terminator" goes back to 1984 to hunt Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton). The killing machine (Arnold Schwarzenegger) stays on Connor's tracks as she uncovers the truth about her role in affecting humanity's future. Sarah must protect her family and stay alive so her son can fulfill a specific role.

#3. Donnie Darko (2001)

- Director: Richard Kelly - Stacker score: 96 - Metascore: 88 - IMDb user rating: 8.0 - Runtime: 113 minutes

In 1988, the title character (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a teenager dealing with sleepwalking episodes. He goes outside one night to encounter a massive, scary rabbit who tells him that the world will end in 28 days. Donnie, unsure of what is real or not, starts to go into a dark direction as time seems to go into flux for him, taking him into a different timeline.

#2. Back to the Future (1985)

- Director: Robert Zemeckis - Stacker score: 98.3 - Metascore: 87 - IMDb user rating: 8.5 - Runtime: 116 minutes

Michael Fox stars as Marty McFly, a teenager in 1985 who is friends with a strange scientist (Christopher Lloyd) named Doc. The latter's latest experiment goes wrong, throwing him back into 1955. He must find a young Doc and try to help him figure out how to get back to his correct timeline. Meanwhile, Marty also encounters his parents as their younger selves. The film has become a sci-fi classic, spawning its own franchise.

#1. It's a Wonderful Life (1946)

- Director: Frank Capra - Stacker score: 100 - Metascore: 89 - IMDb user rating: 8.6 - Runtime: 130 minutes

George Bailey is a man who is in over his head with family and general life problems. He considers dying by suicide but his family's prayers reach the heavens. His life is shown in flashbacks and an angel comes down to show him how much he matters to those closest to him. The now-iconic Christmas film was shot during the summer—in a heat wave, no less.

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‘humanity’s spacecraft’ voyager 1 is back online and still exploring.

After five months of glitching, the spacecraft is talking to Earth again from interstellar space

The Voyager 1 spacecraft (illustrated) is back online after a few months of transmitting garbled data. It’s now poised to continue its exploration of interstellar space.

JPL-Caltech/NASA

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By Ramin Skibba

April 26, 2024 at 11:45 am

After months of challenging trouble-shooting and suspenseful waiting, Voyager 1 is once again talking to Earth.

The aging NASA spacecraft, about 24 billion kilometers from home, began transmitting garbled data in November. On April 20, NASA scientists got the probe back online after uploading new flight software to work around a chunk of onboard computer memory that had failed. They’re now receiving data about the spacecraft’s health and hope to hear from its science instruments again in a few weeks, says Suzanne Dodd, the mission’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

That means the iconic craft could be on a path to recovery — and to continue its exploration of interstellar space.

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 briefly visited Jupiter and Saturn before eventually departing the solar system. It and its twin, Voyager 2, are the longest-operating space probes, now tasked with studying far-flung solar particles and cosmic rays. In particular, the probes have been monitoring the changing of the sun’s magnetic field and the density of plasma beyond the solar system, yielding information about the farthest reaches of the sun’s influence .

“The spacecraft is really remarkable in its longevity. It’s incredible,” Dodd says. “We want to keep Voyager going as long as possible so we have this time record of these changes.”

Voyager 1 and 2, cruising along diverging paths, made history by crossing the heliopause in 2012 and 2018 , respectively ( SN: 9/12/13; SN: 12/10/18 ). At nearly 18 billion kilometers from the sun, that’s long been considered the outer extent of our star’s magnetic field and the solar wind, the boundary before interstellar space.

Since then, Dodd says, the science team has made some surprising findings ( SN: 11/4/19 ). For one, they’ve determined that the heliosphere, the huge bubble of space dominated by the solar wind, might not be spherical but have one or two tails, making it shaped like a comet or a croissant.

And thanks to Voyager, scientists now know that, despite expectations otherwise, the sun’s magnetic field and charged particles actually remain significant even beyond the heliopause, says David McComas, a Princeton University astrophysicist not involved in the mission.

Some theories predicted a serene environment in the distant oceans of interstellar space, but the Voyagers keep passing through waves of charged particles, indicating that the solar magnetic field still holds some sway there. What’s more, the probes’ data have shown how ripples in the field form bubbles at the edge of the solar system, which is more frothy and dynamic than expected.

Other missions have begun building on Voyager’s solar physics research. These include NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer, or IBEX, and the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe, or IMAP, which is set to launch next year. Earth-orbiting IBEX has been measuring high-energy particles to map the heliosphere for 15 years, whereas IMAP will orbit between the sun and Earth, giving it an uninterrupted view of the sun as it monitors the galactic cosmic rays that manage to filter through the heliosphere.

“There’s a huge synergy between the Voyagers and both IBEX and IMAP,” says McComas, principal investigator of the latter two missions. “We were all really scared when Voyager 1 stopped phoning home.”

It will be decades until another mission could accomplish what the Voyagers have done. NASA’s New Horizons soared by Pluto in 2015 and kept going ( SN:8/9/18 ). It’s heading toward the edge of the solar system, but it’s cruising slowly and will run out of power before it can collect data beyond the heliopause.

The Voyagers can fly forever, but power for their instruments is waning. Over the next few years, NASA will shut some down to conserve energy for the rest.

That means Voyager 1’s days of collecting science data are numbered. “It’s a very beloved mission,” Dodd says. “It’s humanity’s spacecraft, and we need to take care of it.”

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