• stickyprimer@lemmy.world
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    6 hours ago

    It’s been said a million times that the human battery thing makes no sense in terms of energy production. But the other huge sin the Matrix commits is having humans block out the sun so robots can’t get solar power. That is ridiculously stupid. Humans need to grow crops. I rest my case. It’s stupid. I love these movies, but that part is just plain stupid.

    • Macchi_the_Slime@piefed.blahaj.zone
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      5 hours ago

      There’s conflicting stories about it so it’s hard to verify, but apparently the battery thing was a rewrite.

      Apparently originally the people plugged into the matrix were meant to be the very hardware the matrix was run on. As in all their brains together formed a literal neural network that provided the processing power to run the matrix. This is then why knowing it’s not real and believing you can do “the impossible” within the matrix can cause you to be able to bend reality. The story goes that executives thought it was too high of a concept for audiences to grasp and demanded the change to the battery explanation to make it simpler to follow.

      • stickyprimer@lemmy.world
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        46 minutes ago

        I’ve heard this too, but even this has an issue. It’s circular. Why imprison humans so their brains can be used to run the matrix which is designed to imprison them?

        • Jyek@sh.itjust.works
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          7 minutes ago

          Presumably the brain network was performing more than the task of simulation. I.E performing processing tasks for the machines. More humans = more brains = more processing headroom (ha, clever) for more machines.

        • Macchi_the_Slime@piefed.blahaj.zone
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          9 minutes ago

          i mean they kind of go into that in the movies don’t they? The machines didn’t want to completely destroy humanity. So they tried to create the matrix as “The Perfect Prison” for them. Using their own minds to create the very prison to hold them in would fit right into that wouldn’t it?

      • JcbAzPx@lemmy.world
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        5 hours ago

        Yeah, it was changed because someone thought that the explanation scene wouldn’t work if they were holding up a CPU. They forced them to use a battery instead, forever ruining the backstory.

        • Macchi_the_Slime@piefed.blahaj.zone
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          7 minutes ago

          I’d never heard Neil Gaiman as the origin of that theory. I’d always heard it came from commentary on the DVDs myself. I just don’t own the films. But I guess that’d be the conflicting stories bit right?

    • Folstar@lemmus.org
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      6 hours ago

      Yeah, humans would never destroy natural resources in favor of some tech fix or just kinda assume that the planet would fix itself… /s

      My headcannon on the human battery thing is that the machines have core programming to make reasonable efforts to preserve human life. Designing power reactors (look how thick the cores are on the towers) with humans slapped to the side technically aligns with the core programming while allowing them to stick it to us apes. It’s also why the attack on Zion was one tentacle abductor machine for each human instead of dumping super plague down the hole and calling it a day.