Humanity has always been enamored with the stars. We look up at the night sky and see not just twinkling lights but distant worlds from the past and future. We see possibility itself. That’s why when NASA released the first images from the James Webb telescope last year, it nearly broke the internet. The images showed insight into the birth of stars and could even change the way we understand galactic history1. Who are we? Why are we here? We ask these aching questions to the vast void above. The stars wink at us in conspiratorial answer.
“This landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” speckled with glittering stars is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region called NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by NASA’s new James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth.
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI” (NASA Reveals Webb Telescope’s First Images of Unseen Universe)
Along with our fascination with cosmic space, we habitually pit the cosmos against Earth, our planet. We see this tension in Interstellar (2014), in which Earth is increasingly uninhabitable and humanity must find a new planet to call home. After all, the celestial elements are the same elements which make up life on Earth, and with the vastness of space, we are bound to discover at least one planet that has life-giving conditions. Cooper, played by Matthew McConaughey, says “Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.” Is this true?
Considering our survival is under threat from the irreversible collapse of Earth’s natural systems from climate change2, if we had the technology and resources to relocate to another planet, should we? If we follow the journey of Interstellar, what could we learn about our current ecological crisis and what it means to save humanity?
When I watched the film a few days ago, I was deeply moved but also unfulfilled. All the elements were there: human survival, ecological crisis, existential questions, and the grandiosity of the celestial. I know it’s a big ask, but the film didn’t quite speak on our intersecting ecological and social crises in the way that I yearned for. Of course, the film’s job was never to provide a solution for our times. Good art is never meant to prescribe solutions. However, it is the job of film and art to represent our stories, teach us about others, and inspire us. Interstellar was released around a decade ago. It also focuses on a technocratic white man’s perspective of humanity through the character of Cooper. It’s time to revisit the story of Interstellar and re-contextualize it to represent, teach, and inspire us in radically new ways.
Earth soil vs. Space rocks
To give a quick recap, Interstellar is set in 2067, America. Our main character Cooper is a retired space pilot and current farmer. When he and his daughter Murph discover the coordinates to a secret NASA base, Cooper is asked to pilot their mission to discover a new home for humanity.
Early on in the film, Cooper’s father-in-law Donald nags Cooper to “do his duty” for society and “repopulate.” Classic parental figure, pushing their children to make them grandchildren – except this hits differently as death hangs in the air. We don’t know what happened, but it seems that whatever caused the death of a large part of the population had something to do with their current ecological crisis: they’re living in a dust bowl. The soil is too loose and dry, leading to dust storms and making it impossible to grow food. In their difficulty growing food, most people are farmers. Among the fields of crops is a mood of despondency. These people are just trying to survive.
Cooper is discontented, restless. “It’s like we’ve forgotten who we are,” he says to his father-in-law. “Explorers, pioneers. Not caretakers.”
“When I was a kid,” Donald responds. “It felt like they made something new everyday. Some gadget or idea, like everyday was Christmas. But 6 billion people. Just try to imagine that. And every last one of them trying to have it all. This world isn’t so bad. You’re the one who doesn’t belong. Born 40 years too late or 40 years too early.”
In this exchange, Donald gives some explanation as to why the world is the way it is. “6 billion people trying to have it all,” he says, attributing their environmental degradation to overconsumption. (Our world is overconsuming as well; is a dust bowl in our future? Maybe, but it also depends on the region.3)
The dialogue above also tells us a lot about Cooper as a character. He’s smart, clearly, but discontented as a farmer. I empathize with Cooper in his restlessness and longing, but I also think he’s ignorant and narrow-minded. He thinks space exploration is more complex, noble, adventurous – greater in all regards – than farming. But the knowledge required to farm our soil is knowledge of vast worlds and galaxies, the galaxies of interacting species and dynamic ecosystems. The welcome destruction of asteroids colliding with planets, offering life-giving organic compounds, is the same welcome destruction of plants and animals in the soil. Death stepping into life. A seedling breaking through the crust to bare itself to the sun.
Cooper favors the knowledge of astronauts over the knowledge of farmers, and most of us do the same. In preferring certain types of knowledge over others, however, we become narrow minded and thus stuck in imaginative hypotheticals. Should we stop our destructive habits and stay on Earth, our planet, or shoot off into space to find a completely new planet? (One of those options saves a lot more people, is much safer, and takes up less resources)
When our hero discovered the secret NASA base – undercover because space exploration was considered taboo – these were the thoughts running through my mind. Earth and all of its life, or space and all of its possibilities?
“Don’t leave,” His daughter begs. She doesn’t see the point in him leaving. Cooper doesn’t even know when he’ll be able to come back, if he comes back. He drives off in tears. Cooper chooses the interstellar and leaves behind his children.
The thick blanket of space is like a blindfold. In the stars, we see what we long for, whether that’s safety, superiority, or something else. Space is so attractive because it is a mirror. Staring into the mirror, we ignore the pulsing life of soil beneath our feet, soil which we can feel and touch and smell.
Cooper as Icarus
Our hero and his team of scientists – experts in their individual fields – jet off into the wormhole. Their mission is to find one planet out of three potentially viable planets which might be our next home. What happens next is, in short, chaos. If you haven’t seen Interstellar in a while, it’s worth the rewatch (just be warned that you will cry).
After the first two out of three planets they visit endanger their lives and prove to be uninhabitable, only Cooper and Dr. Brand are left with a faulty spaceship, limited fuel, and their existential questions. Was their mission for nothing? What’s the point if they survive but their families – and the rest of humanity – doesn’t?
I thought their story would surely end in tragedy, Cooper dying like Icarus. There were too many similarities between the two characters: their intelligence, them escaping from danger, their overconfidence, and Cooper literally flying too high.
In this tragedy, Cooper’s ultimate moment would’ve been the moment he realized there was no way to survive nor get back to his children. Presently alive only because of a metal ship which would run out of fuel soon, he would’ve been faced with the reality of his loneliness. No other human being aside from Brand was in his vicinity for lightyears. He now sees the interstellar for what it really is: distant, cold, and lifeless.
Call me morbid, but there’s a satisfying truth to tragedy. It warns us what not to do. We shouldn’t, in our pride, look to the stars for an answer to our ecological crises. If Cooper had faced this tragic death, Interstellar would have encouraged us to think about staying on Earth. Climate change, the sixth mass extinction, and all of the threats to our human life? These problems are on Earth and we can’t just run away from them. Mankind was born on Earth, yes, and it was meant to thrive here.
Cooper didn’t die, and Interstellar is not a tragedy. While the story would’ve been more personally compelling to me as a tragedy, there’s an enlightening metaphor through what happens next.
The black hole is on Earth
Gargantua, the black hole which Miller’s and Mann’s planets orbit (Interstellar, 2014).
Gargantua is a massive, rapidly spinning black hole. Its gravitational pull forces two nearby planets into its orbit, and if you get too close to its center, you will be pulled into a point of infinite density.
Interstellar shows Cooper and the robot TARS sacrificing themselves into the black hole so that Dr. Brand could reach the last potentially inhabitable planet with their limited fuel. It was a Hail Mary pass, a classic last act of heroism for Cooper.
Cooper’s fall is excruciating. Pulled by the monstrous force of the black hole and pelted by debris, his ship begins to break down. He ejects from the ship. Floating, drifting, then falling. Falling fast into light that fractures into intersecting corridors. The tesseract. There, Cooper and TARS learned valuable information that they use to help the people on Earth escape.
Instead of dying, Cooper fell into something extremely valuable, changing the fate of his mission and the fate of humanity.
The real black hole isn’t lightyears away, not something only a few select people can access. Equally frightening and just as grand, the real black hole is on Earth. Our ecological and social issues are concentric circles which have collapsed in on themselves like the death of a star to form a black hole. Compelling all matter into its incomprehensible enigmatic center is the problem behind the Earth’s diagnoses, the problem which we try to articulate but cannot completely comprehend.
Scholars, activists, revolutionaries and people just trying to make sure their children stay alive, will tell you that our problem is a systemic problem. I’m sure you’ve heard of this before. The system is broken, and in fact it was broken to begin with.
You may have heard it articulated as a problem of our dominant economic system, capitalism. You may have heard it articulated as a problem of power; only a few people have absolute power over the masses. You may have heard it articulated as simply that our global human population is too large. The truth is, it is all of these and more. The problem we face is so dense and consuming that we are still attempting to articulate what the problem truly is. Observing it is futile; no light passes through a black hole. Calculations are met with dead-ends; its singularity is infinitely increasing. And when the black hole is on Earth, all of us are orbiting it or already inside of it.
We don’t need to be afraid of it. If the overlapping issues are together a black hole, we can take inspiration from Interstellar and fall into it. Rather than intellectualize the problem, we can sacrifice ourselves to the center of it. If we survive, we might gain access to the fifth dimension, time.
One of the main concerns I hear from scholars and activists is that we are running out of time. We are running out of time, and so what else is left but to despair? Everything we know is set to morph into a nightmare in the next decade. If you’ve ever seen those climate change countdown timers showing the exact amount of time we have left until 2030, then you know how disconcerting it is.4
But time is funny, if not relative. The distance between 1 and 2 is 1. However, there are an infinite amount of numbers between 1 and 2: 1.1, 1.11, 1.111, and so on. There are an infinite number of moments in a finite amount of time.
What if instead of thinking of our window as seven years, we thought of it as infinite? What if we could manipulate time like we manipulate space?
Is it crazy to think of time as a dimension that we may be able to access? In Interstellar, Cooper fell into a strange tesseract and could reach backward in time just by reaching out his hand. He theorizes that the tesseract he fell into was not made by extraterrestrial beings but by humans in the future who found a way to save their past selves. What if we could do the same thing?
It might be getting a bit too abstract at this moment, so let’s think of the fifth dimension as an abstract force, a thing, something we can create. It's an unknown, but we created it. If we got ourselves into this crisis, we can surely find a way to get ourselves out. The answer is to create.
Unlike Interstellar, falling into the problem, like falling into the black hole, is not something only one person must do. One person cannot save us all. We all have to willingly enter the center of the problem, despite the pain it inflicts on us. What we’ll learn and create, collectively, is what will save us all.
Future stories
Interstellar (2014) and other stories like it are a way to deal with our palpable anxiety at the doomsday declarations of climate change, plastic pollution, deforestation, and other interconnected trends. This anxiety is universal, so we find an outlet for it through storytelling.
I know storytelling through film has gained more depth in recent years. I’m excited to see what new stories sprout up from our existential anxiety that start conversations like these, especially from our marginalized but majority communities: women, BIPOC, LGBTQ+ folks, persons with disabilities, and others. Their perspectives are invaluable.
Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)
When it comes to our window of time, scientists say we must drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030. Not doing so would mean dire and ‘chain-reaction’ type consequences.