Why not build a rocket to the moon? Morpheus says that “We scorched the sky, as they depended on the sun” or some such. Why did the machines not just bugger off into space? Live on the moon, plenty of solar power, no pesky humans… They dont need oxegen, its not like earths is still a holiday spot…
Any other alternatives to the machines power solution?
Mainly because “The Matrix” would become “The abandoned planet” and there wouldn’t be any bullet-time effects or black leather.
Seriously though, I don’t think the machines were capable of space travel.
I suppose they just hadn’t thought of it. ISTR an episode of BattleStar Galactica where they said that, despite being very smart, the Cylons, being machines, lacked the ability to just come up with random ideas like humans do (well, they called it “Independent Initiative or some such”)
of course, in the Matrix universe, it’s also possible that space travel never happened. That big massive underground network of tunnels and communications lines seems kinda silly if you can just lob comm sats into space. (Granted, they could have done this, and rendered their own com sats useless when they blackened the sky, thus necessesitating the massive underground network).
The power thing makes no sense whatsoever. None. Fusion (which Morpheus mentions the machines as having), old fashioned fission (even a chernobyl sized disaster isn’t a big deal if you’re a machine taht doesn’t get cancer) or geothermal (which the Zionists use), would be better choices. They coul’ve even used an orbital microwave transmitter to harness the sun.
If you’d like, you could pretend that the humans in the matrix are using spare brainpower for computing and running the machines as a massive living beowulf cluster. Or else that Morpheus’ story is completely bullshit and the humans first plugged themselves into teh Matrix voluntarily, then their machine custodians just got a bit overzealous.
This is more or less what Agent Smith says to Morpheus later on. The Matrix was originally supposed to be an Utopia (or, if you prefer, an eTopia) for all of humanity, but it just wouldn’t work for some reason, so the Machines changed it until it was drab, dreary, and greenish. That said, Smith’s version of the backstory doesn’t get much screen time vs. Morpheus’s and Zion’s version of the story (as told in the Animatrix). I dunno which version is true, but the only practical reason I could see for keeping the humans around was for ther collective computing power. Or the Machines might have been feeling vengeful and ironical.
No, I’m almost completely certain that wasn’t a voluntary plug-in Matrix for the humans. Agent Smith said that their battery humans essentially “failed to thrive” when they had a piped-in utopia, that their brains didn’t believe in it, so they changed it to a drab Earth-style existence and that worked.
Right, but I’m going on the assumption here that the machines were somewhat irate at the humans for all that abuse (Something drove them to go to war, though I suppose it’s entirely possible that the machines did everything they did out of self-defense). Assuming the machines were feeling vengeful, putting the humans in a eParadise doesn’t seem quite right. Of course, I could be attributing them with emotions they just didn’t have.
I still don’t know why they didn’t just, y’know, lobotomize the humans they were using for a “power supply,” if that’s really supposed to be the reason for it.
Yeah, yeah, I know…then the movie wouldn’t happen. Or Neo would have to run around a Matrix filled with zombies watching paint dry. (Neo himself, being a superior “chosen one,” would have an IQ of 93. Insert your own joke here.)
I heard this was the original explanation, but the dialouge explaning it got too complicated, so they just changed the script to the (somewhat nonsensical) humans as power source explanation.
It was a good enough movie that I was able to suspend disbelief over the various thermodynamic difficulties with the power source thing (it would be more efficent to burn what you feed the humans for power then feed it to them and have things run off their body heat), but it would’ve been a better movie if they hadn’t changed it (or made sequels).