SPOILER DISCUSSION

1.I know I ragged on the exposition in the movie, but the revelation that messages between the Earth and spacecraft took years on end to reach, made me think that the life-support system would work indefinitely without people giving biometric data/having to write super detailed logs. If no one can review the reports or logs, then ensuring they happen isn’t relevant. It’s more so to make sure that results are recorded in some fashion, and given that these inmates were willing to go out of the planet in order to live, it’s easy to assume that they’d be diligent in their reports for the same reason. I thought it was a cool knock on tradition and the way we constantly follow rules because we’re told they’re good for us or necessary, but they only have power because we give it to them. I might just be super wrong, which is likely, because the ship could have also been coded to require at least one signal to keep it going and then had some super intelligent natural language parser that could determine if “enough” of a result had been acquired. I like my version more.