»Some Paradoxes«

Assumption 1) Zion/Machine world is real.
Assumption 2) AI reasons rationally.

1) Electricity/Power. -- It seems from the movie that Zion is producing the power it uses. This means that there are alternative sources of energy to using humans as batteries. If the machines were rational they would have used this source, even if it meant digging deep into the earth core, rather than maintaining the Matrix and risking that some abnomallity within the Matrix(Neo/Smith) would destroy their energy source. There is a possibility that the machines are providing Zion with power. In this case it would be rational to cut off the energy supply when you want to destroy Zion, rather sending a huge army down there. -- So either assumption 1 or 2 is incorrect.

2) Air/Oxygen -- According to the Architect Zion is rebuilt 5 times. Repopulating a city of 100.000 from 21 humans 5 times would have taken at least 2000 years. 2000 years of no sun and no plants and trees would reduce oxygen levels dramatically making it impossible to breathe normally in tunnels deep underground. -- So the first assumtion must be incorrect.

I have many more contradictionas, but very sleepy now, and please excuse my English, it's my 3rd language.

Finally I want to say that 1st movie was great, the second even better, the third sucked bad.
/cheers

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1) Electricity/Power. -- It seems from the movie that Zion is producing the power it uses. This means that there are alternative sources of energy to using humans as batteries. If the machines were rational they would have used this source

there probably are alternatives to using humas as batteries. yet i dont believe that was sole reason for the creation of the matrix. do you believe that the only reason for the existence of the matrix was to provide energy for the machines?

the machines and humans were at war, therefore i think:

- as soon as the humans sorched the skies, the human battery was a good, fast alternative for a power source.
- just like back in the day of the egyptians, they conquered and enslaved the jews. used them for the dirty work. maybe this could be another use fo the matrix. the egyptians didnt kill off all the jews, they wanted them as slaves. and humans still pluged in to the matrix are slaves of it.

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There is a possibility that the machines are providing Zion with power.

that is possible, although not probable. zion had many subsystems that we never knew about. when the counselor took neo down to the engineering level, he talked about the water recycling machine. therefore it's safe to asume that there was an air recycler also.

as for the food an plant thing. sadly we are never told anything about that in the movies. yet there has to be a level in zion for farming and raising animal for food. it only seems logical.

any thoughts...

Wouldn't that have been explained via the breakfast scen in M1, when they were sitting around the table discussing the snot like substance on tap masquerading as food. Wouldn't Zion be into the same type of sustenance. I mean somewhere along the line you have to take a leap of faith and recognize where theatrical license is used to explain an analogous construct.

the point about the synthetic foods would be good if you didnt see hundreds of people giving gifts of bread and fruit to neo when he returned to zion

Hey Matrix 3 maybe a great film technologically speaking but one major quirk is present
If one battleship's EMP can destroy the whole lot of these machines at once, why didn't the commander order at least one ship to remain in the city just in case?
It's stupid really.
I quite liked MAtrix 2 which involved higher ideas like spirituality and other quotes from philosophical books. But the Wachowski bros messed it up in Revolutions. Hope another trilogy explains everything to us

If you want to know how they have bread in Zion.. read the Matrix Comics.. there's a story called "The Miller's Tale".

It talks about how in the beginning, everyone DID have to eat that crappy goop all the time that you see in the 1st movie.. and everyone was sick of it. But one way the humans have survived is to make surface forays for anything that remains which can be of use/comfort.

On one of these surface forays, they discovered primitive disks which were "so primitive that they carried no more data than say, a matrix agent's hair stirred by a virtual breeze".. these "primitive" disks were actually movie DVD's but one disk in particular stuck out because it showed farming and the cultivation of wheat. The older people in Zion had eaten bread as a child but had long forgotten what it tasted like, but fuelled by these images, they hatched a plan.

They found an old map of the surface which revealed the location of a lab which held the seeds of both heirloom and genetically modified species of crops and plants. Going against authority, a group of 6 people went out on the longest surface foray ever to recover the seeds.. out to where no matrix born human had ever been.. the far countryside. They stocked up with as much grain as they could and headed back to Zion but they were apprehended by a surface seeker and 5 of the group were killed.. the last remaining member of the group made it back and they began to experiment with the seeds trying to cultivate them, using stolen UV lights from the machines (humans need UV light to synthesize vitamin D, so the machines need to use UV lights to keep the humans hooked up to the power plant alive)

They set up tents on the surface to shield the crops from the harsh rain and wind and tapped into the machines power lines to run the UV lights, thus managing to create fields of wheat. But it didn't go unnoticed forever, cuz the machines noticed the extra drain from their power supply and destroyed the fields, killing all the farmers too.

Now, Zion holds a bread feast twice a year using STOCKPILED grain in memory of those who died so that the people of Zion could enjoy the simple pleasure of bread.

So you see.. it was a huge gesture for those people to offer all that bread to Neo because it has to be rationed carefully.. I think its safe to presume that the fruit is also a rarity but it still exists, nonetheless!

Also, from the Zion archives we see that in Link's quarters, they grow mushrooms like funghi on the pipes or radiators or whatever they are! so this must be a common food source in Zion.

Hope this was helpful to you all.

About the "Miller's tale"... they say that the world above is maximum 100 years old, and that's where they found seeds for farming.

So, how comes that these seeds are still functional after several centuries (maybe milleniums since the Architecte is not very clear about past time) ?

Not to mention that we see ducks and frogs that survived. After all these years !

At the end of the comics, we see that Morpheus as children is eating the bread, so that story is happening after the last reload.


To me, the only logical explanation is that, after a certain time, earth goes out of ressources and then machines send all their informations in the past by time travelling.
That would explain how a program like the Oracle can predict so well the futur and how Zion could have been rebuilt 5 times etc.

Just to answer at the fact that Machiens could use the same energy source than humans, unfortunetly it would not work a long time because taking the heat from earth will cool it and provoke earthquakes and many other natural catastrophes.
It works if a bunch of humans use it but if all the machines on the world did the same (u saw as me the siez of 01), eath would not last a long time before collapsing on itself.

Seeds can last a surprising amount of time. When the conditions are not right for germination they go into a dormant period and can survive like that for hundreds of years until they are placed in the required growth conditions of moisture and temperature etc. On top of that, the seeds were taken from a lab so they could also have been preserved. I highly doubt that time travel is involved.

Also for anyone who's critisized the machines method of obtaining power and questioned the necessity to enslave humans, I think you're thinking too technically and not practically. It doesn't matter that there are a million and one other ways in which the machines could have obtained power. Morpheus himself says that they use the human power plant in conjunction with "a form of fusion". For those that don't know, fusion is the same mechanism that fuels the sun, so we're not talking the equivalent to a few AA batteries! They didn't have difficulty in obtaining a power source, but quite simply, by using humans - they killed 2 birds with one stone. Remember, man and machine were AT WAR. They were enemies. The machines didn't HAVE to create the human power plant, but in doing so they could obtain power while retaining the upper hand over manking AT THE SAME TIME.

Blizz wrote:

Hey Matrix 3 maybe a great film technologically speaking but one major quirk is present If one battleship's EMP can destroy the whole lot of these machines at once, why didn't the commander order at least one ship to remain in the city just in case? It's stupid really.

No it's not a flaw. We even saw why they couldn't do that in the movie itself. When Niobe flew the Mjolnir back into Zion and activated the EMP, it destroyed that wave of sentinals. While the others are celebrating, Commander Lock then tells them that they've handed the dock to them on a plate because not only did they take out the sentinals, they took out all the APU's and other defences. As we saw from the next wave of sentinals and also from the shots of 01 where Neo & Trinity go, there were just far too many sentinals to take out in just 1 EMP. It wouldn't be possible to leave more ships either because the 1st EMP would take out the circuits of all the ships present too.

wAkE_uP_nEo,

how explain the ducks and the frogs surviving so long without sunlights ? All the other arguments I gave and that you ignored ?

But what you said about Morpheus talking about fusion is interesting. But I don't see the point of using human beings for that fusion, they could have been horses and anything else.

The only explanation to that would be that this fusion requires a functionning mind with some level of intelligence and, above all, something based on carbon-like life or else machines would have made that energy themself.

Well, that resolves partially that old question of humans being simple batteries.

Apoc is right, there are still paradoxes about the dates. Something is wrong in the trylogy.
Why, after all these years, the machines have still not found a way to go above the cloud ? That's strange too...

There is a story on the official site where it is told that Aliens are attacking machines by throwing asteroids on them.

The machines create a little vessel with a human to pilot it and send him as suicide mission to kill the Aliens in the space.

Now, that sounds ridiculous to send a human, why not use an AI ? So it looks like machines can't go through the cloud.

I think that humans have left the earth and then created the cloud. Earth is a prison made to prevent machines from spreading in the universe. Maybe even that this supposed alien vessel is in fact coming from humans that survived on anotehr planet.

I didn't ignore them.. I just didn't feel like writing a long explanation at the time!

It has been said that in the event of a nuclear war, the dust raised would block out the sun and create what's known as a nuclear winter, a state which would be very similar to the desert of the real where the human "scorched the sky". In this state, it has been suggested that all PHOTOSYNTHETIC plants would die but that other, more basic forms of life would survive. Accordingly, under Darwin's theory of evolution, some life which has certain adaptations will be able to survive to its new environment, giving breed to new species which are also able to survive the new environment.

The frogs and ducks don't need the sun DIRECTLY to survive. The only reason a lot of life depends on it now is because it helps to maintain the plant life at the very bottom of the food web on which everything else depends on. Now what has happened is most of the photosynthetic plants are dead, BUT it also shows that some survive which goes along with what I said earlier about evolution. Also fungi and other such plant life not dependant on sunlight still remains. This means that there is still an abundance of plant life on the earth's surface to maintain other life. This is how the frogs and ducks survive.

Going back to the power.. again, I have to stress: the machines didn't EVER have to use humans. The thing I said about fusion.. it doesn't involve humans. It's the combining of particles to release MASSIVE amounts of energy.. the same process which fuels the sun. The point is, the sun creates HUGE amounts of energy which provides enough energy to sustain life on the whole planet. Using fusion alone would probably produce enough energy for the machines. They use humans in the power plant simply to render them harmless. It's a perfect way to imprison your enemies-at-war but ALSO get power from them in a way that's completely renewable. So the argument that they could have used horses, cows or whatever is wholly redundant. The same applies to the idea of going above the clouds.

I don't get it... what's the point of keeping humans then ? And it really looks that machines do need us. If FUgian don't need sun, what is their energy source then ? I bet that if you check, you'll see that is lays on another plant that uses photosynthesis.

but they DON'T need to keep the humans... that's just it... not for energy. The only reason why they do is because we were trying to destroy them in war.. so this way they could keep us imprisoned but get power at the same time... no other reason they didn't NEED us for power.. that's only what the humans thought.

But why not simply kill us all ?

that's open to debate.. it has been suggested that the machines aren't capable of making the choice to wipe us out, which is why the Architect gives Neo a choice at the end of Reloaded. Another possibility is that essentially machines were built to serve man. They didn't start the war. As we saw from the Animatrix they wanted peace but the humans rejected that and tried to destroy the machines. Thinking from the machines POV.. they suggested peace, but we said no.. so the logical conclusion is that we wanted war. It could be a case that the only thing that was ever needed to end the war was to prove that we wanted harmony between man and machine which was ultimately achieved through Neo's "self sacrifice".

Finally, I think we should bear in mind that there is a point, beyond which, you just have to say.. if the machines just killed us all, then there really wouldn't be a story worth telling now would there? I think you have to allow for some degree of artistic license in that respect too, but that's not to say that there aren't reasons for it which fit the story. I'm of the opinion that the Wachowskis have thought this story through more thoroughly than a lot of people give them credit for..

...just to give a couple of examples.. using hard lines as exits.. the brothers realised that the amount of data require to jack in and out of the matrix would be high in volume and so transferring through a cellular network would be unfeasible, either because of the bulk of information or perhaps the speed at which that amount of data could be transmitted. Also if you look at the exits, they're always in really crappy, run down and decrepit areas.. and the reason is that they wanted to be able to jack in and out of the matrix using lines which yielded low traffic as to remain undetected. These are just a couple of examples of small, seemingly insignificant details which have actually been very clearly thought about. We must remember that this trilogy is the culmination of years of brainstorming and jotted notes and ideas.. there is so much detail, its incredible!

Ok for the artistic part, but that's a big flaw in the story if the W. brother have no explanations for keeping us alive.

The phone thing is rather to give importance to the stroy. Indeed, if they could get out whenver they wanted, there would not be danger for them and thus nothing interesting for the battles.
Imagine, an agent come and all you have to do is to leave or use your cellphone... to easy

i didn't say the Wachowskis didn't have an explanation for it. I just gave a few suggestions of my own. I believe that they have explanations for nearly every tiny little detail of the world of the matrix.

and also the thing i said about the phones.. i wasn't guessing.. i was telling you what the Wachowskis said about the volume of data etc.. its not just to make it more exciting.. there is a reason for that too.. it was an example of the small details they have thought of.

Maze wrote:

Apoc is right, there are still paradoxes about the dates. Something is wrong in the trylogy. Why, after all these years, the machines have still not found a way to go above the cloud ? That's strange too...

Hey all, i'm new here and just thought i would post my 2 testicles worth. The cloud layer wreaks havoc on anything electrical. This is shown in Revolutions when Neo and Trinity shoot above the clouds. Their hovercraft powers down/malfunctions. They have to restart is once they have come back down from the clouds. So its safe to assume that the machines cannot penetrate the clouds.

I realise that im posting the bleeding obvious, my apologies for it. im just getting in the swing of things

APOLOGIES! for some reason the word "c e n t s" was changed to testicles. i did not do it on purpose!

The admin made it so that changes.

Hey everybody,

I think the machines DID need us. The theory on nuclear fusion is a good one, but there are two problems with it. 1) Fusion consumes natural resources. 2) Fusion isn't possible yet. Explanation below....

2) Let's do this one first - Fusion isn't possible yet. It's close, but no cigar. Basically, the reaction works in theory, and we know it does - every star in the universe operates on fusion. Physicists have created fusion reactions, but the problem is, in order to maintain the conditions that allow the reaction, you need EXTREMELY hot materials to work with. And I'm talking constantly hot. By hot, I mean something like 1,000,000 degrees Kelvin (if memory serves...). They can do it, but that raises another problem - how the hell do you contain something that hot? Also, the reaction actually GIVES OFF more heat than that. Basically, it burns itself out. There's not enough heat left to sustain itself. Now you're thinking "No problem! We'll heat the process externally!", and you are right. Except that the amount of energy/heat needed to fuel the process is more than fusion gives off.

So, with current fusion processes, we actually LOSE energy. But hey, they're working on it....

So let's say the machines researched, experimented, blah blah blah, and found the secret to fusion, and got it working. WHy wouldn't they use it, but use humans instead? See my first point!

1) It's not renewable. Fusion uses up (depending on what process you use) deuterium and Lithium. Both are readily available in the environment. There's a ton of each of these. Fusion would last us for thousands of years, would be insanely environmentally cleaner than current energy generation, and would give us more power (no more California blackouts for you Yankees out there! ). BUT! If someone said "hey - choose between these two power sources you'd like to use... both need to be maintained, and both will last you a freaking long time, but one will eventually run out." Which one are you going to choose? HUMANS.

Questions/comments?

Matty

i know that fusion isn't possible, or rather not a viable option NOW but i think its a pretty safe assumption to say that either man or machine has conquered the secret of nuclear fusion in the timeframe of the matrix story. i mean.. c'mon, we haven't been able to create hovercrafts, APU's, EMP's which have a range better than a few feet or even AI good enough to spawn a whole race of machines like in the matrix either, but i think that would be absurdly picky to say this is a flaw in the story, it is afterall set in the future. i don't really think its useful to analyze the story in this way or else we could go on forever about all the things in the movie that we're not able to do now, or any other movie which has a science fiction element for that matter.

as for its renewability, i was led to believe that although it does require deuterium and tritium, fusion is.. practically speaking.. pretty much effectively limitless, the main source being from the ocean. i don't think we can be 100% about the exact amount of time this could be sustained for, but it has been suggested that it will provide as much as we'd ever need. also in the even that it doesn't, it is still technically feasible to be generated in nuclear reactors.