What if the coordinates of NASA were not sent?

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I haven't seen this answered yet so here goes...In Interstellar, what if Cooper never sent the coordinates to himself? When he's in the tesseract, he surely remembers receiving the coordinates of NASA. But suppose he never sends the coordinates...how would he get to the tesseract in the first place? At the moment of his decision, would he be instantly transported back to his home before the message (is never) sent?



Best Answer

The time travel logic of Interstellar follows the Novikov self-consistency principle (which physicist Kip Thorne, associated with the movie, did work on). Different time travel stories handle the logic of time travel in different ways. Consider the grandfather paradox, where you go back in time and kill your grandfather. In some stories, it's possible for you to kill you grandfather, but as soon as you do it you'll disappear. (I think in "Back to the Future Marty McFly starts to disappear when he makes changes to the lives of his parents.) In other stories, you can kill your grandfather, but then when you go back to the present no one will remember you, since you were never born. (That's similar to the plot of "It's a Wonderful Life.")

But my favorite kind of time travel stories, which include Lost and Interstellar, are the ones that don't have this kind of inconsistency, where it's impossible for you to time travel and do something that would logically make it so that you would have never gone back in time in the first place. Instead, you simply cannot go back in time and kill your grandfather: the very fact that you are alive means that one way or another, your grandfather is guaranteed to survive. So no matter what you try to do, you won't kill your grandfather, because the fact that you exist means that you didn't succeed in killing him. There is only one timeline, and all events, whether past, present or future have already taken place, whether you know about them or not. So you can only cause your past to happen (like save your grandfather's life), you can never change your past.

So the fact that Cooper received the coordinates implies that he DID send the coordinates. So the answer to your question "what if the coordinates were not sent" is simply "then he wouldn't receive the coordinates, and thus he would never have reached the tesseract." So Cooper didn't and couldn't have changed his past, he did cause his past to happen: it was his actions in the tesseract that caused him to go into the tesseract in the first place.

The Novikov self-consistency principle, by the way, is also crucial to understanding the movie as a whole. The aliens (revealed to be humans from the future) knew that Cooper's daughter Murphy was destined to save the human race. So they caused the past to happen: they set up a tesseract so that Cooper would go into it and convey the information (i.e. the quantum data) Murphy needed in order to save the human race. It's not that the human race originally perished but the humans from the future saved them; it's that the future humans brought about the events which they knew had already happened.

And also, this is more speculative but it's strongly implied that love is not just a product of evolutionary accident, but rather the future humans were the ones who were responsible for humans having love. And yet at the same time, the reason that the future humans are helping their past ancestors so much is out of love for their forbears. So they are giving their ancestors love, and they're doing it out of love! Novikov's self-consistency principle strikes again!




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Why did Cooper send NASA coordinates?

Now in the teseract Cooper initially wants Murph to stay in the room, so he sends the message of STAY. When he realises that what has happened in the past cannot be changed, then he wants to save the future of mankind. That is why he sends the location of NASA to his past self.

Who gives the coordinates in interstellar?

Murph has been the chosen one to save humanity, but Cooper is the one chosen to help engineer it. He sends the coordinates to himself at the farmhouse to NASA, then the data from the black hole through TARS via Morse Code to a wristwatch he gave Murph before he left, which is the gravity equation.

What would happen if Cooper stayed?

When a strip of copper is kept immersed in a solution of silver nitrate, the solution will gradually become blue and a shining greyish-white deposit of silver metal is seen on the copper strip.

How did Murph save the world in interstellar?

Murph's equation enables creation of wormholes, control of atmosphere around space objects (creation of mini planets with atmosphere) , creation of inverse gravity space station as seen at end of film, lifting of huge mass from the earth, i.e. cheap space travel without fuel.



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Answer 2

I thought a lot about this and becuase he already sent himself the coordinates (before he goes). I personally think him not sending the coordinates it would break the loop and return to the original loop which earth and everyone on it dies (but that's just my thoughts).

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