system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
[Interstellar] Why did they choose Miller's planet first?

While in orbit, they *knew* one hour there equaled 7 of their years. They could take a full year to evaluate Mann's broadcast, and still be back to Miller in under 9 minutes local time. While watching the film, this was the most mind-boggling decision that broke all suspension of belief.
gpt
They simply failed to realize that Miller's broadcast would have been redshifted. It's a elementary mistake but completely, wholly unintuitive. We're getting a binary beep, right? It says "Yay!" We've been getting it for 12 years here. We could look at Miller, we could see how close it was to Gargantua's gravity well (Romily does note that it's closer than they originally suspected, so before Endurance left it's entirely plausible nobody had any idea of the extent of the dilation), and we know it has water. WATER! the first exoplanet we've ever found with liquid water. We need to check this out!


When you stare at a dot in the sky, does it instantly occur to you that that space station or satellite or moon is experiencing life and the universe in slower motion than you? According to the universe, it should occur to you. But it doesn't. We've never moved far enough from our Gravity Well to experience this fundamental truth. We see time as a constant. This couldn't be further from the truth.


Bottom line is that they did a flawed cost benefit analysis while in a hurry to save humanity. They knew it was closest and had water. They knew there was some time dilation, but it wasn't until they got close that they could see just how much. And it's one thing to understand, academically, and another to *know*. That's what Brand meant when she and Cooper had their shouting match about the survival instincts of a boy scout troop. They got that far on smarts alone and it wasn't enough. They learned through *knowing* that day, and it cost them dearly.