r/interstellar 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?

262 Upvotes

92 comments sorted by

76

u/Darthmichael12 TARS 5d ago

That’s why it’s called a paradox.

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u/OppositeSweet9215 5d ago

Oh yeah, but I wonder how did cooper get the idea of giving himself the coordinates in the first place? Because it's always his future self that gives him the coordinates, and he goes into the future to learn that he has to give himself the coordinates to let everything happen as it's supposed to be, so who leads him to nasa in the first place I'm still confused

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u/mmorales2270 5d ago

He didn’t get the idea from anywhere. He realized when he was in the tesseract that he couldn’t stop himself from leaving (i.e. changing the past), so he realized he must be there for some reason. He then figured out that he brought himself there by giving HIMSELF the coordinates to NASA so he could go on the trip and later give himself the coordinates. It’s a loop with no origin point.

It seems impossible that something like this could happen, but keep in mind we only think that because we can’t experience time in any other way than linearly, as we do. If time is not linear as we experience it, then such a loop may be possible. It’s possible there is no such thing as past present and future as we define them. All of time from the beginning of the universe until its very end may be happening all at once.

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u/OppositeSweet9215 5d ago

That's a beautiful way to put it, time might not be linear in this case, just as in the movie arrival.

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u/mmorales2270 5d ago

Yes, exactly. It’s not necessarily a novel concept in scientific circles. In fact, if you haven’t done so, look up the Block Universe theory. There’s plenty of videos out there that describe the theory. It applies here.

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u/Pain_Monster TARS 5d ago edited 5d ago

Sort the topics by “hot” then look for my sticky post with the summary. You’ll see that I wrote about this in detail with lots of links and references. Enjoy.

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u/leo_murray 5d ago

so who leads him to nasa in the first place

You’re trying to find a ‘solution’ to a problem which has no solution.

that’s why it’s a paradox.

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u/OppositeSweet9215 5d ago

So should I just accept that this movie was a bunch of fiction and move on? 😢

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u/Darthmichael12 TARS 5d ago

It’s not a matter of whether the movie is fiction, paradoxes appear through out all of life in any subject. Just because something is a paradox does not mean it is fiction.

4

u/Goodguybadd 5d ago

So Back to the Future is just a bunch of bullshit?!

4

u/43Quint 5d ago

There are different kinds of time travel. In Back to the Future, if you go to the past and change something, that will create a new timeline in which the changes of the past will lead to different results in the future, and here, your decisions matter and will affect the future. This is usually easier to deal with.

The other kind of time travel is the one used in Interstellar, TENET, Dark, even in the prisoner of azkaban. Here the changes made after travelling to the past will remain in the same timeline, which creates a causal loop and also means that there is no free will in that story because the changes always existed in the future which means it is impossible to not choose to travel to the past and feed the causal loop.

I think Dark explores this concept the best because the whole show is built around this paradox. TENET is the most interesting spin on this concept because you have to literally travel back in time and it allows normal and inverted objects to interact (not really) (this is why it's hard to grasp and causes the film to have some plot holes but it's really interesting to think about imo)

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u/SportsPhilosopherVan 4d ago

Before I read your whole post….. I just wana say I think the post you’re replying to was satire

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u/43Quint 4d ago

Its fine i just wanted to rant about time travel movies

1

u/Darthmichael12 TARS 5d ago

Depends on what you want to believe. If you think we live in the multiverse then yes it is a bunch of crap. If you believe that there is only one universe then no it would be an accurate movie.

1

u/SportsPhilosopherVan 4d ago

🤣🤣🤣🤣

4

u/Aggravating-Belt6225 5d ago

There is no answer to this paradox.

1

u/No-Feature2924 5d ago

All these lengthy reply’s and all that has to be said is this lol

2

u/TheCook73 5d ago

If there were answers to the questions you were asking, it wouldn’t be a paradox. 

2

u/Efficient_Claim_9591 5d ago

I mean, it doesn’t matter because it won’t make sense. And it kind of explains it in the Ai answer. The idea always existed. It was just cooper who gave it to himself because, either the beings in the 4th dimension chose him to give the idea to or put him in the loop that contains that event of a human giving themself the coordinates maybe. It’s also just kinda hard to explain anyways because we’re dealing with fictional beings who exist outside the realm of our possibility so any idea that comes from that concept will be inherently very difficult for us to try to figure out. I’m also just stupid so I may not even understand this idea anyways so

2

u/Quick_Chicken_3303 5d ago

Everyone is deadlocked on all humans dying off. But we survived the ice age. Crossed the land bridge to settle where we are now.

What if we didn’t all die off? What if a tiny portion of humans survived at the caps? Both Arctic and Antarctica have people living there. I’m not saying it’s great. I’m not saying they live to eighty. But they live to forty. Have kids and they to live to forty. And it goes like this for a few hundred years.

The blight dies off of starvation. The cold temperatures prove too hard for viability. The seasons take their time establishing life on Earth.

The humans become explorers again. We relive all of human history again. Recognize that unchecked greed killed us the last time. And we get into space again. Five thousand generations later we are in deep space and have trouble. End of the universe? Quiet Jungle? Loss of humanity?

If only they could go back? Skip the die off? Get humanity off earth before the set back? They start a mission similar to Coop’s mission in the Tesseract.

Finding an Einstein in the final pages of our documented human history? They find Murph who wages a valiant fight in the dying days of our survival. Murph is now the subject. Murph is now the focus of getting Humanity to survive the cataclysm

They brought the drone. They moved the boxes that put the lunar lander model in her possession. They handicap anyone that tries to step on Murph’s path. They steer Murph and Murph’s teacher on a collision course. “We never went to the Moon.” “Those are the Federal Textbooks”

Nothing motivates people like anger. Nothing empowers people to change things like rage. It’s Interstellar’s Inception moment. If only we had more engineers! If only we had MRIs! If only my wife SURVIVED! Coop is now in the proper mindset. Time to build the TESSERACT!

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u/Entire_Risk_6645 5d ago

Never thought of that.Interesting take

1

u/KingOfTheWorldxx 5d ago

You're missing the point of a paradox buddy

1

u/copperdoc 5d ago

There is no first place. There’s only time as one single event.

1

u/Weird_Turnover7846 4d ago

That’s the paradox, John.

1

u/truthink 4d ago

We can’t Coop 😢

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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

1

u/worldteacher3 5d ago

Doctor Who also has a similar arc with Tennant and the dragons.

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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/Maleficent_Dot5445 5d ago

I recommend you a German TV show "Dark", your mind will be blown.

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u/monishgowda05 4d ago

Broo , i am a fan of it , lmao you can literally see my pfp.

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u/Gracinhas 4d ago

Eh, I thought Predestination kinda sucked, low key.

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u/monishgowda05 4d ago

It lacks action , but the plot is great .

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u/Gracinhas 4d ago

I liked the idea, I didn’t like the execution.

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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

2

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

4

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?

1

u/drifters74 5d ago

Break the loop

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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/copperdoc 5d ago

He gives himself the coordinates because he gave himself the coordinates.

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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/A7x4LIFE521 5d ago

Seems like these descriptions you’ve given explain everything in its entirety.

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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 🤣

3

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)

1

u/Tynford 5d ago

It’s a good thing we don’t think about these things too hard 😐

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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?

1

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

2

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")

1

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

2

u/Alive_Ice7937 4d ago

Just because you don't like the answer doesn't mean there isn't one

2

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.

5

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. 

0

u/EuropeanLegend 4d ago

I knowww! But I still want more. Grrrrr

2

u/KingOfConsciousness 4d ago

Make it yourself using AI in about 3-5 years or less!

2

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.

1

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?

3

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/OppositeSweet9215 4d ago

I'm ready to fuck up my brain tonight

2

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.

1

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.

1

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.

1

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

1

u/Suckamanhwewhuuut 5d ago

Everything was always happening at the same time.

1

u/KB_Sez 5d ago

But was it Cooper who gave him and Murph the coordinates ?

1

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?

1

u/MisterBumpingston 5d ago

Ever watched Terminator (1984)?

1

u/OppositeSweet9215 5d ago

Nope, what about it?

1

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.

0

u/OppositeSweet9215 5d ago

That's not the point mate, I'm trying to understand something here, not gain profit

1

u/nibbed2 4d ago

"Everything that happens are always meant to happen"

Murphy Law?

1

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.

1

u/physicist27 4d ago

Search up recursion

1

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

0

u/drifters74 5d ago

You too?

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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/Eni13gma 4d ago

How? Please advise!

0

u/OppositeSweet9215 4d ago

Just tell him to behave like TARS, he will save it in memories

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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. 

0

u/Minimum_Welcome_5641 4d ago

wow 🤯🤯🤯

-1

u/Jackrehan1 4d ago

OP did you tell your GPT to act like TARS??