What did Christopher Nolan mean by “they” in Interstellar?
Both the science-fiction films, Christpher Nolam’s, Interstellar (2014) and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) had quite a few subtle references to God. One may choose to believe that, or not. Several times in Interstellar the characters have referred to someone called “they”. Even after watching the film several times myself, I was not sure what Nolan meant by the term “they”.
In Interstellar, Dr. Brand (Anne Hathaway), physically tries contact “them” (not sure if it was by feel or touch) while the astronauts were riding through the wormhole. Later in the movie Coop mentions to TARS and Murph that it was “we” who created this wormhole in the first place. When Coop and TARS enter the black hole and are inside, going through time as infinite lines, TARS also mentions about “them” creating the 4D tesseract[1] to help Coop comprehend or understand.
Was that reference to an alien civilization or future human beings, or God? That is left wide open for every person to interpret on their own.
Given the abstract explanation here, being a skeptic, I could conclude that it is either a Good Samaritan alien or a futuristic human being who has the power to alter or communicate with our past (as Coop does with Murph at their house, in this case) and potentially our future, given time becomes a dimension that can be traversed back and forth inside the blackhole. But then again, the question arises, who put these there in the first case? Isn’t feature of ‘futuristic human being’ mentioned above attributed to a character of God? It is not clear. As skeptics would often question, if God created the Universe, and if everything has a creator, who created God?
You might say Nolan specifies it is the future humans. But then, who set the wormholes for present humans to travel through them to become future humans? It is an egg-and-chicken situation. I would be more relaxed if I knew God had put in the wormhole and tesseract for benefit of mankind.
2001: A Space Odyssey 2001 went to elaborate lengths to explain the physics of space travel. The director, Stanley Kubrick, was determined to make what he called the “first science fiction film that isn’t considered trash”.
In an interview in 2013 Kubrick explains the allegory of God in the film: “The God concept is at the heart of this film. It’s unavoidable that it would be, once you believe that the universe is seething with advanced forms of intelligent life.
“Just think about it for a moment. There are a hundred billion stars in the galaxy and a hundred billion galaxies in the visible universe. Each star is a sun, like our own, probably with planets around them. The evolution of life, it is widely believed, comes as an inevitable consequence of a certain amount of time on a planet in a stable orbit which is not too hot or too cold. First comes chemical evolution — chance rearrangements of basic matter, then biological evolution.
“Think of the kind of life that may have evolved on those planets over the millennia, and think, too, what relatively giant technological strides man has made on Earth in the six thousand years of his recorded civilization — a period that is less than a single grain of sand in the cosmic hourglass.
“At a time when man’s distant evolutionary ancestors were just crawling out of the primordial ooze, there must have been civilizations in the universe sending out their starships to explore the farthest reaches of the cosmos and conquering all the secrets of nature. Such cosmic intelligences, growing in knowledge over the eons, would be as far removed from man as we are from the ants.
“They could be in instantaneous telepathic communication throughout the universe; they might have achieved total mastery over matter so that they can telekinetically transport themselves instantly across billions of light years of space; in their ultimate form they might shed the corporeal shell entirely and exist as a disembodied immortal consciousness throughout the universe.”
His words and the allegory of Interstellar in combination echo the entire reason for this book: that future humans would, in no way, be any less than God.
Like in his book Homo deus, (Human god) which gives a glimpse of the dreams and nightmares that will shape the 21st century, Professor Yuval Noah Harari talks about now that humans are advancing into a dreamlike technological manifold, what will happen to democracy when Google and Facebook come to know our likes and our political preferences better than we know them ourselves? What will happen to the welfare state when computers push humans out of the job market and create a massive new “useless class”? How might Islam handle genetic engineering? Will Silicon Valley end up producing new religions and gods, rather than just novel gadgets? Harari talks about a world where humans life will effortlessly span over 150 years. By 2100 humans may be able to overcome death with nanotechnology, genetic engineering and regenerative medicines.
According to the book, anyone possessing a healthy bank account and a healthy body may cheat death a decade at a time. “Every 10 years you can march into a clinic and get a makeover treatment that will not only cure your illnesses, but will also regenerate decaying tissues, and upgrade hands, eyes and brains. Before the next treatment is due, doctors would have invented a plethora of new medicines, upgrades and gadgets.”
Me being an anti-Royalty, I look at the generations of monarchy in UK cheating death, and living up to/over a 100 years, and I am thinking, we are probably seeing such immortals around us already!
Why just medicines, Baba Ramdev, the yoga guru of India has revived the 5000-year-old method of keeping oneself healthy only with yoga and pranayama[2]. He says, “If, with daily yoga and pranayama, you are pumping enough oxygen into your lungs, heart, cells and brain; exercising the inner organs regularly; with yoga, you are keeping every muscle, every tissue, ligament, cartilage healthy and operating, how will you die?”
Like the mystic, Sadhguru says, “This is the best era for humans to be living in.” According to Prof Harari, in Homo deus, humans are no longer in a state where they can die of starvation. Come hail or high storm or any Earthquake or tsunami, with the universal survival kits reaching to every corner of the globe, there is a very little probability that humans will die of starvation.
Actually, more and more humans will die of over-eating, he says. Humans have conquered most diseases that were slapped upon humanity throughout history. And it will… is… conquering Covid too.
Will that turn humans more and more like God? With our clear, yet, struggling path towards attaining immortality through the use of replacement organs, cybernetics, gene manipulation, computerized brain emulation, or a combination of all these and holistic, alternative and natural means of extending life; very definite and bold strides towards inter-planetary homes; a theoretical, yet plausible phenomenon of time-travel; and a gamut of technological advancements we are seeing every day, man can very surely call himself the future people of the universe.
Of course, God with a capital ‘G’ is way beyond that! We are only talking small steps to cheat death. We are trying to get away from the scythe of Grim Reaper and the mace of Yamaraja[3].
But what about the other life-threatening actions that are already killing humans in millions? Already endangering the life on planet Earth? In one hand, we are trying to achieve immortality, on the other, we are destroying the only home we have, or can have in a few hundred years to come.
I understand that Nasa and SpaceX are making great headways to Mars. Scientists are even thinking of terraforming Venus, by altering its atmosphere, and are on their way to making the Moon our refueling base. But how about altering our own atmosphere to reduce global warming? How about stopping the waste of plastic, which is engulfing marine life and choking Earth? How about educating those militants and stopping the vicious wars? How about eliminating religions completely from humanity that sets the ball of hatred rolling in the first place?
“Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace
You, you may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you will join us
And the world will be as one
~John Lennon
The above lyrics of the John Lennon song is very futuristic, and humans can only attempt to reach even the 5th dimension if they abandon religions and countries altogether. We know that there are 11 dimensions, and only beyond that is the abode of God. We also know about the Kardashev’s scale, and that humanity has only reached a big ZERO in that scale so far. Hence, only after we achieve near-immortality, only after we manage to harness the power of more than one planet, only after we start living in complete peace and only after we have conquered all viruses and tamed death, can we even think of achieving a Godly status.
So, is the “they” that Dr Brad in Interstellar was referring to, future humans, and not God? (I think the overuse of Zimmerman’s organ tricked our minds into believing that “they’ was being referred to as Gods.) Who have already advanced into the other dimensions that they could create a tesseract[4] in the space to save present humanity?
So, if Cooper saved humans from the 5th dimension, opened the wormhole and engineered the whole sequence of events, guided his past self and his daughter on how to save humanity, there is a compelling question, how did future Cooper exist in the first place? You cannot exist if you weren’t there in the past, correct? Kind of shown fittingly in the ending of the 1985 film, Back to the Future.
Which is to say, you can’t travel back in time and engineer your own salvation. Don’t you first have to be saved, so that you will exist in the future to travel back in time? This isn’t a “chicken or the egg” question as much it is a “chicken travels back in time and lays egg that hatches and becomes that chicken” question, and that’s kind of eerie.
Very well shown in the movie, Predestined. A must watch.
But even if we assume that future Cooper saved past Cooper with the help of present Cooper; that future humans, aka God, are saving us each day, it is possible that they are creating our destiny exactly the way they have been made. When we chose path ‘Y’ over path ‘X’, in taking a major decision in life, with the understanding of the science of future humans, we can safely conclude that that path was guided to be taken by our future self, who has already taken that path.
In other words, when our parents and astrologers told us that our destiny is pre-determined, they weren’t fibbing. This means that we have lived and lived over and over again to make the decisions that has already been made by our future selves. It makes sense of the word ‘reincarnation’. Like if you’ve not achieved something in this life, you will come back in next life, and then your future self will direct you to achieve that.
Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end. ~ John Lennon.
But what if we are the future humans, can we time travel into our past selves and change our decisions? No. Not yet. For that we have to invent time-travel first.
This is getting my head and yours too, reeling, I’m sure. But look at it this way, when we talk about another ‘you’ existing in a parallel dimension, who may have taken the path ‘X’ instead, or in another dimension, the path ‘Z’, and their respective future selves were guiding them in taking that path, the whole thing falls into a pattern and becomes a plausible ‘fiction’. I cannot write ‘truth’ or ‘fact’ here, as these are completely my rationalization of the existing jibber-jabber. I’ll just stick to my astrologer for the time.
[1] In geometry, the tesseract is the four-dimensional analogue of the cube; the tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square. Just as the surface of the cube consists of six square faces, the hypersurface of the tesseract consists of eight cubical cells. The tesseract is one of the six convex regular 4-polytopes.
[2] Prāṇāyāma is the practice of breath control in yoga. It is a distinct breathing exercise, usually practiced after asanas, It consists mainly of three techniques:pūrak (inhale), rechak (exhale), kumbhak. It also consists of synchronizing the breath with movements between asanas. This is extensively discussed in texts like the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and later in Hatha yoga texts.
[3] In Hinduism, Yama or Yamaraja is a Rigvedic deity. He is the lord of death and justice, responsible for the dispensation of law and punishment of sinners in his abode, Yamaloka.
[4] The Tesseract makes its onscreen debut in Captain America: The First Avenger and then plays the role of MacGuffin over and over again in various Marvel films. In Interstellar, it is where Coop and TARS enter after passing through the event horizon (the boundary at which even light cannot escape) of the gargantuan black hole.
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In other words, when our parents and astrologers told us that our destiny is pre-determined, they weren’t fibbing. This means that we have lived and lived over and over again to make the decisions that has already been made by our future selves. It makes sense of the word ‘reincarnation’. Like if you’ve not achieved something in this life, you will come back in next life, and then your future self will direct you to achieve that.
Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end. ~ John Lennon.
But what if we are the future humans, can we time travel into our past selves and change our decisions? No. Not yet. For that we have to invent time-travel first.
This is getting my head and yours too, reeling, I’m sure. But look at it this way, when we talk about another ‘you’ existing in a parallel dimension, who may have taken the path ‘X’ instead, or in another dimension, the path ‘Z’, and their respective future selves were guiding them in taking that path, the whole thing falls into a pattern and becomes a plausible ‘fiction’. I cannot write ‘truth’ or ‘fact’ here, as these are completely my rationalization of the existing jibber-jabber. I’ll just stick to my astrologer for the time
An extract from my 6th book: WtF I Found God
In India: WtF I Found God
Please feel free to comment your thoughts below.
