I bow to your greater powers of logicality, Cap’n, have fun![sub]I’m just gonna go wait in line for LOTR tickets, now.[/sub]
Welcome to the board, joshmaker.
What did you think? That humans must eat plants to survive? Look, it is a relatively simple idea that the machines could find a food source which didn’t require the sun in order to make a food for us, and then we created the energy for them.
It is a science fiction movie. the question isn’t “Can we do it?” but rather “is it conceivable that it could be done?” In my mind, yes, it is. The entire process of life is about one living being getting energy from another living being or its byproducts.
joshmaker, then I suppose we cannot be breathing, right? We turn oxygen into co2 and plants turn co2 into oxygen. that must violate the 2nd law! We’re not actually breathing! 
He did move out of the way. The cop died, not the agent.
clayton
What information did they put in? Actually, I liked the oracle as the high-point of the film. “You’re not the one.” That is killer. And he wasn’t. “I don’t know, waiting for another life maybe.” And he was, wasn’t he? I don’t think she said anything as question-begging, which is what you seem to imply.
Here he comes, the Nitpick Nitpicker!
Am I the only one who heard Morpheus also say “…Combined with a form of fusion”? Using humans as “batteries” is only a small part of the power generation. How great a part, we don’t know. Maybe the machines have control of a giant Spam manufacturing plant, giving them unlimited quantities of Spam, and use humans to process the spam into electricity.
Why does it require getting more energy out of a system than was put in? Cars provide useful work… do they provide more energy than was put in? No. They are, in reality, horribly inefficient. But they turn a fuel which is otherwise unusable into something usable. Why is it inconceivable for humans to be used as processing stations?
One theory states that the machines, in addition to tapping excess electricity, also use spare brainpower in humans as processing power. Much like the SETI project that uses your computer’s spare computational cycles to analyze information.
I’m a theatre guy. There’s only one response to this sort of wannabe nitpick: Suspension of disbelief. In other words, it’s cooler to have Trinity deliver a piece of reparte’.
The Matrix scans through all information sent through the telephone lines, as evidenced by the wiretapping at the beginning of the movie. Such an act would require tappable lines to and from the Matrix and the scanning ports.
In other words, the Agents are just software. The machines that scan the data are hardware. Hardware can be tapped. Software can’t.
The problem with the ‘Humans as Power-Sources’ concept as presented is that the form of energy they were supposedly getting from humans was body heat. Human body heat is a side-effect to our metabolism burning it’s food for motive power. As anyone who’s been shown how to determine the caloric content of food in high school science class knows, you can get more heat from the food from simply burning it. WHATEVER the machines were using to feed the humans, it would have been more efficient for their stated purposes to simply burn it in a furnace.
The only way they could retain any scientific plausibility at all would be if it was later shown that Morpheus and his crew had some artificial mental block preventing them from seeing the obvious problems in their explanation. They were obviously not stupid enough to be unable to figure this out on their own, even if that’s what they were told - any rational person given time to think about the explanation ‘they use human body heat to power their machines’ would have realized the fallacy eventually.
There is one explanation that could have fit with the facts as presented - that the machines needed human mental function to continue their existence. Even if you totally ignore the basic laws of thermodynamics that make using animal metabolism for power impossible, you need to explain why the machines didn’t use cattle instead of humans. Perhaps the artificial intelligences evolved from computers that had a direct interface with the human brain, which is what the whole Matrix relies on. They can’t function as well if you take the human brain out of the loop, so they arrange it so that humans stay jacked-in for their entire lives.
Glad to see you joshmaker, it’s cool to have your first post here.
Badtz, I agree. However, if the machines were using the humans for spare processing power, wouldn’t it also make sense for them to try to tap into the spare energy that would otherwise just be wasted? I believe that both theories can coexist perfectly.
Plot hole: What happens when everyone is unplugged? It took extensive work to fix his body after it’s escape from the matrix. What happens when 6 billion people are ejected? Wouldn’t most of them die? and of those who do live through it, living in a world that has been trashed for a century and has no sun… the matrix almost sounds like a good thing…
Except that Agent Smith did, remember? He was so fanatacal and sadistic in his pursuit of the free humans his two underlings became reluctant to go along with him. And the speech to Morpheus? Pure hubris, the classic taint of the serial killer mind.
Agent Smith might have become sentient, if Neo hadn’t disrupted his program. But he would have been a very dangerous sociopathic killer.
clayton_e:
I understood the ending, with Neo flying upwards and proclaiming the society without rules, without limits, without you (talking to the MCP (bad Tron reference :)) that runs the Matrix), as saying that the humans would wrest control of the Matrix from the AI and put it in the hands of the humans. After all, the Matrix is a powerful tool. Not using it is insane.
How about this observation on humans as mobile power units? It’s one I came up with myself, and a few friends seem to think it’s plausible, at least in terms of movie logic.
Living beings are instinctively driven to survive, and use up their resources much more completely in a desire to keep functioning. When a battery runs out of power (or even just runs low), it stops working. When an organism runs out of energy reserves, it begins to consume itself – muscle, bone, and all the rest – in order to continue providing power for homeostasis and brain functions. Thus, while a human battery won’t necessarily provide as much current as another type, it will do so more reliably and lessen breakdowns in the field. Combine this with the popular notion of offloading some processor tasks to the human brain, and you have a working model for why the Matrix uses humans instead of exterminating them John Cameron/SkyNet style.
I liked the scene on the roof where Neo unloads 2 9mm handguns at the agent who dodges them all (without moving his legs… AIM FOR THE LEGS, IDIOT!) and during the whole agent is blurry thing there’s another skyscraper in the background… which appears to be impervious to small arms fire. No holes, no cracks, not even a big of wiggling. Maybe the agent wasn’t dodging, he was catching? 
It’s actually pretty common for the backstop of the bullets being fired in a movie to show no ill effects from it.
I also like the slow mo subway scene in which bullets are coming out of the gun… but there is no recoil. That is, the bullets were drawn in later, but the gun isn’t actually firing.
Oh, and Neo’s aim with the mini-gun on the helicopter is pretty impressive since he was just waving it around and spraying lead everywhere. A great idea for a rescue… hose down the room with machine gun fire! No possibility of problems there!
And how come the agents can’t shoot straight? They’re bloody computer programs, and I shoot better than them! Unless, of course, there is the need of a superficial calf wound to justify the helicopter rope trick.
The humans as power is silly since if you’ve got fusion, the human part isn’t real helpful. Heck, if you’re not worried about the waste (and why would machines?) then fission works perfectly well. In the book they were using the humans to generate CPU cycles… or so I’ve heard. Haven’t read it. Sure makes better sense than a hand waving “humans used for power” explanation, though.
Hehe… okay, I’ll stop.
I figured this was a case of their superheroic Matrix powers and skills. Besides, not all such guns spray lead in a wide cone – a careful gunner (with computer combat-enhancement) at such close range could shoot all around Morpheus without hitting him. In a movie, anyway.
There’s that; there’s also the need to try and keep their prisoner in the building without killing him. Remember that Morpheus is their only means of discovering the access codes to Zion.