"Humans are natural born explorers." "We charge into uncharted territory and seek out the unknown." "We've mapped nearly every inch of Mother Earth.." "..and left tracks on the Moon." "But to set foot on another planet, to travel beyond our solar system, that is a dream for the future." "A dream that comes to life in the feature film Interstellar." "We must think not as individuals, but as a species." "We must confront the reality of interstellar travel." "The film Interstellar deals with the quest for new worlds and the faith of humanity." "Sound like the stuff of science fiction?" "Maybe." "But the foundations of this film are rooted in real science, thanks to the involvement of a renowned astrophysicist Kip Thorne." "In Interstellar, one of the most important features is the way that science is totally embedded in the film." "There is some wild things in here." "Beyond fantasy and fiction, this is the real science of Interstellar." "Space travel has been a staple of the movies from the very beginning, but the feature film Interstellar has a unique pedigree." "It was inspired in part by the work of Kip Thorne, an authority on astrophysics, gravitational waves and the warping of spacetime, he is also an executive producer on the film." "In Interstellar, real science was built into the fabric of the film from the outset." "The other major players in this film, they all respected the science and they worked with me to see if the science was well incorporated." "Can you tell me what the... the easiest definition of what a singularity is?" "Kip and myself meshed well in terms of trying to use current thinking, current scientific understanding to drive the narrative" "It lies in between, this is a place where curvature of space and time gets infinitely high." "So we're good, okay." "And we just hope that the research that we've done and the conversations that I'd had over the years with Kip and that Chris had had with Kip informed the narrative, and that the audience would feel that." "Why simply imagine, fantasize about things that might happen in space or an interstellar journey?" "Why not actually look at the real science there?" "It's an Indian surveillance drone!" "Interstellar takes place in the future where living conditions on Earth threaten the survival of humanity." "Now you need to tell me what your plan it is to save the world." "We're not meant to save the world, we're meant to leave it." "One of the things that the film explores is do we belong on Earth and should we be staying on Earth, and if there is anything else that there should we be exploring there." " Here we go." "In the film the crew seeks a new place to call home." "A planet that can sustain life." "Human life." "We're not gonna to make it!" "Yes you are." "Sounds like a job for the explorers of tomorrow." "But the search for another Earth is happening right now." "Astrophysicist Natalie Bataglia is a passionate planet hunter." "you think the only way that we're really going to really understand our place in the galaxy is by looking at this broad picture and understanding the diversity of all planets." "20 or 30 years ago we didn't know of any other planets orbiting normal stars like our own Sun." "Natalie has helped rewrite that story as a misison scientist for NASA's Kepler space telescope" "Kepler's objective is very simple: it's to determine the fraction of stars in our galaxy that harbour potentially habitable oversized planets." "And what makes a planet potentially habitable?" "The one ingredient that we think is common to all life forms is this requirement of liquid water." "So that's why we look for planets that have rocky surfaces where water can pool and that are receiving the right amount of energy from the star where the water wouldn't be locked up in a frozen state because the planet is so cold, nor would" "it be evaporated away because the planet is too hot." "We call it the Goldilocks zone, where liquid water could potentially exist." "Launched in 2009, Kepler stared at one small patch of the Milky Way for four years straight." "Compared to stars, planets are too tiny for Kepler to spot... but it can detect their shadows." "Every planet orbiting an illuminous object is casting a shadow out into space and the Kepler spacecraft makes use of that fact." "Waiting for a planet in it's orbit about the star to pass directly between the disc of the star and the spacecraft, and the telescope perceives that as a dimming of light." "This simple method has revealed 1000's of exoplanets." "Planets orbiting other stars in our galaxy." "What we've learned so far is that literally every star in our galaxy has at least one planet." "There is an amazing diversity of exoplanets out there and we've found very exotic worlds." "200 lightyears away there is a Saturn sized planet orbiting not one, but two stars." "So if you were living on a world like" "Kepler-16b, you would see in the sky two stars rising in the east setting in the west, continuously changing position as they orbit one another." "This is an artist rendition of the planet Kepler-10b, it's orbiting 23 times closer to its parent star than Mercury is to our own Sun." "So this star-facing side is just being blasted by this stellar radiation." "Creating temperatures in excess of that required to melt iron." "The planet has an entire hemisphere larger than the Pacific Ocean, which is an ocean, but it's not an ocean of water." "It's an ocean of molten lava." "Not an attractive destination." "But Kepler recently found as a possible second home." "This is an artist concept of the Kepler-186 planetary system." "Five planets orbiting this M-type star and the outermost planet is Kepler-186f." "Our first discovery of an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of a normal star." "When I think about Kepler-186f, I try to imagine it as a real place because it is a real place." "We know that it could be rocky, same size as Earth so I do imagine a rocky surface..." "We don't know that it has a liquid ocean, but we can certainly imagine one." "And then, all of a sudden in your imagination you eternalize the existence of this world out there, that there is a place that could be very, very much like Earth." "So, when do we set sail for these distant shores?" "Reality check." "Kepler-186f is nearly three quadrillion miles (~4.8 quadrillion km) from Earth." "Otherwise put five hundred light years away." "That's a journey 500 years at the speed of light." "But no thing can travel as fast as light." "At best, our spacecrafts are thousands of times slower." "Even the spaceships in Insterstellar don't come close." "So how do they reach new worlds beyond our solar system?" "They take a walk on the warp side of space and time." "The science of Interstellar" "You have no idea when you're coming back." "Couldn't you have told her you were going to save the world?" "No." "I'm coming back." "When we journey to a far off place we travel not just in space but also in time, as we move into the future." "Until about a century ago scientists believed that space and time were entirely separate." "Theoretical physicist Sean Caroll explains how Albert Einstein overturned that idea." "One of Einsten's great insights was that space and time were related to each other, where you had space and you had time, Einsten says: "Actually, there's only one thing which we call spacetime."" "And then he says" ""this spacetime thing, it's not just the stage on which all the action plays out." "It's an act for itself."" "Spacetime can change, it can move, it can bend and it can warp." "Einstein's theory of relativity states that spacetime is like a flexible fabric." "The objects embedded in it: the Sun, planets, even us, warp that fabric." "And the consequence of that warping is what we call gravity." "The more massive the object, the more spacetime is warped and the greater the gravity." "We feel gravity." "The flexibility of spacetime is harder to grasp on a gut level but it's effects are measurable." "As Sean demonstrates, the greater the gravity, the more slowly time flows." "For example, if I were on the ground floor with a clock, a super accurate atomic clock, and a twin of mine was up on the top floor of the building with an equally accurate atomic clock," "if we later on compared them, mine would've ticked off fewer seconds." "On the gorund floor, Sean experiences slightly more gravity than his twin on the top floor." "He also experiences slightly less time than his twin." "The difference is tiny, but real." "And there are practical applications." "For example, the GPS system is a very, very precise set of clocks on satellites orbiting around the Earth." "and that orbit is in a slightly different gravitational field than we are in down here so the fact that time moves differently here on the surface of the Earth than in the satellite orbit, is very very important to getting the GPS to work correctly." "Time on a GPS satellite clock advances faster than the clock on Earth by about 38ms per day, so the system's computers correct for that." "Motion also affects our experience of spacetime." "The best way to say this just staying still means that you experience the most time that you can." "Moving around and doing things means you experience less time." "Let's revisit Sean at the wheel of his car and his twin on a park bench." "If you move out of your car, and then you come back, compared to the person who stayed behind your clock that you took with you on that journey will have experienced a little bit less time than the one who stayed behind." "We normally move too slowly to notice the effect." "But if Sean could drive near the speed of light, he could race across the USA and back again a million times and experience less than a second of time, while the twin he left behind would endure hours of waiting for Sean's return." "In other words, Sean would've travelled into the future compared to his twin." "This means things may get tricky in years to come, as we build faster spaceships." "The closer we get to the speed of light, the more out of sync we'll become with those we leave behind." "But the warping of spacetime may also provide shortcuts that could make interstellar travel a snap." "Wormholes: they're a staple of science fiction, but they're based on real science." "Einstein's relativistic laws govern the warping of space and time and they say that wormholes might exist, they could exist." "So this dates all the way back to 1916." "The wormhole's a particular way that space and time can be curved." "It's like adding a little tube that connects two parts of space." "The basic idea is that if you're an ant, and you live on the surface of the apple, the surface of the apple is your entire universe." "You can go around the outside through the universe itself, or you can go through the wormhole." "But Einstein's equations also predict that if wormholes do form in nature, they may be sub-atomic in size and exist for only fractions of a second before closing off." "Theoretically, what would it take to keep a wormhole open and make it big enough to acommodate a spaceship." "It turns out that in order to pull the wormhole open so it doesn't crunch off and kill you when you try to go through, then you have to have the wormhole threaded by a negative mass or negative energy, Einstein says mass and energy are equivalent." "Almost all the forms of matter we know have positive mass and exert gravity." "Negative mass would exert anti-gravity and repel the walls of a wormhole to keep it open." "Strangely, it is true that negative energy can exist, and it's been created in the laboratory but only in very tiny amounts." "It would take vast quantities to prop open a wormhole big enough for a spaceship," "But just maybe, in the future, engineers will devise advanced technologies to do just that." "Today's it's an educated guess, maybe I should say a half-educated guess, that wormholes can not exist in our universe, but we're far from sure of that." " The truth is, we just don't know right now." "We don't understand the laws of physics well enough to say for sure wether or not wormholes are possible." "But since they're not impossible, they're fair game for a filmmaker." "I was very excited about the idea of focusing on a family who would be the pioneers, who would experience some of the extraordinary features of astrophysics, particularly the idea of a wormhole that would allow us to travel to distant stars." "To create a wormhole based on real science, visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin turned to Kip Thorne." "The topolar image of what a wormhole might look like is literally just a hole in space." "Generally it sits on an invisible surface, you can see stuff sliding down the sides and disappearing down the drain as it were." "And right in that first conversation Kip showed me an image of that kind of classical fantasy image of these things and said "This is all wrong!"" ""This is not how it is."" "Kip worked out the scientific equations that define the wormhole and sent it to Paul's animators in London." "And so for the movie I built a mathematical model wormhole based on Einstein's relativity equations." "Paul, Kip and myself, we discussed "Okay, we'll visualize the hole, we'll simulate it exactly as your calculations say."" "And Paul Franklin and his team, they were thrilled to get algorithms that were the latest, most interesting and up to the minute." "Now we go to the other one." "The wormhole is a three-dimensional hole in space, and what do you get if you take a circle, sweep it out in three dimensions?" "You get a sphere." "So the wormhole almost feels like a crystal ball hanging in space." "I don't think anybody ever really done this kind of visualization before." "This is really unique." "First time for me, as well as for you and the audience." " Absolutely, yes." "In Interstellar, crew members take a giant leap of faith when they plunge into a wormhole" "You can't just think about your family, now you have to think bigger than that." "I am thinking about my family and millions of other families." "Beyond that wormhole, the crew will enter the realm of the most extreme objects in the universe:" "black holes." "From Earth, the starry sky may seem a realm of timeless calm." "But when we aim our most advanced tools at the universe, they capture displays of monstruous power and violence." "Galaxies collide, cosmic clouds of gas and dust spew radiation." "Stars explode and die." "For a filmmaker, space is full of dramatic possibilities." "When you venture out into a story about a man against the elements, when that journey is interstellar, the possibilities for visualizing the threat against our protagonist become very much more exotic." "Deep, deep space gives you a very fresh approach." " Exactly." "One of the greatest challenges for a crew on an interstellar voyage will be to nagivate the dangers of black holes." "Black holes were predicted by Einstein's equations, but physicists question wether they could really exist." "The black hole is a strange beast." "If this were a black hole, then instead of a rubber surface it would have a surface that is made of absolutely nothing except warped space and time." "It's a place where gravity is so strong that if anything falls into the black hole, it can never get back out." "If you fall in, you can't send signals back out, light can't get out from the interior." "See, you might ask: how did that ever happen?" "In outer space you can get so much mass together like in a super-massive star, that the gravity does become stronger and stronger and stronger, and eventually the pressure that matter exerts on itself can't keep up." "And everything collapses, there's a big explosion, some of the stuff is blown away but the rest of it collapses into a black hole." "A black hole that spins on its axis drags the very space around it into a whilring motion that pulls stars and planets into orbit." "Closer in, gravity increases like a riptide." "At a boundary called the event horizon the gravity becomes so extreme that nothing can escape being pulled into the heart of the beast and lost forever." "Black holes are simple, and yet they have a lot of character." "It's almost like they can take on personalities, umm, they can be picky eaters, they can be energetic." "And what you're seeing and describing is really how the black hole interacts with the environment." "UCLA astronomer Andrea Ghez is an expert on black hole detection." "She played a key role investigating what had long been a scientific hunch." "That a huge black hole lives at the centre of the Milky Way." "It's looking good." "Astronomers knew the heart of our galaxy was buzzing with gas, dust and millions of stars." "Some powerful force appeared to be driving this hubbub." "Could it be a black hole?" "Ground telescopes just couldn't produce sharp images of the region, when the technique called adaptive optics vastly improved the view." "So this is what it looks like before you use the advanced technology, it's a blurry mess and now you can see the individual stars with the adaptive optics turned on." "So each point of light here is associated with an individual star." "Andrea put that technique to work at the Keck observatory in Hawaii." "This is a roadmap." " And she and her team began to track the stars at the centre of the Milky way." "And that's the centre of our galaxy." "The very first year that we took the data was in 1995." "Then we go back to the telescope in '96, and then we take our second image, and you have two pictures." "We can compare them," " Andrea wanted to see if the stars were orbiting a single source of gravity, but stars can take years to complete an orbit." "So it was really important that we kept going, and by 2000 we finally started to see the star's curve." "In other words, the gravitational influence of the black hole had made those stars go from straight lines to starting to bend." "The measurements were precise enough to see that curvature." "Year by year," "Andrea and her team built their case." "This animation represents 20 years of work and it tells you that it is a black hole, and exactly how massive it is." "Andrea's painstaking project revealed a monster with more than 400 million times the mass of our Sun at the centre of our Milky Way." "Today, scientists are hunting black holes with new tools." "CalTech astrophysicist Fiona Harrison scans the skies with New Star, a telescope that looks at the universe in high energy X-rays." "The black hole itself doesn't emit light, but dust and gas falls onto the black holes and in doing so heats up, and it emits X-rays." "New Star captures black holes in a process of feasting on matter, and the telescope is spotting it all over the place." " It's really only 10 or 20 years ago that we thought black holes were rare." "We now know that every galaxy, like our Milky way, has a massive black hole at its heart." "so rather than being just curiosities they're actually fundamentally important to why the universe is the way it is." "So, is the Earth at risk of getting swallowed by a black hole?" "Even though we have black holes sprinkled throughout the galaxy, we're at absolutely no danger." "It's a common misconception that black holes might suck the Earth." "Well, there's no sucking going on, it's just normal gravity." "It's just when you get very close to it that there's a region from which even light can't even escape, and the Earth is not gonna do that." "But what if a spaceship had a close encounter?" "What if an astronaut dove in feet first?" "In the simplest descriptions of this, the descriptions you'll find in most books that you read you're simply stretched from head to foot, and squeezed from the sides by tidal forces 'spaghettified' as it's well often said, you're spaghettified if you fall in" "and you're destroyed." "That's the standard story." "The truth is, all the laws of physics that we know break down in the heart of the black hole." "Physicists are still working on exactly what happens there." "That's the gravity where there is no..." "When we talk to a physicist, we will often say 'it's the gravity' lie." "So you've been lying to us all these years." "You know how these things go: there are lies and there are 'lies'." " I know, but now..." "The movie Interstellar deals with physics that is well understood, well established, it deals with physics where we make educated guesses and we're almost sure but not a 100% sure of our guesses." "And it deals with physics at the frontiers of human understanding where we have to speculate and when you get beyond those frontiers, Interstellar works hard to align itself with the best speculations our scientists can imagine." "Interstellar mines that gray area where new ideas percolate and taps deep into questions about the nature of the universe." "In Interstellar, telescopes on Earth first detect the presence of a wormhole it shows up as a gravitational anomaly that distorts the view of space." "We made the wormholes have all that strong gravity." "But what then?" "Cuz then you have a reason for your..." " I just, I feel uncomfortable with the wormhole having that much gravity." "When I first began working with Christopher Nolan, he wanted the wormhole to have a rather gentle gravity, so we discussed how big the wormhole should be and we agreed that it should be just barely big enough" "that it could be seen from Earth through the bending of light around the wormhole by it's warped space." "Kip Thorne worked out just the right gravity for Interstellar's wormhole." "Using equations based on Einstein's theory of general relativity." "As we've learned, that theory states that objects warp space and time, creating gravity." "It also predicts that when objects move they generate a pulse that propagates through spacetime a bit like waves through the water." "These gravitational waves have never been directly observed." "They would be small and hard to detect unless they were generated by a massively violent motion." "Like the birth of the universe." "Physicists developed their Big Bang theory in part by observing that today the universe is expanding." "Galaxies are moving away from each other like raisins in a rising loaf of bread which suggests that in the distant past, the universe must've been much smaller." "If you wind the movie backwards, in the past everything was closer together and you plug that idea into the equations that Einstein gives us." "And there's a moment which we now know was about 14 billion years ago, when everything was on top of everything else, when the density of stuff in the universe was apparently infinitely big." "Then a powerful force triggered an expansion of space itself." "Faster than the speed of light, a theory called Cosmic Inflation." "And the theory said that this Inflation should've taken fluctuation from the shape of space and amplify them, so they got much stronger." "And they've become gravitational waves, producing ripple from the fabric of space and time." "If we could detect those ripples today, it would help us understand how the Big Bang - banged." "The trick was always how were we going to measure such a thing." "And that led us to propose and develop this very specialized experiment which one of my colleagues refered to gleefully as a wild goose chase." "CalTech physicist Jamie Bock works in experimental cosmology." "Experimental cosmology is building experiments, trying to get back to the dawn of time." "You need a hand with that?" "The focus of his latest experiment was the oldest light in the universe." "The faint afterglow of the Big Bang." "Physicists have mapped this cosmic microwave bacground across the universe." "If the birth of the universe produced gravitational waves, they would've warped this primordial light and cause it to be polarized or curled in a specific direction." "If one could measure the polarization and then not only measure, but look at its pattern, there might be kind of a swirly pattern that would be an indicator of gravitational waves." "Jamie and his team designed a series of small super-sensitive telescopes that they installed where the skies are crystal clear." "At the South Pole." "The South Pole is the closest that we can get to outer space to make our measurements." "For eight years the team's telescope scanned a patch in the sky, measuring minute differences in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background, and a pattern emerged." "Our results reported that we see this swirly pattern of polarization that's consistent with what you expect from gravitational waves." "So they didn't really see the gravitational waves from the early universe, they saw this polarization pattern that was precisely what was predicted, except they were stronger than expected." "Ok, this is like, going on immediately after the Big Bang when the universe was a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second old." "So it's seeing almost the creation of the universe." "The finding must be confirmed by other experiments." "If it holds up, this will be the first evidence for detection of the gravitational waves predicted by Einstein." "To contemplate the mysteries of space, time and the universe can make a person feel mighty small." "Maybe it's best to lower our sights, hunger down and focus on planet Earth." "But that's not really an option for you, namely in the long run." "Interstellar depicts a future where living conditions on Earth are grim." "There's only one solution." "Now you need to tell me what your plan it is to save the world." "We're not meant to save the world, we're meant to leave it." "This blue oasis is the only place we know that supports life." "But that could change in a flash." "February 15th, 2013" "A meteor shining brighter than the Sun shrieks across Siberia." "It's a rock 65 feet in diameter, and when it explodes in mid-air it releases more than 20 times the energy of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima." "No one was killed, but more than a thousand people were injured." "Asteroids have struck Earth before." "Some 65 million years ago, a monster 6 miles wide may have wiped out half the species on Earth." "Remember the dinosaurs?" "A similar impact, or worse, could happen anytime and turn our Blue Marble into a lifeless rock." "In the meantime, perhaps a greater threat to the planet is us." "And the bottom line?" "Earth can not sustain us forever." "In a few billion years, our Sun will expand as it begins to die." "And our planet will be toast." "But there's good news." "Unlike the dinosaurs, we can leave Earth." "T minus 10, 9..." "Ignition sequence start!" "6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1..." "Zero!" "Zero left. lift off of space shuttle Atlantis." "Today nearly 600 people have traveled to space." "During the shuttle era, Marsha Ivins made the trip five times." "In order to record all of this, we have created this wiring nightmare here." "At Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex she checks in on an old friend." "Looking at Atlantis hanging here, it's a surreal kind of experience to think..." "I flew that into outer space." "It's still something that I have a hard time believing." "And it makes me feel good that people still have a wonder and an amazement and a pure joy for the fact that we did fly this vehicle into space." "For Marsha, each mission was as breathtaking as her first." "I looked up overhead, and here was this black sky and this blue Earth." "It all hits you at that point: "I am not on the planet anymore."" "And every astronaut who has flewn has come back and said the same thing." "As you circle the Earth, you do not see natural borders and boundaries that separate the countries." "And all of the wars, and the angst and the strife that tear this planet apart seem so insignificant from that view." "To me space travel, space exploration has always represented the ultimate frontier." "It's of the absolute extremities of what human experience is, and it's all about trying to in some way define our place in the universe." "40 sec away from the Apollo 11 lift off." "I remember growing up as a kid and we were both fascinated by this impulse to fly." "This impulse to build unimaginable machines and use them to blast off into.. into space." "Having fired the imagination of a generation, pulls into port for the last time." "The space shuttles were retired in 2011 after traveling more than a half billion miles." "Space exploration demands enormous resources." "The kind that government agencies like NASA can marshal." "Recently, some new players entered the fray" "I really think we're at a dawn of a new space era, and it's one where commercial companies play a much stronger role." "NASA's not out of the picture, they're very much in the picture, but it's not all a NASA design system." "In 2002, Elon Musk started his own rocket company." "A decade later, under contract of NASA" "SpaceX became the first private company in history to carry supplies to and from the ISS." "Now SpaceX is tackling an even greater challenge." "I started SpaceX with the idea of trying to revolutionize space transport." "And critical to that is full and rapid reusability of the rocket." "The big issue with rocketry today is that you get one use out of the rocket, and then it smashes down into the ocean or warms the plains of Siberia, and you can't use it again." "If you can, in fact, land a rocket safely and then reuse it with a minimal amount of effort then you can dramatically reduce the cost of both for space transport." "SpaceX is currently developing a fully and rapidly reusable launch system." "And that will take Elon closer to a more ambitious goal:" "to help send crews to establish a colony on Mars." "Not an issue for the faint-hearted." "If anybody wants to go to Mars, their desire for adventure would have to overcome the desire for comfort and safety." "The colony on Mars could be the next giant leap for human kind." "It's such a fundamental idea when you think about it, it's just the decision that has to be made in terms of how you view the... the human race's place in the universe." "We are to stay here on Earth, or we leave and we journey through the galaxy?" "We'll find a way, we always have." "To create the look and the space technology of" "Interstellar, Christopher Nolan took a clean design." "We didn't want to have anything that felt purely decorative." "We wanted to approach it from a much, much more functional point of view, just be as convincing as possible, looking at NASA technology that already exists today and the ISS, these kind of things were our influences." "There's no telling how space technology will evolve in the years to come, we may be decades away or longer from establishing a colony on Mars." "or a permanent habitat in orbit around the Earth." "But people around the world are dreaming of that next step." "At a recent space conference, NASA and the International Space Society hands out awards to dozens of forward-looking designs." "So, a sustaining settlement for 20,000 people." "A moon base that mines minerals from lunar soil." "A fleet of robots that clean up space junk." "But of course this is really hard, because we're burning fuel..." "There's not a single PhD among the prize-winning designers." "These are middle and high school students from around the world." "One of these kids may stand on Mars some day, or make a breakthrough in propulsion systems." "Or start a revolution in astrophysics." "To inspire their kind of enthusiasm is the hope of the Interstellar team." "I would love the kids to watch and get excited about the possibilities of space travel and exploration." "I would hope that this film introduces many people to science that might have not have gotten curious about this kind of science in any other way." "I think it would be really thrilling if people got some sense from this film, these ideas are worth thinking about." "The interplay between science and sci-fi springs from a deep-seeded creative drive." "To make sense of the unknown... to engineer new worlds... to dream up a better future..." "we'll find answers where we always have." "Just beyond the next horizon. (thanks vvb)"