Interstellar Part 3: Chris didnāt science properly
When doing proper serious sci-fi, the kind where your story must be somewhat plausible, you have to get both your science and your engineering correct. Interstellar again fails in this area. I now present to you every scientific or engineering failure I noticed in Interstellar. Some are nitpicks, some are serious plot holes. 1. The blight is not a sufficiently dire catastrophe to abandon Earth. Which sounds easier to you? Find a way to kill or foil the blight, or go to another galaxy via some wormhole you found that may or may not have any habitable worlds within reach? If your answer is to fight or foil the blight, then congratulations, you chose correctly. There are a number of ways in which the blight could be combated, including finding an agent that can neutralize it, using genetic engineering to develop crops resistant to it, just growing crops indoors, and a great many other ways. The movie never mentioned any of these. This complaint is a big one, since it undermines the main conflict of the entire film. 2. Coop seeing lines of force in the dust being blown into his daughters bedroom should make him conclude that itās electro-magnetism heās dealing with, not gravity. He should be doubly convinced by the fact that the same phenomenon caused both a drone and a bunch of automated harvesters to malfunction. A small gravitational distortion will not cause electronics to malfunction, but strong magnetic fields interfering with their compasses will. If it does make Coop conclude gravity is the force heās dealing with, the audience should be informed as to why this is. 3.The star system Coop and his fellow astronauts visited on the other side of the wormhole shouldnāt have formed any planets owing to the fact that it has two gravity wells that are likely to rip apart any planet sized body caught between them, given enough time. 4. The tidal effects on the first world they saw should have been anticipated, and they should have written it off immediately as too dangerous, and not worth landing on at all. It wonāt be habitable, write it off your list immediately. 5. For the sort of gravity-derived time dilation shown in the film to take place, the astronauts would need to be considerably closer to that black hole, close enough to be caught in its gravity well, in fact.
6. The drone seen near the beginning is described as solar powered, when it has no solar panels on it and clearly has a jet engine. It is jet powered Coop, you blind goof. 7. Why did the future humans give us a wormhole that led to a star system without any habitable worlds in it? Are they just a bunch of assholes who want us to fail and die out? 8. Why did the astronauts spend so much time debating which planet to go to? Itās fairly simple to figure out which ones are your best bet. Find the Goldilocks zone of the parent star, and look for earth-sized rocky planets there. You will have at most 2 choices, and you wonāt need to land on them initially to figure out whether or not they are worth a look. 9. Why didnāt NASA send unmanned probes through the wormhole to have a look at what is on the other side? The job they gave their first group of astronauts (go and have a look at whatās habitable, signal back what you found) is something an unmanned probe can do for around 1/10th the cost. That way you can save your resources for Coopās mission.
