I haven’t really studied the film or its history or the statements of the writers/directors/producers but this is my theory.
That was the garbageman.
The Red Pill was essentially a virus. Once it was introduced into Neo’s system it started disrupting his internal body electrochemistry(by messing with the “software” in his head and causing the normally unconsious controls of things like heart rate and body temperature to go haywire) and essentially made him a “bad battery”. Occasionally someone in the Matrix must get sick and their body stop producing at a level within tolerances. When this happens they “die” and are removed from the Matrix. The connections are all severed and the “bad battery” is flushed. It was the disruption to the power matrix that Morpheus was homing on in to find Neo post-flush.**
As Achernar mentioned, this does affect the ship and the equipment inside. Personally I find this particular piece very hard to suspend disbelief on. To assume the machines could not develop shielding(we know how to shield from EM interference now, although not on the scale we’d need to develop to shield from a real pulse, the principles would hold) and that they couldn’t develop re-boot sequences is pretty farfetched to me. I guess if the machines were limited to magnetic memory that I could see it, but I see no reason they couldn’t have optical memories in simple devices like Seekers and have them re-boot after being exposed to an EMP.
I can think of a half-dozen ways, just off the top of my head, to trigger a re-boot after shutdown from EMP interference that wouldn’t be killed by the EMP. Imagine a gyroscope kept spinning all the time. If an EMP hits a machine and the motor powering the gyroscope fails then it stops spinning and falls over. When it falls over it lands on the “reboot” button and the seeker wakes back up. A solonoid holding a weight that will fall on a reboot button if the power supply to the solonoid is not maintained. If the machine shuts down the solonoid goes dead and the weight falls.
I can’t buy the EMP as an effective weapon the machines couldn’t counter.
My take on it was that even though they were all complaining about the food, it was a point of pride to eat ‘real human’ food instead of dining on the imaginary matrix food.
They could just hook up feeding tubes and skip the simulation program right? Maybe that would be too much like going back to being plugged in machines. If I spent the first twenty odd years of my life plugged into a machine, I’m sure I would want to eat with a spoon and fork just so I’d know I was human still.
Actually a plain old EP would be a bolt of lightning. I leave it to your own imagination as to wheather or not this would be a good weapon for carbon-based organisms to use while in close proximity to machines.
I think you have a good point, so maybe it’s possible that the machines don’t know they need to shield for it? Maybe at the end of The Matrix was the first time the humans ever used it.
From what little I saw of the machine world I’d guess EM shielding would be standard. Did you see the lightning arcing up and down the rows of the vats each battery lives in? That’s a pretty freaking noisy environment(although that scene really pissed me off too. If the machines are relying on the humans for power then why in hell are they letting millions of volts go to waste arcing through the air every few seconds?). Shielding would be a must or the first time one of those arcs got near a machine it would fry it. Plus, if EMPs were an effective weapon then howinhell did humans lose the war in the first place? It’s not like the machines started out with armies of sentinels. If EMPs work, then there is no way the humans would lose.
I guess it’s possible they developed shielding during the war and stopped using it afterward, but retro-fitting a sentinel with EMP shielding should be pretty easy and as I noted above I’d expect such shielding to be standard anyway. With perpetual storms on the planet it isn’t like human-directed EMPs would be the only source of dangerous EM fields.
Keeps the meat fresher and the pods clean. Remember they render the dead ones to feed intravenously to the next batch. Drop them in the water and have a machine that scuttles around collecting them every so often. That is another part of why they have to collect Neo quickly after he’s ejected.
I figure they COULD sheild the robots but they are makeing them by the million so they don’t bother. I figure that a hive mind sort of AI that rules the earth probobly takes the path of strength in number. I am sure that if they faught anything stronger than a roveing low level guard it would take more than an EMP pulse.
I think its safe to assume the robots have sheilding that could defend against it but they choose not to waste resources on expendable probes
I knew she was going to say that before he stepped into the room. Especially when she looked at his palm. He was so worried about not living up to being “the one” that I figured if she was really smart that’s what she would say. I think he was under to much pressure to clear his mind and do whatever amazing things he was supposed to do. Once he thought he was like everyone else, he wasn’t trying to be the best, he was just trying to do his best.
Morphius had good intentions. But Neo was worrying way to much about being the one, to be the one.
I knew she was going to say that before he stepped into the room. Especially when she looked at his palm. He was so worried about not living up to being “the one” that I figured if she was really smart that’s what she would say. I think he was under to much pressure to clear his mind and do whatever amazing things he was supposed to do. Once he thought he was like everyone else, he wasn’t trying to be the best, he was just trying to do his best.
Morphius had good intentions. But Neo was worrying way to much about being the one, to be the one.
This also depends on the magnitude of the pulse. To simplify a bit, imagine that, when hit by an EMP, every wire becomes a light bulb filament. Now, some of these filaments are rated high enough(maybe think of a high-wattage bulb, 100, 150 watt) to carry the induced current safely. Some(think 25, 40 watt bulbs) would fry and never work again. It is also important to note that the larger a component is, the more electricity can be induced in it by an EMP. If there was a fuse, or a circuit breaker between a long length of fat wire(which can have lots of electricity induced in it by an EMP) and a more fragile processing circuit, isolating the two by the fuse blowing or the breaker tripping would protect the short, thin wires in the processing circuit. Each wire in the more delicate circuit is of insufficient length/mass to have enough curent induced in it to burn itself, or its neighbors, out.
The important thing to remember is that only the more fragile components are succeptible to EMP unless that emp is of sufficient magnitude to induce EXTREME voltages. If a human crew fired off an EMP capable of inducing millions of volts in the surroundings I’d bet their chairs, the deck plating, etc, would end up frying THEM, or at very least damage their low-tech hovercraft beyond repair.
As noted, EMPs are normally most effective on currently “on” equipment. What they do is take the normal power flow through those circuits, and boost it to the point where it fries. An EMP of sufficient magnitude to induce ALL the power needed to take a circuit from zero to burnout is far more dangerous, and would fry ships systems as well. Many circuits have surge/spike supression capabilities and can drop the power, or open the circuit(turn it off) in response to a surge/spike. Combined with shielding, I would expect this type of protection to be more than adequate to allow a machine to survive an EMP of the magnitude the humans are capable/likely to generate and still be able to re-boot.
I’d still like to know (speculation would be welcome!) why the damned machines didn’t just use nuclear power (were they radical enviromentalists?) or windmills. It looked pretty damned stormy up on the surface, and it seems to be easier to just cover the Earth in windmills then to harvest us. Probably isn’t as fun, though.
Or was using humans as batteries some code weaseled in to keep humans alive, albiet enslaved?
I got the impression from the movie that the EMP didn’t permanently disable the squiddies, and that even after the EMP, they still had to get the hell out of Dodge before the squids rebooted. They had to reboot their systems, too, but they were prepared for it: It’s sort of like the difference between “Start:Shut Down” and just yanking out the plug. So after the EMP, everyone on the sub just pushed the “reset” button, while the squids were going through Scandisk.
