MovieChat Forums > Interstellar (2014) Discussion > Was the major flaw / plot hole at the ce...

Was the major flaw / plot hole at the centre of this film ever addressed?


I'm talking here of the future humans (or whatever their evolved state made them) and why they created the wormhole to save this film's particular failed branch of humanity?

I don't think I ever read an explanation back in the day so I could never really get onboard with this film.

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"They" created the wormhole because earth was dying and unable to produce crops. None of the other planets in our solar system can retain human life and traveling to the nearest planet without a loophole that would take hundreds of thousands of years. The loophole was created to send humans quickly to a solar system with the possibility to sustain human life.

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Yes, I understand the purpose of the wormhole.

However the plot hole I was addressing was the who's and why's of the wormhole's creation. Given that humanity was dying off, there would be no one left in the future of film's particular timeline to create the wormhole in the first place and save their ancestors.

Therefore - to avoid that paradox - I'd seen it discussed that they must have been humans from an alternate future (many worlds quantum mechanics). However what would their purpose be in saving one particular failed branch of humanity?

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It's clearly because love is the one thing we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that, even if we can't understand it.

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The humans on earth survive the blight infestation just barely, one way or another. It's comparable to the Black Death that swept across Europe. It's said that it stalled humanity's advancement by a lot. The future humans looked back and realized their future would be better (not worse) by placing the wormhole.

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Ha. Interesting get around! I haven't heard that before but surely we can't accept that as the entire premise is set around plans to save the future of humanity.

If humans did survive and had eventually repopulated the Earth and advanced their technology sufficiently, why would they bother creating the wormhole?

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If it were real, time travel should have been closed loop. So you can enjoy the effect before the cause. Say, if i have a time machine (or will have at some point in the future), and i'm locked inside a box, i can just say "When i get out of this box, i'm gonna go back to this exact moment and save myself from the box", and the box will immediately be opened by my future self and i will be saved.

If humans are on the way to certain extinction and decide to send help after they are saved and then have invented the time machine, said salvation will come today instantaneously.

I just said to myself if any of my yet unborn grandchildren purchases an Apple TimeMachine one day, they should bring an anti gravity pencil to my 30 year old self. I don't posses such a pen at the moment, which means my grandchildren are undutiful pieces of shit!

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And if you're in a tight spot, you can think "Garbage can", and one will fall from above onto the head of your adversary so you can make your getaway.

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Future humans don't repopulate Earth, as it becomes unlivable. Future humans, wherever they may be, put the wormhole there so present day humans could get to a new solar system to live and eventually become future humans, whenever that may be.

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"Future humans don't repopulate Earth, as it becomes unlivable."

Yes, that's what saying above re the entire premise of the movie. I think we are meant to believe it would be extinction if the plans failed.

But if the future humans are from an alternate quantum future, then I don't see the purpose of saving one of what I presume would be an infinite possible count of failed branches of humanity. There would be no logical purpose.

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Yes, I understand the purpose of the wormhole.

However the plot hole I was addressing was the who's and why's of the wormhole's creation. Given that humanity was dying off, there would be no one left in the future of film's particular timeline to create the wormhole in the first place and save their ancestors.

Therefore - to avoid that paradox - I'd seen it discussed that they must have been humans from an alternate future (many worlds quantum mechanics). However what would their purpose be in saving one particular failed branch of humanity?


hmm , but as long as humanity pretty confident it will transcend to the 5th dimension or whatever , it just has to remember - on a postit note - to go make a wormhole back in the 21st century to help itself out that time.
.......

What do we want! - time machines!
When do we want it! - doesent matter!

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hmm , but as long as humanity pretty confident it will transcend to the 5th dimension or whatever , it just has to remember - on a postit note - to go make a wormhole back in the 21st century to help itself out that time.

Sure but my point was:-
To what end? What's the purpose? If they've survived and evolved on that timeline, what's the point...

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Exactly how far off in the future are these humans to be able to go to outa space and make a short cut in space. How was Matthew able to go and look back in time and survive.
This movie is some made up bull, no real science in it

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Except a bunch of scientists have praised how scientifically accurate it was, with some exceptions.

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not all films needed to be overanalyzed

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That's true. But then this is a film which was praised for its supposed scientific accuracy, e.g. the time dilation, but as someone said above, the only solution to this is erm, "love".

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Its impossible to enter a black hole or a wormhole, so there goes "scientific accuracy"

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I wouldn't throw around the word impossible when we simply have no idea.

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Ummmmm they had to create it or else the events of the film couldn't happen and then humanity would die.

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Yes but you can't have a causal loop at play here where the very point is that humanity won't exist at all in the future.

It's like Marty couldn't travel back to 1955 and kick off his causal loop with his parents if Aliens had arrived in 1980 and entirely destroyed the planet. Only a Marty from an alternate future where the Aliens didn't arrive could possibly do that...

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I thought it was that Brand’s new population evolved to be 5th dimensional beings and were able to create the wormhole to help the people of Earth and preserve their own creation.

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This is very possible as well.

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That’s a very discussed time paradox. And it still remains a time paradox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_paradox

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I'm just going to repost a reply I made earlier in this thread to show why the grandfather paradox isn't (as far as I can reason!) applicable in this case:-

Yes but you can't have a causal loop at play here where the very point is that humanity won't exist at all in the future.

It's like Marty couldn't travel back to 1955 and kick off his causal loop with his parents if Aliens had arrived in 1980 and entirely destroyed the planet. Only a Marty from an alternate future where the Aliens didn't arrive could possibly do that...


The paradox is only applicable in the case of Interstellar IF humanity could survive the extinction event so the loop would always happen. Problem is though, in that case, why? Why would the future humans bother given that they were so ok they'd evolved beyond our understanding...

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Well, it's a variant of that paradox.

The paradox is applicable in any case of a situation in which the effect is in the past and the cause in the future, but the effect is a variable that without the cause will not exist, so a cause for the effect.

Well, the future humans cannot exist without them saving the humanity.

Have you seen Predestination? :D


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Humanity does survive the extinction event. They survive the extinction event because humanity provides the solution by sending it backwards in time.

This isn't any different from the time loop shown in like...12 Monkeys, or Terminator 1, or even Harry Potter.

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I did mention something about Back to the Future and aliens somewhere on this thread re the causality loop but even discarding that, as per my previous post:-
"Why would the future humans bother given that they were so ok they'd evolved beyond our understanding..."

They've survived and evolved anyway. They didn't need to create the worm hole at all.

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Nope. They did not survive by incident. They survived because their ancestors had the chance to make use of a wormhole. And as wormholes don't appear incidentally, they had to force this development by creating one in the past.
It's somehow pretty simple, not even a paradox is involved.

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I'll be honest, I read that Back to the future bit and didn't quite follow the example lol

They've survived and evolved anyway.


That's like saying that Harry didn't need to cast the Patronus spell because he's already survived. But he has to do so, because that's what has to happen for him to survive.

The future humans bother because that's the only reason why they exist. The future humans had involved because at some point in their past, Matthew McConaughey transmitted this information to his daughter.

This really is a philosophical question lol, it's certainly not open and shut. Cause you could just reply to me and go, well, what if they don't. They're already fine, far in the future. They don't need to create the wormhole. What if they don't create it? Would they cease to exist Looper-style? Or would they just keep going.

In my pov, I'm thinking they will create the wormhole, because they will, and they always will have done so. In terms of causation; they have to. Kinda like what happens in Tenet; anything that's happened already will have happened and always will have already happened.

But...for the sake of argument, what would happen if they don't create it...I think that they would cease to exist. Like if a person took a time machine and killed their past self. I'm not sure if I've read or watched something that convincingly shows how this might happen in a single timeline.

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The point of the Back to the Future example was to question the time travel framework used in this film, if it was indeed the causality / fixed / single timeline / grandfather paradox methodology.

It looks like that is what you are going with which is fair enough - like you said it's all philosophical anyway. Or hypothetical.

Anyway I'm not sure if that is the confirmed method (maybe it was) but it would be interesting if so, given this is a film which tried to pride itself on scientific authenticity and the many worlds interpretation of how time travel may work borne from quantum mechanics (and the version seen in Primer) would be more fitting.

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Good question, and I don't think it was ever explained.

I enjoyed this film quite a bit, but my problem with it is more fundamental. It's not possible for fifth-dimensional beings who don't experience linear time (and therefore predate time since they've always existed) to evolve (a process that requires the passage of time) from fourth-dimensional beings who do. Meaning, unless I missed something with the plot (and numerous discussions back then), and the so-called "future humans" aren't actually fifth-dimensional in nature, but are just able to manipulate reality fifth-dimensionally, it can't be future humans that created the tesseract and wormhole (it must be some other lifeform that did not evolve from humans).

Entities that exist in four-dimensional spacetime can never evolve to exist in five dimensions, which is what I got out of the film (but perhaps I'm wrong that this is what "Interstellar" was portraying) since they exist outside the confines of so-called "spacetime."
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Never believe. Always question. Rebuke belief, a.k.a. bias, a.k.a. groupthink, a.k.a. ideology, the bane of skeptical, logical reason.

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Bootstrap paradox

The people who built the wormhole wouldn’t exist if Cooper and company didn’t go through the wormhole and such. But Cooper and company wouldn’t go through the wormhole unless the people who built the wormhole existed

It’s the same thing in Terminator. John O’Connor sent Kyle Reese from the future to save Sarah O’Connor, but Kyle Reese turns out to be John O’Connor’s father. So John O’Connor isn’t born unless his future self sends his father back in time, but his future self cannot exist unless he was born in the past

All time travel movies have to deal with this shit. Just consider it fictional

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Yeah, true, that works in terms of the mechanism.

But, as I pointed out in some of the previous replies in this thread, it makes no sense in terms of logic.

e.g. The terminator example - John Connor must send his (non Irish) father Kyle Reese back in time otherwise he will never exist. It's a completely closed loop.

However in this film, they can only create the wormhole because they DO exist in the future. So sure, they could create the wormhole but to what purpose?

On the initial time loop, they exist just fine in the future. So why would they bother trying to (not) "save" themselves?


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