the ultimate weapon

betaprimus

been thinking about the humans darkening the sky to win the war with the machines, I don't quite buy that notion that was the whole plan, as we see when neo went above the clouds what happened to the sentinals and bombs that followed, they were all zapped along with niobe's ship

and thinking that zion the last human city is underground deep into the earth, why? the machines recreated the last human city like it was before they destroyed it, but the why was the last human city underground? if darkening the sky was to be humity's best bet, why build a city under ground?

my theory is darkening the sky was not the plan, creating a world wide EM field, and building a base deep within the earth to shield themselves from the EM field was the plan, however the plan never came to a conclusion, I believe the plan was to create the em field and shield themselves from it, and to bring that em field down to fry all the machines

cesspool · 03/18/2007 00:28:20

My understanding is that the darkening of the sky was indeed intended to starve the Machines, as stated pretty explicitly in the Second Renaissance. Zion was built underground because without the sun the Earth's temperature cooled considerably, and underground was the only place where it was still warm. They also seem to make use of geothermal energy so it makes sense.

If the humans had been smart about it (which they weren't, they looked way off the deep end in the Second Renaissance) instead of trying to vaporize the machines with their whole arsenal of nukes, which aparently didn't work, they would have set a few of them, maybe even just one, off in the upper atmosphere. Depending on how high from the ground they did it they could have shut down the entire country of 01 with astonishingly little effort. When a nuke is set off in the upper atmosphere it can create an enormous EMP. A well placed ICBM over 01 would have effectively made the whole country ripe for the slaughter, but as was proven over and over again, the humans of that era were far from rational or tactical.

betaprimus

thing is though that the "Second Renaissance" is based on the zion archive, which we know the machines know everything in it

the sky is still darkened, the machines have been unable or unwilling to undo the darkened sky, the nations of man knew more than what it was implied in the Second Renaissance

plus did the nations of man have a plan if it worked? leave the sky scorched?

what was the fallback plan if it had failed?

the true knowledge of the plan are lost, duely to prevention of the machines obtaining the knowledge

we just know it failed, and the armies of man fell, and the last hold out zion was destroyed to me it sounds like 3 plans failed, starving the machines of power, defending the nations of man from the machines, and failure to destroy the machines

so what I am saying is that the truth behind the darksky is not known by anyone, and the info in the Second Renaissance" is not quite the truth either, its likely very close

the theory placed earlier could have been a fallback plan that never got executed

WGAnubis1

In second Ren. we learn that it was the humans that struck first and all that, however Morpheus said in the first movie that it was unknown who struck first. In all likelyhood, the Second Ren. is there for the benefit of the audience. If this is the case then it doesnt matter if it the archive was in Zion or the Machine mainframe. In all honesty it would have been more plausable to believe it was in the machine mainframe, but at the time Animatrix was released (between matrix's two and three) it is more acceptable to have had this short be found in the Zion mainframe rather then the machines as the audience, which is human, would have "access" to the file dispite the cannon breakage. But then again, cannonship as to who had it doesnt apply as Second Ren is for the benefit of the audience and had no impact on the current point in time for the story (IE Second Ren, while explaining why it started, is set 600 years into the past and has no bearing on the current cycle).

In regards to how and why man dropped nucks rather then detonate in the atmosphere, I think the people who wrote that story most likely failed to do proper research on EMP's. When you really think about it, it was rather foolish that man didnt build some sort of factory recall command into the AI's which would have made it far more easyer for dismantle the robots instead of letting the local populations rip them apart.

And finally, the machines of the past were dependent on solar energy. However when Darkstorm hit they were forced to seek out alternate and abundent sources of enegy, IE man. Darkstorm is explained, in the ultimate collection, to be compossed of trillians of nanites designed to blot out the sun and to attack anything with an electrial current. This would make sence as if there was no secondary function to prevent machines from breeching the storm would merely have to build either cloud peircing towers or giant solar collecting robots to rise above the storm, bask in the sun light for awhile, and return to 01 with a full battery. Why the machines pursued Neo and Trinity into darkstorm when they knew themselves that the Logos would have come falling down, who knows. It could very well be another plot hole, though needed, to explain that DarkStrom was deadly to the machines.

betaprimus

that is another thing, the humans blackened the sky, the machiens were solar powered, how much power did they have on battery power, before capturing humans building an effecient power system based on humans/fusion

humans are one thing but the standby power source of fusion... 01 is in a very poor resource region, the materials to feed fusion are not there

yeah a shutdown code...just about every scifi dealing with AI will have some sort of shutdown code built in, hell even real robots today have a shutdown sequence

the humans in the matrix are like "well we could put in a shutdown code, ahh but why bother" as you mentioned the humans in the matrix are showed as being extremely dumb

not to mention space... there are no space stations? no colonies? no machine rockets?

the movie has huge *CENSORED* plot holes

WGAnubis1

Well I think you are starting to dig too deeply into the story. If you try to get every detail you will get Moby *CENSORED* in terms of length but I think its best to discribe a few things as this:

1. The machines had ample time to learn about DarkStorm and began to stockpile the solar energy. Keep in mind that machines can natrually share information within the amount of time it takes to blink. So if one machine learned about Darkstorm, in the time it takes to blink the entire machine population knows, has formed a counter plan and already begun to task machines to build the required items needed to tied them over until they can find an alternate energy source.

2. In the battle after darkstorm hit, we clearly see humans were already being used in a more or less simple fusion process to power the machines more powerful weaponry, the later process focused on containment and so forth while the war time one most likely focused on getting energy quickly. In short DarkStorm lost its advantage realitivly quickly after being deployed.

3. Even if there were space colonies (there is nothing to say there are or arnt) there would have been no way you could take the earths popuation and move it to space. We have 6 billion people now, imagine what the population would have been during the time of the second Ren. Even if there were established space colonies, there would be no way to move the earth population nor would humans want to move to begin with. The vast majority would have the "we were here first!" mentality.

betaprimus

the space colonies thing was really saying that darkstorm really hosed humanity more than it did the machines, if there were space colonies, darkstorm would sever those colonies from both machine and man, I believe there are colonies, cause the knowledge of how to undo darkstorm must exist somewhere... the machines don't have it, so odds are its not on earth

minuend

“Goliath” (a 6-page color illustrated text story by Neil Gaiman with art by Bill Sienkiewicz and Gregory Ruth) is narrated by a large British man who was trained in accelerated versions of the Matrix, repeating parts of his life, in order to prepare him to fly a strike in the real world against an alien ship already hitting the Earth (The Matrix Comics)5

5 “Goliath” is particularly hard to place, since it refers to an alien attack upon the machine-controlled Earth, one that takes out significant areas and would be noticed by Zion; the story also does not feature the Matrix as we know it, instead featuring a Matrix-like simulation that can be sped up and repeated. The story features no characters from the movies, including any agents.

That is quoted from the timeline located at http://www.sequart.com/matrixchronology.htm

I've read the comic..if you haven't, you should.
They ARE official, so they count right?

It proves beyond a doubt that Darkstorm did nothing but doom all organic life on Earth. Darkstorm killed Gaia. It also shows that the Machines WILLINGLY ALLOW themselves to be vulnerable to EMP. It's part of their trick to make us feel like we can compete with them in any way. Or it is an attempt to be more like their creators, we are vulnerable to EMP as well. It's just not something we in our current real life run into. I bet you an EMP as strong as what we saw in the movies would make you feel really sick. Like those big magnetic imaging rooms doctors have, I heard that is not a fun ride to take.. It must be remembered that magnetic energy and electricity are related, you can use either to generate the other. The Machines could go so far as to turn our EMP weapons into a quick recharge button for themselves, but they don't.

It proves the Machines could easily move to any other cold dark lifeless rock floating in space. Hell, they could just "Voltron" and form a Deathstar out of Sentinels in space. Like that giant face that worked as one unit that everyone was tricked into thinking was a single entity.. Anyway, they could go solar within the galaxy. I'm sure their batteries are really really good.

So far the only explanation for why our situation is the way it is...is the Machines don't want to lose us. The explanation is an emotional response. It's the same, "we require a Parental Figure/Higher Authority to drive Purpose," that all of Mankind is obsessed and driven by. Remember, we are literally their God.

WGAnubis1

betaprimus wrote:

the space colonies thing was really saying that darkstorm really hosed humanity more than it did the machines, if there were space colonies, darkstorm would sever those colonies from both machine and man, I believe there are colonies, cause the knowledge of how to undo darkstorm must exist somewhere... the machines don't have it, so odds are its not on earth

Eh, until I hear the brothers say mankind had space colonies during this time im going to consider such things as either plauseable or fanfiction as there is nothing to say for or against such ideas but honestly for DarkStorm take into account that mankind was trying to defeat the machines and were getting desprite. The mentality was shoot first ask questions later. I think the grim reaper clapping at the confrence was pretty good indicator that man was shooting themselves in the foot.