Project Hail Mary and Interstellar: Where Science Meets the Soul

The short answer: Project Hail Mary and Interstellar are both science-fiction stories about the limits of what science can tell us. Both use physics as the setting and human connection as the subject. Ryland Grace and the alien Rocky show that connection does not require sameness. Cooper and Murph show that a bond can survive distance and time. Psychology adds that people are relational beings who need attachment, meaning and belonging, and that these needs are not a weakness in a capable mind.

Content note: this article contains spoilers for Interstellar and for the central relationship in Project Hail Mary. It also touches on loneliness, grief and depression. If you are struggling right now, the support numbers are at the end.

Why these two stories belong together

At first glance the two stories could hardly be more different. Project Hail Mary, the 2026 film directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller from Andy Weir’s 2021 novel, follows Ryland Grace, a former biologist turned science teacher who wakes alone on a spacecraft with no memory of how he got there. As his memory returns he learns his mission, and he finds an unlikely partner: an alien he comes to call Rocky.[9][10] Interstellar, Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film, follows Cooper, a father who leaves his daughter Murph to travel through a wormhole in search of a future for humanity.[11]

One explores friendship across species; the other explores love across time and space. Beneath those premises they share a question: what happens when human intelligence reaches the boundary of what it can understand, and discovers that knowledge alone may not be enough? That is what makes them psychologically interesting. They are less stories about space than stories about people trying to find meaning in an incomprehensibly large universe.

Science as architecture, relationships as meaning

Science fiction is often treated as a genre about technology: spaceships, black holes, artificial intelligence, wormholes. But its best work uses scientific ideas as a mirror for psychological and philosophical questions. Interstellar uses relativity and gravity to explore separation, mortality, parenthood and love. Project Hail Mary uses an interstellar survival problem to explore cooperation, trust and friendship. The science gives each story its structure. The relationships give it its meaning.

The distinction matters because science can explain an enormous amount about the universe without answering the question a person actually lives with: what should I do with my brief existence inside it? The psychiatrist Viktor Frankl argued that the search for meaning is a fundamental human concern and built his approach, logotherapy, around it.[1] The existential psychiatrist Irvin Yalom identified four “ultimate concerns”: death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness.[2] Few stories put those four in front of an audience as vividly as these two.

A caution before we begin. Neither film proves a scientific or spiritual proposition, and we do not treat them as if they did. Physics, psychology, philosophy and spirituality ask different kinds of question. The aim here is to let them speak to one another without collapsing one into another.

Two journeys at a glance

Project Hail Mary: connection without sameness

Grace begins the story profoundly isolated. He is alone, without his memory, and the rest of the crew are dead.[9] The mission starts out as a problem to be solved: there is an objective, there are variables, there are constraints. Then he meets Rocky, and the problem changes shape.

Rocky is not a human character in an alien costume. His body, his way of sensing the world and his history are genuinely different from ours. Even basic communication has to be built from scratch, through experiment. Yet the two learn to understand one another, then to cooperate, then to trust one another, and eventually to care. The most profound psychological idea in the story may be this: connection does not require sameness.

The psychology of radical difference

Human closeness often leans on perceived similarity. We feel nearer to people who share our language, culture, values or worldview. Rocky removes almost every one of those props. Grace cannot assume Rocky experiences the world as he does; he has to become curious, observe, tolerate misunderstanding and adapt.

That is close to what psychologists call mentalization or perspective-taking: the capacity to understand behaviour in terms of underlying mental states, intentions and feelings, without assuming that another person’s inner world is identical to your own.[3] The story pushes the idea past ordinary human relationships and asks whether empathy could cross the boundary between species. Its answer is essentially yes, not because Grace and Rocky become alike, but because they become willing to understand.

From “how do I survive?” to “how do we?”

There is a second, quieter change. The question gradually stops being “how do I survive?” and becomes “how do we survive?” Self-determination theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, proposes three basic psychological needs that underlie motivation and wellbeing: autonomy, competence and relatedness.[12] Grace has competence in abundance. Competence alone cannot sustain a human life. Rocky supplies relatedness, and the story suggests something worth holding on to: another consciousness does not necessarily distract us from our purpose; sometimes it helps us find it.

Interstellar: love across time

If Project Hail Mary asks whether connection can cross species, Interstellar asks whether it can survive something stranger still: time itself. The physics here is not decoration. General relativity predicts that clocks deeper in a gravitational field run slower than those farther out.[13] The film’s black hole and its time-slowed planet were worked out with the physicist Kip Thorne, who describes how one hour on that planet can correspond to seven years on Earth if the planet orbits close enough to a fast-spinning black hole.[4][14]

What Nolan does with this is unusual. He takes an abstract physical fact and turns it into an emotional experience. For Cooper, time is physics. For Murph, time is abandonment. For both, it becomes loss.

Responsibility meets attachment

The emotional centre of the film is not the wormhole or even the survival of humanity. It is a father and daughter separated by time. Cooper leaves because he believes humanity’s survival requires it. From Murph’s side, something simpler has happened: her father left. Cooper experiences the decision through responsibility; Murph experiences it through attachment. Neither perspective is trivial.

Attachment theory, which begins with John Bowlby’s work, emphasises the importance of enduring emotional bonds and the distress that can accompany separation from the people we are attached to.[5] That is what turns Interstellar from a rescue story into something more human: a picture of what happens when a duty to humanity collides with a duty to the people we love. There is an irony in it too. Cooper travels farther from Murph than any person could reasonably imagine, and psychologically his whole journey stays centred on her. Distance increases. Attachment does not disappear.

Is love a force? Metaphor and evidence

One of the film’s most debated ideas is that love may be something that transcends the dimensions we ordinarily perceive. Taken literally as physics, that is not established science. Gravity has measurable physical effects; love is not a known fundamental force in that sense.

But the film is not really making a physics claim. Love works as a psychological and narrative bridge: it keeps Cooper oriented toward Murph across impossible distances, and it gives his journey meaning. And while love is not a fifth force of nature, its consequences in human lives are measurable. A meta-analysis of 148 studies with 308,849 participants found that stronger social relationships were associated with a 50% increased likelihood of survival, an effect comparable to well-established risk factors such as smoking.[6] This is an association across studies, not proof that any one relationship saves any one life, but it shows how much the subjective significance of another person matters to real health.

Reaching someone you cannot reach

In Interstellar’s most famous sequence, Cooper finds himself inside a strange structure built from Murph’s bedroom at many moments in time. He can see her, but he cannot walk into the room, sit beside her or speak to her. He searches for any way to send a message.[11]

The problem it dramatises is remarkably ordinary: how do I reach someone I cannot physically reach? We meet versions of it constantly:

• a parent trying to understand an adolescent child;
• two partners who cannot put into words what each is feeling;
• a grieving person wishing they could speak to someone who has died;
• a lonely person longing to be understood;
• someone with depression who cannot explain what is happening inside their own mind;
• a family split across countries, connected by video calls and time zones.

In each case the physical distance may be small and the psychological distance enormous. Interstellar turns that invisible distance into a literal dimension. Project Hail Mary asks the mirror-image question: two beings are close enough to communicate but separated by biology and evolution, and the effort of communicating is exactly what brings them together. In one story, people who are profoundly connected are separated. In the other, beings who are profoundly different become connected. Both ask what it takes for one consciousness to reach another.

Connection as the real miracle

We usually call technological feats miracles: landing on the Moon, crossing space, imaging distant galaxies. But there is another kind we tend to overlook. One consciousness can care about another. You cannot enter another person’s mind; you live inside your own perspective. And yet you can listen to someone, understand them, comfort them, love them, remember them, and change because of them.

The philosopher Martin Buber distinguished between meeting another person as an object to be used or classified (“I–It”) and meeting them in genuine encounter (“I–Thou”).[15] Both stories dramatise that shift. Rocky stops being “an alien” and becomes someone. Murph stops being “the daughter left behind” and becomes the person around whom Cooper’s emotional world is organised. The other ceases to be an object and becomes a subject. That may be where real connection begins.

The loneliness beneath extraordinary intelligence

Grace and Cooper are both highly capable, and capability does not protect against loneliness. Modern societies often confuse competence with wellbeing: if someone is intelligent, educated, successful or productive, we assume they must be fine. But competence answers only one question, can you handle the task? It does not answer how are you experiencing your life?

The World Health Organization distinguishes loneliness, “the painful feeling that arises from a gap between desired and actual social connections”, from social isolation, the objective lack of sufficient connections. Its 2025 Commission on Social Connection estimated that about 1 in 6 people worldwide is affected by loneliness, with rates highest among adolescents and young adults.[7] A meta-analysis of mortality studies found that both objective isolation and subjective loneliness were associated with an increased likelihood of early death.[16] A person can be surrounded by people and still be profoundly lonely when their relationships do not provide the connection they need, and being extraordinarily capable does not remove the need for attachment.

What science cannot answer

Here both stories turn philosophical. Science is extraordinarily good at certain kinds of question: how gravity behaves, how a star produces energy, how a pathogen spreads, what happens to time near a black hole. Other questions are different: why should I love? What makes a life meaningful? What do I owe another person? What is worth sacrificing for? Why should humanity survive? These are not simply empirical questions; they involve ethics, values, philosophy and psychology.

That does not diminish science. It clarifies its extraordinary but specific role. Science tells us what is possible. Meaning asks what is worth doing. Project Hail Mary contains a great deal of scientific problem-solving, but its emotional force does not come from solving equations; it comes from deciding who matters. Interstellar contains genuine physics, but audiences do not cry over field equations. They cry because Cooper wants to see Murph again. The science creates the conditions, and human meaning creates the emotional reality.

Looking at the stars, and what “spiritual” means

There is something psychologically ancient about looking up. Long before modern astronomy, people looked at the night sky and asked where they came from, what lay beyond them and whether they were alone. Modern cosmology has not removed those questions; in some ways it has enlarged them. Human beings experience an immense universe from one small planet, and that tension between cosmic insignificance and personal significance is central to existential thought. Carl Sagan’s “Pale Blue Dot” reflection captures it: humanity is physically tiny within the cosmos, yet every relationship, conflict, achievement and memory we have ever known happened on that one small world.[17] Smallness does not have to mean meaninglessness. It may make our relationships more precious.

A word about “spiritual”

Spirituality does not necessarily mean supernatural belief. In the psychological literature it can describe experiences of meaning, connectedness, transcendence and relationship to something felt to be larger than the individual self.[18] It can take religious forms, and it can be entirely secular. A scientist awestruck by the universe, a parent holding a newborn, a person under a dark, star-filled sky: each may describe the experience as spiritual without any claim about the supernatural. These experiences matter psychologically even when they cannot be reduced to a laboratory measurement.

This is the real overlap between the two stories and spirituality. Neither rejects science. Both treat evidence, mathematics and reason with awe. But alongside them sit questions equations cannot settle: love, sacrifice, hope, responsibility, mortality. It is not science versus spirituality; it is different questions asked about the same reality.

What gives a life purpose?

Neither film hands us a neat answer, and that may be why they are valuable. There may be no single, scientifically demonstrable purpose that applies identically to everyone. Psychological research instead suggests that people find meaning through several routes: coherence (life makes sense), purpose (valued aims and direction) and significance (a sense that one’s existence matters).[8]

Purpose can be grand, but it can also be ordinary: to raise a child, care for someone, discover something, create, teach, heal, protect, understand, or make another person’s life slightly less painful. In Project Hail Mary purpose emerges through cooperation and sacrifice; in Interstellar through love, responsibility and the survival of humanity. Neither requires the individual to be the centre of the universe.

Becoming ourselves through what is beyond ourselves

A thread runs beneath both stories: we become ourselves through our relationship with what lies beyond us. Grace changes through Rocky. Cooper and Murph change through each other, even across absence. This resembles self-transcendence, a concept Abraham Maslow added to his later thinking about human development, in which a person moves beyond exclusive preoccupation with the self toward people, values, causes or realities larger than themselves.[19][20] On this reading, psychological maturity is not only becoming more independent. It is also becoming capable of belonging to something larger. (That is an interpretation, not a finding of either story.)

Finitude belongs here too. Existential psychology holds that awareness of mortality shapes how we experience time, relationships, responsibility and purpose.[2] Cooper and Murph lose years they can never recover, and that is exactly why the time they eventually regain matters so much. Love does not make loss disappear. It makes the loss matter.

From intelligence to wisdom

Both stories contain extraordinary intelligence, and neither suggests intelligence will save us on its own. Intelligence can tell us how to reach another planet; wisdom asks what we should do when we arrive. Intelligence can manipulate nature; wisdom asks what deserves protecting. Intelligence can help us survive; wisdom helps us decide what makes survival meaningful.

The distinction is not academic. We are building increasingly powerful artificial intelligence, editing genomes, changing the climate and exploring other worlds. The psychological and ethical question remains whether our wisdom can keep pace with our power.

What this means for real relationships

You do not need a spaceship for any of this. Five ideas from the two stories translate directly into everyday life.

1. Be curious about difference. Instead of “why aren’t you like me?”, try “what is it like to be you?” That is perspective-taking in one sentence, and it is the skill Grace has to learn.[3]
2. Find the “we”. A shared problem or goal makes relatedness possible even between people who otherwise have little in common.[12]
3. Reach across distance on purpose. Time zones, migration and busy lives create their own version of Cooper’s separation. Bonds survive distance better when contact is deliberate. If you are living far from family, our article on loneliness among NRIs looks at this in depth.
4. Do not mistake capability for wellbeing. Ask the competent people around you, and yourself, how life actually feels, not only whether the work is getting done.
5. Let meaning be ordinary. Purpose does not have to be cosmic. Caring for someone, creating, teaching and protecting count.[8]

When these themes stop being a film

Loneliness, grief and a sense that nothing matters are part of being human. They deserve professional attention when they:

• last most of the day, nearly every day, for two weeks or more;
• come with loss of interest in things you used to enjoy;
• change your sleep, appetite or energy noticeably;
• make it hard to work, study or look after yourself or others;
• bring persistent hopelessness, worthlessness or a feeling that life has no meaning;
• include thoughts of death, self-harm or suicide, in which case please reach out today.

Therapy is one of the most reliable ways to work on exactly the things these stories dramatise: understanding another person, tolerating distance, making sense of attachment and loss, and finding what gives your life direction. It is not the only route, and you do not need to be in crisis to start. For a closer look at low mood, see depression: signs, causes and treatment, and for the attachment patterns behind how we respond to separation, romantic attachment styles.

The final question

Perhaps the most profound link between the two stories is not about space at all. It is about the other. Rocky is the other; Murph is the other; the alien, the child, the person we cannot fully understand. Our lives become meaningful through our relationship with these others. Both stories begin with enormous scientific questions (can humanity survive, can we cross the stars, can we understand the universe?) and arrive somewhere smaller and more intimate: can I reach you? can you understand me? does my existence matter to you?

Project Hail Mary answers: not necessarily alone, because even the most unimaginable difference can become friendship. Interstellar answers: perhaps distance cannot erase the bonds that give life meaning. Psychology adds that human beings are not built merely to survive; we are relational beings who seek attachment, meaning, belonging and purpose. We may never fully understand the universe, or answer every question about existence, or find a final equation for meaning. But we can still choose how to live while the questions stay open. We can be curious, humble and kind, and we can care.

Common questions

Related reading: four films that understand depression and loneliness, is watching a film “therapy”?, loneliness among NRIs, online therapy for NRIs, and individual therapy.