Recent replies to "the human body as power source"

Reply from Jeff Crook

Jeff Crook — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:53:01 -0000

It might downsize and reboot.

Reply from Sergio Stagnaro

Sergio Stagnaro — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:30:46 -0000

I am interested in been told if statins can also, among a large number of other action mechanisms, augment the Energy of internal human batteries, for instance activating respiratory chain in mitochondria.In other words what Matrix would do if treated with statins?

Reply from Zarry Flarer

Zarry Flarer — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 09:48:00 -0000

But it uses heat radiated by human as their power source. So, I was thinking, why use humans when they can create machines that can generate more heat!

Reply from Jeff Crook

Jeff Crook — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:36:26 -0000

Well there were some cool scenes in the movies, no doubt, but once they started getting into the whys and hows in the second and third installments, the structure began to fall apart.

I like the idea. It’s just the humans-as-batteries concept that bothers me. I think they wrote that in at the behest of the marketing people who had sold a Duracell product placement.

Reply from Henry Gee

Henry Gee — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 18:17:10 -0000

I think the humans-as-batteries element of The Matrix is Gothick rather thah Hard SF - all it has to do is be creepy and over-the-top – it doesn’t have to make sense.

Reply from Jeff Crook

Jeff Crook — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:07:11 -0000

Oh, and why didn’t The Matrix just lobotomize the humans at birth? Maintaining The Matrix just seems a pointless effort all the way around.

Thus the entire irrational structure exists only to serve the plot.

Reply from Jeff Crook

Jeff Crook — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:04:33 -0000

How about the ‘human as battery’ concept in Matrix? It was something I’d always sort of accepted without thinking until the last time I watched the movie.

Since humans cause The Matrix so many problems, wouldn’t it have made more sense for the machines to choose a more compliant species? I’m thinking electric eels might have been a better choice. All the same, I can’t imagine that the sum of power gained could have equaled the cost in power of maintaining The Matrix while keeping all those restless, troublesome human batteries alive, not to mention all the reboots.

Reply from Brian Derby

Brian Derby — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 23:30:54 -0000

How much power is there available? Food consumption for a day is about 12000 KJ. There are 86400 seconds in a day, so the mean power output (assuming no losses) will be about 140 W. Enough to illuminate a room. My guess is that generating power say by using an enzymatic generator (gluciose oxidase?) would ne pretty inefficient so we would only be extracting mW.

Stick with duracell!