Interstellar (movie)

[The Romulan Republic]

I think I recall someone telling Mr. Cooper that his daughter is coming from another station to see him near the end.

[Tychu]

Apparently she was to old to make the trip but wanted to see her father.

Forgot about that. I guess there are nation ships floating around like Season 5 Episode 2 of Doctor Wh

[Oskuro]

Sorry if this counts as a Necro, but since the thread is still in the first page of Science Fiction I thought I'd take the chance.

Firstly, I really liked the movie despite its flaws. I like to jokingly define it as "Man takes giant iPads surfing to outer space"

I find it interesting though how a lot of people I meet who didn't like it, had a lot of trouble grasping the concepts being thrown around.

Anyway, I'm posting due to a question someone made at the start of the thread which I've been thinking about, that is, the problem with the apparent time loop (how can future humans affect their own history?)

My personal "fix" to the paradox is the assumption that the future space-time-bending humans are the descendants of the population bomb, in a timeline where Plan A failed and they had to resort to Plan B. I picture future hyper-dimensional archaeologists looking back through their history and deciding to help Plan A succeed to make sure much of humanity's history and culture could survive.

Of course that would result in a new paradox, but that's when we have to resort to the "future humans make spacetime their bitch" handwave.

As for the love thing... I thought the point of Cooper was that, as he had intimate knowledge of the places, times and people (the room, the house and his daughter), he was qualified to navigate the tesseract to find the solution, while the future-humans would be utterly lost trying to figure things out.

[madd0ct0r]

Finally saw it on a long haul flight. Was not impressed.

It was clumsy And simplistic. A couple of neat ideas smothered under stock characters and yokel-friendly 'science'. It was a presentation of familiar false but popular ideas (black hole horizons, the power of love over logic, that lone geniuses are all deranged arrogant threats, etc)

Things that were handled well: black hole graphics; morality of ordering robot to sacrifice itself (quite cleverly resolved) and the design of the robots were interesting

[The Romulan Republic]

Where are you getting the idea that the film was showing "...that lone geniuses are all deranged arrogant threats..."? Certainly doesn't fit Murphy, unless you count believing in the whole ghost thing as being deranged. And even the old professor was more a ruthless pragmatist than just a mad scientist, while the astronaut who went crazy clearly did so out of fear and loneliness, not because he was a genius. The film actually has a pretty pro-science position.

[Tychu]

As for Pro-Science, there were scenes that had the crew doing MATH!!! Plotting how many Earth Years will be used up skirting the event horizon and so on. I'm pretty sure yokels have no concept of the speed of time relative to gravity

[Patroklos]

Making a science movie accessible to "yokels" is most definitely a better service to science generally than some commercial failure of a movie nobody sees outside some academics and scifi nerds who already know about such things because its incomprehensible. People who know nothing of space science or advanced physics probably learned a few things if even on the most basic level. I know a lot of very smart people who knew nothing about Bernal Spheres for instance and this movie served as a wonderful gateway into learning about space habitats.

It may not have been entirely hard scifi, but it was by far further along on that scale of things than anything made recently as far as space based scifi goes. The fact that people actually enthusiastically went and saw it given that is nothing short of a miracle.

[jwl]

I found this interesting article on what the movie could have been: http://www.slashfilm.com/interstellar-s ... fferences/

On whether this counts as hard sci-fi: it depends if you count, say, ringworld as hard sci fi. Ringworld has luck manipulation and FTL travel, Interstellar has bootstrap paradoxes and perpetual motion machines.