Just watched Interstellar again. Here are my impressions, and why I think a few of the groan inducing, universally panned moments of the film may actually have been saying something deeply complex and beautiful.<\/p>\n
HERE BE SPOILERS:<\/strong><\/p>\n Interstellar opens by establishing – through a mixture of prolepsis (flashforwards), stark imagery, narration, and dialogue – that the human race has passed over the precipice of a Malthusian catastrophe. We learn that the food supply has dwindled due to an unexplained “blight” on crops. The blight is mostly vague, but beyond war, pollution, and some sort of alien invasion, blight is a worthy plot device whose function is to wriggle through all possible technological solutions to appear insurmountable. Humans are finished.<\/p>\n We know that the blight has wiped out wheat and okra, and somewhat inconsistent with this premise, we still see Cooper drinking beer regularly, perhaps as a means of establishing his post-NASA gray-collar career, but it’s enough to make the viewer understand the asperity of the situation that humanity has found itself in:<\/p>\n Even using modern methods and technology, a single farmer today can support around 170 people, hence why the United States currently has 3.4 million farmers.<\/p>\n But the number of people a farmer can support is up two orders of magnitude from nearly 100 years ago, when a single farmer could feed only 4 people. But it should be noted that this figure comes from the 1930s: Dust Bowl territory. And America’s Dust Bowl was the inspiration for Interstellar’s “blight.”<\/p>\n Interstellar takes place in 2067, and some dialogue from the film suggests that the population has been reduced significantly from around 6 billion. This number is also suggestive of calamities other than blight having occurred before 2067, since in 2014 when the film was released, the world population was already more than 7 billion. Nolan appears to be suggesting here, at least to me, that blight wasn’t the world’s only issue leading up to the film’s start date.<\/p>\n The film tells us that a wormhole appeared “near Saturn” some 48 years before the Interstellar story begins, and that the wormhole leads not, as the film’s title would suggest, just to another star, but to another galaxy, putting us within reasonable proximity of 12 Goldilocks planets. The\u00a0Endurance<\/em> crew visits three of these planets\u2014Miller, Mann, and Edmunds\u2014which orbit the supermassive black hole Gargantua. The remaining nine planets are in separate star systems, as indicated by the mission’s scope.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The government then recommissions NASA to begin a new campaign: the Lazarus program, which would take a few intrepid explorers through the wormhole to find a new home for humanity.<\/p>\n Ok, plot established. Let’s go down the rabbit hole, based on what I think the film has told us about 2026:<\/p>\n 1.<\/strong> Human beings are threatened with extinction, but they are destined to survive. We know they survive because…<\/p>\n 2.<\/strong> …Far in the future, human beings reach stage III or IV on the Kardashev scale and can manipulate the raw material of time and space.\u00a0 Due to this ability, they no longer exist in 3-space and have become our proverbial “Bulk Beings,” living in 5-space. As 5-space beings, they lose the ability to communicate with 3-space beings (in this case, their evolutionary progenitors living in the past) effectively.<\/p>\n 3.<\/strong> These Kardashev III or higher beings are able to manipulate gravity and space – which they use to protect Cooper when he enters the blackhole, giving him access to Murphy’s room across many moments in time (represented by subtly different moments extending across the Z axis when he’s in the tesseract).<\/p>\n 4.<\/strong> The imagery seems to show that the Bulk Beings held one area of 3-space FIXED and expressed time as a physical dimension. When he looks through the bookcase and sees Murphy enter her room, he also sees a copy of that same moment but just slightly behind, and a copy of that moment just slightly behind, and so on into (presumably) infinity. The image is the same as if you’d held two mirrors facing one another, with the images in the reflections offset slightly by the time it takes light to traverse the distances between the mirrors and be intercepted by our eyes. In the film, each 3-dimensional scene is stacked on top of the other, allowing him to float to any moment in time he likes while remaining in that single location.<\/p>\n 5.<\/strong> Cooper then learns to manipulate gravity from the 3-dimensional space within the tesseract in order to communicate with his daughter. This is critical, because we have established, or will establish, that the Bulk Beings cannot <\/em>do this. And if he was not successful, humanity would not have survived to evolve to Kardashev III or higher, and they therefore would not have been able to create the wormhole and subsequently the tesseract. We see here that over the long span of time that Cooper existed as Murphy’s “poltergeist” were mere minutes to him, but a long span of time for Murphy. While this is consistent with relativity’s space-time distortion, it’s really more about the fact that from the tesseract, Cooper had access to Murphy’s room throughout all of time. 6.<\/strong> The data which Tars sends or brings back allows Murphy to figure out how to use gravity as fuel, which then allows them to build something as massive as Cooper station, allowing a sizable portion of the human race to leave earth behind, pushing forward to, presumably Edmunds’ planet, where Dr. Brand is seen burying Edmunds.<\/p>\n Note: Cooper does not make it to Edmund’ planet in an earlier version of the script. Instead, he remains locked in the tesseract. I like this ending better, And in yet another version of the script, the Bulk Beings actually are aliens. The existence of that version of the script would seem to suggest that the point of the film was not who sent the wormhole, but that it was there. Had it been aliens, then invoking the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle may not have been necessary.<\/p>\n HYPEROBJECTS:<\/strong><\/p>\n Many people balked at Dr. Brand’s (Anne Hathaway) assertion that love is a higher dimensional artifact which, like gravity, transcends time and space.\u00a0 The tired trope that ‘love conquers all’ or has some magical property that makes it exempt from the laws of time and space bordered on humorous for most cynics. But it was important enough for Nolan(s) to explicitly state in the film, and it’s important to at least explore the concept, because in my opinion, this is one of the first times it has been presented in this way on film.<\/p>\n Timothy Morton, Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University, coined the word ‘Hyperobject’ to refer to entities that are “massively distributed across time and space relative to humans” in order to meet the pressing need for the philosophical treatment of such things as the presence and effects of styrofoam use, humanity’s relationship to nuclear materials, the effects of capitalism, fast-food and plastic bags. Religion and its effects on human beings, is a hyperobject. According to Morton, hyperobjects share five qualities: viscosity, non-locality, temporal undulation, phasing, and interobjectivity.<\/p>\n Viscosity:<\/strong> Non-locality:<\/strong> Temporal Undulation:<\/strong> Phasing:<\/strong> If, for example, we could see, say, the weather from a higher dimensional space, stretched across both space and time, we would encounter it as a singular object, probably resembling a Lorentzian strange attractor. Or, if we could see ourselves from a fourth dimension (let’s say Time), from birth to death, we would encounter ourselves as a singular, connected, snakelike object with our infant selves on one side and our elderly selves on the other. Even this is too simple, because we would also be connected with our fathers and mothers in this fashion, There would be no discrete separation between ourselves and our parents. We would witness a massive causal string connecting not just ourselves to our parents, but our parents to their parents, and indeed every human being on the planet would be so connected, a singular,contiguous object stretching from the beginning of time to the end of time. But as beings who experience the passing of time as moments – slices of 4 dimensions, we see and experience a separation between ourselves and other things. Objects appear phased.<\/p>\n In many ways, the property of Phasing is implied by Non-Locality and Temporal Undulation (they involve both space and time respectively), but phasing speaks directly to how we experience of 4-dimensional constructs distributed throughout time and space as discrete, local, and momentary 3-dimensional entities. We see the Everglade here and now. We do not see it all at once.<\/p>\n Interobjectivity:<\/strong> Now, recall from the film, Dr. Brand’s whimsical summation of love:<\/p>\n “\u2026so listen to me, when I say that love isn\u2019t something we invented. It\u2019s…observable, powerful. It has to mean something…maybe it\u2019s some evidence, some artifact of a higher dimension that we can\u2019t consciously perceive. I\u2019m drawn across the universe to someone I haven\u2019t seen in a decade who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing that we\u2019re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that even if we can\u2019t understand it yet.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I groaned at this during the film. It wasn’t so much what she was saying, but that they made her say it, and that it was written and delivered so clumsily through no fault of Hathaway’s.<\/p>\n There is plenty of reason for a cynical, skeptical, evidence-driven science-fiction buff to scoff at this field-skipping, light-loafered description of love. But consider love as a hyperobject. Consider how it is causally responsible for when and where you are currently sitting. Years ago, love may have compelled your parent(s) to take deep, thoughtful consideration of the quality of your food. Doing so would have provided your brain the nutrients it needed to develop and grow during important window periods which open and close quickly during child development and have long-term effects on our intelligence, well-being and ultimately our success.<\/p>\n Love may have compelled our romantic partners to take special consideration of our needs, perhaps driving them to arrange a fateful introduction to someone who could help us get our foot in the door of our careers, or our education, or perhaps become a collaborator for some project whose success hinged upon such cooperation. The effects of these actions, once they occur, spread out through timespace in a kind of cone from the moment of their occurrence throughout the rest of our lives. Some effects may even have infinitesimally small consequences, but over time and despite this diluted interobjectivity, these consequences become statistically significant and meaningful. Love actually matters.<\/p>\n Love compels us to make irrational choices which favor our pairs, families and friends. It drives us to face odds we would otherwise have no rational reason to face. Even reduced to the collective dispersion of oxytocin, dopamine and other neurotransmitters in human brains over the last 200,000 years, love, all forms of it, has dictated possibilities for the human race which were otherwise inaccessible; possiblities which would have not have existed for creatures that do not experience it.<\/p>\n Love, described as the emergent effects of many individual moments of altered human behavior, is non-local, phased, viscous, temporally undulated, and interobjective. Love is a hyperobject in the same way that capitalism, Global Warming, Islam, and fashion are hyperobjects. The human world of symbols and signs and meanings is a function of many trends in human behavior. One of these trends, perhaps one of the most important, is love. No matter how I feel about the unglamorous chemical signals washing through the lump of fat in my skull, the effects of my great, great, great grandmother’s love still reaches across time and space to intertwine with me to this very day. And while the fact of her ‘love’ is not actually necessary (for all I know, she could have been a sociopath or perhaps was incapable of feeling and had just learned to fake it), she was likely surrounded by people who could exhibit it, and even their choices affect me.<\/p>\n So we see in the film the many times Cooper’s love for his daughter and in turn her love for him alter humanity’s future. How just this single relationship between father and daughter determined whether or not humanity would ever make it off the planet. It had already been established that Cooper was the only<\/em> pilot left with the training to make the journey. The single living being capable of doing the job. That in fact, he’d already trained for it before NASA’s refusal to drop bombs caused their dissolution.<\/p>\n Try to watch the film and keep an eye out for every decision that would have been different had these two not shared such a profound bond. And pay attention to Cooper’s behavior in the tesseract – his determination to get a message to Murphy so that he might never leave in the first place, thus opening the causal-loop, would never have taken place had he not been devastatingly sick with regret over the loss of his connection with his daughter. In that sense, Dr. Brand’s clumsily written speech on love was shown to be literally true: Like gravity, love reached across the cosmos and affected Murphy, and her sense of his presence as a person and not a ghoul, due in part to the way he chose to communicate with her\u2014only possible through intimate knowledge of her\u2014that kept her comfortable with her poltergeist and allowed her the confidence to continue attempting to decipher those messages without being distracted by fear.<\/p>\n THE NOVIKOV SELF-CONSISTENCY PRINCIPLE:<\/strong><\/p>\n We are presented with time-travel and its insurmountable paradoxes in hundreds if not thousands of science-fiction stories. Many of these stories feature alternate timelines, wherein a change to the past creates an alternate but co-existing timeline with the new changes applied to the future. In many of these stories, multiple timelines are accessible. In some, only one timeline exists, and alternate timelines are destroyed, erased, and deleted whenever the past is changed. We’ve seen stories with timelines showing a one-to-one correspondence between actions of the past and effects in the future. In these stories, killing our grandfathers would result in our deletion from the timeline, and the visual aid for this concept in the film might be a person’s disappearance from a photo, or a scar appearing on their face.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n To me, these editable futures have always been ridiculous. This singular timeline approach presents an insurmountable problem: the loss of logical consistency. Why, for example, did the photographer in the new timeline take such a terribly centered photo if one of the subjects of the photo never existed in the first place? Why did the person in the photo go to Olan Mills alone? Why did they buy this specific house with that specific mantle if they’d never met the person they purchased the house with in a previous timeline? ?<\/p>\n Sure, the medium of film has to use its visual vocabulary to convey meaning, but these disappearances are often diegetic. Characters in the story can perceive them.<\/p>\n For me, at least, these stories rarely deal with the so-called Grandfather Paradox in a convincing way. Nearly anything we do on even a microscopic level will propagate a series of changes that will, through a chaotic system, effect the future. And the future must be derivable from its past. Most time travel stories fail because they do not involve logically consistent outcomes.<\/p>\n The film Looper, for example, attempted to keep the past, present and future consistent with one another without changing anything else in the world. In Looper, if a mafia man cuts your arm off in the past due to a decision you make right there in the present, it means losing your arm at that moment. But why would the moment of discovery be the present if your arm no longer existed between the past and the present? This stitched up logic is good for the fantasy world presented by the films, but are hard to imagine being consistent with a world off the screen.<\/p>\n Enter the Novikov Self-Consistency Principle, which restricts the number of available timelines to one and prevents paradoxes from occurring by allowing for an infinite number of non-paradoxical events to take place in lieu of the problematic one. From Wikipedia:<\/p>\n “In response, another physicist named Joseph Polchinski sent them a letter in which he argued that one could avoid questions of free will by considering a potentially paradoxical situation involving a billiard ball sent through a wormhole which sends it back in time. In this scenario, the ball is fired into a wormhole at an angle such that, if it continues along that path, it will exit the wormhole in the past at just the right angle to collide with its earlier self, thereby knocking it off course and preventing it from entering the wormhole in the first place. Thorne deemed this problem “Polchinski’s paradox”.[3]:510\u2013511<\/p>\n After considering the problem, two students at Caltech (where Thorne taught), Fernando Echeverria and Gunnar Klinkhammer, were able to find a solution beginning with the original billiard ball trajectory proposed by Polchinski which managed to avoid any inconsistencies. In this situation, the billiard ball emerges from the future at a different angle than the one used to generate the paradox, and delivers its younger self a glancing blow instead of knocking it completely away from the wormhole, a blow which changes its trajectory in just the right way so that it will travel back in time with the angle required to deliver its younger self this glancing blow. Echeverria and Klinkhammer actually found that there was more than one self-consistent solution, with slightly different angles for the glancing blow in each case. Later analysis by Thorne and Robert Forward showed that for certain initial trajectories of the billiard ball, there could actually be an infinite number of self-consistent solutions.[3]:511\u2013513″<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is, I think, the reason a wormhole could be “sent” from the future to create a reality in the past which is causally responsible for the future which generated the wormhole in the first place. The events are self-consistent; there is no need for an alternate timeline. And the hyperobject that, as\u00a0 Dr. Brand says, is “observable, powerful,” and has to mean something, perhaps persisting in some higher dimension that we can\u2019t consciously perceive,\u00a0 and which drew her across the universe to someone she hadn’t seen in a decade, whom she knew was probably dead, was love<\/p>\n “Love is the one thing that we\u2019re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that even if we can\u2019t understand it yet.”<\/p>\n I know. I roll my eyes every time I hear it. But… There are no other lessons so central in this film. Try to make any other sci-fi aspect the center of the plot, dialogue, and backstory, and what you’ll see is imbalanced nonsense. I believe the entire purpose of Interstellar was to put on display one of the most powerful tools humanity has ever had at its disposal. The ability to look past the workings of our superpower, rationality, to see minute possibilities in the madness, and take unjustifiable risks.<\/p>\n And so, at the end of the film, Cooper seeks further connection at the behest of his daughter, Murph, just before she passes away. With the rest of humanity isolated on O’Neill space habitats surrounding Saturn (Cooper station)\u2014habitats only made possible by the data Cooper sent from the tesseract\u2014Cooper steals a ship and heads to Edmund’s planet to find Dr. Brand, the only person alive who understood what he sacrificed. By the end of the film, this location, in a faraway galaxy, locked in the orbit of a supermassive black hole, is implied to be the future home of the human race.<\/p>\n It wasn’t just them. It was plan B; the fallback mission. A genetic payload of several hundred frozen embryos and automated incubation equipment. But surely, Brand would have needed help. And Wolf Edmunds was gone. Cooper’s ridiculous push to find Brand, in the face of sheer absurdity, could only have happened for one reason. It may not have been the same romantic love gave her the conviction to go to Edmund’s world, but it was love nonetheless. A many faceted thing. A form of human connection that can weave between stars. One might even call it interstellar.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Just watched Interstellar again. Here are my impressions, and why I think a few of the groan inducing, universally panned moments of the film may actually have been saying something deeply complex and beautiful. 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\n<\/span><\/span><\/span>There are a few scientific issues folks raise…for example, the gigantic waves we see on Miller’s planet should not have occurred due to tidal locking. But that’s not why I’m writing. Right now, I’m interested in figuring out who the “Bulk Beings” were, and I think the film provided that answer.<\/p>\n
\n<\/em>
\nAnd this is where the Novikov self-consistency principle (and love) comes in. We now have a possible future\u2014where the human race survives and progresses to become Bulk Beings\u2014whose very existence is contingent upon Cooper’s success at communicating with his daughter. If he was not successful in communicating with her, then he never would have been able to give the coordinates to Murphy, and he never would have gone on the mission.<\/p>\n
\nThe film would seem to be showing a bizarre time paradox, where the past depends on the future and the future depends on the past, but this causal relationship is actually self-consistent in 5 dimensions, and is also supported by the Novikov self-consistency principle. It is only paradoxical in 3 dimensions.<\/p>\n
\nAccording to Morton, the \/viscosity\/ of hyperobjects is the quality of being causally intertwined with us. Global Warming, as a hyperobject, surrounds us, is due to us, and is an inescapable part of our existence. We breath in its effects. We eat its effects. The gravity of a black hole at the center of our galaxy affects me and all of us. These effects operate on us throughout space and time and are inescapable. One cannot simply point to a hyperobject and claim it is “over there” because the hyperobject is attached to us, and, per the next summary, non-local.<\/p>\n
\nA plastic bag may be an object right here on the table in front of me, but the plastic bag as a hyperobject is part of a manufacturing trend, part of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the subject of social trends and movements to be banned, etc. Global Warming, as the collusion of sunlight, carbon dioxide, the greenhouse effect, the chaotic system of weather, is non-local. I cannot touch Global Warming, yet its effects surround me. Capitalism too is a massive non-localized hyperobject which affects not only ourselves as individuals, but every human being, plant and animal on the planet.<\/p>\n
\nAccording to Morton, the Florida Everglades are a hyperobject. We can see them now and refer to them as nature; as a natural phenomenon localized in time, but at 5000 years old the Everglades are massively distributed throughout time relative to humans. In this sense, the totality of their effects cannot easily be seen without the ability for us to pull back in scope and observe the goings-on of the entire planet and ecosphere for the past 5000 years.<\/p>\n
\nThis refers to the fact that we only encounter portions of hyperobjects at a given time. Our experience of a forest occurs during a stacked series of single moments. We do not experience it as it was 500 years ago. We do not see it grow from sprouts, or from a ragtag collection of trees. We do not see its root system expand. The forest is phased…we are given only a moment of its lifespan. Only a cross section of its physicality.<\/p>\n
\nHyperobjects are phenomena which are distributed across many objects. The wind, for example, experienced in the moment, is the emergent property of the behavior of an uncountable number of non-contiguous, discrete atoms. The Everglades is the emergent construct which is the result of tens of thousands of trees, large swaths of grass, the shapes of wetlands, the occurrence of fires, seasonal flooding, and all the objects therein.<\/p>\n