Here is a simple explanation of the ending of Christopher Nolan’s film Interstellar, if every time you see it you find yourself with several questions to answer
It is perhaps the most famous film of Christopher Nolanwhich consecrated Matthew McConaughey (and even more so Jessica Chastain) in the Olympus of the great Hollywood actors. We’re talking about Interstellara 2014 film set in an unspecified future in which humanity will be forced to look for a new home in interstellar space. The film begins with an Earth caught in the grip of a “plague”. Nolan doesn’t give us much information about what made the planet so uninhabitable, although it all points to pollution and in particular .
The membership card and the search for a new home
The film, indeed. The director relied on the astrophysicist and Nobel Prize winner to represent the wormhole in the most realistic way possible. The film deals with the journey of some astronauts through the wormhole created by our descendants to allow humanity to travel between galaxies in the shortest possible time. But who are “they”? In Cooper’s words, “they” are nothing but our learnerswhich will have evolved in the rather distant future beyond our three dimensions. It will be this future civilization that creates the wormhole () which allows Cooper to communicate with his daughter and save the human race.
How Interstellar ends
At the end of the film the protagonist manages to return from the black hole and transmit quantum data to his (now adult) daughter to allow her to build spaceships large enough to transport humanity away from planet Earth. When Cooper is rescued by rangers adrift near Saturn, he finds his daughter now elderly and on her deathbed. That’s what many call it “ontological paradox”: as if a chicken sent an egg back in time and it then became a chicken. We don’t currently have the resources to say whether something like this is feasible, but it’s something theoretical physicists have been arguing about for some time. The time shift between Cooper’s age and Murph’s, however, is entirely plausible: it is the consequence of the theory of relativitywhich we talked about in an in-depth article.
In the final scenehowever, we see Doctor Brand who, having arrived on Edmunds’ planet, takes off her helmet, buries the astronaut of the same name that NASA had sent there, turns and returns to the base, where she prepares to grow human embryos transported from Earth with the aim of creating a colony (plan B). It is there that Cooper decides to leave again to join her on that new inhabitable world.
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