Interstellar

Perhaps this means I am insufficiently depressed- that I can focus on something other than myself. In this case, I have been watching sci-fi movie trailers, and I can now pick apart a movie before it has even come out.

The thing is, "Interstellar" used to be the kind of movie I lived for. If I was a teenager again, I'd love it. Being a physics major kind of cured me of my love of these kinds of movies. I ask too many questions.

From what I can tell from the trailers, the earth isn't doing very well, at one point someone tells the main character that his daughter is the last generation that will live on the earth. Scenes of fires and barren farm land. But then, I think, faster than light drive is discovered, and a ship is built. Astronauts are sent to look for habitable planets. I will assume that they find them.

But then what? The trailers don't tell me. I don't see how a sizable number of people could be evacuated from the earth. That would just be too energy and resource intensive. And what would you take? What plants? What animals? What microbes? Could we even set up a functioning ecosystem on another planet from scratch and not crash it pretty fast if we don't know what we are doing? And if we knew how to do that, we could probably manage our own a lot better. There are some geoengineering techniques that have been proposed to deal with climate change that are pretty low-tech compared with interstellar space ships.

So I am sure that I will see the movie- but I already have my reservations about the premise.