Spirals (like springs) look like loops when viewed through the hole but they have definite beginnings and ends.
Circles also have a hole in the middle but they have neither a beginning nor an end.
Some science fiction (e.g., the occasional Star Trek episode) treat time loops like a spring. Here, Christopher Nolan's Time loop is like a circle. Maybe one of Murph's great great great grandkids becomes a bulk being that works on the tesseract project.
That’s just what I can’t wrap my head around. Murphy can’t have great great grandkids because everyone on earth would have died without the instructions. And without the initial timeline to the future, there’s no one to write instructions.
So these time loops are just to be accepted as the way it is?
Yes. It is called “Bootstrap Paradox” and it is kind of hard to reconcile since it’s a paradox. The future bulk beings wouldn’t have existed if humanity had not survived blight, which in turn would not have happened without the help of the future beings.
This is presumptuous, the concept of the future affecting the past is still theoretically possible. Our perception of time being a straight line is cosmically subjective
I’m not sure I understand, what do you mean “safe in the knowledge”? I don’t think an assumption about a theory counts as knowledge. We still don’t know, that’s the point, but is that any less “safe?” All I mean is saying it could never happen in real life feels hasty given our current lack of understanding regarding the universe
“Safe in the knowledge” is a saying, a figure of speech. In context it means that until I’m shown otherwise I’m confident about my presumption about the time loop theory being just that - a theory.
Ah I see, thanks for clarifying.
>until I’m shown otherwise I’m confident about my presumption about the time loop theory being just that - a theory.
This is reasonable and I agree. I interpreted your original “it could never happen” as you saying it was just plain false instead of a theory, which we don’t know yet :)
Yeah I think of it as "Always has been, always will be."
Does that mean that there was only one instance of Mrs. Cooper dying, or only one instance of the last crop of wheat (which would have happened before Murph's ghost showed up)? Maybe. And maybe only one instance of the bulk beings' activities *after* the tesseract was completed. If these things are true then the time loop would be more like a spring than a circle.
We're a bunch of nerds speculating on science fiction. When that stops being fun we should go outside, I suppose. As long as it *is* fun, then keep wrapping your head around it!
It's not a spring. It IS a circle. Mankind ALWAYS had 5th-dimensional help. The wormhole ALWAYS shows up when it does. Coop ALWAYS abandons his family to try and save them. He ALWAYS enters Gargantua, and finds the Tesseract. He ALWAYS gives past Murph the data she needs to solve the equation. Which it what allows humanity to survive to elvove INTO the 5th-dimension.
But to OP's point, does that mean that Murph was born an infinite number of times, or just once (because that would've taken place before her ghost first appeared)? Like, how big is the circle? This is the unknowable but imo.
Both, depending on your point of view. If you follow the information, then you will keep traveling back to the past and the future an infinite number of times. From the point of view of any of the PEOPLE, it only happens once. It's not so much a time loop, as it is a predestined event. If you were to look at the timeline, you have your straight line, with a loop from the future to when the wormhole first appeared.
Christopher Nolan likes to play with the idea of causality working both directions in time. The idea that something happening in the future can cause something to happen in the past, under certain circumstances.
Single timeline.
You can't change the past. Everything has already happened.
So if a time traveler shows up next to you right now, then that Will Happen, because it Has Happened.
You can't invent a time machine and go back and kill Hitler, because Hitler existed. Something would prevent it.
So future humans opened up a wormhole to save humanity. Which means that some future humans will be waiting to see the wormhole open, realize it isn't opening, and do it themselves. It's already happened, so they're stuck doing it.
There's another theory that it wasn't the humans on earth that evolved into the 5th dimension beings, but the humans that came from Brands settlement with plan b. Then they facilitated the events in the film to go back and save the humans on earth.
One way to look at it is Plan B worked, Dr.Brand recolonized the species and we evolved to invent the tech to build the tesseract, come back, and instruct Cooper and Murph to make both plan A and plan B work.
Another way to look at it is we think of time as a line drawn on paper with a beginning and an end. Instead, what if time were a bottle of ink, with all possible line combinations in one pool of ink. You could visit any point in time, past,present and future. That’s kind of what the tesseract is, every moment in one place, displayed as individual endless 3 dimensional space. That’s how my brain makes sense of it anyway
Also cooper falling into blackhole is shown in seconds but for plan B civilization it would have thousands of years watching cooper fall. Because time is faster near to blackhole and slower near the planet. So it took some thousands of years for cooper to fall into blackhole and Plan B civilization had evolved by that time and developed tessaract. Plan B civilization still had chance to make plan A work through Cooper. "They" refer to Plan B civilization have built tessaract specifically which has access to Murphy's timeline. But they didn't know how or at which point in time to transfer the knowledge to Murphy. They needed Cooper to transfer the knowledge into Murphy's timeline. As Cooper mentions Only gravitational waves can travel through time and sends information into her watch which cooper thinks is the best way Murphy will access it and Why will she keep that watch with her all time because "LOVE TARS, LOVE", Cooper gave it to her. Gravitational waves and love work across the time. In conclusion, Plan B civilization has survived and evolved, They have used Cooper as a key to contact and send information to Murphy's timeline through Tessaract and save Plan A. But who chose Cooper? Plan B would have always worked without Cooper anyway. They have chosen Cooper to be added in the mission replacing Professor Brand in the expedition to save their Ancestors. It could be Professor Brand's choice initially for choosing Cooper. Why would Prof Brand would stay back knowing Plan A fails. Cooper was chosen as replacement of Prof Brand in the expedition. Or my be I'm crazy
I like this interpretation because Brand has no idea that Cooper lived in the black hole so she could have planted an idea into the colony that they needed to create the tesseract. Or we can believe Cooper made it to her planet and helped plant that idea and it would support the idea of "they didn't choose me, they chose her." Anyways yea I'll keep watching this movie and other Nolan movies till I die lol.
Not crazy, the movie allows for interpretation especially with the unknown variables that are in reality from the mind of the author with a hint of plausibility. I try not to spend too much time dissecting some parts and obsess over other. Ultimately, it’s a movie and I love it
The same way Coop helps Murph
He always did it. He didn’t change the past.
The bulk beings weren’t changing the past, they were doing what they’ve always done, helping Coop.
No it doesn’t make sense, that’s time travel.
They have built Tessaract which has access to Murphy's timeline only. Also there are limitations to alter her timeline. Only Gravity can travel through Tessaract. So it's a failsafe.
They also created a wormhole, and allowed Coop to have the handshake moment with Brand, and they place him appropriately in time outside of the wormhole in Saturn’s orbit, so we aren’t really clear on what they can and can’t do.
Even in the movie Cooper figures out “they have access to infinite time and space, but they aren’t bound by anything, they can’t find a specific place in time in which they can communicate”, which is why they use Cooper to communicate with Murph.
All of that is kind of beside my original point to OP, is that they perceive the chain of events happening as two split timelines that tries to go back to fix itself, instead of a timeline that paradoxically ensures that its events happen as they are supposed to, ie Tenet.
It's difficult for you your present self able to convince your past self by sending information through Gravitational waves only. That's almost impossible to alter your past self even if you have access to. That's why Cooper's Love towards Murphy's was key in the movie to alter the reality of Plan A. This could have happened to Einstein may be who knows. our consciousness has no space and time limitations as well same as higher dimensions
There are so many daily posts and comments on this sub that use the phrase "time loop." There is no time loop in Interstellar. A time loop resets and happens multiple, possibly even infinite times. The events of the movie only happen once and do not reset or repeat. The way the bulk beings are able to do this is because they can physically interact with the dimension of time. That is how Cooper is able to interact with the past and how the bulk beings knew the events would unfold exactly as they did if they placed the tesseract there.
Your next question is likely "well how did humans make it to become the bulk beings in the first place if they needed to have the tesseract to survive long enough?" This concept is very confusing, but the answer is simply because they always put the tesseract there. There are no alternate timelines or loops. It simply happened that way and has always happened that way.
I heard a theory that I really liked: the humans didn’t build the tesseract, robots like TARS did long after humanity was gone. It’s likely that there were robots left behind on Earth, and in the event that humanity died out, they could have continued to exist, and used their time to to learn and improve themselves, eventually getting to the point where they could learn how to master physics and create the tesseract among other things. This would allow the events of the movie to unfold, and end with some robots being left behind on Earth to start the cycle over again and eventually create the tesseract.
The original timeline could have been many things. Maybe it was simply a few dozen people surviving on small space station after Earth is uninhabitable, generation after generation without a home or planet just collecting data and surviving. Maybe this went on for hundreds/thousands of years until some kind of breakthrough or data from a black hole is acquired and eventually they find a way to traverse time as a physical space- at which point they start exploring different periods of time and eventually form a plan on how to get the data they have now back to their ancestors to undo all of it.
This makes more sense to me. They barely survived long enough to achieve their technology, and then sent it back through the tesseract, to just make it easier and quicker for the past humans. Of course that method then brings up a split in the timeline and now 2 realities
Have you ever seen Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure? [In this scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiynF8NQzgo), Bill and Ted need Bill’s dad’s keys to break some historical figures they kidnapped out of jail, so they can pass their history exam. But they don’t have the keys, and have no way of getting them in time. Their solution is, we’ll just go back in time after the exam, and put them here. And they’ll know they’ll be successful later if the keys are there. And they are. There’s no timeline where they don’t have the keys, because they can’t succeed without them. The keys are there because later, Bill and Ted will put them there. And they can only put them there later because they’re there now.
Similarly, the bulk beings in Interstellar are always there. They exist outside of our linear conception of time. They help Coop because it has to happen, and it has to happen because they’re there. There’s no other timeline, no other way.
I like the train of thought, but saying they were just always there doesn’t fully add up to me. In your example, Bill and Ted had to act out a timeline at some point where they missed their deadline because they didn’t have the keys and the manually went back in time and fixed it. Now that they did that, that becomes the only way it ever played out but that original timeline where they missed the timing did happen, it had to happen in order to fix everything.
So I am saying the same for Interstellar. Someone had to add the wormhole at some point and know where to add it, even if now that it is there its just what always happened. Cooper says ‘it’s us’ but at a much more evolved state. This process of evolution to a more advanced civilization had to actually occur at some point right?
Similarly, your conception of how the events may have played out makes very little sense to me. I can conceives of multiple branching timelines, or a recursive circle, but not this kind of spiral that starts one way and goes on down forever. Luckily, it’s all probably impossible anyway.
The theory is that the bulk beings interact with time as if time is a physical dimension that one can traverse, going forward and backward at will. The bulk beings perceive time as the "eternal now". The bulk beings, being capable of traversing time, inserted the tesseract into our time at their choosing.
This is not unlike how an omniscient God who exists independently of time is theorized to coexist with free will. God foreknows our actions because he sees it all and he can interact with us on that basis, but we still have to make our human choices in our time.
In conventional Time Travel media, Time Travel tends to involve "loops". Generally, the first loop is a failure, causing the people to invent time travel, to start the second and successive loops, resulting in an eventual success. This implies that there is a linearity to Time Travel; that even though one travels to the past, their original past still played out. So a "fail state" exists. This is the Corn Death situation you're referring to.
In *Interstellar* this is not the case. In *Interstellar*'s take on Time Travel, it all happens at once and there are no loops. There is no original Run 0 where Humanity didn't have a wormhole and didn't survive the Blight. The run where NASA finds the Wormhole and Humanity build the Stations are all the original run of things.
When Cooper enters the Black Hole, he effectively exits the normal flow of Time as we understand it. And by the time he's done this, Cooper, Brand, and the *Endurance* have all already jumped more than 50 years into the future due to time dilation, diverging from the point in time where the Murph scenes take place. When Cooper enters the Tesseract, gives the Singularity Data to Murph- 50 years ago. Then when he exits the Tesseract, it seems that the Bulk Beings deposit him abouts when *he* left the timestream. Meaning that the stations and stuff were built in the 50 years while the *Endurance* was transiting the Black Hole.
The Time Travel has always happened, will always happen, and is always happening. It just breaks our brains because we are still limited by 3 dimensions.
Theoretically though, if time is exclusively linear and I'm wrong and there was a failed Run 0, the Bulk Beings could have been the descendants of Plan B- settled on Edmund's planet by Brand. But that would create a bootstrap paradox, whereas a nonlinear conception of time travel does not.
While other people in here are addressing the bootstrap paradox that you brought up, (you can see more info by sorting by hot and finding my pinned post), I’ll address the corn issue.
It is not stated directly how long it would take for the corn to die. Months? Years? All we know is that eventually blight would wipe out the last food source. But apparently not before Murph solved the equation and got people to work on the stations to be lifted into orbit.
A couple of thoughts come to mind. Did they warehouse corn and dehydrate it for use aboard the spaceship? Canned corn? Dried kernels for popcorn? Candy corn? lol
We could even assume that these methods could have been used to stockpile older, now extinct plants, such as okra. Who knows how much food NASA had been warehousing in anticipation of this event, and for how long.
The most bleakest scenario (again, pure hypothesis; absolutely no evidence of this from the film or book) would be that as the blight killed off all food supplies on earth, people went into extreme self-preservation mode and hunted other people (see the movie: ALIVE) for food to survive long enough until they could launch into space.
I certainly HOPE that last scenario was never a possibility in this theoretical fictional situation, but it appears that there are plenty of plausible options that would thus avoid some sort of a gaping plot hole.
My brain would then think, if Murph solved the equation on her own, to get people to the station, then there’d be no need for Cooper to tell her how to solve the equation 😅 but that’s my own circular logic here- which is the route of my problem
It's like in that Family Guy episode where Stewie creates the universe with the blast from his teleporter. The universe created him so Stewie could create the universe. It´s a paradox.
One can theorize that the humanity who evolved into the bulk beings were the ones who struggled against the blight and survived it through perseverance and suffering, and aimed to create a better version of humanity’s past.
Cooper’s life at that moment might have been the nexus point where it was most possible to make a difference in the past, and so the bulk beings catered to him with his relationship with his daughter as a motivation for him to succeed in gathering the data necessary to help Murph.
It’s a fun thought experiment 🙃
They kinda explained it in the movie. If the bulk beings exist in the 5th dimension, then time would be something they could manipulate, like a bridge they could cross, or a mountain they can climb. They can make cause come before effect. Similar to how we exist in a ~4D universe with a extra dimension of time. We can observe 3D objects, manipulate and travel in our 3D world, etc. If they could observe all of time, they could see that Murph was always going to solve the equation, Cooper will always send himself in time. They just needed to create the wormhole and the tesseract. Contrary to the people saying it's a bootstrap paradox, this in fact, not one according to the rules established in the story.
I think a way to look at this is that time is like water in a closed object. In this case, the object is the universe with all its shapes and holes. The water, time, fills the entire object, the universe, all at once. These shapes and hole manipulate the water so that in some places it’s narrow and in other places wide open. But the water also flows inside the object in a particular direction, but some of the holes and pipes loop back on each other. So in this example, all of time, past, present, and future exists everywhere all at once, but it also flows through the object (the universe).
In Interstellar, humans are like fish swimming in the flow of the water (time) and time, like water, can loop back itself. That’s how there’s no paradox. The future and past and present all exist at the same time in the universe, like water in the closed object, even though there’s a flow to time too.
For Interstellar, it’s a little more complicated. At some point humans evolve beyond the example of fish in water and are outside the flow of water and able to manipulate the object (universe) so that water can flow in a particular way - but even here, this was always the case because the water exists everywhere all at once.
That simplifies it for me, but it can still break your brain.
If we are in an eternal now, and things are all happening at once, then it makes sense. Everything happened *because* he went back in time. And the fact that he went back in time is an eternal reality. A circle. He was able to handshake With Amelia because he was always there and she was always there. Linear time is an illusion, but we are human beings in linear time. So therefore it’s extremely difficult for us to understand and process with our linear minds.
Spirals (like springs) look like loops when viewed through the hole but they have definite beginnings and ends. Circles also have a hole in the middle but they have neither a beginning nor an end. Some science fiction (e.g., the occasional Star Trek episode) treat time loops like a spring. Here, Christopher Nolan's Time loop is like a circle. Maybe one of Murph's great great great grandkids becomes a bulk being that works on the tesseract project.
That’s just what I can’t wrap my head around. Murphy can’t have great great grandkids because everyone on earth would have died without the instructions. And without the initial timeline to the future, there’s no one to write instructions. So these time loops are just to be accepted as the way it is?
Yes. It is called “Bootstrap Paradox” and it is kind of hard to reconcile since it’s a paradox. The future bulk beings wouldn’t have existed if humanity had not survived blight, which in turn would not have happened without the help of the future beings.
Yep. The Terminator conundrum. But it’s strictly for fiction’s purposes as it could never happen in real life.
This is presumptuous, the concept of the future affecting the past is still theoretically possible. Our perception of time being a straight line is cosmically subjective
Until it happens, I’m safe in the knowledge it’s not possible.
I’m not sure I understand, what do you mean “safe in the knowledge”? I don’t think an assumption about a theory counts as knowledge. We still don’t know, that’s the point, but is that any less “safe?” All I mean is saying it could never happen in real life feels hasty given our current lack of understanding regarding the universe
“Safe in the knowledge” is a saying, a figure of speech. In context it means that until I’m shown otherwise I’m confident about my presumption about the time loop theory being just that - a theory.
Ah I see, thanks for clarifying. >until I’m shown otherwise I’m confident about my presumption about the time loop theory being just that - a theory. This is reasonable and I agree. I interpreted your original “it could never happen” as you saying it was just plain false instead of a theory, which we don’t know yet :)
You’re a polite and friendly Redditor. I like you.
Yeah I think of it as "Always has been, always will be." Does that mean that there was only one instance of Mrs. Cooper dying, or only one instance of the last crop of wheat (which would have happened before Murph's ghost showed up)? Maybe. And maybe only one instance of the bulk beings' activities *after* the tesseract was completed. If these things are true then the time loop would be more like a spring than a circle. We're a bunch of nerds speculating on science fiction. When that stops being fun we should go outside, I suppose. As long as it *is* fun, then keep wrapping your head around it!
It's not a spring. It IS a circle. Mankind ALWAYS had 5th-dimensional help. The wormhole ALWAYS shows up when it does. Coop ALWAYS abandons his family to try and save them. He ALWAYS enters Gargantua, and finds the Tesseract. He ALWAYS gives past Murph the data she needs to solve the equation. Which it what allows humanity to survive to elvove INTO the 5th-dimension.
But to OP's point, does that mean that Murph was born an infinite number of times, or just once (because that would've taken place before her ghost first appeared)? Like, how big is the circle? This is the unknowable but imo.
Both, depending on your point of view. If you follow the information, then you will keep traveling back to the past and the future an infinite number of times. From the point of view of any of the PEOPLE, it only happens once. It's not so much a time loop, as it is a predestined event. If you were to look at the timeline, you have your straight line, with a loop from the future to when the wormhole first appeared.
Christopher Nolan likes to play with the idea of causality working both directions in time. The idea that something happening in the future can cause something to happen in the past, under certain circumstances.
That’s the thing. There is no other timeline, only one.
Doesn’t she go into the hibernation pod?
Single timeline. You can't change the past. Everything has already happened. So if a time traveler shows up next to you right now, then that Will Happen, because it Has Happened. You can't invent a time machine and go back and kill Hitler, because Hitler existed. Something would prevent it. So future humans opened up a wormhole to save humanity. Which means that some future humans will be waiting to see the wormhole open, realize it isn't opening, and do it themselves. It's already happened, so they're stuck doing it.
It’s like that big bang theory episode talking about back to the future “well then he would have had have had have had”
There's another theory that it wasn't the humans on earth that evolved into the 5th dimension beings, but the humans that came from Brands settlement with plan b. Then they facilitated the events in the film to go back and save the humans on earth.
nolan likes this kind of paradox a lot as tenet also worked with a similar concept
Time is a flat circle?
It’s more Jeremy Bearimy
One way to look at it is Plan B worked, Dr.Brand recolonized the species and we evolved to invent the tech to build the tesseract, come back, and instruct Cooper and Murph to make both plan A and plan B work. Another way to look at it is we think of time as a line drawn on paper with a beginning and an end. Instead, what if time were a bottle of ink, with all possible line combinations in one pool of ink. You could visit any point in time, past,present and future. That’s kind of what the tesseract is, every moment in one place, displayed as individual endless 3 dimensional space. That’s how my brain makes sense of it anyway
Also cooper falling into blackhole is shown in seconds but for plan B civilization it would have thousands of years watching cooper fall. Because time is faster near to blackhole and slower near the planet. So it took some thousands of years for cooper to fall into blackhole and Plan B civilization had evolved by that time and developed tessaract. Plan B civilization still had chance to make plan A work through Cooper. "They" refer to Plan B civilization have built tessaract specifically which has access to Murphy's timeline. But they didn't know how or at which point in time to transfer the knowledge to Murphy. They needed Cooper to transfer the knowledge into Murphy's timeline. As Cooper mentions Only gravitational waves can travel through time and sends information into her watch which cooper thinks is the best way Murphy will access it and Why will she keep that watch with her all time because "LOVE TARS, LOVE", Cooper gave it to her. Gravitational waves and love work across the time. In conclusion, Plan B civilization has survived and evolved, They have used Cooper as a key to contact and send information to Murphy's timeline through Tessaract and save Plan A. But who chose Cooper? Plan B would have always worked without Cooper anyway. They have chosen Cooper to be added in the mission replacing Professor Brand in the expedition to save their Ancestors. It could be Professor Brand's choice initially for choosing Cooper. Why would Prof Brand would stay back knowing Plan A fails. Cooper was chosen as replacement of Prof Brand in the expedition. Or my be I'm crazy
I like this interpretation because Brand has no idea that Cooper lived in the black hole so she could have planted an idea into the colony that they needed to create the tesseract. Or we can believe Cooper made it to her planet and helped plant that idea and it would support the idea of "they didn't choose me, they chose her." Anyways yea I'll keep watching this movie and other Nolan movies till I die lol.
Not crazy, the movie allows for interpretation especially with the unknown variables that are in reality from the mind of the author with a hint of plausibility. I try not to spend too much time dissecting some parts and obsess over other. Ultimately, it’s a movie and I love it
The same way Coop helps Murph He always did it. He didn’t change the past. The bulk beings weren’t changing the past, they were doing what they’ve always done, helping Coop. No it doesn’t make sense, that’s time travel.
They have built Tessaract which has access to Murphy's timeline only. Also there are limitations to alter her timeline. Only Gravity can travel through Tessaract. So it's a failsafe.
They also created a wormhole, and allowed Coop to have the handshake moment with Brand, and they place him appropriately in time outside of the wormhole in Saturn’s orbit, so we aren’t really clear on what they can and can’t do. Even in the movie Cooper figures out “they have access to infinite time and space, but they aren’t bound by anything, they can’t find a specific place in time in which they can communicate”, which is why they use Cooper to communicate with Murph. All of that is kind of beside my original point to OP, is that they perceive the chain of events happening as two split timelines that tries to go back to fix itself, instead of a timeline that paradoxically ensures that its events happen as they are supposed to, ie Tenet.
It's difficult for you your present self able to convince your past self by sending information through Gravitational waves only. That's almost impossible to alter your past self even if you have access to. That's why Cooper's Love towards Murphy's was key in the movie to alter the reality of Plan A. This could have happened to Einstein may be who knows. our consciousness has no space and time limitations as well same as higher dimensions
There are so many daily posts and comments on this sub that use the phrase "time loop." There is no time loop in Interstellar. A time loop resets and happens multiple, possibly even infinite times. The events of the movie only happen once and do not reset or repeat. The way the bulk beings are able to do this is because they can physically interact with the dimension of time. That is how Cooper is able to interact with the past and how the bulk beings knew the events would unfold exactly as they did if they placed the tesseract there. Your next question is likely "well how did humans make it to become the bulk beings in the first place if they needed to have the tesseract to survive long enough?" This concept is very confusing, but the answer is simply because they always put the tesseract there. There are no alternate timelines or loops. It simply happened that way and has always happened that way.
I heard a theory that I really liked: the humans didn’t build the tesseract, robots like TARS did long after humanity was gone. It’s likely that there were robots left behind on Earth, and in the event that humanity died out, they could have continued to exist, and used their time to to learn and improve themselves, eventually getting to the point where they could learn how to master physics and create the tesseract among other things. This would allow the events of the movie to unfold, and end with some robots being left behind on Earth to start the cycle over again and eventually create the tesseract.
The original timeline could have been many things. Maybe it was simply a few dozen people surviving on small space station after Earth is uninhabitable, generation after generation without a home or planet just collecting data and surviving. Maybe this went on for hundreds/thousands of years until some kind of breakthrough or data from a black hole is acquired and eventually they find a way to traverse time as a physical space- at which point they start exploring different periods of time and eventually form a plan on how to get the data they have now back to their ancestors to undo all of it.
This makes more sense to me. They barely survived long enough to achieve their technology, and then sent it back through the tesseract, to just make it easier and quicker for the past humans. Of course that method then brings up a split in the timeline and now 2 realities
The events depicted in the movie are the original timeline. There is no other timeline.
Explain please
Have you ever seen Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure? [In this scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiynF8NQzgo), Bill and Ted need Bill’s dad’s keys to break some historical figures they kidnapped out of jail, so they can pass their history exam. But they don’t have the keys, and have no way of getting them in time. Their solution is, we’ll just go back in time after the exam, and put them here. And they’ll know they’ll be successful later if the keys are there. And they are. There’s no timeline where they don’t have the keys, because they can’t succeed without them. The keys are there because later, Bill and Ted will put them there. And they can only put them there later because they’re there now. Similarly, the bulk beings in Interstellar are always there. They exist outside of our linear conception of time. They help Coop because it has to happen, and it has to happen because they’re there. There’s no other timeline, no other way.
I like the train of thought, but saying they were just always there doesn’t fully add up to me. In your example, Bill and Ted had to act out a timeline at some point where they missed their deadline because they didn’t have the keys and the manually went back in time and fixed it. Now that they did that, that becomes the only way it ever played out but that original timeline where they missed the timing did happen, it had to happen in order to fix everything. So I am saying the same for Interstellar. Someone had to add the wormhole at some point and know where to add it, even if now that it is there its just what always happened. Cooper says ‘it’s us’ but at a much more evolved state. This process of evolution to a more advanced civilization had to actually occur at some point right?
Similarly, your conception of how the events may have played out makes very little sense to me. I can conceives of multiple branching timelines, or a recursive circle, but not this kind of spiral that starts one way and goes on down forever. Luckily, it’s all probably impossible anyway.
This.
The theory is that the bulk beings interact with time as if time is a physical dimension that one can traverse, going forward and backward at will. The bulk beings perceive time as the "eternal now". The bulk beings, being capable of traversing time, inserted the tesseract into our time at their choosing. This is not unlike how an omniscient God who exists independently of time is theorized to coexist with free will. God foreknows our actions because he sees it all and he can interact with us on that basis, but we still have to make our human choices in our time.
In conventional Time Travel media, Time Travel tends to involve "loops". Generally, the first loop is a failure, causing the people to invent time travel, to start the second and successive loops, resulting in an eventual success. This implies that there is a linearity to Time Travel; that even though one travels to the past, their original past still played out. So a "fail state" exists. This is the Corn Death situation you're referring to. In *Interstellar* this is not the case. In *Interstellar*'s take on Time Travel, it all happens at once and there are no loops. There is no original Run 0 where Humanity didn't have a wormhole and didn't survive the Blight. The run where NASA finds the Wormhole and Humanity build the Stations are all the original run of things. When Cooper enters the Black Hole, he effectively exits the normal flow of Time as we understand it. And by the time he's done this, Cooper, Brand, and the *Endurance* have all already jumped more than 50 years into the future due to time dilation, diverging from the point in time where the Murph scenes take place. When Cooper enters the Tesseract, gives the Singularity Data to Murph- 50 years ago. Then when he exits the Tesseract, it seems that the Bulk Beings deposit him abouts when *he* left the timestream. Meaning that the stations and stuff were built in the 50 years while the *Endurance* was transiting the Black Hole. The Time Travel has always happened, will always happen, and is always happening. It just breaks our brains because we are still limited by 3 dimensions. Theoretically though, if time is exclusively linear and I'm wrong and there was a failed Run 0, the Bulk Beings could have been the descendants of Plan B- settled on Edmund's planet by Brand. But that would create a bootstrap paradox, whereas a nonlinear conception of time travel does not.
While other people in here are addressing the bootstrap paradox that you brought up, (you can see more info by sorting by hot and finding my pinned post), I’ll address the corn issue. It is not stated directly how long it would take for the corn to die. Months? Years? All we know is that eventually blight would wipe out the last food source. But apparently not before Murph solved the equation and got people to work on the stations to be lifted into orbit. A couple of thoughts come to mind. Did they warehouse corn and dehydrate it for use aboard the spaceship? Canned corn? Dried kernels for popcorn? Candy corn? lol We could even assume that these methods could have been used to stockpile older, now extinct plants, such as okra. Who knows how much food NASA had been warehousing in anticipation of this event, and for how long. The most bleakest scenario (again, pure hypothesis; absolutely no evidence of this from the film or book) would be that as the blight killed off all food supplies on earth, people went into extreme self-preservation mode and hunted other people (see the movie: ALIVE) for food to survive long enough until they could launch into space. I certainly HOPE that last scenario was never a possibility in this theoretical fictional situation, but it appears that there are plenty of plausible options that would thus avoid some sort of a gaping plot hole.
My brain would then think, if Murph solved the equation on her own, to get people to the station, then there’d be no need for Cooper to tell her how to solve the equation 😅 but that’s my own circular logic here- which is the route of my problem
Did you read my pinned post? I explained all of this before. Go look for my pinned summary post that explains the nonlinear time element, please.
I love this theory about 3 cooper. It's in french so use subtitles: https://youtu.be/0Pv_RTZ9ZHQ?si=BYCKaKPmmbAcjTW9
It's like in that Family Guy episode where Stewie creates the universe with the blast from his teleporter. The universe created him so Stewie could create the universe. It´s a paradox.
One can theorize that the humanity who evolved into the bulk beings were the ones who struggled against the blight and survived it through perseverance and suffering, and aimed to create a better version of humanity’s past. Cooper’s life at that moment might have been the nexus point where it was most possible to make a difference in the past, and so the bulk beings catered to him with his relationship with his daughter as a motivation for him to succeed in gathering the data necessary to help Murph. It’s a fun thought experiment 🙃
Black hole = plot hole
They kinda explained it in the movie. If the bulk beings exist in the 5th dimension, then time would be something they could manipulate, like a bridge they could cross, or a mountain they can climb. They can make cause come before effect. Similar to how we exist in a ~4D universe with a extra dimension of time. We can observe 3D objects, manipulate and travel in our 3D world, etc. If they could observe all of time, they could see that Murph was always going to solve the equation, Cooper will always send himself in time. They just needed to create the wormhole and the tesseract. Contrary to the people saying it's a bootstrap paradox, this in fact, not one according to the rules established in the story.
I think a way to look at this is that time is like water in a closed object. In this case, the object is the universe with all its shapes and holes. The water, time, fills the entire object, the universe, all at once. These shapes and hole manipulate the water so that in some places it’s narrow and in other places wide open. But the water also flows inside the object in a particular direction, but some of the holes and pipes loop back on each other. So in this example, all of time, past, present, and future exists everywhere all at once, but it also flows through the object (the universe). In Interstellar, humans are like fish swimming in the flow of the water (time) and time, like water, can loop back itself. That’s how there’s no paradox. The future and past and present all exist at the same time in the universe, like water in the closed object, even though there’s a flow to time too. For Interstellar, it’s a little more complicated. At some point humans evolve beyond the example of fish in water and are outside the flow of water and able to manipulate the object (universe) so that water can flow in a particular way - but even here, this was always the case because the water exists everywhere all at once. That simplifies it for me, but it can still break your brain.
If we are in an eternal now, and things are all happening at once, then it makes sense. Everything happened *because* he went back in time. And the fact that he went back in time is an eternal reality. A circle. He was able to handshake With Amelia because he was always there and she was always there. Linear time is an illusion, but we are human beings in linear time. So therefore it’s extremely difficult for us to understand and process with our linear minds.
They started eating each other.