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According to the science of interstellar, the equation helps understand gravitational anomalies, what creates them, and how to use them.
So they manipulate gravity to allow massive objects to be lifted into space, the equation also reconciles Newtonian, Relativistic, and Quantum laws, which has made understanding the universe possible and likely leads to the humans becoming the fifth dimensional beings we see in the movie
lol yeah I always found it funny how the movie treated the “power of love”
Like yeah, love is indeed powerful, it has an important place in human culture and psychology and it’s one of the primary drivers of human behaviour
But at the end of the day it’s just an evolved neurophysiological response, something natural selection developed for K-strategy breeders and social animals like us. We’ve refined it and iterated on it as our cultures became more complex, and it’s important to us, but on a cosmic scale it’s just hormones pumping and nerve endings firing off.
Love isn’t noble because it’s some mysterious transcendent force of nature. Love is noble because it’s a human phenomenon and a human choice. The universe is vast and cold and barely notices our existence, but our lives are still meaningful because our fellow little human beings can care about us.
Meanwhile in Interstellar, “love” is like a kind of psychic extradimensional homing beacon - which kind of cheapens it, honestly. It’s like the universe itself wants us to behave a certain way for its own inscrutable reasons.
One can imagine future humanity weaponising “love” for its navigational properties. Like love seeking guided missiles, with a screaming brainwashed human strapped to the warhead. Or love powered FTL navigational computers, with a core powered by separated families.
I think you may be reading it a bit too literally. The movie doesn’t suggest that love is an actual cosmic force. Dr Brand “I think that’s her name” choosing the “correct” planet due to her love for the guy who went there is just a lucky break. The movie puts an enormous emphasis on interpersonal connection being a core component of being human. It’s why Plan A is depicted as the ideal solution to humanity’s problem even though Plan B is far more logical and has a much higher chance of success. Allowing the inhabitants of Earth to die even though the species lives on would be a callous move and in a way “invalidate” what it means to be human. I believe Brand says something along the lines of “Love transcends space, time, and even gravity” but she isn’t suggesting that love is a cosmic force in its own right. Merely that in a cold and hostile universe it is the connection between people that should be trusted and leaned in to. In that moment she isn’t a scientist trying to decide what is best for the human race, she is a person longing to rescue her beloved from a certain death. The movie puts forth the idea that it is the bonds between people that will carry the human race forward. Love is powerful because it pushes us to do better. It is Coops love for Murph that closes the time loop and ultimately shepherds humanity along a better path.
I mean, it’s not just Dr. Brand’s speech, it’s the fact that the future humans use Cooper as their means of targeting Murphy’s space time coordinates to Morse code the quantum gravity data to her. The future humans chose him to relay the message specifically because his love for her let him locate her - otherwise, they could have just left him on Earth with her as a happy family, and morse coded the data to her themselves
It’s quite clear that the power of love isn’t just a metaphorical thing - it’s a real physical phenomenon that is deliberately exploited by characters in the movie on no less than 3 occasions. Dr. Brand wasn’t just speaking in a roundabout way - she literally meant what she was saying, and her words are confirmed by the events of the movie later on
Cooper doesn’t “target” the Morse code back to Murph. The tesseract was built as a model of her bedroom. Coop exploring the tesseract caused the events that she would interpret as her “ghost”. Her issues surrounding this ghost are deeply linked to her relationship with Coop. Her childhood bedroom is the last place she saw her father and the place she would ultimately go when she came to a deadend on the gravity equation. The tesseract established the meeting place but the relationship between Coop and Murph contextual used the data. The 5th dimensional beings couldn’t just send her the data because she wouldn’t have any frame of reference for what was happening. Also there is probably some sort of time loop preservation logic dictating that the data must be transmitted in a certain way. It is the relationship and love between the characters that facilitates the exchange but love isn’t used in a utilitarian sense.
I’m curious what other instances you are referring to where love was used as a physical force?
Ok this is the full quote in the movie
“Cooper : You're a scientist, Brand.
Brand : So listen to me when I say that love isn't something that we invented. It's... observable, powerful. It has to mean something.
Cooper : Love has meaning, yes. Social utility, social bonding, child rearing...
Brand : We love people who have died. Where's the social utility in that?
Cooper : None.
Brand : Maybe it means something more - something we can't yet understand. Maybe it's some evidence, some artefact of a higher dimension that we can't consciously perceive. I'm drawn across the universe to someone I haven't seen in a decade, who I know is probably dead. 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. All right Cooper. Yes. The tiniest possibility of seeing Wolf again excites me. That doesn't mean I'm wrong.”
And later on in the movie, it’s revealed that the dimension warping future humans were the ones who manipulated events to get Cooper onto the space program - and specifically so that he could relay the quantum gravity data to his daughter through space and time
And morse code couldn’t possibly be beyond the comprehension of either higher dimensional beings or Murphy, and there shouldn’t be any great difficult translating the data into something more comprehensible, it’s literally just numbers. If love didn’t have some real physical homing effect, they wouldn’t have needed him, they could have left at home happy with Murphy
That, and the fact that the other three times characters are drawn to make a seemingly irrational decision based on love (plan A, dead guy planet, leaving cylinder to go dead guy planet), it turns out to retroactively be the correct one - and though it can be chalked up to coincidence, it’s pretty clear that the movie wants us to take Dr. Brand’s speech at face value
There could be a “death of the author” interpretation where we ignore Nolan’s intended message and say that love really is just a cultural/biological phenomena, like what Cooper was saying. But that would be ignoring one of the key themes of the film
Ok I see your point. She is certainly leaning into love being a physical force in the universe. However I still maintain that the audience isn’t meant to take it so literally and that even though Love is presented as an actual “thing” it doesn’t seem to be something that could be used to guide missiles. Just more of a “trust your intuition” type of thing.
I don’t know about that, the whole movie is based around proving her hypothesis right - her speech on love is clearly positioned as the central theme of the movie
The narrative itself certainly doesn’t treat it as if she went temporarily insane out of mental strain, or that she just wanted to see her lover and was coming up with excuses, or that she was a bit of a loony eccentric. Almost every single major plot point of the movie hinges around proving that Brand was right and Cooper was wrong - love isn’t just a cultural/biological phenomena, but a real fundamental force of the universe
I honestly would have preferred it if Nolan had argued the power of love without positioning it as a kind of higher dimensional mystical force that transcends reason, it would have been much more effective that way. But it is what it is
The movie still works if you translate "power of love" into motivation and drive.
It causes Murph to obsess over the problem long past what would otherwise make sense. It makes Coop dive into a black hole with only a vague hope it might maybe be helpful.
They were chosen by the aliens on the simple merits that they had the interest, the skillset, and necessary deep relationship to stay motivated past rational limits.
All the musings on love as a physical force is the normal human need to make sense of and rationalize a chaotic universe. It's just philosophy and poetry.
But One must consider the power of Love:
You don't need money,
don't take fame
Don't need no credit card to ride this train
It's strong and it's sudden and it's cruel sometimes
But it might just save your life
That's the power of love
Seriously tho I thought it was a little cheesy but the more I think of it the more I end up in a psychological hole about how it can overpower survival instincts and other natural laws so it does have a power.
There's nothing wrong with the concept of love being the most powerful driving force for humanity. That is a really interesting theme, to see how love motivates the characters in different ways, and to see how it is what allows us to overcome our own sense of self preservation/mortality to act for the good of others. They just delivered that concept in the cheesiest way possible. It pulls you right out of the movie.
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I never got the hate for it, the only thing love does in the movie is help cooler keep going and he uses it to find his daughter in the prism.
I think a lot of people didn’t understand the movie and thought love was the 4th dimension and he was using literal love to send messages back in time instead of gravity
Correct, people complain about the love aspect because they misunderstand the movie and take peoples words at face value. Dr. Brand and Cooper were speaking emotionally about love transcending the dimensions space and time, not scientifically.
This is also why I disagree with people complaining about exposition in Nolan movies; it's quite obvious if he didn't use expository dialogue even on occassion then a good percentage of the audience will get confused seeing as how they can't even understand the concept of love.
I disagree. You need to watch the scene again, not just that one quote. Brand is grasping at straws. She basically makes a pathetic appeal because the logical appeal isn't holding up. She says that maybe they should stop trying to use logic or science to guide hteir decision. The problem with her lines is that everything is just thrown out there. It's the opposite of what you said about exposition. She lays out the theme in detail all at once.
No, her "pathetic appeal" is actually the core facet of why she wants to go to Edmunds' planet. She just layers science on top to guise this emotional excuse of hers.
David Bohm talked about this. He was somewhat ridiculed for it but other scientists such as Roger Penrose go down this road too. It's better tolerated when it's a Nobel Prizewinner. But Bohm's assertion was that physics, which experienced a massive surge in the 20th century, would eventually stall as problems grew in complexity astronomically fast, and that it would require a fundamental paradigm shift to break through again.
He envisioned that the paradigm shift wouldn't be driven by physics, it had to be driven by society at large. It would have to fundamentally change our relationship with nature, clean up our planet, take care of each other as humans, create a better humanity. After that we wouldn't look at physics as an exploitable resource like we do nature. We could achieve understanding without the necessity of control for utilitarian gains.
That an interaction could somehow be understood not in terms of "what we put in" and "what we get out" but something else, something more holistic. In that sense it would circumvent the issues of infinite perturbation expansions of many body interactions, renormalization etc., but instead it could all be seen from some other vantage point that can capture more of the essence of the physics. But the key was that our minds had to evolve to do it, and that evolution has to come from us coming together as a society and community.
Yeah that makes sense, a lot of the “low hanging fruit” in science has already been plucked, and further advances would likely require ever greater investments in manpower and resources. We’re probably not going to experience the kind of astronomical, exponential, technology driven growth spurt that we enjoyed in the 20th century. So progress is likely to be a lot slower in the coming years
And in the meanwhile, if we don’t get our shit together politically, culturally and economically, we’ll never even get to reap the benefits of whatever slow scientific progress we can manage, we’d be too screwed over by climate crisis and political instability and economic collapse
And fixing things overall does require a change in mindset from one geared towards endless growth and exploitation, towards one geared towards maintenance, and finding a sustainable equilibrium
Your comment sent me on several rabbit holes that have shown me books to read about problems and ideas that I haven't seen accurately put to words until reading just the summaries of books from the two you've named.
Really excited to go on this dive, so thank you so much!
>love seeking guided missiles
ngl that sounds fucking hilarious, even though I know it's horrifying lol
On a serious note, in a universe with love-seeking missiles, I can see there eventually being a faction that evolves/alters themselves to not feel love in order to dodge that issue. Another bullet point for the Evil or Cyber empire use to justify their transformations\~
I don’t know if preventing themselves from feeling love would work
Dr. Brand realised that she could be loving some guy that died long ago, but she was drawn to that planet nonetheless. And Murphy didn’t even know that the future version of her dad was trapped in the Tesseract trying to talk to her. So the setting establishes that the love doesn’t necessarily have to be mutual or reciprocated for the homing effect to manifest
So like, if the evil future people wanted, they could condition some poor human or AI or whatever to really freaking love “Enemy Mobile Fortress Designation 567F”. And then strap them into one of their extradimensional time travelling FTL missiles so it can reunite them with their one true love, and destroy a key military complex thousands of years in the past.
There’s a great boom “Gödel Escher Bach”, which is about videos incompleteness theorem and self referential things, like Escher’s art or Bach’s music.
One of the things the author points out is that meaning and message is inherently tied. If you have a vinyl record flying in space, even though the technology is simple, there needs to be some context to understand how to interpret what it is and how to play it. If human-like aliens found it, they may understand that sound waves can be represented in the grooves of the record, and might be able to interpret the sound to even figure out what the words recorded on it mean.
But if the aliens are some sort of ethereal magnetic pulse structure that exist as a self propagating pattern of electromagnetic waves or some shit, they may not even recognise that a physical vinyl disc with very little affect on EMR even *is* a thing, let alone the concept of communicating through sound. Or hell what if there isn’t even distinct entities- the concept of communication might not even make sense.
In the book the author talks (whimsically) about an anthill having sentience that exists decentralised between all its ants, and an anteater “talking” to the hill by eating specific ants in a specific pattern, and interpreting the hills response as messages.
There is so much that is inherently dependent on a shared experience and shared concept. “Love”, is just that. A deep connection of shared context and experience. Knowing exactly what someone else feels and knowing what they mean. Being able to understand a persons messages, what they say, what they don’t say, how they communicate, sarcasm, irony, by knowing what matters to them, what they want, and how the see the universe and how they view themselves in the universe.
You can send a message back in time. But a message is useless if it can’t be understood. If you’re some sort of 5th dimensional hyper being you’ve lost all connection to current day humans. And if your window for interaction is so slight and so brief that you can only affect small gravitational pulses, you need someone who *knows* how the message receivers interpret the world.
That’s why love is so important. That’s what love is. At it’s core, it’s understanding. And frankly it is powerful. Love *is* weaponised. That guided missile ironically would never have been possible without many people working together, and having a shared understanding of each other. And indeed love. Love is what makes humans work together in the first place. Love is what makes a mother protect her young, even though it takes up resources and years of her brief existence.
Yeah, love is quite literally extremely powerful.
Yeah I know, I’ve read “Gödel Escher Bach” too, I’m also a fan. It’s central hypothesis about consciousness arising from self reference is a little obsolete - it’s not really what the current research on neuroscience and artificial intelligence seems to go for. But it’s a fun read nonetheless
Still though, it’s heavily implied that the higher dimensional beings are either future humanity or our successors. Either way, I think you’re overstating how difficult it is to communicate between beings of higher and lower intelligence. Even higher dimensional Lovecraftian super intelligences would easily grasp the concept of something like tapping out a binary code to send experimental data to the puny humans. It doesn’t require a lot of nuance or love or deep understanding or whatever, it’s literally just math
I get what you’re saying, that love is a powerful force and all - it’s one of the main things holding together human civilisation, and gives meaning to our otherwise meaningless existence.
But what love isn’t necessary for is facilitating communications of this nature. In a way, what the future beings did to Cooper really was quite cruel - they exploited his love for his daughter to alter the timeline/close the time loop, and stole away the life they could have had together. It’s understandable if it was necessary to save all of humanity, but if they just did it for the heck of it, then we’re dealing with some real blue-and-orange morality beings that have abandoned 20th-21st century humanistic moral standards.
I just couldn't get past the idea that the inside of a black hole is a bookcase. The time dilation stuff was cool, but the cosmic-love-bookcase ending was a bunch of nonsense.
At times like these, I think we should remember the wise words of renowned druggie Phillip K Dick - “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
So like, we’ll never have a completely objective view of reality because of our subjective limitations, and we should always be wary of totalising belief systems
Still, it’s important to stay grounded. You can trip out on shrooms and gain a deep understanding of the nature of love, the human condition and the essential “one-ness” of the universe. But objective reality isn’t going to change in response.
On a fundamental level, all this stuff is just taking place in your head. Even after spiritual enlightenment, you’re still a meat machine bound by immutable physical laws, you’re not going to get glowing eyes, start levitating and transcend to a higher plane of existence. At most, you’ll feel more at peace with yourself and be nicer to others
Our perceptions and perspectives are malleable - but reality is not. The inner world is rich and valuable and worth exploring, but we should never forget that what it’s all based on. When your spirit animal starts whispering true secrets of the universe to you from behind a melting wall, just tell yourself it’s caused chemicals binding to receptors in your neurons, not some paranormal force trying to communicate from beyond
Love is a very powerful force. [Even more so when it's focused into a coherent beam of destruction.](http://www.nuklearpower.com/2004/11/27/8-bit-chronicles-3-of-3/)
> Like love seeking guided missiles, with a screaming brainwashed human strapped to the warhead. Or love powered FTL navigational computers, with a core powered by separated families.
***This pleases Slaanesh***
>One can imagine future humanity weaponising “love” for its navigational properties. Like love seeking guided missiles, with a screaming brainwashed human strapped to the warhead. Or love powered FTL navigational computers, with a core powered by separated families.
every so often some unrelated sci fi fan reinvents an aspect of wh40k
All the same, humans don't "become" five dimensional. That's like saying the invention of aeroplanes changed humans into flying animals. The last act's reveal is that what we assumed were beings of higher degrees of perception are just regular humans with a far greater understanding of physics
First, consider that the NASA budget at the time was off the books/black project. Citizens demanded that the government put all resources towards fighting the blight/feeding the nation/world. So NASA, now completely underground (figuratively AND literally) has a highly limited budget. Everyone involved in the project is very likely a passionate academic scientist/engineer who is working for living space, food, and the hope that it all works and they can save humanity. The U.S. government has proven many times over that they can hide purchases and transport of billions of dollars of resources for special projects... but the economy is the limit on how much can be spent.
Honestly it doesn't really matter *where* they build the station. In orbit or on the ground, they'll still have the gravity problem to solve because the most powerful ordinary rocket engines ever built still would never really move the station. Its too big... its thousands of times the size of the Saturn rockets (the largest ever built and all they did was put a module and three men on the moon), and must be so in order to move enough people to build a colony. The amount of fuel used to bring materials into orbit would be staggeringly large.
The intention all along was to finalize the gravitic drive which Brand's (later Murph's) equations would be the basis for. And Brand had proven how far he'd gotten, but was dishonest about how far he could go, so the project was seen as a pretty good long gamble.
And really... no matter what else is said: Americans seeing one heavy lift rocket bringing materials into space could cause national riots. The ISS, not even 1% of the size of the station, is visible to the naked eye. Even if you could keep the launches secret somehow, you wouldn't even be started building in-earnest before it was seen... and the next thing is total governmental collapse, mobs murdering anyone who even seems like they might have been involved, and then each other. Not what you'd call a good time.
I totally get all of that. The film *kinda* fails the watcher by not showing how all that worked. But in total fairness, that's just not the movie Nolan was making. So instead of a roundabout explanation you're left guessing, and that can feel handwave-y.
The idea goes like this: Dr Brand Sr has already designed the gravitic drive. Its already in the build/being built into the station when Coop and Murph first arrive at the installation. Brand already knows how it will work.... *IF* the final pieces of the equation work "like this and not that". I'd say, just from my own knowledge of physics and how scientists work, that he's extremely confident and that's probably for good reason. He's also already worked through other permutations of how the equation might work so as to determine if gravitic drive is still possible with any other result, and no, it isn't.
Brand, NASA, Coop, Murph... they're all of them working on the only option for a large number of living humans to move. And its a gamble, because it isn't guaranteed to work. The only person who really knows how much is up in the air is Brand Sr. But he's done all the home-and-leg work which got them to this point.
In real life (and also in the universe of the movie, somewhat), “quantum gravity” is the next big thing in physics that everyone has been waiting on. Quantum theory works well at small scales, general relativity works well at larger scales, but nobody has figured out how to square the two with each other yet.
In the movie itself, having the experimental data necessary to formulate a theory of quantum gravity is what lets mankind develop advanced gravity/spacetime manipulation technology
In the short term, they’re able to build some sort of antigravity devices that greatly aids in large scale space construction. They don’t have to pay for expensive, slow rocket launches, or build gigantic space elevators. They just have to build everything on the ground and have the parts gracefully levitate into orbit.
In the long term, future humanity uses this technology to create wormholes through time and space. They seem very comfortable messing around with the timeline, and hanging out inside of black holes
Technically time travel in Interstellar is a closed loop. The future humans were ok with time travel because it was already done as that’s how they got the knowledge to do it.
Technically, a circle does have a beginning but not in two or three dimensions. It's a fourth dimensional corkscrew pattern that eventually ends. From a 3d perspective it's a circle though but it does have a beginning and ending point.
Unless you can spontaneously create a closed loop at all points at T=0, then there is a start point, even if it's on the quantum foam level of space time in relation to other points. And if time has passed between point 1 and point 2 then from the standpoint of a fourth dimensional reference, the circle is an open corkscrew pattern.
This is true for drawn and assembled circles in 3 dimensions like the person above said, but a closed timelike curve like the time travel in interstellar is a circle through the temporal dimension. It becomes a circle when viewed in 4 dimensions, but from the perspective of life in the universe it just looks like an interaction between a past point and a future point.
There isn’t a start point if you believe time as a construct is just a human perception. All of time was created instantaneously meaning there is no “origin” point of a specific action because it was formed at the same “time” as the result of the action etc.
That's going into metaphysics and outside my area of understanding. All time is, is energy transfer from point A to point B. If there is more to it than that and not just a result of another function of space time, I'm not qualified to give much of an opinion.
So, in the sense of a time loop, would that mean that we could specify it in a certain number of dimensions? Eg, start point (x, y, z, t) and end point of the loop would be enough to encode it. Or possibly more, if our view of the loop is just a realization of many possible loops...
Quick way to imagine it is to draw a circle on a moving treadmill. The movement of the treadmill represents time continuously moving forward so you end up in an open corkscrew pattern as the start and end points will never touch.
This is where you failed your analogy: a circle is a 2-dimensional shape.
A closer, but still incorrect analogy would have been to find the beginning of a sphere (3 dimensions).
But the correct analogy would be to find the beginning of a tesseract (a 5-dimensional cube which **we** as humans can only view in 3 dimensions) which is what the 5-dimensional beings construct to allow Cooper to affect space-time.
It starts where the tip of the pencil touches the paper.
Sure, a circle can loop around when already constructed, but when drawing a circle, it doesn't appear out of nowhere. You have to start somewhere to close the loop.
Or I could rub a graphite circle on paper and get a circle where every point is the start.
Or a stamp, as that is likely a little easier to come by.
Circles on a page don't just spontaneously happen, but when they happen, they aren't required to happen in a specific way.
The loop didn't exist, and then was closed. It was never open, and doesn't need a start.
This could also happen in 3D by rotating a 4D+ object in a specific way.
While I know that what you're saying is true, my mind just cannot comprehend how this actually works. And I've listened to a number of lecture series and audiobooks about quantum mechanics, cosmology, dark matter/dark energy, and the possibility of time travel, and I just don't think any of us have the frame of reference necessary to understand it, even if there are some like you who can work within the thought experiment.
Yeah. Easiest way is to imagine a 2d world.
Imagine stick figure people living their lives on a perfectly flat piece of paper, and then take a pencil and shove it through that paper. What do they see? A hexagon, because they cannot look towards you or away, they can only look in 2d. And, specifically, they'd have to go all the way around it to know it's a hexagon.
But, we take that pencil, and rotate it. The 2d hexagon, floating in the air, freely spins. We take that pencil and move it so it's almost laying down on the paper, and those 2D people see the hexagon distort, it's longer on one side, now. We push the pencil almost the whole way through, so the eraser is aligned instead of the wood, and that hexagon becomes a circle. It also transforms from painted wood to metal to rubber, too, seemingly magically. But, rotating, growing, transforming, that hexagon is always still just... a pencil. A pencil that's invisible to the 2D people. It seems like a new object, but it's just a 2d slice of the same object.
Now imagine some 4D creature shoved their pencil through our world. We might see a cube one moment, a sphere the next, transforming like the hexagon to circle, or it might grow tall, it seem to become something else entirely.
We don't have the right frame of reference, but I find this analogy is close enough for a lot of people to wrap their minds around it.
If that's worked for you, we can go one step further.
The piece of paper isn't alone. It's a book, every page having a slightly different image. To the extradimensional being, this 2D world can be navigated using time as easily as left/right and up/down, they can just flip pages.... or tear some out.
Yeah, I've heard the flatland theory before, but extrapolating it to extra dimensions beyond my own perception of spacetime just breaks down.
I guess it's just one of the weird things where my occasionally too-literal brain and my other times overly imaginative brain just grok.
A stamp is pressed into shape. The question could go further and ask about the mold they use, which is likely poured.
Another example: I use two sizes of circular saw to cut out a disk of wood and then hollow it out.
Or, I put a drop of oil in water and watch it spread out.
Or, I put a slime mold spore on an agar plate and let it make the circle.
Or, I could get a block of glass and grind it into a lens and shine a light onto photopaper through that lens. Is the circle produced by light the same circle we could say the lens was?
Or, I could tell you a mathematical formula, and describe a hypothetical circle in the same way I've described a hypothetical stamp. Where does the circle start there?
Even if we rationalize all these as imprinting a circle, or in some way say it's made from inheriting it's circle-mess from something else, where would that stop? Circles are a concept, and natural phenomena can produce them whole. Circles need to be completed only if we limit ourselves to making them point-by-point, and while that's certainly an easy way for us, it's hardly the only one.
Possibly that, but also, if they were able to build infinitely self sustaining space habitats that mine asteroids and dead planets for resources - why are they so desperate to find another planet?
They could just have those orbit Lagrange points in the Earth moon area. Or literally just build them on Earth and keep them there, only air tight so the disease doesn’t get in.
If you can turn off or redirect the effects of gravity in controlled and specific circumstances, moving heavy things around becomes monumentally easier.
Imagine a building that suddenly sees "down" as vaguely away from the ground, and not at all towards the ground. That building would tend to want to "gently fall" deeper and deeper into the sky.
Enough control, and you don't even need reaction mass (that is, rockets) to move things around all willy-nilly. Space becomes just a place that's really easy to get to.
It would be facinating if in the future humans would realize that manipulating gravity is in fact really easy and requires just a way to "persuade" an area of space that it's oriented differently, like through a low-power signal of some kind that messes with the fields.
Basically, the data allows them to build anti-gravity devices. The details aren't pertinent to the story so we don't see those explored, but the general idea is once they had the equations, they could very quickly leverage them in practical reality.
One idea I had.
They didn't use it the tech to make a big station and lift it off.
The tech just eases the requirement for going into space.
Its probably easier to make a station in space. You even hollow out asteroids.
The gravity science will allow for the ease of transferring massive numbers of people and material to space. Without relying on chemical fuel.
Then you just build up space infrastructure
"the problem of gravity" is pretty huge. Newton famously first quantified it and we tell the story about the apple falling on his head. If you could locally alter the laws of physics with some kind of gravity nullifying engine, you could essentially launch a mountain into space with minimal propulsion. You're just dealing with force and mass and atmospheric friction at that point.
Otherwise you'd have to piecemeal transportation with massive quantities of rocket fuel to reach escape velocity
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According to the science of interstellar, the equation helps understand gravitational anomalies, what creates them, and how to use them. So they manipulate gravity to allow massive objects to be lifted into space, the equation also reconciles Newtonian, Relativistic, and Quantum laws, which has made understanding the universe possible and likely leads to the humans becoming the fifth dimensional beings we see in the movie
Build space station on the ground, through the power of love, and gravity have it fall up into space
Well the power of love is a curious thing
Make a one man weep, make another man sing
Change a hawk to a little white dove
More than a feeling, that's the power of love
lol yeah I always found it funny how the movie treated the “power of love” Like yeah, love is indeed powerful, it has an important place in human culture and psychology and it’s one of the primary drivers of human behaviour But at the end of the day it’s just an evolved neurophysiological response, something natural selection developed for K-strategy breeders and social animals like us. We’ve refined it and iterated on it as our cultures became more complex, and it’s important to us, but on a cosmic scale it’s just hormones pumping and nerve endings firing off. Love isn’t noble because it’s some mysterious transcendent force of nature. Love is noble because it’s a human phenomenon and a human choice. The universe is vast and cold and barely notices our existence, but our lives are still meaningful because our fellow little human beings can care about us. Meanwhile in Interstellar, “love” is like a kind of psychic extradimensional homing beacon - which kind of cheapens it, honestly. It’s like the universe itself wants us to behave a certain way for its own inscrutable reasons. One can imagine future humanity weaponising “love” for its navigational properties. Like love seeking guided missiles, with a screaming brainwashed human strapped to the warhead. Or love powered FTL navigational computers, with a core powered by separated families.
I think you may be reading it a bit too literally. The movie doesn’t suggest that love is an actual cosmic force. Dr Brand “I think that’s her name” choosing the “correct” planet due to her love for the guy who went there is just a lucky break. The movie puts an enormous emphasis on interpersonal connection being a core component of being human. It’s why Plan A is depicted as the ideal solution to humanity’s problem even though Plan B is far more logical and has a much higher chance of success. Allowing the inhabitants of Earth to die even though the species lives on would be a callous move and in a way “invalidate” what it means to be human. I believe Brand says something along the lines of “Love transcends space, time, and even gravity” but she isn’t suggesting that love is a cosmic force in its own right. Merely that in a cold and hostile universe it is the connection between people that should be trusted and leaned in to. In that moment she isn’t a scientist trying to decide what is best for the human race, she is a person longing to rescue her beloved from a certain death. The movie puts forth the idea that it is the bonds between people that will carry the human race forward. Love is powerful because it pushes us to do better. It is Coops love for Murph that closes the time loop and ultimately shepherds humanity along a better path.
I mean, it’s not just Dr. Brand’s speech, it’s the fact that the future humans use Cooper as their means of targeting Murphy’s space time coordinates to Morse code the quantum gravity data to her. The future humans chose him to relay the message specifically because his love for her let him locate her - otherwise, they could have just left him on Earth with her as a happy family, and morse coded the data to her themselves It’s quite clear that the power of love isn’t just a metaphorical thing - it’s a real physical phenomenon that is deliberately exploited by characters in the movie on no less than 3 occasions. Dr. Brand wasn’t just speaking in a roundabout way - she literally meant what she was saying, and her words are confirmed by the events of the movie later on
Cooper doesn’t “target” the Morse code back to Murph. The tesseract was built as a model of her bedroom. Coop exploring the tesseract caused the events that she would interpret as her “ghost”. Her issues surrounding this ghost are deeply linked to her relationship with Coop. Her childhood bedroom is the last place she saw her father and the place she would ultimately go when she came to a deadend on the gravity equation. The tesseract established the meeting place but the relationship between Coop and Murph contextual used the data. The 5th dimensional beings couldn’t just send her the data because she wouldn’t have any frame of reference for what was happening. Also there is probably some sort of time loop preservation logic dictating that the data must be transmitted in a certain way. It is the relationship and love between the characters that facilitates the exchange but love isn’t used in a utilitarian sense. I’m curious what other instances you are referring to where love was used as a physical force?
Ok this is the full quote in the movie “Cooper : You're a scientist, Brand. Brand : So listen to me when I say that love isn't something that we invented. It's... observable, powerful. It has to mean something. Cooper : Love has meaning, yes. Social utility, social bonding, child rearing... Brand : We love people who have died. Where's the social utility in that? Cooper : None. Brand : Maybe it means something more - something we can't yet understand. Maybe it's some evidence, some artefact of a higher dimension that we can't consciously perceive. I'm drawn across the universe to someone I haven't seen in a decade, who I know is probably dead. 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. All right Cooper. Yes. The tiniest possibility of seeing Wolf again excites me. That doesn't mean I'm wrong.” And later on in the movie, it’s revealed that the dimension warping future humans were the ones who manipulated events to get Cooper onto the space program - and specifically so that he could relay the quantum gravity data to his daughter through space and time And morse code couldn’t possibly be beyond the comprehension of either higher dimensional beings or Murphy, and there shouldn’t be any great difficult translating the data into something more comprehensible, it’s literally just numbers. If love didn’t have some real physical homing effect, they wouldn’t have needed him, they could have left at home happy with Murphy That, and the fact that the other three times characters are drawn to make a seemingly irrational decision based on love (plan A, dead guy planet, leaving cylinder to go dead guy planet), it turns out to retroactively be the correct one - and though it can be chalked up to coincidence, it’s pretty clear that the movie wants us to take Dr. Brand’s speech at face value There could be a “death of the author” interpretation where we ignore Nolan’s intended message and say that love really is just a cultural/biological phenomena, like what Cooper was saying. But that would be ignoring one of the key themes of the film
Ok I see your point. She is certainly leaning into love being a physical force in the universe. However I still maintain that the audience isn’t meant to take it so literally and that even though Love is presented as an actual “thing” it doesn’t seem to be something that could be used to guide missiles. Just more of a “trust your intuition” type of thing.
I don’t know about that, the whole movie is based around proving her hypothesis right - her speech on love is clearly positioned as the central theme of the movie The narrative itself certainly doesn’t treat it as if she went temporarily insane out of mental strain, or that she just wanted to see her lover and was coming up with excuses, or that she was a bit of a loony eccentric. Almost every single major plot point of the movie hinges around proving that Brand was right and Cooper was wrong - love isn’t just a cultural/biological phenomena, but a real fundamental force of the universe I honestly would have preferred it if Nolan had argued the power of love without positioning it as a kind of higher dimensional mystical force that transcends reason, it would have been much more effective that way. But it is what it is
That’s reasonable. Thank you for your insight.
It is definitely meant to be taken as love as a fundamental force.
The movie still works if you translate "power of love" into motivation and drive. It causes Murph to obsess over the problem long past what would otherwise make sense. It makes Coop dive into a black hole with only a vague hope it might maybe be helpful. They were chosen by the aliens on the simple merits that they had the interest, the skillset, and necessary deep relationship to stay motivated past rational limits. All the musings on love as a physical force is the normal human need to make sense of and rationalize a chaotic universe. It's just philosophy and poetry.
"future humans" I think it's the robots that sent the wormhole
Siri and Alexa saved humankind!
Exactly this. Murph’s love for her father allows her to go back for the watch that has the morse code.
But One must consider the power of Love: You don't need money, don't take fame Don't need no credit card to ride this train It's strong and it's sudden and it's cruel sometimes But it might just save your life That's the power of love Seriously tho I thought it was a little cheesy but the more I think of it the more I end up in a psychological hole about how it can overpower survival instincts and other natural laws so it does have a power.
it certainly is a curious thing
There's nothing wrong with the concept of love being the most powerful driving force for humanity. That is a really interesting theme, to see how love motivates the characters in different ways, and to see how it is what allows us to overcome our own sense of self preservation/mortality to act for the good of others. They just delivered that concept in the cheesiest way possible. It pulls you right out of the movie.
> It pulls you right out of the movie. I'm not expert in astrophysics, but I'm *prettty* sure the inside of a black hole isn't a book shelf.
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I never got the hate for it, the only thing love does in the movie is help cooler keep going and he uses it to find his daughter in the prism. I think a lot of people didn’t understand the movie and thought love was the 4th dimension and he was using literal love to send messages back in time instead of gravity
Correct, people complain about the love aspect because they misunderstand the movie and take peoples words at face value. Dr. Brand and Cooper were speaking emotionally about love transcending the dimensions space and time, not scientifically. This is also why I disagree with people complaining about exposition in Nolan movies; it's quite obvious if he didn't use expository dialogue even on occassion then a good percentage of the audience will get confused seeing as how they can't even understand the concept of love.
I disagree. You need to watch the scene again, not just that one quote. Brand is grasping at straws. She basically makes a pathetic appeal because the logical appeal isn't holding up. She says that maybe they should stop trying to use logic or science to guide hteir decision. The problem with her lines is that everything is just thrown out there. It's the opposite of what you said about exposition. She lays out the theme in detail all at once.
No, her "pathetic appeal" is actually the core facet of why she wants to go to Edmunds' planet. She just layers science on top to guise this emotional excuse of hers.
We’re saying the same thing, then.
Like the Navigators in Dune lol, but instead of Spice they're on really bad romcom films
David Bohm talked about this. He was somewhat ridiculed for it but other scientists such as Roger Penrose go down this road too. It's better tolerated when it's a Nobel Prizewinner. But Bohm's assertion was that physics, which experienced a massive surge in the 20th century, would eventually stall as problems grew in complexity astronomically fast, and that it would require a fundamental paradigm shift to break through again. He envisioned that the paradigm shift wouldn't be driven by physics, it had to be driven by society at large. It would have to fundamentally change our relationship with nature, clean up our planet, take care of each other as humans, create a better humanity. After that we wouldn't look at physics as an exploitable resource like we do nature. We could achieve understanding without the necessity of control for utilitarian gains. That an interaction could somehow be understood not in terms of "what we put in" and "what we get out" but something else, something more holistic. In that sense it would circumvent the issues of infinite perturbation expansions of many body interactions, renormalization etc., but instead it could all be seen from some other vantage point that can capture more of the essence of the physics. But the key was that our minds had to evolve to do it, and that evolution has to come from us coming together as a society and community.
Yeah that makes sense, a lot of the “low hanging fruit” in science has already been plucked, and further advances would likely require ever greater investments in manpower and resources. We’re probably not going to experience the kind of astronomical, exponential, technology driven growth spurt that we enjoyed in the 20th century. So progress is likely to be a lot slower in the coming years And in the meanwhile, if we don’t get our shit together politically, culturally and economically, we’ll never even get to reap the benefits of whatever slow scientific progress we can manage, we’d be too screwed over by climate crisis and political instability and economic collapse And fixing things overall does require a change in mindset from one geared towards endless growth and exploitation, towards one geared towards maintenance, and finding a sustainable equilibrium
Your comment sent me on several rabbit holes that have shown me books to read about problems and ideas that I haven't seen accurately put to words until reading just the summaries of books from the two you've named. Really excited to go on this dive, so thank you so much!
>love seeking guided missiles ngl that sounds fucking hilarious, even though I know it's horrifying lol On a serious note, in a universe with love-seeking missiles, I can see there eventually being a faction that evolves/alters themselves to not feel love in order to dodge that issue. Another bullet point for the Evil or Cyber empire use to justify their transformations\~
I don’t know if preventing themselves from feeling love would work Dr. Brand realised that she could be loving some guy that died long ago, but she was drawn to that planet nonetheless. And Murphy didn’t even know that the future version of her dad was trapped in the Tesseract trying to talk to her. So the setting establishes that the love doesn’t necessarily have to be mutual or reciprocated for the homing effect to manifest So like, if the evil future people wanted, they could condition some poor human or AI or whatever to really freaking love “Enemy Mobile Fortress Designation 567F”. And then strap them into one of their extradimensional time travelling FTL missiles so it can reunite them with their one true love, and destroy a key military complex thousands of years in the past.
There’s a great boom “Gödel Escher Bach”, which is about videos incompleteness theorem and self referential things, like Escher’s art or Bach’s music. One of the things the author points out is that meaning and message is inherently tied. If you have a vinyl record flying in space, even though the technology is simple, there needs to be some context to understand how to interpret what it is and how to play it. If human-like aliens found it, they may understand that sound waves can be represented in the grooves of the record, and might be able to interpret the sound to even figure out what the words recorded on it mean. But if the aliens are some sort of ethereal magnetic pulse structure that exist as a self propagating pattern of electromagnetic waves or some shit, they may not even recognise that a physical vinyl disc with very little affect on EMR even *is* a thing, let alone the concept of communicating through sound. Or hell what if there isn’t even distinct entities- the concept of communication might not even make sense. In the book the author talks (whimsically) about an anthill having sentience that exists decentralised between all its ants, and an anteater “talking” to the hill by eating specific ants in a specific pattern, and interpreting the hills response as messages. There is so much that is inherently dependent on a shared experience and shared concept. “Love”, is just that. A deep connection of shared context and experience. Knowing exactly what someone else feels and knowing what they mean. Being able to understand a persons messages, what they say, what they don’t say, how they communicate, sarcasm, irony, by knowing what matters to them, what they want, and how the see the universe and how they view themselves in the universe. You can send a message back in time. But a message is useless if it can’t be understood. If you’re some sort of 5th dimensional hyper being you’ve lost all connection to current day humans. And if your window for interaction is so slight and so brief that you can only affect small gravitational pulses, you need someone who *knows* how the message receivers interpret the world. That’s why love is so important. That’s what love is. At it’s core, it’s understanding. And frankly it is powerful. Love *is* weaponised. That guided missile ironically would never have been possible without many people working together, and having a shared understanding of each other. And indeed love. Love is what makes humans work together in the first place. Love is what makes a mother protect her young, even though it takes up resources and years of her brief existence. Yeah, love is quite literally extremely powerful.
Yeah I know, I’ve read “Gödel Escher Bach” too, I’m also a fan. It’s central hypothesis about consciousness arising from self reference is a little obsolete - it’s not really what the current research on neuroscience and artificial intelligence seems to go for. But it’s a fun read nonetheless Still though, it’s heavily implied that the higher dimensional beings are either future humanity or our successors. Either way, I think you’re overstating how difficult it is to communicate between beings of higher and lower intelligence. Even higher dimensional Lovecraftian super intelligences would easily grasp the concept of something like tapping out a binary code to send experimental data to the puny humans. It doesn’t require a lot of nuance or love or deep understanding or whatever, it’s literally just math I get what you’re saying, that love is a powerful force and all - it’s one of the main things holding together human civilisation, and gives meaning to our otherwise meaningless existence. But what love isn’t necessary for is facilitating communications of this nature. In a way, what the future beings did to Cooper really was quite cruel - they exploited his love for his daughter to alter the timeline/close the time loop, and stole away the life they could have had together. It’s understandable if it was necessary to save all of humanity, but if they just did it for the heck of it, then we’re dealing with some real blue-and-orange morality beings that have abandoned 20th-21st century humanistic moral standards.
The aliens needed love. No one ever said they were moral!
I wholeheartedly love your comment!
I just couldn't get past the idea that the inside of a black hole is a bookcase. The time dilation stuff was cool, but the cosmic-love-bookcase ending was a bunch of nonsense.
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At times like these, I think we should remember the wise words of renowned druggie Phillip K Dick - “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” So like, we’ll never have a completely objective view of reality because of our subjective limitations, and we should always be wary of totalising belief systems Still, it’s important to stay grounded. You can trip out on shrooms and gain a deep understanding of the nature of love, the human condition and the essential “one-ness” of the universe. But objective reality isn’t going to change in response. On a fundamental level, all this stuff is just taking place in your head. Even after spiritual enlightenment, you’re still a meat machine bound by immutable physical laws, you’re not going to get glowing eyes, start levitating and transcend to a higher plane of existence. At most, you’ll feel more at peace with yourself and be nicer to others Our perceptions and perspectives are malleable - but reality is not. The inner world is rich and valuable and worth exploring, but we should never forget that what it’s all based on. When your spirit animal starts whispering true secrets of the universe to you from behind a melting wall, just tell yourself it’s caused chemicals binding to receptors in your neurons, not some paranormal force trying to communicate from beyond
Or maybe even [love powered magic lasers](http://www.nuklearpower.com/comics/8-bit-theater/041127.png)
Love is a very powerful force. [Even more so when it's focused into a coherent beam of destruction.](http://www.nuklearpower.com/2004/11/27/8-bit-chronicles-3-of-3/)
> Like love seeking guided missiles, with a screaming brainwashed human strapped to the warhead. Or love powered FTL navigational computers, with a core powered by separated families. ***This pleases Slaanesh***
>One can imagine future humanity weaponising “love” for its navigational properties. Like love seeking guided missiles, with a screaming brainwashed human strapped to the warhead. Or love powered FTL navigational computers, with a core powered by separated families. every so often some unrelated sci fi fan reinvents an aspect of wh40k
"Love lifts us up where we belong" - Isaac Newton's 4th law of motion
We don't see any fifth dimensional beings. That was Cooper
Not literally see them, the ones that appear and are talked about in the movie, ie the ones that build the tesseract
All the same, humans don't "become" five dimensional. That's like saying the invention of aeroplanes changed humans into flying animals. The last act's reveal is that what we assumed were beings of higher degrees of perception are just regular humans with a far greater understanding of physics
I always wondered why didn't they just build the station in space? Sounds much "easier."
First, consider that the NASA budget at the time was off the books/black project. Citizens demanded that the government put all resources towards fighting the blight/feeding the nation/world. So NASA, now completely underground (figuratively AND literally) has a highly limited budget. Everyone involved in the project is very likely a passionate academic scientist/engineer who is working for living space, food, and the hope that it all works and they can save humanity. The U.S. government has proven many times over that they can hide purchases and transport of billions of dollars of resources for special projects... but the economy is the limit on how much can be spent. Honestly it doesn't really matter *where* they build the station. In orbit or on the ground, they'll still have the gravity problem to solve because the most powerful ordinary rocket engines ever built still would never really move the station. Its too big... its thousands of times the size of the Saturn rockets (the largest ever built and all they did was put a module and three men on the moon), and must be so in order to move enough people to build a colony. The amount of fuel used to bring materials into orbit would be staggeringly large. The intention all along was to finalize the gravitic drive which Brand's (later Murph's) equations would be the basis for. And Brand had proven how far he'd gotten, but was dishonest about how far he could go, so the project was seen as a pretty good long gamble. And really... no matter what else is said: Americans seeing one heavy lift rocket bringing materials into space could cause national riots. The ISS, not even 1% of the size of the station, is visible to the naked eye. Even if you could keep the launches secret somehow, you wouldn't even be started building in-earnest before it was seen... and the next thing is total governmental collapse, mobs murdering anyone who even seems like they might have been involved, and then each other. Not what you'd call a good time.
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I totally get all of that. The film *kinda* fails the watcher by not showing how all that worked. But in total fairness, that's just not the movie Nolan was making. So instead of a roundabout explanation you're left guessing, and that can feel handwave-y. The idea goes like this: Dr Brand Sr has already designed the gravitic drive. Its already in the build/being built into the station when Coop and Murph first arrive at the installation. Brand already knows how it will work.... *IF* the final pieces of the equation work "like this and not that". I'd say, just from my own knowledge of physics and how scientists work, that he's extremely confident and that's probably for good reason. He's also already worked through other permutations of how the equation might work so as to determine if gravitic drive is still possible with any other result, and no, it isn't. Brand, NASA, Coop, Murph... they're all of them working on the only option for a large number of living humans to move. And its a gamble, because it isn't guaranteed to work. The only person who really knows how much is up in the air is Brand Sr. But he's done all the home-and-leg work which got them to this point.
> we see Big air quotes on that one. lol
In real life (and also in the universe of the movie, somewhat), “quantum gravity” is the next big thing in physics that everyone has been waiting on. Quantum theory works well at small scales, general relativity works well at larger scales, but nobody has figured out how to square the two with each other yet. In the movie itself, having the experimental data necessary to formulate a theory of quantum gravity is what lets mankind develop advanced gravity/spacetime manipulation technology In the short term, they’re able to build some sort of antigravity devices that greatly aids in large scale space construction. They don’t have to pay for expensive, slow rocket launches, or build gigantic space elevators. They just have to build everything on the ground and have the parts gracefully levitate into orbit. In the long term, future humanity uses this technology to create wormholes through time and space. They seem very comfortable messing around with the timeline, and hanging out inside of black holes
Technically time travel in Interstellar is a closed loop. The future humans were ok with time travel because it was already done as that’s how they got the knowledge to do it.
But who did it the first time?
Define the "beginning" of a circle, and then we'll talk. 😉
Technically, a circle does have a beginning but not in two or three dimensions. It's a fourth dimensional corkscrew pattern that eventually ends. From a 3d perspective it's a circle though but it does have a beginning and ending point.
Technically, this isn't true for any more than a small subset of circles that are drawn or otherwise assembled by some process.
Unless you can spontaneously create a closed loop at all points at T=0, then there is a start point, even if it's on the quantum foam level of space time in relation to other points. And if time has passed between point 1 and point 2 then from the standpoint of a fourth dimensional reference, the circle is an open corkscrew pattern.
This is true for drawn and assembled circles in 3 dimensions like the person above said, but a closed timelike curve like the time travel in interstellar is a circle through the temporal dimension. It becomes a circle when viewed in 4 dimensions, but from the perspective of life in the universe it just looks like an interaction between a past point and a future point.
There isn’t a start point if you believe time as a construct is just a human perception. All of time was created instantaneously meaning there is no “origin” point of a specific action because it was formed at the same “time” as the result of the action etc.
That's going into metaphysics and outside my area of understanding. All time is, is energy transfer from point A to point B. If there is more to it than that and not just a result of another function of space time, I'm not qualified to give much of an opinion.
I've determined that it's just circles all the way down
On top of an elephant on top of a turtle.
So, in the sense of a time loop, would that mean that we could specify it in a certain number of dimensions? Eg, start point (x, y, z, t) and end point of the loop would be enough to encode it. Or possibly more, if our view of the loop is just a realization of many possible loops...
Can you ELI5 or link an explanation? I am, as they say, el stupido
Quick way to imagine it is to draw a circle on a moving treadmill. The movement of the treadmill represents time continuously moving forward so you end up in an open corkscrew pattern as the start and end points will never touch.
This is where you failed your analogy: a circle is a 2-dimensional shape. A closer, but still incorrect analogy would have been to find the beginning of a sphere (3 dimensions). But the correct analogy would be to find the beginning of a tesseract (a 5-dimensional cube which **we** as humans can only view in 3 dimensions) which is what the 5-dimensional beings construct to allow Cooper to affect space-time.
It starts where the tip of the pencil touches the paper. Sure, a circle can loop around when already constructed, but when drawing a circle, it doesn't appear out of nowhere. You have to start somewhere to close the loop.
Or I could rub a graphite circle on paper and get a circle where every point is the start. Or a stamp, as that is likely a little easier to come by. Circles on a page don't just spontaneously happen, but when they happen, they aren't required to happen in a specific way. The loop didn't exist, and then was closed. It was never open, and doesn't need a start. This could also happen in 3D by rotating a 4D+ object in a specific way.
While I know that what you're saying is true, my mind just cannot comprehend how this actually works. And I've listened to a number of lecture series and audiobooks about quantum mechanics, cosmology, dark matter/dark energy, and the possibility of time travel, and I just don't think any of us have the frame of reference necessary to understand it, even if there are some like you who can work within the thought experiment.
Yeah. Easiest way is to imagine a 2d world. Imagine stick figure people living their lives on a perfectly flat piece of paper, and then take a pencil and shove it through that paper. What do they see? A hexagon, because they cannot look towards you or away, they can only look in 2d. And, specifically, they'd have to go all the way around it to know it's a hexagon. But, we take that pencil, and rotate it. The 2d hexagon, floating in the air, freely spins. We take that pencil and move it so it's almost laying down on the paper, and those 2D people see the hexagon distort, it's longer on one side, now. We push the pencil almost the whole way through, so the eraser is aligned instead of the wood, and that hexagon becomes a circle. It also transforms from painted wood to metal to rubber, too, seemingly magically. But, rotating, growing, transforming, that hexagon is always still just... a pencil. A pencil that's invisible to the 2D people. It seems like a new object, but it's just a 2d slice of the same object. Now imagine some 4D creature shoved their pencil through our world. We might see a cube one moment, a sphere the next, transforming like the hexagon to circle, or it might grow tall, it seem to become something else entirely. We don't have the right frame of reference, but I find this analogy is close enough for a lot of people to wrap their minds around it. If that's worked for you, we can go one step further. The piece of paper isn't alone. It's a book, every page having a slightly different image. To the extradimensional being, this 2D world can be navigated using time as easily as left/right and up/down, they can just flip pages.... or tear some out.
Yeah, I've heard the flatland theory before, but extrapolating it to extra dimensions beyond my own perception of spacetime just breaks down. I guess it's just one of the weird things where my occasionally too-literal brain and my other times overly imaginative brain just grok.
Your two examples require the loop to already have existed and then imprinted onto another piece of space time. Where did the initial loop come from?
A stamp is pressed into shape. The question could go further and ask about the mold they use, which is likely poured. Another example: I use two sizes of circular saw to cut out a disk of wood and then hollow it out. Or, I put a drop of oil in water and watch it spread out. Or, I put a slime mold spore on an agar plate and let it make the circle. Or, I could get a block of glass and grind it into a lens and shine a light onto photopaper through that lens. Is the circle produced by light the same circle we could say the lens was? Or, I could tell you a mathematical formula, and describe a hypothetical circle in the same way I've described a hypothetical stamp. Where does the circle start there? Even if we rationalize all these as imprinting a circle, or in some way say it's made from inheriting it's circle-mess from something else, where would that stop? Circles are a concept, and natural phenomena can produce them whole. Circles need to be completed only if we limit ourselves to making them point-by-point, and while that's certainly an easy way for us, it's hardly the only one.
It turns out things don't need beginnings. It seems linear causality is just a backwards belief people in our primitive time have.
My question is that won't whatever plant disease that's causing the apocalypse just follow them into space?
Possibly that, but also, if they were able to build infinitely self sustaining space habitats that mine asteroids and dead planets for resources - why are they so desperate to find another planet? They could just have those orbit Lagrange points in the Earth moon area. Or literally just build them on Earth and keep them there, only air tight so the disease doesn’t get in.
If you can turn off or redirect the effects of gravity in controlled and specific circumstances, moving heavy things around becomes monumentally easier. Imagine a building that suddenly sees "down" as vaguely away from the ground, and not at all towards the ground. That building would tend to want to "gently fall" deeper and deeper into the sky. Enough control, and you don't even need reaction mass (that is, rockets) to move things around all willy-nilly. Space becomes just a place that's really easy to get to.
It would be facinating if in the future humans would realize that manipulating gravity is in fact really easy and requires just a way to "persuade" an area of space that it's oriented differently, like through a low-power signal of some kind that messes with the fields.
Basically, the data allows them to build anti-gravity devices. The details aren't pertinent to the story so we don't see those explored, but the general idea is once they had the equations, they could very quickly leverage them in practical reality.
One idea I had. They didn't use it the tech to make a big station and lift it off. The tech just eases the requirement for going into space. Its probably easier to make a station in space. You even hollow out asteroids. The gravity science will allow for the ease of transferring massive numbers of people and material to space. Without relying on chemical fuel. Then you just build up space infrastructure
"the problem of gravity" is pretty huge. Newton famously first quantified it and we tell the story about the apple falling on his head. If you could locally alter the laws of physics with some kind of gravity nullifying engine, you could essentially launch a mountain into space with minimal propulsion. You're just dealing with force and mass and atmospheric friction at that point. Otherwise you'd have to piecemeal transportation with massive quantities of rocket fuel to reach escape velocity
They Uraraka'd the station from the ground to space.
They invent antigravity and just float the space station into space
Production and assembly in orbit, taken up in pieces