It’s one of my favorite movies, I cry every time I watch it. I was just thinking about it and I’m not really sure how solving gravity and moving the population of earth into space fixes the problem of all the crops dying. Did I miss something?
It’s one of my favorite movies, I cry every time I watch it. I was just thinking about it and I’m not really sure how solving gravity and moving the population of earth into space fixes the problem of all the crops dying. Did I miss something?
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They’re trying to find a place where crops won’t die
They were trying to escape the Blight which was killing crops and also turning the air into more nitrogen than oxygen.
And how did the future humans survive? They wouldn’t have the even further future humans to open the wormhole for them. Like someone had to survive long enough to make the super advanced wormhole technology in the first place before they could help the past with it…
Earth was suffering a serious problem; while they had genetically engineered crops, they were getting blights that were mutating beyond their ability to engineer around; in fact, the very genetic engineered traits left them more susceptible to these mutated blights thanks to their genetic similarities. Their only remaining solutions, whily struggling to make new types of corn, was to burn the infection out before it spread too far.
In order to grow food for humanity, they needed to plant it from the seed level somewhere these unusually durable blights couldn’t reach. On an earth racked with polllution and running out of resources, doing so in a manner that would let them feed all of man’s billions was impossible. Some of them considered human extinction inevitable.
If you could get into space for a reasonable cost, all the water and materials you’d need to build a completely isolated place to grow crops could be easily reached. A massive hydroponics facility could safely grow food in a completely contained environment and drop it back down to earth. The only way space infrastructure wouldn’t be able to grow a surplus of food is if it were in deep space or lacked basic starter resources like seeds; maintenance in space would actually be easier than terestrial facilities in many ways.
In addition, the expedition was equipped to start a new colony from square one if they found a suitable place, assuming humanity on earth could not be saved.
I believe there is another issue that also their oxygen levels on the atmosphere were lowering the Blight feeds from nitrogen.
They mention people will suffocate soon.
Some of humanity would have survived underground, they mention that that’s where people are going at one point, but it would only be a fraction and the human race would have an uncertain future. If the blight got into their habitats they’d die anyway.
The only solution was to find an entirely new world and start again with the population bomb, but instead they were able to ‘solve’ gravity with the info from the black hole and launch space arks which functioned like mini worlds and were completely seperated from the blight.
The arks would cruise through space and eventually over generations find new worlds to colonise.
Something to add to the points here about setting up on Earth, the average person in Interstellar is aggressively anti-intellectual in a soft Idiocracy situation. NASA is working secretly because they’re trying to find a solution that can be prepared to save humanity without the general public finding out before it’s ready and trying to stop them.
Sending preserved embryos away on a spaceship can potentially be done quietly, trying to globally reform farming can’t.
It doesn’t. There’s no reason those habitats couldn’t be built on Earth’s surface much more cheaply and grow crops in sealed environments there. There’s nothing magically “cursed” about Earth’s surface.
The problem is that John Brand wants humanity to live in space. He believes in it with a religious fervor. He was the director of NASA and when the blight crisis resulted in NASA’s funding being diverted to agricultural research something broke in him. He would rather see humanity’s resources spent on a project that he knows can’t work, or on a giant roll of the dice that might possibly save a handful of embryos, than see those resources go into boring old agricultural research that could save a lot more people but that doesn’t result in the space colonies he’s dedicated his life to realizing.
Dr. Brand was a monster. A charismatic narcissist who very nearly doomed humanity with his hubris, and only escaped that fate due to literally miraculous intervention by entities that could not possibly have been predicted.
Well that’s the point. It wasn’t ever going to.
The voyage of Cooper and the rest of the gang onboard the Endurance were launched specifically to assess and confirm the last readings the probes into the black hole by Saturn sent out. The plan was a one-way trip, to repopulate the human race with Plan B. Plan B was always Plan A, but they never thought going into the wormhole with ANY kind of plan would end up working at all.
Through “Them”, Murph was able to figure out the gravity equation from Cooper by inputting it in Morse via the watch on her shelf (how long did that take for him to do btw? damn), so she got lucky and had her “Eureka!” moment and sent everyone into space, able to live.
To Murph and the rest of “present day” Earth, the Endurance was a failure, until Brand’s signal of success came back after set up shop with a base on Edmound’s planet.
I personally think they could have just went to a desert like death valley, or went to either of the ice caps where it’s mostly sterile or hostile to bacteria and grown there in domes. Very little chance of contamination because there’s not going to be any contaminants outside of the domes. Hell they could have grown in the ocean, at depths that were hostile to bacteria. There’s so much they could have done, it just wouldn’t have made for a fun movie. They could have gone to the moon or Mars, or even one of Jupiter’s moons. They didn’t have to go to like a whole other planet or a whole other galaxy or whatever. There were very viable options.
Less mouths to feed on Earth means more food security for whomever remains… in theory, at least.
It’s never explained how they prevented the blight from following them to the stars, presumably they had safe seeds and other samples sequestered (like the Seed Vault, maybe).
It certainly seems to be easier to create a Blight-free area on Earth that can grow proper food than it would be to do the same thing in space, but even if that’s true, there’s probably no way to scale that method fast enough to save everyone on Earth. A lot of people were going to starve. No one had hope.
Worse, the official government opinion was that science was bullshit, so even if they did have a Blight-fix, the government might reject it.
Going to space can at least give people hope, and once you have that, you might snap enough of the world’s governments out of their negative spirals that some people can be saved.
The solve the problems because they become a forward thinking society rather than a regressive one. The kind of society that would go to space, is the kind that could fix it’s problems on earth. We arn’t given any real specifics other than ‘humanity gets better’.