Did Interstellar come true?
Partly. Interstellar (2014) has a P(n) of 52% on Nearfi's P(n) Board, our estimate of the chance its future arrives within 20 years. Of its 5 tracked predictions, 2 have arrived and 1 are arriving. Its central premise, 'Successive crop blights destroy the world's staple crops one after another, leaving only corn and ending large-scale food production', is still far off. The next prediction is estimated to arrive around 2030.
Interstellar is most prescient in its machines and its physics: autonomous farm equipment is on sale, assistants with adjustable personality are ordinary, and the look of a spinning black hole has been computed and, in the real sky, imaged. Its premises are further off. A sequence of blights that ends food production has no precedent, and a crewed, hibernating journey to Saturn depends on a drug and a propulsion system nobody has.
Read the review · 7.9/10 →
How this P(n) was calculated
P(n) is the chance that this work's future arrives within 20 years, by 2046. For each prediction we turn our estimate into a probability: arrived is 100%, diverged is 0%, and otherwise the low end of our 80% range counts as a 10% chance, the median year 50% and the high end 90%. Each prediction is weighted 1–5 by how pivotal it is to the story, and P(n) is the weighted average. P50 does the same by 2076. P(n), explained.
| Claim | Prediction · why this weight | Weight | Status · estimate | By 2046 | By 2076 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| INTERSTELLAR-1 | Successive crop blights destroy the world's staple crops one after another, leaving only corn and ending large-scale food production. Core premise: the blight is why Earth is dying and why Cooper leaves; the story doesn't exist without it. |
5 | FAR 2150 (2080–2400) | 4% | 9% |
| INTERSTELLAR-2 | Farming is carried out by autonomous, self-driving machinery that a farmer supervises from a distance. Supporting: the harvesters and drones shape the farm setting, but the plot turns on the blight, not the machinery. |
3 | ARRIVED arrived 2022 | 100% | 100% |
| INTERSTELLAR-3 | A crew travels to Saturn in about two years, kept in hibernation for the journey, and launches an expedition through a wormhole. Major: the Saturn voyage and hibernating crew drive the whole second half of the story. |
4 | FAR 2100 (2060–2200) | 6% | 26% |
| INTERSTELLAR-4 | A robot companion has personality settings, such as humour and honesty, that its crew can adjust. Supporting: TARS is a key crew member and source of humour, but the plot doesn't depend on its dials. |
3 | ARRIVING 2030 (2027–2038) | 100% | 100% |
| INTERSTELLAR-5 | The appearance of a spinning black hole, including gravitational lensing of the sky behind it, can be computed and rendered accurately. Supporting: Gargantua and its time dilation shape the plot, but the story would run with a different rendering. |
3 | ARRIVED arrived 2015 | 100% | 100% |
| P(n) = P20 = Σ(weight × chance by 2046) ÷ Σ weight = 9.4 ÷ 18 = 52% | |||||
| P50 = 10.5 ÷ 18 = 58% | |||||
Already here today (arrived 1, arriving ½, weighted): 42%.
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INTERSTELLAR-1
Successive crop blights destroy the world's staple crops one after another, leaving only corn and ending large-scale food production.
Weight 5/5 · Core premise: the blight is why Earth is dying and why Cooper leaves; the story doesn't exist without it.
Crop diseases are real, spreading and costly. Wheat blast reached Bangladesh in 2016 and Zambia in 2020, and a 2019 expert survey put pathogen and pest losses on five staple crops at roughly 10 to 41 per cent of yield. But the losses are partial and regional, and nothing resembles a sequential collapse of every staple. The film's atmospheric mechanism, in which the blight draws down oxygen, was dismissed by an astrobiologist at release. The range is wide because we are estimating a tail risk and cannot rule out a pathogen of that kind. 123
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INTERSTELLAR-2
Farming is carried out by autonomous, self-driving machinery that a farmer supervises from a distance.
Weight 3/5 · Supporting: the harvesters and drones shape the farm setting, but the plot turns on the blight, not the machinery.
Deere showed a fully autonomous 8R tractor at CES in January 2022 and said it was ready for large-scale production and would be available to farmers later that year. The farmer drives it to the field and sets it up, then starts it from a phone app and can leave while it works. A second-generation kit followed in 2025. Coverage of how widely it is in use is thin, so this is a reading of availability, not of adoption, and the harvesters in the film are more autonomous than what is sold. 45
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INTERSTELLAR-3
A crew travels to Saturn in about two years, kept in hibernation for the journey, and launches an expedition through a wormhole.
Weight 4/5 · Major: the Saturn voyage and hibernating crew drive the whole second half of the story.
A crewed trip to Saturn is a far greater undertaking than the Moon or Mars. Cassini, a robotic craft, took from 1997 to 2004 to reach it, and NASA's next Saturn-system mission, the Dragonfly rotorcraft, is not due at Titan until late 2034. ESA has studied human torpor for Mars and found it could cut spacecraft mass by about a third, but the approach needs a drug that does not yet exist. The wormhole is not part of the estimate, which covers only the crewed voyage. 678
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INTERSTELLAR-4
A robot companion has personality settings, such as humour and honesty, that its crew can adjust.
Weight 3/5 · Supporting: TARS is a key crew member and source of humour, but the plot doesn't depend on its dials.
Chatbots now let users change tone. In December 2025 OpenAI added controls for warmth and enthusiasm to ChatGPT, and in April 2025 it rolled back a GPT-4o update that users found too flattering. But no one sells a physical robot companion on a ship, and the settings in the film let the user set how truthful the machine is. Current controls cover style, and developers have not offered the user a dial for honesty itself. We rate it as arriving. 910
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INTERSTELLAR-5
The appearance of a spinning black hole, including gravitational lensing of the sky behind it, can be computed and rendered accurately.
Weight 3/5 · Supporting: Gargantua and its time dilation shape the plot, but the story would run with a different rendering.
The film's effects team and Kip Thorne published the method for rendering Gargantua in Classical and Quantum Gravity in 2015. In April 2019 the Event Horizon Telescope released the first image of a real black hole's shadow, at the centre of M87. The film simplified its picture, reducing the spin and leaving out some effects that would have made the disc look lopsided, so it is accurate in method but not in every detail. 111213
- FOR Prompt pest reports from Zambia and Jordan: enhanced global cooperation on pest prevention and control. International Plant Protection Convention (IPPC, FAO), 2020-10-07. Wheat blast was first recorded outside the Americas in Bangladesh in 2016, hitting about 15% of its wheat area, and reached Africa in Zambia in 2020.
- CONTEXT The global burden of pathogens and pests on major food crops. Nature Ecology & Evolution, 2019-03-01. Expert survey estimating yield losses to pathogens and pests on wheat, rice, maize, potato and soybean; the losses are heavy but partial.
- AGAINST What's Wrong With the Science of 'Interstellar'?. Mother Jones, 2014-11-12. Astrobiologist David Grinspoon calls the film's blight, which draws down atmospheric oxygen, scientifically unsound.
- FOR John Deere Unveils Fully Autonomous Tractor at CES 2022. Robotics 24/7, 2022-01-04. Deere says the tractor is ready for large-scale production and farmers can run it from a phone app.
- FOR Deere Reveals Its Newest Autonomous Technology at CES, Plans to Bring It to More Vehicles. DTN Progressive Farmer, 2025-01-06. Deere announces a second-generation autonomy kit for new and existing tractors, plus autonomy-ready factory tractors.
- CONTEXT Hibernating astronauts would need smaller spacecraft. European Space Agency, 2019-11-18. ESA's study of crew hibernation for a six-person Mars trip finds a mass saving of about a third, with a 180-day cruise in torpor.
- AGAINST Dragonfly. NASA, 2026-11-05. NASA's next mission to the Saturn system is a robotic rotorcraft, launching no earlier than July 2028 and arriving at Titan in late 2034.
- AGAINST Cassini-Huygens. NASA, 2026-11-05. Cassini launched in October 1997 and began its study of Saturn in 2004, which gives a sense of the travel time for a robot.
- FOR You can now tweak how warm and enthusiastic ChatGPT's responses are. Engadget, 2025-12-21. ChatGPT gains adjustable warmth, enthusiasm, list and emoji use, on top of base styles such as Professional, Candid and Quirky.
- CONTEXT OpenAI rolls back update that made ChatGPT an ass-kissing weirdo. Engadget, 2025-04-30. OpenAI reverses a GPT-4o update after users found it too sycophantic, which shows a personality setting can carry a cost.
- FOR Gravitational Lensing by Spinning Black Holes in Astrophysics, and in the Movie Interstellar. arXiv (Classical and Quantum Gravity 32, 065001), 2015-02-12. James, von Tunzelmann, Franklin and Thorne describe the software that traces light through a spinning black hole's spacetime and its use for the film.
- FOR Black Hole Image Makes History. NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 2019-04-10. The Event Horizon Telescope captures the first image of a black hole's shadow, at the centre of M87, about 55 million light-years away.
- AGAINST The Truth Behind Interstellar's 'Scientifically Accurate' Black Hole. Gizmodo, 2015-02-17. The film cut the spin and left out frequency shifts, making the image more symmetrical than the full simulation.
Ledger updated 5 Nov 2026. All works on the P(n) Board · Method