Interstellar: Our Responsibility to Our Species

Black Hole GARGANTUA from the movie

I’ve just watched Interstellar, again, for a second time. I remember the first time I watched it - I was young, maybe around 8 or 9 years old. I didn’t understand any of the larger plots or concepts the movie was trying to grasp, but I knew what I did like - the visuals. The most distinct to my underdeveloped brain was the image of Dr. Brand on the Endurance - reaching her hand out through space-time to Cooper, travelling through a black hole. The black-gold swirls, colliding, fighting the natural world - the orderly. Something that seemed to be displaced, unknown - yet was strangely beautiful - almost exotic. What a metaphor for the advent of science, such a visual. All of human knowledge, existence, identity, I believe is formed around a central desire to KNOW the unknown. To push forward in that darkness, to progress. In that same way, the swirls, the enormous demonstration of space - something that is fearful, terrifying, yet also magnificent, meant to be understood… that is what I remembered. Perhaps it wasn’t at the forefront of my mind throughout all these years, perhaps I’d forgotten the movie in itself even existed. But when I saw it had come unto Netflix, and watched it, it was that image that I reveled in the prospect of seeing once again, only older, and hopefully wiser.

And with that being said, I’d like to take the time to talk about the most beautiful concepts and ideas expressed through such a movie, in the context of pace travel. The first is the idea of death. What happens when we die - or at the very least, about to die? What happens in our final moments, when our body understands very well that the ensuing moments could the the very last ones we spend, ever? Do we accept or fate, make peace with it? Do we try to enjoy the last moments we have? Or do we fight, desperately, even if it’s impossible for us to change the outcome? I think that our civility argues that we would take the former. As a “civil” human being, we should be accepting of the society that houses us - we should die with peace. Yet, Dr. Mann abandons all civility instead… he tries to murder Cooper, take control of the Endurance, and essentially maroon his three comrades on a planet with little-to-no hope for survival. It’s interesting to see the transition of a man who was so believing in the mission, so believing in creating a new life - even if it meant sacrificing those on Earth, eroded by how dire his situation truly was. Cooper calls him a “coward” for this -  Dr. Mann calls it a “survival instinct.”  Truth be told, Dr. Mann only did what anyone would have done. If you knew that you were going to die, alone, on a random planet, uninhabitable, foreign. No matter what you may have told yourself going into things, no matter how believing you were in SOCIETY over the individual -you become reduced to one man, living for himself. To some extent it shows that humans are at their base - selfish. Maybe that’s a good OR a bad thing… it has its pros and cons. Will our selfishness be our undoing, as was the case for Dr.Mann? After all, ultimately it was his own actions that got him killed due to the imperfect locking on the Endurance… or does our need for self-preservation prove to be a blessing despite its cons? Should we value ourselves or our species, first? The movie, of course, takes the latter opinion; we are left with an image of humanity thriving, pushing onwards, because of Cooper’s actions favoring humans as a whole. He sacrificed himself for such a reason - and it’s proved to work out. Should we apply that motto: “The good of the group” to our own living - no matter what? Perhaps it’s not so simple… segregation, gay-rights, racial discrimination… if we were all just told to agree with society, there would be no change… the problems would be met with no solution. So then, what must we do?