Science Fiction and Human Thought

 

Science Fiction is one of the most viewed, discussed, and thought-about genres throughout the broad spectrum of entertainment. Whether it is a book like The Martian, 1984, or even Dune, or a movie like Interstellar, science fiction can change how we as humans think about not only ourselves as a race on this planet but how we view the world around us. One of my favorite recent movies is Christopher Nolan's Interstellar for many reasons. If you know Christopher Nolan then you know that he takes pride in using his work to deconstruct human emotion and thought in a way that makes you question reality as a whole. At its core, Interstellar is a film about humanity's survival. In Interstellar, Earth as we know it is dying and a group of astronauts need to travel through a wormhole on a mission to find a new home for the human race. The problem with that is the fact that they do not know if the planets they are searching for can maintain human life. At the same time, some of these planets have a ratio of time, where time works one way for some and works another way for others.

I love to compare Interstellar to what you see now in the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantummania and many of the movies that came before it like Avengers: Endgame and the previous two Ant-Man films. The MCU introduces the concept of "The Quantum Realm" which is a realm that lives under our own universe but with far worse circumstances than ours. In other words, picture our universe with its unlimited worlds and layers and then add unimaginable horrors and the fact that time and reality itself work differently. In the MCU, the character of Janet Van Dyne/Wasp who is played wonderfully by Michelle Pfieffer is lost in the Quantum Realm for decades and Scott Lang, played by Paul Rudd is lost there for mere hours. Time moves differently for them. Scott seems to not age at all whereas Janet ages decades. Why is that? When Janet was lost in the Quantum Realm, she was in the Quantum Realm itself and Scott was stuck in a time vortex. Decades had passed for Janet when only 5 hours had passed for Scott. Scott only knew this when he returned to Earth to find that the world thought he was dead along with everyone else Thanos snapped out of existence and his daughter Cassie had aged 5+ years since the last time he had seen her. 

What I love about the MCU but also the work of Christopher Nolan is that you get an idea of a scientific idea or concept that is not that far from the realm of possibility, but you get it in a way where you can understand the real-world consequences. The Quantum Realm in a way is like a prison, you are lost there with almost no way of leaving. Not everyone in the Quantum Realm has a Scott Lang to rescue them, some are stuck there forever. The Quantum Realm is like Mars, without the proper equipment, your body will combust and you will die gruesomely. Although I love the way science fiction movies handle real-world science and then find a way to flip it on its head, there are problems with doing that. Doing that not only confuses your audience and creates plot holes, but you end up breaking the rules you set to begin with. Think of the Avengers in Avengers: Endgame. They did their best to follow every rule of time travel that was set in stone by literally every time travel movie and tv show ever created, but in doing so they broke those rules. To return the Infinity Stones to the exact spots they were before Thanos found them, they would have to not only alter the timeline but run into their past selves. Two things that are a big no-no in science fiction. Doing this created what is known as a branch timeline or what we usually call the multiverse.

The idea of the multiverse while cool on paper is not cool. You do not know how many different versions of you and your reality there are and changing those realities brings more trouble than good. Einstein said it best, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. You try to change your timeline and you create a new timeline that can be better or worse than your current timeline. Messing with reality is dangerous and the rewards are not greater than the risks. As humans, we try to use science and data to come up with concepts that have not been thought of before, but at least we think about the consequences of those actions. It is better to know what we are getting into than to embark on a mission like the characters in Interstellar or Avengers: Endgame where we do not fully know what we will find on the other side.