this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2026
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Boy should I not rewatch those movies…
“What do you mean they use them as batteries do you know how inefficient that is?” “Wait they’re growing the WHOLE BODY, MUSCLE AN ALL? How? And… For what? To jack a single neuron signal? That’s like 150 milivolts.” “Where the fuck are they even getting the goop? I’m sure if they’re advanced enough to harvest any energy from humans they could get WAY MORE from that goo on its own.”
Where did you learn how much electricity the human body generates? And about the laws of thermodynamics? That's right, inside the matrix. The machines are fucking liars, man
The idiot is a machine!
Apparently the original plan was for the machines to use the brains of humans for computing power, like a giant neural network. But movie execs thought that was too complicated for the average movie goer and they made them change it to the battery thing.
Using them for processing power made more sense but they could probably done it better by just maintaining the brains and not the entire body, or even just made neural networks and ditch the humans. Also I assumed the goop is just made from the dead humans. They also never explain how they make new humans, they clone them? Artificial insemination?
Where do they get new humans? Why do they keep the whole body?
Have you ever had a wet dream?
If you cum in the Matrix you cum in real life.
Warm vat of liquid goo doesn't sound so nice when it's recirculation community jizz (I mean, not to mention. I ain't judging.)
They answer this in the movie. Humans aren't born. They are grown.
So probably artificial insemination.
Morpheus says the goop is made of dead humans. But they never mention reproduction.
This also means total biomass of humans i.e. pooulation must be decreasing but whatever. The brain network kind of makes energy source makes no sense, just go with it.
But like… we eat a LOT of calories a day to stay alive as a whole body I can’t imagine dead bodies being enough to feed us unless the population is going down a LOT. (Like a human body has maybe 2 years worth of calories)
I would say maybe less in a coma but those humans have fully developed bodies and muscles and all, so should be consuming about the same.
And yeah, extra processing power makes more sense than battery.
A fucking tortilla gives you enough energy to run for half an hour, we’re crazy efficient compared to machines, but the machines just needed a plentiful energy source and it wouldn’t matter that much. Yeah, the original brain computing made a lot more sense:
I thought it was closer to 1 year. In any case it's something of that magnitude. That's been a trope in Hollywood for a long time. Soylent Green (1973) has the same "eat people" thing. It would mean every 1 of 2 years, one half of the population would have to eat the other half.
The dichotomy is more "how do we get some utility out of these humans without having to just kill all of them because we think genocide is probably wrong."
This has always been my theory. Some kind of inbuilt mechanism whereby they must trick themselves into thinking that what they are doing is somehow to our benefit, as in the first law of robotics by Isaac Asimov.
I don't remember if it was from one of the movies or one of the other related media, but don't they claim to have put the humans into the matrix out of kindness and sympathy? That they wanted them to have a relatively easy and happy existence.
That becomes very believable if they don't actually need them for power. And in fact it makes me wonder if the machines even need them conscious at all or could just as easily keep them comatose.
I think you may be referring to the "humans are a virus / human beings are a disease" dialogue ... "and we are the cure".
That refers more to human society, but yeah, why refer to yourself as "the cure" if you think of yourself as a superior lifeform who conquered and then even colonized the bodies of the former chief predator on the planet?
All of this getting back to: why not just make a fusion reactor or some such, and not bother with all that (bio-)mechanical machinery needed to harvest human "energy", even if we were a battery, that surely sounds more wasteful and inefficient?
On the other hand, human society went extinct so humans had no collective memory of the past - unless it could be found written somewhere, which we were not told of in the movie series - and also robot society may itself not even be aware of its own motivations. Machines are better at repeating patterns than truly "thinking", especially outside-of-the-box creative stuff (in movies, whereas irl machines don't "think" at all... yet), so it seems more plausible that Mr. Smith is purely spouting BS here to keep Morpheus' mind occupied while it can be hacked, maybe even believing his own crap, but all very minor in relation to fulfilling his programming-mandated mission (seemingly not knowing that a prior instantiation of him has done this before? or more likely not caring even if he did).
Anyway, this may be going too far since it is also highly plausible that even if the machines did want humans for batteries, the offer of a pleasant Ephesian Fields / Heaven type existence was not genuinely for the benefit of the humans (they seem to think at any rate), but rather to keep them docile & complacent.
Ultimately, it's art so it means whatever we want it to? :-P
I like the alternative better, where human brains were used for processing power. The battery stuff makes no sense, except it's an easy visual thing when Morpheus explains it.
Yeah I could see like the machines having to keep humans alive so this is the way to keep them from killing themselves and also proving useful for some background processing power.
The body typically produces between 100-500w of heat. That's like three to five people to run a toaster.