>>10993528No, Kip Thorne got it right, relying on rockets that spew reaction mass to move around will doom our future in space to one of gritty near-no existence.
The true way forward, long term, is to go full Star Trek and understand how to manipulate gravity as we would any other force, which means, at the very least, that we can near-effortlessly send obscene amounts of raw materials into space more or less effortlessly. In the case of Interstellar, they knew the best chance they had at saving the vast bulk of humanity was by figuring out how to do this, which was why they were building those giant concrete O'Neill cylinders on earth in secret, hoping that they'd be able to figure out how to launch them easily/cheaply.
Now, remember that in this movie they acknowledge that to be an extreme long shot, which is why the Endurance mission is explicitly stated to be a low-risk "plan B" to preserve the existence of the species by using frozen embryos and artificial wombs to seed a new, most likely archaic human population on a habitable world in the event that they find one. Thorne/Nolan clearly implied that it's this archaic population that eventually evolves to become the bulkspace-inhabiting post-humans who place the wormhole in the first place, and save TARS and Cooper's life to allow him to give humans the gravity equation thousands of years earlier so that the original human population can live as a "thank you" for his saving Brand's life and allowing her to seed Planet Iceland and allow them to exist in the first place.
It's not quite 2001, but as sci-fi goes, it easily ranks up there with the best of the 50s, 60s, and 70s.
