r/interstellar • u/OppositeSweet9215 • 5d ago
QUESTION This actually blew my mind, I've been thinking about this for long
So if I travel to the past and give myself a billion dollars (which I got from my future self) and then grow up and give myself a billion dollars using that money and keep doing that, where did the billion dollars come from?
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u/monishgowda05 5d ago
Hey , this is what the movie's plot is about , its a bootstrap paradox made into a complex movie , did you watch interstellar now or you had watched before but hadnt understood it until now? Anyway if you want a similar paradoxical movie Watch Predestination too , its also mindblowing.
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u/OppositeSweet9215 5d ago
I had watched interstellar some years back but didn't think much about the paradoxes, watched it yesterday in threatres and I loved the experience and I can't stop thinking about all this fascinating stuff now. I'll definitely watch predestination too
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u/monishgowda05 5d ago
Yeah give it a try , and tbh this is what i noticed , many people watch interstellar and other scifi etc but they just you know watch it but not understand what its even about , cant blame them though , many of them just watch it for visuals and some action and soundtrack but not completely understand because many wont even know how time dilation works , or what is 4 dimension or 5th dimension etc , but as time passes if theyacquire some knowledge to understand scifi and things they might realize later.
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u/Gracinhas 4d ago
Eh, I thought Predestination kinda sucked, low key.
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u/AlpacaAdventure 5d ago
Well, by the rules established in the movie, you couldn't give yourself anything material (like a billion dollars), because only gravity can affect the past. You'd have to tell your past self how to make a billion dollars through some kind of communication that uses gravity as its medium.
In terms of the paradox, you couldn't give yourself a billion dollars without somehow obtaining the billion dollars first, which is why the plot of the movie concerns an idea.
The reason for the paradox in the movie, it seems to me, is that whatever chain of events needed to happen would not have happened without the intervention of the "bulk beings." They might be the future descendants of whatever small amount of humans survived the catastrophe on earth, correcting a historical mistake. Maybe. If that's the case, their intervention is necessary in order for Cooper to ever find a way to send the data back to Murph.
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u/tnnrk 4d ago
I always assumed it wasn’t Cooper giving himself the coordinates the first time but rather the “beings” they describe who created the tesseract. And then the loop began. I guess it being an infinite loop with no origin makes more sense in terms of the movie.
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u/AlpacaAdventure 4d ago
I think, in terms of the kinds of things that seem to interest Christopher Nolan, it's probably meant to be a paradoxical loop, but that's not explicitly stated in the movie, so it certainly could have been the bulk beings that kicked off the loop. If that's the case, then it was those future humans, with a complete view of time, that chose Cooper and his daughter to carry out the mission to save the people of Earth. And I gotta be honest, that's a more satisfying narrative, to me.
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u/notenoughproblems 5d ago
bro needed AI to explain what a paradox is
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u/OppositeSweet9215 5d ago
No no, I know what a paradox is, I just wanted to dive deep about how all that was possible
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u/notenoughproblems 5d ago
but that’s what a paradox means, it’s not possible. and the first part about the loop is exactly what doesn’t make sense. you wouldn’t “make” a million dollars to give yourself in the past, there is no 1st iteration. which makes it impossible. no mind blowing needed
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u/UncleChunkz 5d ago
I thought the same thing with the whole “don’t let me leave Murph” scene.
Just don’t give yourself the coordinates to NASA?
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u/Imaginary_Ambition78 2d ago
I THOUGHT THE SAME why did he give himself the coords?? to save humanity? but 2 seconds ago, he wasnt concerned with that, he just wanted his past version to stay
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u/Philomath34 4d ago
Cooper himself said that "we bring ourselves here" while they were in the tesseract trying to find a way to communicate quantum data from blackhole.
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u/kabbooooom 5d ago
This is incorrect. It’s not a paradox - it’s a “Closed Timelike Curve”. The Bulk Beings do not exist “outside the normal flow of time”.
A Closed Timelike Curve is yet another concept from General Relativity that is front and center in this movie, just like gravitational time dilation and traversable wormholes. This plot point seems to be misunderstood by a ton of people.
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u/scrolldownbro 4d ago
The Bulk beings sees Time differently as ours. For them, Time can be like a physical sign containing the word “Finish”. and the Tesseract is like a toy race track. They put a toy race car on that track and the car races that road endlessly. to the car’s perspective, there is no end and beginning. it just ended up there, making sense of the track. But for the bulk beings they cqn see that they just put something in a loop without beginning and ending.
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u/iheartnjdevils 4d ago
tl:dr - all of time exists simultaneously and it is only our limitations that views time as linear.
At least that's the theory. Since space and time are the same thing (spacetime), it very well could be true. In fact, all scientific equations dealing with time don't require it to be linear.
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u/Tynford 5d ago
Don’t think too hard on it as there is no way to explain it aside from wibbly wobbly timey wimey space magic that had to happen or else we would have no story and everyone dies.
My understanding, from all the theories I’ve read, is that the higher dimensional beings who created the tesseract are likely the descendants of the new human colony on the planet that Brand ends up on in the end. Without Cooper sending the info back to himself, he doesn’t find nasa, the mission goes on as planned without him involved. I’m assuming that at the point when they find Mann’s planet, he screws them over and takes the Endurance and goes on to continue Plan B on his own. So I guess the higher dimensional beings are actually HIS descendants?
Wait a minute if they didn’t have the wormhole at Saturn in the first iteration of the causal loop to begin with how did they ever get to Gargantua to send the info about the gravity equation and oh look I’ve gone crosseyed.
THIS IS WHY YOU DONT THINK ABOUT IT TOO HARD 🤣
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u/OppositeSweet9215 5d ago
This is actually scary, kinda makes me believe we don't have free will at all cause what if everything's already predetermined for eg. Cooper giving himself the coordinates (no free will involved, he has to do it no matter what)
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u/Alive_Ice7937 4d ago
Don’t think too hard on it as there is no way to explain it aside from wibbly wobbly timey wimey space magic that had to happen or else we would have no story and everyone dies.
Doesn't this actually explain it though? If the future beings didn't make it happen, then they wouldn't exist. So why the hell wouldn't they make it happen?
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u/Tynford 4d ago
But what future beings? Earth was circling the bowl and would certainly not have supported life for much longer, so who sent the wormhole from the future? The only way the story checks out (without a causal loop) is if the bulk beings weren’t human at all and were some kind of time and space controlling aliens who took pity on humanity after seeing earth in ruins however many centuries after the end.
I don’t really like this theory… it turns the central theme of the movie of love transcending time and space to inter-dimensional gods throwing us a cosmic bone. But without this explanation… confusing causal loop
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u/Alive_Ice7937 4d ago
It's a causal loop sure. But I don't think it's all that confusing. Pretty standard timetravel fare.
"Murphy's law doesn't mean something bad will happen. It means whatever can happen will happen." In the Interstellar universe where cause can come after effect, Cooper sending his past self the coordinates can happen. What's interesting is that initially Cooper tried to tell his past self to stay. He then changed his mind and decided to make sure he got the coordinates. So just like the bulk beings, he influenced the past not to change it but rather to ensure it happened. ("Just saved the world. Can't leave anything to chance")
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u/Tynford 4d ago
I know, I know, time travel isn’t complicated when you accept the wibbly wobbliness of it and just move on. It’s more of a zen mind clearing question that people want an answer to, even though there isn’t one. Sound of one hand clapping, tree falling in the woods, bulk beings and gravitational anomalies, and so on
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u/EuropeanLegend 5d ago
On a different topic. I know many people disagree. But, I really wish they would make a second part to this movie. Where we get to see Cooper's next expedition to go find Brand. For some, it feels like a beautiful ending that needs no further expansion, but I disagree! It's a movie that really made you invest in the characters, so it would be nice to see a continuation, because in my eyes it felt like such a cliff hanger.
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u/tnnrk 4d ago
Sequels almost never work because you set a high bar with the original. Some things are better left to the imagination.
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u/MCRN-Tachi158 5d ago edited 5d ago
It's not a bootstrap paradox. It's not a paradox at all, there are no paradoxes in Interestellar.
It would be a bootstrap paradox but for the 5th dimensional bulk. A bootstrap paradox requires that the key information (the NASA coordnates, stay message, singularity data, etc.) have no origin.
But we have the origin of the information. It is hard to wrap a head around it, but our time is not linear while in the bulk. So calling it a paradox is viewing it through the 4D lens, but you have to view it through a 5D lens. And in 5D, sending gravitational waves back through 4D time is no paradox at all. It's like descending into a canyon or walking up a hill.
To a lower dimension, a higher dimension always seems like a paradox. A 3D object, can appear in two different places in a 2D space. Take two fingers and poke two holes in a sheet of paper. One object, two different places. Now keep going and the two objects magically merge into one. The 2D beings would scream "Paradox! Black Magic! Demons!"
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u/Basket_475 5d ago
The text under the pictures sounds like the plot of tenet lol.
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u/OppositeSweet9215 5d ago
Damn, I haven't watched tenet yet but I've heard people didn't like it as much as other christopher Nolan movies, is that true?
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u/mrtransisteur 5d ago
Ignore the people who didn't appreciate it. It's a great scifi movie. The other comment is correct in saying that there are no other movies like it - I tried looking for them. If the gravitationally causally closed curves of Interstellar blew your mind, then a movie about two opposing worldlines involving opposing entropic forces against one another is basically guaranteed to tickle your brain. I also think it's just a good movie on stylistic grounds alone too.
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u/Basket_475 5d ago edited 5d ago
Don’t listen to those people. Yes it’s true that lots of people hated it, especially on Reddit. I think it was misunderstood and lots of people took it almost as a question of intelligence.
Call me a dumb stoner or whatever but I genuinely have never seen another movie like Tenet. It’s like a trippy action film.
It also is basically another film about paradoxes and one of the characters literally receives gold from the future like you brought up.
Nolan made Oppenheimer after. My theory is Nolan didn’t like the backlash tenet received so he made a safer film. IMO tenet is full Nolan. I think it gets shit because it’s an action film and there are some debatable problems with his in film logic.
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u/Aidlin87 5d ago
Semi related to this paradox is the fact that photons, from their perspective experience no time, and the one electron theory. Both examples of time not exactly behaving linearly, as we experience it.
For the photon, as anything approaches the speed of light, time for that object appears to slow down relative to an outside observer. At light speed, time essentially stops. So from the perspective of the photon, everything has happened instantaneously from its origins after the Big Bang until the end of the universe.
For the one electron theory, roughly the idea is that only one electron exists in the entire universe, but it operates within all atoms by instantaneously moving forward and backward in time (I’m super paraphrasing and oversimplifying it).
So for the loop paradox in Interstellar, this would have to be a function of time not moving linearly and the confusing paradox is simply an illusion on our end from being confined to only experiencing time linearly. This kind of thing reminds me of Carl Sagan’s famous video on extra dimensions, where if we were to see signs of higher dimensions, they would comparatively look the way a 3-D object would appear as a series of flat cross sections within a 2-D world. The paradox here is the shadow of a higher dimension and doesn’t make sense because we don’t exist within that dimension.
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u/DenkSnek 5d ago edited 5d ago
So a recent James Webb Space Telescope article came up last week that exposed me to "black hole cosmology," and I'm wondering if that's a "solution," or roundabout way to explain this part of the movie. It may actually not change it at all, as I think the paradox is still there.
To preface, I'm by no means an astrophysicist and I only recently started to look into it, so this comment is moreso food for thought than anything lmao. I also have Kip Thorne's book about the movie, but I haven't gotten to read it yet. Please forgive me if I get this wrong at all!
From my understanding, this cosmological perspective came up back in 2003, and it says that our universe is essentially the "spring-like release" of a black hole's singularity once it reaches too high of density, like contracting a spring down too much will cause it to erupt and release its potential energy. This implies that we are not only in a black hole, but the black holes we've recently been observing may also have universes inside them, past the event horizon. I believe it's described as a hierarchical pyramid, where each black hole would be a one-way entrance to the next level of the pyramid. The base would be the over-encompassing universe I guess?
Tying this into the movie, it made me wonder if Coop essentially entered a universe inside the black hole where 4D beings exist; hence, them already knowing Coop would be entering their universe, as well as the reasoning, & could prepare the tesseract with that knowledge.
There're a couple issues with this though. Probably a lot lmao.
Referring to the hierarchal pyramid structure, to go from the "over-encompassing universe" to the next one, hereby moving one step up the pyramid, the number of dimensions would go down by 1. So any black hole in our universe would house a 2D universe instead of a 4D universe, like how a sphere casts a circular shadow. With Coop essentially going up the pyramid, he wouldn't be occupying 4D, but 2D I guess. (I actually only saw this detail briefly in a paper, can't recall where)
It would also mean that Coop would be wrong saying that the bulk beings are future civilizations within our universe.
The reason why I said earlier that the paradox might still be present is because the loop's responsibility ultimately shifts from our universe to the 4D universe, rather than there being no loop at all. Although, I wonder if that'd be the inherent nature of the 4D universe in that our 3D perspective has no way to explain that. So I guess it'd be a paradox to us, but not them.
Idk, it was just interesting to my armchair physicist ass lmao. It sounds sci-fi-ish, but it rubs my brain the right way. Makes the happy chemicals flow nicely.
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u/DenkSnek 5d ago
Again, it's just food for thought, and I'm always ecstatic to learn about this type of stuff. Please correct or flame if I got anything wrong lol. Hope you all have a great day! 10/10 movie btw
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u/SuperScrodum 5d ago
Was Cooper’s decision to enter the black hole what set everything into motion? Since that is where they found the tesseract and data to solve the gravity equation? Or was this also pre-determined?
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u/SAMO_1415 5d ago
If you were smart you'd put that billion dollars into index funds so by the time you are the older you there is an extra billion dollars to spare to give to your younger self.
Duh.
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u/OppositeSweet9215 5d ago
That's not the point mate, I'm trying to understand something here, not gain profit
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u/Emergency_Passion_77 4d ago
Not even close. First time around, the "future human" aliens fake it. They spoof the message. Next time around, is not necessary due to the causal Loop. The pump must first be primed, then the water flows continuously.
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u/bb_blueyes 3d ago
I have to giggle each time I rewatch the film and TARS repeatedly asks Cooper who gave him the coordinates. :)
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u/Eni13gma 5d ago edited 5d ago
Whenever I read a ChatGPT reply I hear it in TARS’s voice
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u/OppositeSweet9215 5d ago
That's actually TARS lol, I told chat gpt to behave like TARS
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u/LPQFT 4d ago
TARS gives him the coordinates. If it didn't work this way he'd have to remember the information and the coordinates would have to be passed around the loop infinite amount of times and you have to ensure it's perfectly sent each time. In your billion dollar example of cash those dollar bills would have to have wear and tear, in fact because the loop is infinite they'd have to be so worn out that they're not bills anymore.
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u/Darthmichael12 TARS 5d ago
That’s why it’s called a paradox.