If you thought Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar makes sense from a scientific standpoint, Neil deGrasse Tyson is here to shatter your illusions about outer space and how it all works.
Let’s admit it; though the 2014 flick about humanity’s last stand against a dying world adheres to the rules of science and our understanding of the physical world, the movie is ultimately an exercise in imagination. This becomes apparent by the inclusion of the “fifth dimensional” beings in the movie’s final act, and how they allow Cooper to communicate with his daughter across time and space.
No amount of stretching Einstein’s theory of relativity could account for that much sci-fi jargon, so it’s not as if we’re talking about a pic that’s here to underline the rules of astrophysics for you. Still, Interstellar prides itself in how it depicted outer space, and many years later, our first real image of a black hole actually seems to confirm that Nolan did his homework before embarking on this ambitious venture.
Yet, Neil deGrasse Tyson wishes you to know that while Interstellar is indeed a stellar work of science-fiction, you shouldn’t really take it too seriously for one key reason.
“So, the whole premise of that film, Interstellar, where there’s a blight on the crops and everyone’s starving… ‘Let’s go find a planet, and ship a billion people there!’ Whatever effort that takes, it seems to me, you should be able to fix the genome of your corn crop. Really? It’s all there under your microscope!”
deGrasse Tyson touched on this subject while addressing Elon Musk’s plans to colonize Mars through his company SpaceX, so he isn’t just attacking Nolan’s cinema out of the blue.
On the off chance that there are no fifth-dimensional beings to give us a convenient wormhole to another habitable planet, how about, for the time being, we focus on preserving our own “pale blue dot,” as Carl Sagan would say?