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Interstellar 2 - My God, it's full of SPOILERS


williamjm

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Why not, I say? Why Not!?!

Jupiter gets to have a storm that lasts for ages, so why can't our murdery water planet have a giant wave that goes around and around forever?

Because this movie had an incredible theoretical physicist as a producer. And I know where his office is. It's right next to a building full of geophysicists and planetary scientists who could have helped out with this problem. :P But really, if the wave is supposed to be caused by tidal forces, it seems like a tidal force that strong would have either ripped the planet apart, heated it up a lot (see volcanism on Io) or tidally locked it. Meh.

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Because this movie had an incredible theoretical physicist as a producer. And I know where his office is. It's right next to a building full of geophysicists and planetary scientists who could have helped out with this problem. :P But really, if the wave is supposed to be caused by tidal forces, it seems like a tidal force that strong would have either ripped the planet apart, heated it up a lot (see volcanism on Io) or tidally locked it. Meh.

Well, they would have helped out by saying "Would never happen". And then the Nolan would have gone "Fuck science, this looks awesome!".

Hell, maybe he did consult them. :P

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That's not really Nolan's style. I'm not saying that that may not have happened, but that would seem to be out of character to me.

Nolan's style is completely to ignore strict realism or causality in favour of better drama.

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Nolan's style is completely to ignore strict realism or causality in favour of better drama.

And that's what I generally like about his films. Nonetheless, I think my issue with movies (and other media) that try to do hard SF is when they want to do hard SF for most of a plot and then throw it out the window at other times. It jars with my sensawunda. Just how much should I suspend my disbelief and is that going to get in the way of the awe over good worldbuilding created by good research? But like many people into science, I nitpick because I enjoy watching the movie and I just can't help it, sort of like how there's about 100,000 users on this forum who like ASOIAF but still can't help but discuss the intricacies of the plot and how such-and-such wouldn't really work.

And I can enjoy movies with terrible science as well, mostly because it is terrible. I actually screamed a little when I saw this trailer before The Hobbit a few weeks ago.

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I just saw this now. Amazing. The notion that it has risible sentimentality or some such is stupid to me. The black guy, Jom (I think that was his name), makes a good point at the beginning about how there is so little between them and space. Some metal, conduits, and insulation. Cooper counters with a good example, but the idea of blasting out beyond the levels of human understanding, of being entirely alone, is more complex than the simplistic notion we so often see in science fiction. I understood Mann and his motivations, I could see how he would lose his mind out on some frozen shit hole in the back end of the universe. Just as I could see Coopers need for his children, Brandt's need for Edmund. And the others were right in calling her on it.



I've read some articles about the science, and it stands. There are several things that have to fall perfectly into place for it to happen, but who gives a fuck? I mean, this is ultimately a movie about ideas.



The black hole stuff did not bother me at all. All concepts break down at some point, at least in regards to science, and there is still the idea that this is a work of fiction.



It was incredible.


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Minor nitpicking: For some reason leading up to this I didn't know that Kip Thorne was a consultant, but once I saw the credits I knew why I had the feeling through the whole movie that they had a really good physics consultant and didn't think through the planetary surface science at all in comparison. The blight- I got the idea that corn was the only crop that could survive...but they were more concerned about not being able to breathe due to O2 running out, despite trees still being able to survive (see the forest that they drove through on the way to NASA) and probably nothing happening to phytoplankton? Meh. Also, the waves on the first planet....I had big problems with those. They were unrealistic for something that was tidally generated (no evidence that the planet was spinning that fast) and they couldn't have both moved that quickly AND not broken. Waves don't move that fast in shallow water. (And yes, I know there was a lot more water behind the wave, but "shallow water" for the purposes of waves is considered <1/20 of the wavelength, and that was a long wave.)

The Blight eats nitrogen, not oxygen.

I don't think the pressure head of the wave was moving at all. The planet was moving beneath it. The wave was a bulge of water at noon, where the pull from Gargantua is strongest. Consider the planet to have 3 layers. Top layer is the gaseous atmosphere. Second layer is the liquid ocean, shallow for many parts of the planet, but bulging hugely where the sun is at zenith. Third layer, the rocky inner core. The core spins, and the liquid layer has a gigantic pressure head that stays under the black hole's zenith.

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The Blight eats nitrogen, not oxygen.

The movie says it "breathes" nitrogen, whatever you think that means.

Considering the next line says that humanity will suffocate, the implication seems to be that the Blight, at the least, consumes oxygen in the atmosphere and replaces it with nitrogen or something like that.

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Yeah, that was my understanding--that it was breathing nitrogen into the air the way that most plants breathe oxygen into the air, and therefore unbalancing the atmosphere so it would eventually not be breathable.


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Not necessarily replacing the oxygen. If it breathes in N2 perhaps it breathes out a carbon nitride like cyanogen, which is a toxic gas, and would account for the suffocation. Heavier carbon nitride would account for the dust, or at least add to it.


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The Blight eats nitrogen, not oxygen.

I don't think the pressure head of the wave was moving at all. The planet was moving beneath it. The wave was a bulge of water at noon, where the pull from Gargantua is strongest. Consider the planet to have 3 layers. Top layer is the gaseous atmosphere. Second layer is the liquid ocean, shallow for many parts of the planet, but bulging hugely where the sun is at zenith. Third layer, the rocky inner core. The core spins, and the liquid layer has a gigantic pressure head that stays under the black hole's zenith.

Except that there were two waves within a period of ~1 hour for them, during which the time of day on the planet did not seem to noticeably change (if they were the two tidal bulges on opposite sides of the planet, about half a day would have had to pass.) Regardless, if the wave is supposed to be a tide, they would not have been standing in still water that whole time. The water would have to come from somewhere to make the wave that high, so they would have been standing in a fairly rapid tidal current for almost the entire time they were in the water. I dunno how much experience you have with tidal currents and ocean waves, but they can be pretty strong and also create a fairly obviously non-flat seafloor.

The movie says it "breathes" nitrogen, whatever you think that means.

Considering the next line says that humanity will suffocate, the implication seems to be that the Blight, at the least, consumes oxygen in the atmosphere and replaces it with nitrogen or something like that.

This makes more sense than what I thought I heard, because I thought it was just that the blight was killing plants, therefore depleting the O2 producers.

But it still doesn't really make sense.

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Because this movie had an incredible theoretical physicist as a producer. And I know where his office is. It's right next to a building full of geophysicists and planetary scientists who could have helped out with this problem. :P But really, if the wave is supposed to be caused by tidal forces, it seems like a tidal force that strong would have either ripped the planet apart, heated it up a lot (see volcanism on Io) or tidally locked it. Meh.

Do they mention how long the days are on Miller's planet? And do they mention how many stars are near Gargantua?

If the planet is Tidally Locked, and completely covered with water, then there would be a wave at each high tide. So if the planet completes a rotation every 2 hours, the timeline between swells would be accurate.

To address why it doesn't become day or night, I have conjecture that I cannot back up because we're not all sciency ladies. (KAT!!!) But do they say how many stars are in proximity to Gargantua? I ask because there seem to be two disks of light forming around the event horizon, couldn't that indicate two stars? One 'parallel' to the Miller-Gargantua plane, and one 'perpendicular' to the Miller-Gargantua plane? I don't know if that's even possible, but wouldn't that provide constant light on Miller?

^^ If that doesn't make any sense, sorry. I'm no astrophysicist and it's hard to describe a 3 dimensional concept non-visually when the reference points aren't even certain. ^^^

But, Neil deGrasse Tyson seemed to think that they merged the concepts of a Supermassive Black Hole (as Gargantua is described), which would let Cooper and TARS survive the trip into the Tesseract, and a Stellar Black Hole, which would have possibly caused the Tidal Locking on Miller, but would have ripped Cooper and TARS apart when they fell into it.

deGrasse Tyson dismissed this problem by pointing out that this is where the Science FICTION comes to play, and according to the interview with him I read, he loved the movie and the fact that he was bothered to nitpick it was a compliment.

He frequently referenced Mark Twain's penchant for getting the facts and then distorting them for his purpose. Now that sounds like something Nolan would do, Shryke. Get his science down and manipulate it to meet his needs. A far cry from the flippant 'fuck science' attitude I felt you were implying up thread.

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I though the entier part with the black hole planet belonged in the idiot plot category. It requires the characters not to think beforehand about the implications of the time dilation on what information is available. Or on the possibility to sufficently explore and get people back from Earth there before humanity is extinct (since plan a is still a thing at that point). Or even about implications for the future : in time, as the planet gets always closer to the black hole, they will get trapped by the increasing gravity. And on them taking the stupidest option.

Even them getting a coherent signal from that planet makes little sense, as the time dilation should have stretched it beyond recognition. Nolan should have known this, they played with this effect for the soundtrack of Inception. Furthermore, this is Star Trek level of science so they have no excuse, except the fact that dealing with time dilation is cool.

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He frequently referenced Mark Twain's penchant for getting the facts and then distorting them for his purpose. Now that sounds like something Nolan would do, Shryke. Get his science down and manipulate it to meet his needs. A far cry from the flippant 'fuck science' attitude I felt you were implying up thread.

This is an distinction without a difference.

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I though the entier part with the black hole planet belonged in the idiot plot category. It requires the characters not to think beforehand about the implications of the time dilation on what information is available. Or on the possibility to sufficently explore and get people back from Earth there before humanity is extinct (since plan a is still a thing at that point). Or even about implications for the future : in time, as the planet gets always closer to the black hole, they will get trapped by the increasing gravity. And on them taking the stupidest option.

Even them getting a coherent signal from that planet makes little sense, as the time dilation should have stretched it beyond recognition. Nolan should have known this, they played with this effect for the soundtrack of Inception. Furthermore, this is Star Trek level of science so they have no excuse, except the fact that dealing with time dilation is cool.

This is not even close to Star Trek levels of science. This is not really much more then what we could put together now levels of science, with a few tweaks like the escape-velocity-capable shuttle craft to make the story work.

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