I am a big fan of science fiction movies and dramas. I loved watching movies like 'Back to the Future' and 'Inception'. Not forgetting sci-fi dramas like 'Fringe' and 'Continuum'. I am intrigued by concepts like time and space travel, teleportation etc. I often wondered how life would be like out in space and marvel at how tiny humans are, compared to the vastness of the universe. Imagine that the Milky Way where our solar system is situated in is just one of the many galaxies God has made. There is no way for us to know how big the universe is but scientists tell us that the universe is still expanding. I loved the fact that outer space and the great unknown out there stretches my imagination like nothing else could.
One of the more outstanding sci-fi movies I have watched was 'Interstellar'. This movie left such an impression on me that I had to watch it again. But before I could fully understand what the movie was talking about, I had to acquaint myself with a few time-space concepts. Let me mention just a few. A wormhole is like a portal that allows one to travel from one place to another, cutting down travelling time tremendously. A wormhole, in theory, might be able to connect extremely far distances such as a billion light years or more, different universes, and different points in time. A wormhole is much like a tunnel with two ends, each at separate points in space time.
In contrast, a black hole happens when a star collapses on itself, sucking everything around it in promixity. There is nothing but darkness within the black hole, hence the term. There is huge gravitational pull around the black hole. That brings me to another concept of time dilation. Time dilation is a difference of elapsed time between two events as measured by observers either moving relative to each other or differently situated from a gravitational mass. Time dilation explains why two working clocks will report different times after different accelerations. For example, astronauts return from missions having aged slightly less than they would have been if they had remained on Earth.
This is a sypnosis of the movie, copied from Wikipedia for easy reference. Widespread catastrophic crop blight on Earth has made farming increasingly difficult and threatens the existence of humanity. Joe Cooper, a widowed former NASA pilot, runs a farm with his father-in-law Donald, son Tom, and daughter Murphy. Murphy believes her bedroom is haunted by a poltergeist. When the "ghost" creates a pattern of dust on the floor, Cooper realizes an unknown intelligence is using gravity to communicate, and interprets the pattern as geographic coordinates, which Cooper and Murphy follow to a secret NASA facility.
There, they meet Dr. Brand, a college professor of Cooper's. Brand reveals that a wormhole, apparently created by an alien intelligence, appeared near Saturn 48 years before and leads to a distant galaxy, 10 billion lightyears from Earth and the Milky Way, with numerous potentially habitable planets. Twelve volunteers have gone through it, knowing they were unlikely to be able to return, each to assess a different planet's suitability as a new home for humanity. Three – Miller, Edmunds and Mann – have sent encouraging data from planets near Gargantua, a supermassive black hole.
Brand recruits Cooper to pilot the spacecraft Endurance to evaluate as many of the planets as possible, while he works on "Plan A", a theory to harness gravity for propulsion, which would allow humanity to leave Earth. However, should his efforts fail, the Endurance also carries 5,000 frozen embryos as "Plan B", to provide for humanity's survival. Cooper agrees to the plan, angering Murphy.
Cooper's crew consists of three scientists – Romilly, Doyle, and Brand's daughter Amelia – and robots TARS and CASE. Traversing the wormhole, they first head to Miller's planet, an ocean world where time is severely dilated due to the proximity to Gargantua; for each hour there, seven years pass on Earth. While Romilly and TARS stay on the Endurance, the rest take a lander to the surface, where they find wreckage of Miller's lander but not its black box. Brand and Doyle venture out further, attempting to find more data. Cooper realizes that the land in front is not mountains but a single, giant, wave. The tidal wave strikes, killing Doyle and waterlogging the lander's engines. By the time Cooper, Amelia, and CASE return to Endurance, 23 years have elapsed back on Earth.
Wow awesome!
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