Hmmm… substitute “the matrix” with “society”.
*I think the point was that if humans’ brainpower is used only to run society, that rather defeats the whole purpose of society to begin with. I mean, if the only reason for society is to maintain the humans, and the only reason for the humans is to maintain society, it’s kind of circular. *
Perhaps the whole movies is a metaphore for the struggle of individuals to escape the confines of society?
This is where it all breaks down. The entire ecosystem, including humans, is also solar-powered. ** Basically, we get our energy from sunlight, eating vegetables and eating other animals. Those other animals have gotten their energy from even more vegetables or even more animals. Eventually, we see that the energy comes from the sun and from different kinds of plantlife. The plants get their energy from the sun, which powers the photosynthesis. This is why there’s still life on earth, despite the second law of thermodynamics – the earth is not a closed system, *energy needs to be put into the system constantly to keep it going. *
In the matrix, they try to keep only humans without the rest of the ecoystem. This does not work. Period.
And here’s the catch. If there’s no sun, then the machines would have to waste more energy to create the plants and the algae and the supplimental nutrients, than us humans could possibly get out of it.
There’s no such thing as a perpetual motion machine. Jesus, it’s not advanced science.
As much as I defend the legitimacy of the movie as speculative fiction (in that we can’t really say it’s breaking rules that may not exist in its frame of reference), it is silly for anyone to try to argue that this is somehow a viable scenario in our understanding of physics.
It just isn’t. There isn’t even the remotest chance that the machines could obtain more energy from humans than they put into keeping them alive.
There are really only three possibilities:
The humans in the story have an incorrect theory about the nature of the Matrix and of the machines’ need for it.
The world of the Matrix follows different rules of physics than ours or has technology which effectively breaks them.
The writers of the movie have a very poor understanding of physics.
I’d prefer 1 or 2. I suspect 3. I still like the movie.
Ok, how about this. Humans are special. We have sentience, language skills, and even “eternal souls” that no other creatures seem to have. See how special we are?
In the Matrix world, humans routinely break the second law of thermodynamics. If we get proper mental stimulation, we produce exactly what is needed to power the chips in the Matrix. All the machines have to do is plug into the electrical current streaming out of our collective asses.
Is the subconscious ability to generate more energy than received any harder to swallow than any other fictional superhuman powers? How can a mutant generate heat beams from his eyes without an external power source?
I think you nail it here. Obviously, the X-men are comic book superheroes, not to be taken seriously, only enjoyed for fun. The Matrix, however, is so obviously serious science fiction! :rolleyes:
So clearly we vegetarians are the only sensible beings on the planet, and should be put in charge!
Wait a minute! Most movies ARE incredibly dull and I ALWAYS get lousy tech support.
Actually the story was Flatlander–but the hull gets used in most of the “Known Space” series. And it doesn’t disappear (it’s already invisible) the pieces of it come apart and drift away. The explanation doesn’t conflict with the laws of physics. Your other points are well taken, however.
Back to the OP’s question:
If you accept the solipsistic assumption of the movie (“it’s all in your head”) then it doesn’t have to make any sort of physical/reality sense at all. Anything can happen because it’s just virtual–the explanations are virtual, the physics are virtual, etc. It’s a Philip K. Dick story! Neo just needs a can of Ubik!!!
There’s no reason to believe that the “real” scenes are any more real than the “virtual” ones. Giant planaria (or whatever they were) that eat through the side of the ship to slurp up the operators? Puh-leeze! These guys (Neo, Morpheus, et al) just needed a little more exciting virtual world to keep them busy than the standard one supplied to most humans.
In reality–hah!–the Kzinti landed years ago, decided they like the taste of humans, put everyone in little cubes (hold on, I’m writing this from a little cube) and put induction helmets on their heads to give them happy dreams. Whenever an order comes in from a resturant–“3 sides of human, to be delivered on Tuesday”–somebody in the simulation dies.
(Dang it, I need a quote from Delany’s The Fall of the Towers here, but I’m away from my bookshelf.)
And then all the nerds woke up and realized it was just a dream…
Totally off thread–science fiction that does not contain either FTL or time travel:
Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
Neuromancer, William Gibson (and seed of The Matrix, Snow Crash, and all who come after)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick (well, it’s not important to the plot)
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
On the Beach, Nevil Shute
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
Whew! That got long, didn’t it?
In fairness to the X-Men movie, it never even raises the question of how Cyclops’ beams work. It’s just the way things are in that world. Nobody in the movie is interested in explaining how or why they work, because they’re not really important to the heart of the plot. Since nobody in the movie cares, neither does the audience.
The situation in the Matrix is different. It’s essential for Neo, and thus for the audience, to learn how this new, “real” world works. Why do the machines keep humans alive at all? Why do the machines bother to keep the Matrix running? These are key plot points. It’s natural for the audience to scrutinize them closely.
If you’re building a stage set you don’t necessarily bother painting the back of it because the audience will never see it. But you make sure that anything the audience can see looks great. The same thing applies to movie scripts. Judging by the length of this thread and the rather convoluted defenses of the movie, there’s a very noticable spot in the Matrix’s script that’s missing paint.
I’m assuming you’ve only seen the movie. In the book nuclear weapons were very much in the mind of the mobile infantry, in fact, they were the reason behind a lot of their tactics, i.e. the soldiers kept themselves spread out in miles-wide formations where they rarely had visual contact with each other, to keep them from all being taken out by one nuke. The mobile infantry were not exactly ground troops, either, as they had limited flight and were inserted directly from orbit, no dropships. Oh yeah, they also used nuclear weapons themselves.
It makes perfect sense if you read the explanation for why General Products hulss were nearly indestructible - each hull was a single molecule. If you annihilate just a few atoms in that molecule, it’s going to break down into it’s component atoms.
The avatars in Snow Crash are not like the avatars we use in modern online games and such. The person behind the avatar, in most cases, was being watched by a camera on his own computer, which would then translate the user’s facial expressions and movements into actions of the avatar in virtual environment. Pretty much any computer in this time frame could render a photorealistic avatar, the lower quality you saw in the avatars of people with less powerful computers is because their computers were not able to process the user’s motions as accurately or as with much detail. Kinda like how a person playing an online game with a slow computer and a slow internet connection is going to have their in-game ‘avatar’ move in a jerky fashion and be slow to react, while it’s visibly obvious which players have a very low pint because of their smoother and more realistic movements.
I’ll give you this one, but Orson Scott Card doesn’t really write hard SF, he mostly writes fantasy with a futuristic setting.
Lotsa typoes in my last post, the only one that isn’t very obvious is where I typed ‘pint’ instead of ‘ping’.
It didn’t say they chose the 1990s because they were the worst period in human history - in fact, they said the exact opposite - the '90s were the peak of the ‘age of humans’, they were chosen because they were the last era before the intelligent machines arose.
Okay, so aliens are allowed to like the taste of humans, but machines aren’t. Got it.
Eh, that doesn’t make much sense either. The Kzinti took tissue samples of humans when they first encountered them, and they can clone whatever parts of a human they like to eat. The reason to take a live human is for the joy of the hunt, and even then there’s better choices than humans.
On the other hand, maybe the Kzinti put the humans in the Matrix so they could have the joy of hunting them in a virtual world (though this doesn’t really mesh well with Kzinti thinking). That’s why some humans develop superhuman powers, that’s to make them more challenging to hunt. 8^)
Well, You have to take this under the context that the information Morpheus gave Neo is only what they know thus far. Humans scorched the sky as a last desperate move to kill the machines. It might have been a poison pill strategy, if you kill us, we’ll take you with us. However, there are several species of algae and animal matter that doesnt require direct contribution of sunlight. Some live well in goethermal eco-systems. But you may be absolutely right, without constant contribution of energy, the world may well be dying but the machines merely made the process longer. For all we know the machines ultimate goal is to clear up the skies and in which case, they will have no need of their human power cells. That might be a good reason to wake everyone up from the matrix.
I just explained why. Humans in the Matrix world are “special”. They produce more energy than they take in as long as they receive the proper mental stimulation.
I don’t see how this is different in Cyclop’s case. I bet if you discovered such a person in real life, the first question out of your mouth would be how does it work? Ans: He is “special”, too.
As to the humans blackening the sky, it’s possible that they had a plan for unblackening it after the Great Robot War was finished.
And a superficial explanation for the humans-as-batteries theme could be as follows:
Yeah, you can’t get more out than you put in, and perpeutal motion is a no-no. Still, you give a pendulum a shove, and it’ll swing for awhile. And you can get some useable work out of it in the meantime. Work that you can store, and save for later. Further, the pendulum has some feedback built into it that’ll keep it running. You get less and less power out of it with every counter-swing, but it’s still power. And eventually it’ll grind to a halt, but you can worry about that when the time comes.
Maybe the PeopleBatteries are a temporary solution. They milk the bodies, feed the dead into the living, milk those bodies, and so on. It’s producing less and less power as time goes on (and they’re having fewer and fewer bodies), but it’s still putting out power. The machines can worry about what to do when all the people are gone later.
Yeah, it falls apart if you look too closely, but so does any science fiction. Bottom line, the plot is just plausible enough to serve as justification for the movie, and not an iota more. And apparently most people don’t mind, because I hear there’s a much-anticipated sequel coming up. Maybe even two.
Jeff
Personally, I don’t see much point in getting too worked up about why the machines put people in the Matrix, or the underlying physics. “Combined with a form of fusion” is sufficient for me to suspend disbelief. But for those who are interested in the back story, The Second Renaissance anime depicts the defeat of mankind and our enslavement happening, even if it doesn’t really get into the technical reasons why. So at least there is a version of Matrix-history (written by the Wachowskis) that’s independent of the human or machine perspective.
Parts one and two can be found on the www.theanimatrix.com
The animation is fantastic, but the story is quite graphic, so consider yourself forewarned.
Rather than make excuses for this error, I will compound my error by admitting I have read the book and just plain misremembered and/or conflated it with John Steakley’s “Armor.” (Also a good book, but makes less sense than ST.)
Again, I conflated two stories together (all of Known Space kind of blends together for me). Rather than try to figure out what struck me as wrong with this, I’ll just chicken out and say Larry Niven used reactionless drives and hyperspace, and they’re not kosher, physics-wise. Also scrith – what’s up with that? And stasis fields? And macroscopic teleportation? Psionics? Luck as a tangible and (to some degree) measurable force? Known Space is certainly more SF than fantasy, but it is full of stuff that, while maybe not simplistically incorrect like the Matrix, is certainly outside the bounds of even theoretical physics.
I don’t know about this. It struck me as extremely silly when I read it (a few weeks ago, actually), particularly that the “cheap avatars” were black-and-white and fuzzy. The cameras may be recording movement, which would explain laggy motion, but the idea that the avatars would be of poor resolution, when they don’t even represent the actual body of the person in question, seems illogical to me. It should be the other way around; people at cheap teminals should have really cruddy pictures of everyone else, not vice versa.
Harder than many, and certainly harder than The Matrix. It just seems to me that it is a silly gripe that The Matrix doesn’t follow physical laws. Lasers aren’t generally visible, don’t make much sound, and are invisible in vacuum. Does that make Star Wars a bad movie? (Episodes I and II notwithstanding.)
The Cyclops analogy doesn’t hold water. I can accept that Cyclops is special. Heck, it’s not impossible that he directly converts the matter he eats to energy, or some such. He’s a mutant superhero metahuman, he can do that.
But in The Matrix, we don’t have mutants or metahumans, we have just a few billion ordinary specimens of Homo sapiens. Maybe Cyclops can totally convert the food he eats, but I sure as heck can’t, and neither can you.
And yeah, it’s science fiction, so it’s allowed to change a few of the rules. But you’ve still got to keep at least some of the real world’s physical framework, and the First Law of Thermodynamics is pretty fundamental.
I know people already stated this:
It violated the Matrix created world laws. Think about how it works for a second. First the machines create a different world so that the humans don’t complain(or whatever people in pods would do). Then it fills the world with so many laws that the humans can’t do anything about it. That is why Neo and the bunch must be stopped, they know the laws are bogus. Thats why they do all that funky stuff, if the laws of thermodynamics being violated bothered you so much, you must have pissed yourself out of anger when you saw what happened to good old gravity.
I thought humans did make electricty, like when the heart beats or something, and doesn’t the brain make a form(if you can call it that) of eletricity when sending information?