Interstellar Ending

I've been doing numerous searches online to help explain a part of the interstellar ending but none of them are giving me proper answers. The one thing that bothers me is how the worm hole ended up being there in the first place. I understand that to 5th dimensional beings time is non-linear, but the worm hole had to have appeared in linear time first in order to allow humans to survive and harness gravity.

I only see one plausible explanation for humans to have survived the plight: Plan B was successfully carried out and colonization on another planet was achieved. Even then, we needed the worm hole in the first place in order to reach planets that we can colonize.

From what I've seen, there are numerous theories with multiple universes and a couple far-fetched ones, but it seems like interstellar is very geared towards one universe in space-time.

Boot strap paradox. Two moments existing in time reliant on the other, and form sort of a closed loop. Like in 'Terminator' in which Kyle Reese is sent back in time as part of a resistance that can only start if he fathers the very person who started it. Future humans get the means to create the wormhole by Coop, which they in turn use to allow Coop to get the information in the first place. It is a sci-fi trope that I think works in the film.

Right, but it still just doesn't make sense. The future humans would have to exist in the first place in order for Coop to have access to the worm hole.

The link that you provided me with gave an example of a woman who developed the schematics to build a time machine. She went back in time and gave the schematics to her younger self which allowed her to build it earlier. What I don't understand is why she then uses the time machine she just built to go back in time and give it to another younger self. It's not like she is forced to do this or else the universe will suddenly just end.

The problem could be that I'm viewing time linearly, but I just can't understand this. By this logic, any time that humans are in danger of extinction, we will always find a way to save ourselves because future humans can just save us. So we can never be in danger of extinction in the future?

You don't have to find any sense to it, it's literally a time paradox, there is no other name for it. Future humans are able to create the wormhole to save the past humans because the past humans were able to find a new planet thanks to the help of the future humans. It's a paradox, a loop. Look for the "grandfather paradox". A man goes back in time and kills his grandfather before he has any children (including the guy's father), so the time traveller never existed and thus his grandpa did lived, so the time traveller did existed and he did went back and killed his granpa, and so forth.

It's sci fi dude, even something like "quantum universe" doesn't make any sense when you think about it.

I know it's a loop, I'm just trying to incorporate this into reality. Much of Interstellar is based on real science, and of course there is also fiction, but none of it (as far as I know) treads past what is theoretically possible. If the grandfather paradox were to truly happen, then would infinite loops just keep occurring forever? We would probably have to adopt a multi-verse viewpoint in order to make sense of this. What's to say these paradoxes are exempt from happening in reality?

Well, not if you view it as the two moments "locked" in time/space and reliant on only each other to happen exactly as shown. Some could say "well, why didn't they just use the wormhole to go back and stop the blight?" but then Coop never is able to provide them with the information needed to create the wormhole to begin with. Humans were destined to survive, but only if Coop's timeline in the film plays out exactly the way we see it. Perhaps if the wormhole was created in any other moment in time then the information would never have been found to begin with so the wormhole cannot exist and erases that possibility from ever happening - like a puzzle piece or combination lock, there are only two very specific moments in time that allow for one to create the other. You do have to not view time as linear I guess, because the paradox is a loop. Coop goes through the wormhole, gets the information needed to create the worm hole, future humans use it to allow Coop in the past to get the information, which future humans use, and on and on. This moment in time would be constantly repeating, but by Coop's perspective and the future humans it only happens once. It is super technical and I am definitely not smart enough to properly explain it but it is one of many paradoxes that have been discussed within physics - and currently really only a theory that works in particular contexts, such as this film.

Like I said, multi-universes dont even make sense to me because they follow the premise that not only the world spins around you, but the entire universe. If a different universe is created from every single action a person takes, then its the same as saying that this person is the one and only reason for said universe to exist.

You're simply trying to put way too much sense in something which doesnt has it or needs it, it's a sci fi flick, regardless of the amount of real science. They also didnt accounted for extremely basic things like the wild gravitational variations in a wormhole and in the black whole (Coop and the crew would have been turned to spaghetti in an instant).

I see what you're saying, it definitely helped me understand the main idea here, thanks. This movie does a great job of portraying non-linear time to people.

Even though I see the loop trick that the movie uses, I still find it perplexing as to how it would take place in reality. If the two moments can be locked together and happen in conjunction with each other, then according to Murphy's Law, they should. At least with the definition of Murphy's Law used in the movie (They said "anything that can happen will happen", I believe the actual law is "anything that can go wrong will go wrong").

But the sci-fi flick has many great ideas that are under debate today. These ideas have existed long before the movie has. If warping of space-time and a 5th dimension do exist, then these problems would definitely be very important.

I think the big thing to remember about the science in 'Interstellar' is that although it is based on actual science/physics, a lot of it are still just theories - which doesn't make it any less scientific. Kip Thorne is behind pretty much all the science in the film, and both him and Nolan have said that Thorne was very adamant that everything that happened have some basis in current theoretical physics - but much of it is just that, theoretical. A lot of the ideas at play are still up for debate in the physics community. For example, you have guys like Neil deGrasse Tyson who has pointed out moments in the film that he thinks are very accurate (like the use of relativity), and others that he questions (like how close one could actually get to a black hole) - but clearly Thorne believes it possible or else he wouldn't have allowed Nolan to use it. This doesn't mean that the ideas that are still up for debate aren't true, but just that their are still conflicting views out there...which happens a lot in the field of theoretical physics. So although the idea of a time loop or boot strap paradox doesn't seem possible in the reality we know, enough of it is grounded in actual physics and theoretical ideas to make it possible - especially in the context of the film.

This is something a lot of people seemed to have taken issue with. They don't like that the film presents itself to be very much based on actual science so that when it moves into more theoretical ideas (which people need to understand is still actual science - just more speculative) that their view of the film is obscured and they have a hard time believing or accepting some of the things in the third act. Personally, I think it was one of many things that made the film great. I loved seeing the use of more well known and understood ideas - like the passing of time due to relativity - but I also really loved seeing them used more theoretical ideas that aren't often explored in the medium with such a direct approach. Whether or not these theoretical ideas are actually true may never be truly known - and can lead to some great debates and speculation like in this thread - but within the context of the film they work, which was enough for me.

Since the movie essentially involves time travel into the past, it's basically just another example of the predestination paradox. Or in other words, it's a single timeline causality loop.

Have you watched The Terminator? Same deal.

And I don't want to hear about it not making sense. I think that by now we should have gotten over the whole "that time travel movie doesn't make sense' complaint. That shit inevitably goes with time travel movies, and there's no way around it. You can go with whatever time travel rules you want, so long as you stick to the rules you established and don't switch things up on the fly (and if the movie is good enough, you can apparently even get away with doing that, as seen in Terminator 2).

Stop trying to overthink things. The time travel element places this in Terminator or 12 Monkeys territory, so just accept the movie's internal logic. The movie doesn't (as far as I can tell) violate its own logic, so stop nitpicking about this stuff. This has been a sci-fi trope as far back as the classic Twilight Zone/Outer Limits era (and probably long before that). I'd think that by now we'd be able to wrap our heads around this stuff.

The reasoning here is that when you go into the past, you cannot cause events that didn't happen (they also did the same thing on Lost). She IS "forced" to do this or that, because "what happened happened". People ask who John Connor's "original" father was, but that's missing the point. Kyle Reese was ALWAYS John Connor's father in EVERY timeline (because in this version of time travel rules, there is only one timeline). Kyle Reese impregnating Sarah Connor didn't change ANYTHING, because there is only one version of that point in space and time if he hadn't impregnated Sarah Connor then he wouldn't have existed to go back in time and impregnate Sarah Connor. The Terminator never had a chance of killing Sarah Connor, because its own history establishes that it didn't kill Sarah Connor. If Sarah Connor had been killed by a Terminator in 1984, then Skynet never would have had to send a Terminator back in time to kill Sarah Connor.

You can say that it doesn't make sense, but it's an old-as-hell sci-fi trope. And you evoke these questions any time you involve time travel into the past. After all, consider the alternative. If you don't go with the "boot strap paradox", then you're implying that the past can be changed. And implying that the past can be changed raises the problem of how there ever arose a future in which someone can go back in time and change the past. After all, if you were allowed to go back in time and murder your own father before you were born, then that means you were never born and therefore can't have gone back in time to murder your father.

That's the nature of time travel movies. It necessarily involves these kinds of problems. The thing you're supposed to do is run with it as long as the movie establishes its working logic and then sticks to the rules which are established for that narrative universe. Interstellar does this, it adheres to its own rules, so any complaint about this aspect of it not making sense essentially boils down to complaining about it using time travel at all. Do you complain this much when the Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings movies use magic ("this movie is bullshit because magic isn't real")?

@MrGeezer: Wow, calm down. I'm not complaining about the movie, I loved it. It's one of Nolan's best. I'm just trying to wrap my head around this concept. You assume that I've seen all the movies that you've listed and that I'm constantly nitpicking about this in each of those movies. I haven't seen any of those movies you listed, this is new to me. You don't seem to see that this concept is familiar to you because you've seen many sci-fi movies, but a large amount of people who are seeing Interstellar are not familiar to this.

Lord of the Rings uses magic, but I run with it because it's fantasy. I ran with this movie too, but I'm wondering how these sorts of paradoxes would work in reality. If you just accept that the paradox is there and that it's cool, I feel like you've just missed the point. Kip Thorne put a lot of work into basing Interstellar off working ideas of reality. Of course Nolan wanted to tell a great story, but another part of it was to get audiences thinking about reality itself. If they had just wanted to tell a good story, they wouldn't have put all this effort into making it based off of working physics. This is what makes Interstellar so exceptional and it's why I'm still thinking about the movie days after having seen it.

Science is about discovery, wonder, and curiosity. The movie does a great job of establishing this, and like I said, it urges the audience to think about the concepts in the movie. Whenever these ideas are discussed in-depth and in relation to reality, you can't just say it's nitpicking or complaining. How would you discover anything if you just accepted everything and refused to think about it?

You might say that these paradoxes aren't worth thinking about, but that's not for you to decide. If people knew what was worth thinking about and what wasn't, we would always know what we are going to discover. It makes no sense to just restrict your vision like that. Otherwise, what is worth thinking about? Really. These are exciting concepts that deal with the fundamentals of space-time and the problems of time travel, they are problems we may have to face one day in the future. Therefore, tackling these concepts is very relevant.

They very well might not work in reality. See, for all we know time travel into the past may not even be possible. The mere existence of paradoxes in these time travel scenarios may be because the scenario itself is something that's impossible. Imagine a movie's plot that involves the hero dividing by zero and then finding some kind of code within the answer (sort of like the movie Pi, except they're dividing by zero instead of using pi). It wouldn't make sense to ask how that work work in reality, it simply wouldn't work in reality because the basic premise is physically impossible.

The goal for Interstellar wasn't to make a movie that is 100% scientifically accurate. The goal was just to make a movie that (for the most part) doesn't violate KNOWN science. If they were so concerned about scientific accuracy, then they wouldn't have used time travel at all since we don't know that time travel is even possible (and if it's not possible, then it's just as much "fantasy" as Gandalf doing some wizard shit).

Yep, as long as it doesn't violate known science it's interesting to consider the possibility of such a thing happening in reality. It's sci-fi of course so there will be fictional elements, but I would still consider that scientifically accurate because we cannot say with certainty that it's not true.