What would you do if a mysterious man approached you with a pill that would allow you to see through the illusion of the world around you, revealing that you are nothing more than a battery for a highly advanced system controlled by machines who have created a virtual world for your mind to conceal the fact that in reality you're little more than a battery for their consumption? If you were a nitpicking scientist, the first thing you'd do is probably ask the robots if the energy return on their input was really worth all the effort. The premise to The Matrix has humanity being harvested for their energy, but unfortunately humans produce very little energy - only around 100 watts of power in a typical day. What are the robots using to power our feeding and life support systems, you might ask? Wouldn't they be better off taking the energy from that instead, since machines like to be so efficient? Of course, had they done all of that then The Matrix movie wouldn't have any need to exist and we'd be deprived of one of the greatest science fiction movies in recent years - although perhaps they could have converted to post-human energy consumption after the first movie to spare us all the terrible sequels...
