Interstellar — Lessons in Very Human Science
Science Fiction Tackles Behavioral Science and Feedback
Science Fiction has been the creative arm of science for a very long time. Long before the term futurist regained popularity and perhaps as far back as science itself. It comes with a giant grain of salt. It is fiction after all. The 2014 movie Interstellar requires a lot of salt, but it is a fun and thoughtful movie none-the-less.
Interstellar tackled three major areas of new and continuing science; the physics of black holes, the complexity of feedback systems, and the most mysterious of them all — behavioral science. Spoiler alerts — this article is not about tackling the truths and absurdities of black hole physics. If you haven’t seen the movie, we are going to spoil the plot.
Feedback
Taking for granted dystopian agrarian Earth, the existence of an interstellar wormhole, and some very confusing recursive time loops; Interstellar launches into a very practical issue — Feedback. Unlike “big data”, the term is not really used in the movie (it is a common enough phrase that it may have slipped in). It is however the core of the plot.
Whether it is heart-wrenching one way communication from home (never really explained well), the irregular and time warped feedback from the first wave of explorers, or the more structured feedback parameters programmed into the robot crew on board the spaceships — feedback is everywhere. It is a major challenge and a major obstacle for the crew. As the plot comes to climax, this obstacle only grows and crosses into the 5-dimensional world of black hole physics… but I digress.
Behavioral Science
Feedback is at the heart of any enterprise and any expedition. But let’s address the behavioral science component before we continue.
Enter the Mann. Matt Damon was not given top billing in this movie. For those not plugged into all the movie feedback, his arrival was a surprise. His role portraying “the best of us” provided a bit of a chuckle. His later descent was all too predictable for students of feedback, but well played by those who cast this movie. I may be a little bias though — I saw The Martian first.
The Mann, “the best among us”, the guy who convinced everyone to go on a likely suicide mission to the stars, falls victim to the human survival instinct and feedback. It is truly a classic tale, although one humans love to forget outside the halls of science fiction. In truth, the movie had been steering us this way from the inception (no, not the movie). We had already seen how the schools, NASA, and the “role model” Dr. Brand had manipulated information and feedback.
The movie also does an excellent job challenging the biases of our two protagonists Cooper and Brand (the daughter). It is interesting how honest they both were with their own flaws and sensitivity to time lags — but no one thought to challenge either in the case of the first two test sites.
In A Game Of Rochambeau (Rocks, Paper, Scissors)…
Human behavior tends to trump feedback, or at least distort it. Granted the ease with which the Mann disabled his robot companion and hacked the “big data” is a little suspect. His willingness to “simply push the button” was far more predictable, even for “the best of us”. Humans have been dealing with feedback since… well, long before science or science fiction, even accounting for recursive time loops and five dimensional space-times. They will always hack the system.
In our game, robot space marines trump humans. In my mind, TARS was the real hero of this story. His algorithms saved the day (err, the time) on many occasions. Reality makes him a metaphor for science (today), perhaps artificial intelligence (in the future). Science (as a discipline) can trump human base instincts, while it will likely never change them.
What may be most disappointing about this movie was how little science (outside the robot marines) played a role in the day-to-day actions of our team of scientists. They retrieved the data. They hacked the data. But only one guy seemed to use the data (Romilly) and only because he had nothing better to do for 23 years! The best we got was the dramatic actions in the black hole to transmit the data. Though I suppose Murphy did finally use it.
Interstellar was an entertaining movie. It was an interesting lesson of feedback and human behavior. It is also intriguing what it might have been before the final edits. Thanks for reading!
