Movie Recommendations - Edition: This year's Blockbusters (Part 2): Interstellar Decoded

All my friends told me to watch Interstellar for months because I would definitely love it and of course they were absolutely right (because I obviously have the greatest friends on Earth). I love astronomy. It's one of my favourite things in the world (and beyond). And I'm also a huge fan of mind-blowing science fiction movies.

Interstellar is a unique movie because it combines actual scientific theories and ideas with science fiction plotlines which are impossible today but might be a normal thing in thousand years.

In this post I will decode the movie Interstellar, make sense of the sometimes a bit demanding story and give astrophysical background information. Because Interstellar is proof how amazing ouw universe really is!

Warning: This post contains Spoilers.

The Story:

Earth's vegeatation is affected by Blight which led to starvation of the world's population and is threatening to extinct the human race.

Background Info:
Blight is an infection which affects plants which then turn brown.
Chlorosis develops, which means that plants have insufficient chlorophyl and die.

A special NASA department called "Lazarus missions" has discovered a Wormhole near Saturn.

Background Info:
To understand Wormholes, imagine that the universe was 2D.
Everything in it can only travel in 2D, except if you travel through a Wormhole.
Through a Wormhole you could travel in 3D.
In reality the universe is in 3D and through a Wormhole one could therefore travel in an unknown higher dimension and travel to places far away.

On the other side of the Wormhole in Interstellar astronauts have found three potentially habitable planets which all orbit a supermassive Black Hole.

The first planet is called Miller. Miller is really close to the Black Hole which is why one hour on Miller equals seven years on Earth. This is why the expedtion crew looses a lot of time on this planet just to find out that it's inhabitable because there are huge waves.

Background Info:
Gravitational Time Dilation means that time is different at different places in the universe.
The closer something is to a source of gravitaion, the slower time passes.
A Black Hole has a lot of gravitaion. Therefore near it time moves slower.
Infact inside a Black Hole there is Gravitational Singularity.
The Gravitational field here appears infinte.

The second planet is Mann which also turns out to be inhabitable because it's too cold.

The third planet, Edmund, finally is habitable.

NASA'a Plan A is to bring people to a habitable planet to keep on living there when Earth becomes inhabitable. They struggle to find out how this might be possible because there's not enough time left but because of a science fiction plotline they succeed in the end.

Plan B is to bring frozen embryos to a habitable planet and to start humanity anew. This is what they do on Edmund.

The science fiction plotline:

In the beginning of the movie the main character Cooper's daughter Merph notices mysterious signals from an unkown creature in her room. In the end of the movie we find out that the signals were actually sent by a Future-version of her father Cooper who sends her the equation which solves the problem of bringing people to a space station from the Future. Merph uses it and everyone is saved.

Though-provoking impulse:

The idea behind this science fiction plotline is that future humans will be able to travel not only through the three dimensions of space but also through the fourth dimension of time. If you keep in mind that time in fact (as Einstein found out) is relative, this idea might not be as crazy as it seems. In a thousand years we might be able to manipulate time.

Isn't this absolutely mind-blowing?