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Comment by hanoz | Hacker News Reader

Isn't the premise, unbearably absurd even by the standards of the rest of the movie, that humans are used as a power supply?

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Here's my favorite fan theory from HPMOR:

>NEO: I've kept quiet for as long as I could, but I feel a certain need to speak up at this point. The human body is the most inefficient source of energy you could possibly imagine. The efficiency of a power plant at converting thermal energy into electricity decreases as you run the turbines at lower temperatures. If you had any sort of food humans could eat, it would be more efficient to burn it in a furnace than feed it to humans. And now you're telling me that their food is the bodies of the dead, fed to the living? Haven't you ever heard of the laws of thermodynamics?

>MORPHEUS: Where did you hear about the laws of thermodynamics, Neo?

>NEO: Anyone who's made it past one science class in high school ought to know about the laws of thermodynamics!

>MORPHEUS: Where did you go to high school, Neo?

>(Pause.)

>NEO: ...in the Matrix.

>MORPHEUS: The machines tell elegant lies.

>(Pause.)

>NEO (in a small voice): Could I please have a real physics textbook?

>MORPHEUS: There is no such thing, Neo. The universe doesn't run on math.

Strictly speaking, Morpheus held up a battery at the end of his little talk. Humans make no sense as an energy source, obviously, but fat has a reasonably solid energy density for its volatility.

My personal headcanon is that the machines were laboring under something akin to Asimov's three laws, which required that they preserve humanity. The Matrix, then is a loophole, something which technically satisfies the requirements of their core programming, but in a way that is advantageous to the machines.

But then, once you've got all those people hooked up, you might as well make some use out of them. They aren't the most efficient battery around, but if you've got to keep them anyway, they might as well serve as a load balancer. The people of Zion just came later and mistook an ancillary benefit for the machine's primary purpose.

NEO: The human body is the most inefficient source of energy you could possibly imagine. The efficiency of a power plant at converting thermal energy into electricity decreases as you run the turbines at lower temperatures. If you had any sort of food humans could eat, it would be more efficient to burn it in a furnace than feed it to humans. And now you're telling me that their food is the bodies of the dead, fed to the living? Haven't you ever heard of the laws of thermodynamics?

MORPHEUS: Where did you hear about the laws of thermodynamics, Neo?

NEO: Anyone who's made it past one science class in high school ought to know about the laws of thermodynamics!

MORPHEUS: Where did you go to high school, Neo?

(Pause.)

NEO: ...in the Matrix.

MORPHEUS: The machines tell elegant lies.

(Pause.)

NEO (in a small voice): Could I please have a real physics textbook?

MORPHEUS: There is no such thing, Neo. The universe doesn't run on math.

[0] https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/1263/is-the-basic-...

Now that's a movie I'd like to see. I mean, if you're going to simulate a universe, what's stopping you from playing around with the parameters a bit? Or at the very least, cutting some corners to save processing time.

Isn't this a theory that's sometimes used to support the simulation hypothesis? The idea that weird effects in nature such as wave/particle duality are the simulation's way of cutting down on processing time, something like reducing draw distance in a 3D game.

It's probably the kind of thing that will be easily debunked by a real physicist (if you are one, go ahead) but I find the idea quite mind-blowing if I think about it for too long.

Rather, it's a reduction of our processing, in our head, if anything. The dialog is correct, noone in school manages to verify quantum physics.

> cutting some corners to save processing time

I've seen this as an explanation for quantum uncertainty.

They wanted them to be used for processing, but producers: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/a/116473

Wasn't that going to rest on the tired old "10% of your brain" trope? Pulling that one out would have bothered me a great deal more than the battery analogy.

That's what the people in Zion believes, not necessarily what was really going on: https://www.quora.com/Why-didnt-the-sentient-machines-in-the...

my understanding is that the original draft of the script had humans being used as a massively parallel distributed processing network. their own brains were the wetware that run the matrix simulation program. that's more sensible and a much more profound statement as to the philosophical connections between the matrix and the social construction of consciousness, which was a major theme of the film.

but then some shit-for-brains hollywood producers read the script, decided it was too intellectual/nerdy and had it rewritten as "humans are batteries" which is gibberish to anyone with an education, but hollywood loves the lowest common denominator.

The premise is that there was a war between humanity and its creations, and the creations won. Subsequently humanity was imprisoned in a virtual world. The specifics on why imprisonment was the chosen punishment is just detail and window dressing.

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