From a simple corn farm to a five-dimensional tesseract built by indescribable humans from the
far future, here's a breakdown of the perplexing timeline in "Interstellar" — relatively speaking.
The initial time period in human history that "Interstellar" explains in detail is the first
half of the 20th century. According to a series of dialogue bits throughout the movie, those few
decades were wracked by one global catastrophe after another — which according to school
teacher Ms. Kelly, came about largely because people in the 20th century were too wasteful.
Alongside economic collapse, an unnamed form of blight arose in this period,
killing off some crop staples entirely and leading
to devastating food shortages worldwide. As a result, Earth's many nations went to war,
one important enough to become almost all-consuming economically and socially.
"Yeah, well in my day people were too busy fighting over food to even play baseball"
Despite the overall crisis in which humanity remained for roughly three decades, it also made
a series of important scientific breakthroughs that ultimately led to its survival. In 2019,
NASA discovers a wormhole near Saturn, according to the Christopher Nolan-approved book "The
Science of Interstellar." Following that, the military invents the first A.I. — and
when the food wars end, they donate the remaining A.I. to NASA. Most importantly,
NASA sends probes through the wormhole and discovers 12 potentially habitable exoplanets.
In one of the opening scenes of "Interstellar," Cooper and his kids chase a wayward malfunctioning
drone, hoping to salvage its valuable solar cells. Cooper identifies it as an
Indian Air Force surveillance drone that has likely flown aimlessly for a decade.
"Delhi mission control went down, same as ours, 10 years ago."
Through that and other dialogue, we can confidently place the end of the food
wars roughly a decade before the present year when the movie starts. After that,
nations rededicated the vast majority of their resources to growing what crops still
remained, leading to an age of farming. For Cooper and his family, like so many others,
this decade was uneventful — aside from the increasing dust storms and blight.
Some of those few who weren't farming, however,
made massive jumps forward on behalf of all of humanity. During this time,
the secret remnant of NASA launched the first crewed missions beyond our solar system.
"The Lazarus Missions."
"Well that sounds cheerful."
Acting on information relayed from past probe missions,
12 NASA astronauts left Earth and entered the wormhole, each headed toward a different,
potentially habitable planet. Their fates are left unknown for years.
Given Christopher Nolan's confirmation that the wormhole was discovered in 2019 — which
Romilly in the film pinpoints as "48 years ago" — the present year when
"Interstellar" begins is 2067. At this point, a decade into the age of farming,
the surviving human population is in dire straits as the blight kills one crop after another.
"Wheat seven years ago, okra this year. Now there's just corn."
At this point, everyone's just hanging out drinking
corn beer or whatever it is, waiting for the end.
In fact, the situation is so bad that the United States's many universities have been
reduced to a few, small academies for the most gifted children only. That's why the
school principal tells Cooper that his son Tom is destined to become a farmer, and a farmer only.
Tom's sister Murph, on the other hand, is a gifted young woman with a passion for science,
which helps her detect and decode the anomalies
that occur in her room. These are the messages from Cooper in the future,
which you might have noticed are the beginning of the movie's potential time-travel paradox.
The anomalies manipulate and move objects in Murph's room,
using Morse code to send English words and binary to convey coordinates. Thanks to these messages,
Cooper and Murph find themselves at the nexus of their fate — NASA's
headquarters in the abandoned bunker that formerly housed NORAD.
"Something sent you here. They chose you."
"Well, who's 'they?'"
At some point in 2067, Cooper agrees to join NASA — mainly due to Professor Brand's persuasion and
Cooper's longstanding dissatisfaction with a life devoid of progress. He receives a tour of their
underground laboratories from Amelia Brand, the daughter of Professor Brand who's an exceptional
scientist herself. Cooper accepts their offer to pilot the Endurance, a ship whose mission is to
travel through the wormhole, review the data gathered by the 12 astronauts of the Lazarus
Missions, select the single best candidate for the next human home, and transmit the data back.
But let's back up some before we get ahead of ourselves. It only takes days to weeks after
Cooper's agreement to pilot the Endurance that the ship launches. Its crew is composed of Cooper,
Brand, Romilly, and Doyle, as well as the A.I. robots TARS and CASE.
"Everybody good? Plenty of slaves for my robot colony?"
"They gave him a humor setting."
The first stage of their mission is to reach the wormhole, which is still located near
Saturn. With the thruster technology they possess in 2067, the journey only takes
about two years — although it's long enough to warrant hyper-sleep for the human crew.
Upon waking in 2069, the crew of the Endurance enters the wormhole. Though the occasion is
momentous, the trip through the singularity takes only about a minute. Once through,
the crew assesses their options and chooses to investigate Miller's planet
first. This is where things start getting weird.
"We'll be waiting for you when you get back. A little older, a little wiser."
The expedition to Miller's planet is the first time in "Interstellar" that
the crew experience time dilation. Due to its close proximity to the black hole Gargantua,
every hour on Miller's planet equates to seven years on Earth.
"Go, go, go, go, go. Seven years per hour here, let's make it count!"
When the crew lands, they discover the source of the signal is merely
the wreckage of Miller's ship, with the explorer herself nowhere to be found. It
isn't long before the Endurance crew discovers the reason why: the planet's intense gravity,
brought about by Gargantua, ensures the water world is constantly wracked by
skyscraper-sized tidal waves. The crew's desperate escape incurs complications,
resulting in Doyle's death and leaving their overall time on the planet at around three hours.
But thanks to relativity, it was a lot longer for everyone else.
"Twenty-three years, four months, eight days."
That brings the date on Earth to 2092. Murph is now 35 and works with an aging Professor Brand at
NASA to figure out the equation to harness gravity. Tom, meanwhile, is 40, married,
has already lost a child to Earth's increasing dust storms, and is on track to lose another.
In terms of the amount of time that passed, the Endurance crew's expedition to Mann's world is one
of the least important pieces of the timeline. The crew doesn't spend long on Mann's world,
and because the time dilation factor between it and Earth is insignificant,
not much time passes on Earth, either.
In terms of story, though, it's pretty important.
On Mann's world, the crew finds Mann, wakes him from hyper-sleep,
and begins preparations to establish a colony on the planet's surface. But as his name implies,
Mann turns out to be a real jerk. He leaves Cooper for dead, Romilly is killed trying to access
Mann's booby-trapped A.I., and Mann attempts to hijack the Endurance. It doesn't go well for him.
On Earth, Professor Brand passes away,
leaving Murph the last member of NASA still attempting to solve the gravity equation.
Following the loss of Romilly and the irreparable damage to the Endurance, Cooper and Brand are
left alone in the craft with too little life support to return to Earth. The ship is also
slipping dangerously far into the unsurpassable gravitational pull of the black hole Gargantua.
After assessing their options, Cooper realizes that the only way forward is
to abandon any hope of returning to Earth and instead slingshot around Gargantua,
using the added momentum to reach the third of their three candidate planets,
Edmund's. But this comes at the cost of another massive time dilation.
"This little maneuver is going to cost us 51 years."
The slingshot is successful, but only after Cooper enacts his secret plan to jettison himself
and TARS from the Endurance. He begins falling toward the black hole, granting Brand and CASE
enough momentum to escape the gravitational pull and fly off toward Edmund's planet.
Though the first 2 hours and 20 minutes of "Interstellar"
are undoubtedly science-fiction, they stay within relatively basic
physical boundaries and are therefore easily digested by audiences at large.
Then, Cooper and TARS enter the black hole,
and the simple space exploration narrative becomes a little less linear.
To many fans and critics, the sequence veers a bit too far off course. Still,
whether you love it or hate it, it plays with time in some interesting ways, and ultimately
closes the loop on the "Interstellar" plot, both literally and figuratively.
Cooper and TARS survive their fall into the black hole and reach a kaleidoscopic space
known as the tesseract, in which time is represented as a physical dimension.
"They constructed this three-dimensional
space inside their five-dimensional reality to allow you to understand it."
"Yeah, that ain't workin'."
Nothing in the tesseract works the way an average person would expect it to,
but Cooper and TARS are smart enough to begin unraveling its mysterious mechanics. Cooper
manipulates the "strings" that line the space's physical surfaces, and in doing so,
is able to send messages to both young Murph and adult Murph. The anomalies that young Murph
encountered when she was 10 were the result of Cooper's time manipulation in the tesseract,
as was the data that adult Murph received which allowed her to finally crack the gravity equation.
After being ejected from the tesseract, transported back to our solar system,
and left adrift in space near Saturn, Cooper passes out. He wakes up on Cooper Station,
which he is amused to find out is named not after him, but Murph. The doctor at his bedside informs
him that he's 124 years old, which presumably puts the current year on Earth at about 2156. By this
point, humanity is completely spacefaring, having left Earth and filled the solar system with an
array of space stations — all of them apparently containing thousands to millions of people.
On the station, Cooper gets a glimpse of modern human life, which has time again for baseball and
no longer suffers from ever-intensifying dust storms. Cooper and Murph are finally reunited,
him just a few years older biologically and her around 90 years older. Unfortunately,
their reunion occurs just as Murph is about to pass away, but not before the two share
a heartfelt exchange in which Murph leaves Cooper with one final purpose: to find Brand.
We're given only the briefest glimpse of Brand before "Interstellar" ends, but it's clear that
Edmund's planet is as close to ideal as Earthlings could hope for. The air is breathable and the
temperature acceptable, allowing Brand to set up a series of buildings, presumably nurseries to raise
the thousands of fertilized ova kept onboard the Endurance for the purpose of population seeding.
All the clues in the movie point to 2156 as the year Cooper arrives on Cooper station.
But there's a hitch: if the slingshot around Gargantua began in 2092 and lasted 51 years,
thereby ending in 2143, we have 13 missing years to account for.
So where did that time go? There are some theories. For starters,
the film doesn't show the crew traveling between planets – months-long journeys
which inform their decision to visit Miller's planet in the first place.
"Dr. Mann's data is promising, right,
but it's going to take us months to get there. And Edmund's, it's even further."
Those journeys may not account for years, but it's helpful to remember that not every second is shown
on screen. Another plausible explanation is that Cooper experienced more time slippage when leaving
the tesseract, or possibly while inside the tesseract itself. In the end, it may be impossible
to pin down every exact year and date in "Interstellar" because of how much is left open to
interpretation, but fortunately that little detail doesn't lessen the, uh, gravity of the film.
"That's relativity, folks."