Murphy's law is an adage or epigram that is typically stated as: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. The way is is said in the movie is a quote by mathematician <PERSON> which he gave on June 23, 1866, analyzing Murphy's law
"The first experiment already illustrates a truth of the theory, well confirmed by practice, whatever can happen will happen, if we make enough trials"
Now how do we perceive this ? Let's start by a few examples Although <PERSON>'s law is applicable in a number of fields, I can only cite examples from my field i.e. Software engineering. While the examples might not make much sense to folks outside this field of work, I will try to keep the language simple
1. Software Programming : computer programmers are first compiled and then run. The programmer has control of the program while it is compiled (any number of times). The programmer can make any number changes in the code to make sure that the program will run correctly. However, once the program is running, the programmer has no control whatsoever. So if programmer has not analyzed a part deeply, in other words has not taken all sorts of precautions, a bug might appear at runtime, given enough number of trials which is testing in Software industry. A very good example of this is the introduction of Generics in Java 5.0, whose sole purpose is to reduce the risk at runtime and do all that is possible at compile time, because anything that can go wrong will go wrong, given enough number of trials.
Second example
1. How Google makes the huge amount of data available to the world
To manage the enormous amount of content on the Internet, Google uses GFS i.e. Google File System. Not going into deep details, let me just tell you the core principle behind this. Any data/content on Internet is stored on a computer which is also called server. Now what will happen to the data if the computer goes down. The manufacturer may say "I have made it so well, there are rare chances that it will fail." So either you can rely on this or rely on <PERSON>'s law. 634
Google engineers follow <PERSON>'s law and lay the principle that at the end of the day, it's just a machine so however good it might be, there are chances even 0.1% that it can fail. So they think that if it can fail, it will fail and hence you can never rely on any data being kept on a single machine. So they make multiple replicas of same data and that's how they make sure everything will always work.
This is my interpretation of <PERSON>'s law. Now in relation with movie's plot, my inference is this :
The human race on earth, (even today) knows that resources are being depleted at fast rate, and population is rising at faster rate. we also know that species before us, were wiped out from earth in a million years time, may be. So since earth, may one day become inhabitable for humans, it definitely will become inhabitable at one time. In the initial few minutes of the movie, we see people living on earth which is already in a pretty bad state. Still they are hoping that somehow earth will be saved and humans will be able to sustain on earth. No one even acknowledges the need to abandon earth. Common perception is "how to save earth". What they are not acknowledging is that earth can not be saved. It will end, one day. The dialogue from older Dr. <PERSON> sums it up when he says "We are not supposed to save earth. We are supposed to leave it." or as the tagline for the movie goes "Human race was born on earth. It was never meant to die on it."
Earth can end one day and hence it will end one day.
This is <PERSON>'s law. 829