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At the end of the movie—or the beginning; take your pick—Cooper ends up in a room that is a three-dimensional projection of a five-dimensional object behind his bookshelf. This five-dimensional room allows him to move freely about space-time within some time frame of his daughter's existence relating to that room, delivering to her critical information via morse code—like a ghost pushing books or manipulating dust patterns—that saves the human race from extinction.

Cooper mentioned that “we brought ourselves here” and there is a place in the movie showing a flashback from the beginning where Cooper is simultaneously in the future and past, touching Brand’s hand through the tesseract room while another Cooper sits next to her in the cabin in another time, unaware. Basically like a paradox as he exists in the future prior to leaving.

I’m completely lost as to who actually constructed this room?

  • Was it some extremely advanced extra-dimensional beings?
  • How could it be “us” humans when we would not have survived to “evolve” to higher dimensions if not for the gravity equation being solved based on this very mission being a success?
  • Is this hinting at the Many-Worlds Interpretation in which infinite universes exists and only one scenario was needed of humans surviving to mastering the universe to then help “lesser” humans in the far past in another universe (to avoid a paradox)?

This room was the entire movie in terms of its importance in saving the human race so who—exactly—made it?

Praxis
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King Friday
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    Ha ha ha! They protected this so non-registers cannot answer and the only answer that made sense, even to canon, was a non-registered person named "Martin". Irony. – King Friday Nov 12 '14 at 17:21
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    When you have time travel like this, it usually ends up in a circular conclusion or a paradox. Humans went into space because there is a wormhole that could lead us to other galaxies. The wormhole is there because future humans made it. But there would not be future humans if humans did not go to space using the wormhole. Head spinning start now! – Huangism Nov 13 '14 at 15:38
  • @Huangism the wormhole would not have existed but that doesn't mean humans would not have sent their seed to other potential planets prior to the wormhole possibility. Given enough time for these seeds to work, the advanced beings would have mastered space-time to discover their origin of Earth, create the wormhole and thus the scenario we see in the movie to save the people of Earth. A paradox could exist from future beings altering the past but this allows for the idea that future humans would exist regardless to save the Earth of the past. – King Friday Nov 13 '14 at 15:43
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    but how are they going to send seed to another habitable planet? Without the wormhole, they can't get there. I think the movie mentioned NASA was reinstated because of the wormhole which means there would be no NASA if not for that wormhole. They don't even know where other habitable planets are. – Huangism Nov 13 '14 at 15:49
  • +1 @Huangism That is a good point, but we cannot see the desperation or ingenuity that occurred in a timeline without a wormhole if the only goal was to save the seeds of humanity which allows for a slimmer of plausibility which was better than no possible cause for the effect which I had thought originally. – King Friday Nov 13 '14 at 15:51
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    Agreed, I am just saying based on what the movie provides, it's a paradox. I think the movie is a very good movie but it's hard to get away without presenting a paradox in these type of films – Huangism Nov 13 '14 at 15:54
  • And that's why one of Unseen University's Library rules is "Do not meddle with the nature of causality"... – Kao Nov 19 '14 at 19:07
  • I think I should have said "4 dimensional projection in 5 dimensions" as time is part of Cooper's experience, not only spatial dimensions. – King Friday Mar 14 '15 at 22:34
  • So the way I interpet the movie, high priority on future humanity's to-do list will be "Build a tesseract for Cooper in the 21st century so he can guarantee our existence". But it's going to happen somehow, whether humanity makes a point of remembering or not. – RobertF Jul 21 '15 at 19:33
  • This is a casualty time loop scenario.. – user931 Feb 10 '18 at 23:04

3 Answers3

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SPOILERS

The extradimensional beings who created the wormhole, the tessearact and any of the other timey wimey events which take place in Interstellar are super-advanced humans creating the events which will lead to humanity taking its place among the stars.

Entertainent Weekly explains it complete with spoilers, so if you don't want to know don't read any further.

Interstellar gilds its version of time travel with a lot of chatter about gravity and relativity, but on a pure plot level, this is time travel by way of Terminator. In the first Terminator, John Connor sends his father back in time, so that his father can meet his mother and thus give birth to John Connor. In Interstellar, Cooper sends messages to his past self so that his past self can become his own future self.

Furthermore:

While he’s inside of the Tesseract, Cooper also has an epiphany. The fifth dimensional beings are not aliens; the fifth dimensional beings are humans from the far, far, far future, who have evolved beyond the limits of the third dimension. These far future humans are now helping to create themselves by giving humanity the wormhole to a new galaxy.

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Thaddeus Howze
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    I think the movie needed something like this because given how close this was to our time, and our current lack of anything like faster than light travel, it would have been equally complained about if we were to suddenly discover the ability to "create" wormholes to other parts of the galaxy. The recent fervor around the universe being empty of life may have lead them to take this tact for fear of creating alien life and removing the idea of humanity pulling itself up by its bootstraps. (It would help if we had boots, of course.) – Thaddeus Howze Nov 10 '14 at 07:57
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    Cooper tried to change the past at first, like sending the message "Stay". But Murph got the message before he left anyway, so nothing was changed. Obviously this is the "stable timeline" kind of time travel. The past can't be changed, whatever you do to change is is something that happened anyway. – George T Nov 10 '14 at 08:33
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    That's not the only circular reasoning. He also was the one who sent himself to the launch site by giving himself the co-ordinates. – PointlessSpike Nov 10 '14 at 11:07
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    Can't vote because can't verify the validity of the answer, can't verify because doesn't want to be spoiled – Braiam Nov 10 '14 at 12:45
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    I still don't get how this all came to be in the first place. I get that this is kind of a time loop where his future self enables his older self to do what he did. But - without the wormhole he would have stayed home, mankind would have died and never reached the stage in evolution which would have allowed them to create the wormhole and thus they couldn't have enabled him to travel to the black hole where he found the information to save mankind. He needed help from mankind's future to create mankind's future. How does that work without someone not directly involved to start the process? – Sebastian_H Nov 10 '14 at 13:02
  • It's a common time-travel trope. It doesn't have to make perfect sense as nothing ever makes perfect sense in time-travel, however you use it. – George T Nov 10 '14 at 13:10
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    Alternatively: The only reason you expect the cause to be before the effect is because you're not a time traveller. If time travel is involved, there's no reason that the cause can't come after the effect. – George T Nov 10 '14 at 13:15
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    @Jason Those no need to get so aggressive just because you reject the idea that ontological paradoxes could be possible. That's your opinion. But there's no reason to go calling it "pathetic". There have been many, many sets of different time travel mechanics throughout sci-fi, this being one of them. Take a look at Doctor Who for starters. Ontological paradoxes go hand in hand with predeterminism according to some schools of reasoning. Perhaps open your mind to other ideas! – Lightness Races in Orbit Nov 12 '14 at 01:18
  • @Jason Sebring - Causal loops are actually seriously analyzed by physicists when studying spacetimes that would theoretically allow for backwards time travel, like wormholes--if you take seriously relativity's view of spacetime as a fixed 4D structure, it's natural to think the Novikov self-consistency principle would apply to time travel, in which case loops would be a real possibility. It's not wise to dismiss ideas in physics out-of-hand just because they conflict with intuitions! – Hypnosifl Nov 12 '14 at 02:16
  • @JasonSebring, in a universe where time travel exists, causality (i.e. "cause->effect") no longer applies. For example, you can go back in time and kill your father because your existence no longer requires your parents' existence. – Greenstone Walker Nov 12 '14 at 03:18
  • @Jason Sebring - In your last comment "your dead self" represent humanity on the verge of extinction, and "some future self" represent the future humanity that survived? I haven't seen the movie yet, just read some stuff about the plot, so I may be missing something. But if that's what it means, then that would fit just fine with the Novikov-self consistency principle--in this theory if you are about to die and are saved by your future self, there never was an "original" timeline where you did die in that situation. – Hypnosifl Nov 12 '14 at 03:44
  • Some slight quibbles - it is implied that "they" are far future descendents of humanity but the characters in the story don't really know. Also the "causality no longer applies" because events will take into account the actions of the time loop (it succeeds because it always succeeded and always will). No grandfather paradox because your grandfather survived the first time around, you simple couldn't proceed with the deed (something prevented it). – Jim2B Apr 07 '15 at 20:48
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"How could it be “us” humans when we would not have survived to “evolve” to higher dimensions if not for the gravity equation being solved based on this very mission being a success?"

Humanity survived through the plan B, that's why they mention it all the time. Then they build the worm hole to save the people of the planet.

phantom42
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Martin
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  • @Huangusm made some good points, see above comments although you probably won't see this again, "Martin". – King Friday Nov 13 '14 at 16:04
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    Martin. Your answer is better than entertainment weeklys. But. I think there were multiple timelines here. I think that humanity survived the first time around. In a bunker in the earth perhaps. Or in a long term – Neo42 Nov 17 '14 at 19:41
  • ...or in a long term spaceship journey to seed a far off planet after a long and lucky journey through space. Then humanity evolved and created a wormhole for us back in the timeline of the movie in order to try to save humanity better the next timeline around. If they were enlightened enough beings they would see the benefit to changing the past even if it meant potentially erasing their own existence/timeline. And maybe they were transcendant enough to survive anyhow. – Neo42 Nov 17 '14 at 19:47
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    There's really no way to explain the plot of Interstellar without self-consistent time loops: if you imagine some "original" timeline where humanity didn't have help from their own future descendants, then Plan A wouldn't have worked because they wouldn't have gotten the data from the black hole, but Plan B wouldn't have worked either, because the wormhole to habitable worlds wouldn't have existed either! In the tesseract Cooper says "We brought ourselves here", and Kip Thorne's The Science of Interstellar makes clear that "They" were the ones who constructed the wormhole. – Hypnosifl Nov 27 '14 at 16:02
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    (continued) Specifically, at the end of ch. 14 Kip Thorne writes of traversable wormholes, "I doubt very much that they can form naturally in the astrophysical universe. My only real hope for forming them is artificially, in the hands of an ultra-advanced civilization. But we are extremely ignorant of how such a civilization could do it ... In Interstellar, however, the wormhole is thought to have been made, held open, and placed near Saturn by a civilization that lives in the bulk, a civilization whose beings have four space dimensions, like the bulk." – Hypnosifl Nov 27 '14 at 16:05
  • @Hypnosifl exactly. I don't know why people often ignore the fact that there is no plan b without the wormhole. The wormhole HAD to be a fluke of nature for anything to make sense in that movie - unless of course we acknowledge aliens are helping the humans. – Chani Jul 22 '15 at 12:07
  • @Wildling - We are agreed that plan B wouldn't have worked without the wormhole, but if you're saying the wormhole had to be either a "fluke of nature" or built by aliens, I disagree--I think it makes sense to imagine Cooper was correct that it was built by future descendants of humanity, see my answer here for more on the model of time travel that I think was being assumed in Interstellar. – Hypnosifl Jul 22 '15 at 12:52
  • @Hypnosifl Those are some hard to disgest - un-intuitive concepts there. I loved reading the two answers - although I must say I didn't fully understand them. Bookmarked them for future reads. Keep up the good work :) – Chani Jul 22 '15 at 12:56
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My understanding is that the future humanity enabled by their actions created the wormhole and tesseract. Effectively, they had mastered time and space based on the breakthrough regarding gravity that Cooper communicated. Yes, this represents a causality loop that creates some philosophical problems, but hey, no worse than Dr. Who.

Paul D. Waite
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