I think what happened is that the astrophysicist said “The power of love? Are you freaking kidding me?!” and stormed off the set. The writers shrugged and said “It’s science fiction, not Nova.”
Just for the record though: except for a few flaws in the second half, it is a remarkably good movie.
I guess you’re implying that they were trying to be as scientifically accurate as possible. Why, then, did this Super-Consultant allow the “Miller’s Planet” narrative? Even if Miller could have obtained any useful data in as little as one week(!), that’s still almost 12,000 Earth years. I’m surprised the NASA scientists sent the first mission to the planet, and dumbfounded they sent the second, merely two hours later. As a renowned astrophysicist whose job was to assure scientific accuracy, I would have objected. Maybe the consultant “stormed off the set” before they presented that scenario to him. Won’t even get into wormholes and intergalactic travel. So, I don’t think it’s a stretch, in the context of the movie, that he could have reached Brand in less than 2.2 million years. I think the consultant was there just to help replicate a visually awesome black hole. It was more fiction than science.
Humans can tolerate higher than 1G acceleration. Fighter pilots routinely go higher. It wasn’t stated explicitly in the film, but I suspect humans can tolerate sustained high Gs when they’re in suspended animation. And as Cooper can long nap, so can Brandt. So by Murphy’s law, while improbable, it isn’t impossible for them to reunite.
But how do you fuel the trip? If you carry all your accelerant, you need progressively more fuel to accelerate the fuel you carry. And Cooper’s ship at the end looked rather small. But if you solve the equation and master gravity, perhaps you could even warp spacetime and shorten the distance ahead of you?
But the real icing on the cake is that if one (sorta stable) wormhole is known to exist, then there could be more and perhaps Cooper stumbles into another wormhole around the orbit of Neptune that just happens to take him over to Brandt’s neck of the woods. Or he lands on Pluto and finds, say, a massive ring-shaped artifact with a dialing mechanism with Egyptian heiroglyphs that, say, flushes sideways.
Thanks for filling me in…but I’ll confess I still don’t really get it. But, given dracoi’s comment, I might not have gotten it even if I had stayed…
Nitpick: A week on Miller’s planet would pass by as much time as 1,200 years on Earth.
Ah yes. I added an extraneous 0. Thanks for the correction.