Did we watch the same movie? They got bunch of physics stuff right, like the water planet, the relative aging due to being near the massive black hole etc. Only thing that wasn't "correct" was the wormhole and especially the tesseract, but that was some creative writing which allowed for a nice twist. I enjoyed it, a nice scifi.
Cooper sobbing as he listened to years of messages from his family? I wish I could've written that. The twist where Mann activated his beacon because he didn't want to die alone? Solid.
We need the gravity equation to get off Earth because the crops are dying? Love can escape a black hole through the tesseract? This is just patent technobabble nonsense.
Where _Interstellar_ fails is in exposition. Love is the most powerful force in the universe? The Fifth Element pulled that off by not pretending to be serious. Anything is permitted in science fiction, but once you commit to explaining it, you need to make sense.
The love angle actually makes sense here. There's no technological way to do what needed to be done: find a willing recipient amongst strangers for a message from the impossible. Only because Murph shared a bond she was able to correctly bet on that there was a message and find out what it was. In something everyone else would not even consider.
Nothing is forbidden, until you try to explain it. I come from the perspective that genre is a contract with the audience. Here _Interstellar_ is making a genre error.
Take _Star Wars_ for example. You don't need to know how the Force works. There's no suspension of disbelief because you've bought into the genre and its tropes. The Force is everywhere, Luke is atuned to it. We don't need to know anything else mechanixally. Then they rolled up with midichlorians and reduced the whole thing to jibberish.
_Interstellar_ sets a hard sci-fi expectation with a visually accurate black hole before losing the train of thought. Imagine if _Lord of the Rings_ spent 20 minutes discussing how the plate tectonics of Middle Earth gave rise to Mount Doom before veering off into the history of the eagles. It gives your audience whiplash.
I'd argue that Interstellar is defying your expectations, but it's hard sci-fi all the way. At no point happens something that's proven to be impossible, and the future is, well, ever unknown to us, and to the viewer.
Given enough time and resources, you'd be right, this would be sufficient. But remember the beginning of the movie - they explicitly stated that every year fewer crops could be harvested, which meant that most people had to work in food production, no matter what they did before. It was also stated that the population wouldn't accept spending going to interplanetary exploration instead of food production - they'd rather survive a little longer than to try and fulfill an impossible goal, or just to have a couple of people survive on ships/stations for a couple years longer, without any hope for long-term survival.
Under these circumstances (only a couple years left until starvation begins & no existing industry) it seems absolutely realistic that the government is able to throw together one hailmary in secret, without also being able to scale production up to save most people before they starve. Remember, the goal of the mission wasn't to measure the data they need to finish their equations, it was to send out one single ship that could continue human civilization on an inhabitable planet.
Had the future humans not intervened (by placing the black hole near inhabitable planets), humanity on earth would have died.
> Had the future humans not intervened (by placing the black hole near inhabitable planets), humanity on earth would have died.
Not only a black hole, a supermassive Kerr black hole with relativistic rotation at its equator.
They could have done a better job at the planets themselves though - Most of them were pretty useless for terraforming.
While I'm sure the US government would trade immediate comfort for long-term survival of the species, I don't think other governments would have the same priorities. I'd assume China would be one of the first to build multiple O'Neil cylinders with carefully controlled environments and as little Earth-originated biomass as possible (to contain the blight).
Their starship was bullshit. On earth they needed a big Saturn 5 like rocket to bring it into space and later they fly into orbit like it's nothing.
If the planets they visited had much lower gravity then earth this may be possible, but this wasn't noticeable or talked about. And even on Mars you need much more fuel to get into orbit than could be stored in their tiny ship.
To expand on this, if they tried to land on the water planet where time so dilated that one hour equals 7 months… what would their velocity have been when they contacted the surface? And how much energy did their spaceship need to reach escape velocity from there?
Well, if you look for this, many if not most movies will have some inaccuracy or holes in explanation like this. In the end, I watch movies for entertainment. If I'm looking for scientific precision, I see a documentary instead.
Eh, this isn't actually that bad. It's quite easy, using a jet aircraft, to (via a ballistic trajectory) get into space. Surrounded by reaction mass as you are, the rocket equation isn't nearly so bad. You could conceivably dock with something in orbit, if you had elastic tethers or something to make the acceleration survivable. If you're much lighter than what you're docking with, you won't knock the satellite out of orbit.
Heck, you could even ignore the jet aspect, and go for full rocket. (An ICBM only weighs around 50 tonnes, after all.) Getting the heavy thing into orbit, though, requires proper, multi-stage rockets.
That's the point at which the jet stops working, but by that point you can be going quite fast. If there isn't enough air to run the jet engine, there also isn't enough air to slow you down (much).
Assuming no air resistance and 10m/s^2 gravity. I calculate that you would have to be doing ~1,100m/s (~mach 3.2 at sea level) straight up at 37km to reach 100km. Or ~1,600m/s (~mach 4.7 at sea level) at 45 degrees to perpendicular.
Yeah, they could've used something simpler and less hand-wavy. Irreversible climate change or a freaking asteroid on a collision course with earth and they needed the black hole data to build something to deviate it. Literally anything else would've worked better.
I think the blight was chosen as a metaphor for the virus of defeatism and anti-scientific attitude. To which the movie proposes (and arguably wants to be) a cure, made of optimistic sci-fi, cool science and, of course, love.
The issue on the literal level of the narrative is that if you have no way to control the infection on earth, there's no reason to suppose you won't bring it with you to the next planet.
