I’ve just finished reading a previous thread on the Terminator series and it inspired a couple of questions.
How low did the human population drop globally? Is it ever stated anywhere in canon or is it just guess-work, I vaguely recall Kyle Reese making a comment implying that the human race nearly went extinct but his knowledge outside of his own local area would be slight and it can’t have dropped that low or humanity would never have been able to organise and resist enough to defeat Skynet.
How good are the senses of the Terminators? Sticking to the classic T-800 model from the second movie, point-of-view shots show that Skynet didn’t bother adding colour vision, probably considering it unneccesary, can they see in infra-red or other frequencies (which would make fighting at night considerably more deadly for the resistance), how about hearing? Does it even have a sense of smell or taste? ̶C̶a̶n̶ ̶i̶t̶ ̶f̶e̶e̶l̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶h̶u̶m̶a̶n̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶w̶e̶ ̶c̶a̶l̶l̶ ̶l̶o̶v̶e̶?̶
I had more questions but can’t recall them at the moment. Thanks in advance
Skynet depopulated the world with nuclear strikes, using everyones nukes. Add in starvation, sickness, general dispair leading to suicide, and you could probably plot an end zone with a venn diagram. Thats something that you would tell the survivors to motivate them.
The purpose of the T series was to flush out survivors, even if its onboard sensors were insufficient, their radios would work just fine, and then the big caterpillar tanks would show up.
Smell and taste would kind of be one and the same, but i have not seen in the movies and display of that kind of sense.
Probably no real reason fuss with that technology for what the terminator does,
programming it to feel love or compassion would be counter productive to Skynet’s plan.
You can not have killing machines suddenly feeling compassion for the prey.
I dont know, hard to compare human taste to a machine, taking a DNA sample from an instrument fashioned to resemble a tongue does not quite seem on par with the complicated human thing called taste?
According to T2 and T3, “three billion people” died in the 1997 Judgement Day, just over half the population.
Not much detailed word in first-level canon about the population aftereffects after that—Arnie does brief Dyson in T2, evidently in nauseating detail, though the audience doesn’t get to hear all of it, and what we do is mostly talked over by Sarah’s narration, although nuclear winter can, unsurprisingly, be made out. And, obviously, a nuclear exchange severe enough to kill three billion people outright isn’t going to create very favorable conditions for survival for the rest, in any scenario.
The effects of three billion people dying all at once would depend on how they were distributed. If the dead were a uniform cross-section of the population, then many more would die in short order, as the systems those people worked in collapsed… but in a nuclear war scenario, the initial casualties were probably all concentrated together in cities, which means that most of the people directly dependent on them probably also died instantly, leaving more rural areas with most of their structures and systems mostly intact.
When an animal tastes something, it’s performing a chemical analysis on it. Taste an orange, and your tongue determines that there’s significant sugar content. Taste a potato chip, and your tongue determines that there’s salt on it. A terminator tasting a blood sample to perform a DNA analysis on it is effectively no different. The terminator likely doesn’t have an emotional response tied to the result of its analysis - tasting something “good” doesn’t make it feel “happy,” the way tasty food improves the mood of humans. But then, a terminator would also not receive any sort of emotional boost from, say, looking at a pretty sunset. Yet you (presumably) wouldn’t argue that a the terminator’s robot eyes don’t really “see.”
Well, when I taste something, I can’t typically do so with the precision to tell, say, one orange apart from another one, based on genetic markers. I can usually detect the differences caused by different genetics well enough to tell apart, say, an orange and an apple, or an orange and a piece of raw meat.
Likewise, I’d be kind of hesitant to say that I can “see” UV and IR radiation using my skin, or that I’m able to “smell” rhinoviruses within my skull.
Except that the Terminator in question did in fact appear to have an emotional response (a simulation of one, at least) to the taste of John Connor’s DNA. It appeared to be a very positive emotional response.
And obviously the feat is impossible with human senses, but there’s no reason for a machine to have the same limitations as a human. Skynet found it useful for that model to have a DNA analyzer, so it designed one for it. And since it’s basically a chemical analysis, it put it in a place homologous to where humans keep our chemical analysis sense organ, even though it works very differently in the details.
