Is this the Future: Interstellar or Project Hail Mary?
when is the moral imperative more important than science and technology?
For 30 years, movies portraying dystopian, post-apocalyptic futures have been a cultural mainstay in movie theaters and on television, their appeal undiminished. Is this because we are compelled to condition ourselves, to dull our sensibilities, to take comfort in the thought that perhaps we are living a fiction that will never become reality? Or are we seeking an escape from reality?
Two recent movies are worth exploring: Interstellar (2014)[i] and Project Hail Mary (2026)[ii]. Both movies are cast in the shadows of doom: Interstellar portrays a world on the brink of starvation and climate collapse, Project Hail Mary envisions cosmic destruction, an interstellar organism devouring stars including our own sun. But the two movies ask very different questions. Interstellar asks will humanity look to technology and science for survival whereas Project Hail Mary demands to know whether any effort, even an ill-fated one, is worth dying for in order to save humanity. Science and Technology versus Moral Resolve. Both movies have heroes, Matthew McConaughey as Joseph “Coop” Cooper, the intrepid astronaut explorer in Interstellar looking for a safe planet to settle human survivors and Jessica Chastain as Murphy “Murph” Cooper, Joseph’s daughter who helps solve an intractable problem to make human interstellar migration possible. The plausibility of the plot is substantiated by the calculations and advice of the real-life Nobel Laureate, Kip Thorne.[iii]
There are two heroes in Project Hail Mary: one real, one digital. Ryan Gosling plays the reluctant, if intrepid scientist, Ryland Grace and the computer generated alien named by Ryland, Rocky, who is an intelligent alien species from the planet Erid (in the fictional 40 Eridani star system). Needless to say, Ryland and Rocky solve the problem although Ryland (spoiler alert!) must spend the rest of his days on the planet Erid.
The science in Project Hail Mary is disposable if clothed with understandable pseudo-babble. But the moral question is not. It is penetrating and disturbing.
The science in Interstellar is solid, if speculative, but begs the question, would humanity come together to collaborate on such a vast, expensive undertaking? In Project Hail Mary, the project director, Eva Stratt played by Sandra Hüller, admonishes Ryland Grace that only he possesses the credentials and ingenuity to solve the problem of cosmic destruction and that the governments of the planet would never agree to husband the resources to prolong human life. The existential consequence is that Grace will be unable to return to earth and that successful or not he will die in space. With that she has Grace abducted, drugged and placed in cold storage aboard the spaceship.
It is a profoundly disturbing question that the character Eva Stratt poses because we see that despite all the scientific evidence and technology available to us, the moral question has no weight in the precincts of power, among the governing oligarchs of our planet. It is a political reality dissected with razor wit in the dark satire of 2021, Don’t Look Up![iv]
[i] Nolan, Christopher. Interstellar. United States: Paramount Pictures, 2014.
[ii] Lord, Phil, and Christopher Miller, dirs. Project Hail Mary. Amazon MGM Studios/Sony Pictures Releasing International, 2026.
[iii] Kip Thorne won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, which he shared with Rainer Weiss and Barry C. Barish. The trio was awarded the honor “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves”. Their collaborative work enabled the first direct detection of gravitational waves, confirming a major prediction from Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.
[iv] Adam McKay, dir., Don’t Look Up (Netflix, 2021).
I know this comment misses the point but I am compelled to state that I loved the movie Interstellar but could barely finish the book Hail Mary. Hail Mary was essentially a story about the relationship between Rocky and Ryland and the universality of moral behavior. While that is a compelling thesis, it has been done to death in literature and in the case of Hail Mary, the novelty, such as it was, was simply that one party was not human. The most egregious mis-step in Hail Mary was the laziness of the scientific premise-a bacteria-like organism that consumes stars. It was so absurd as to be a constant distraction from the book’s thesis.
Now that I got that off my chest, let me talk about the subject of your essay. It might be a false dichotomy to say that the path to humanity’s future existence will depend on either actions notable primarily for their moral bases or on actions notable for their scientific underpinnings. I have probably mis-characterized your argument and if so I apologize.
In order for a happy outcome to prevail, human actions need to be moral and have scientific underpinnings. With the one without the other, we get Hiroshimas/Nagasakis and with the other without the one, we get hapless spiritual institutions that instruct us that whatever badness happens, it is “God’s will.”