Science Fiction and Climate Change: Matrix
I am going to start my small, personal review of science fiction and climate change with Matrix. Although this is not a film anyone would relate with climate change it deserves a place in the hearts of science fiction lovers, at least for me. The nightmare of being harvested and artificially entertained by a quite imperfect world not so different from the real one was terrible and fascinating at the same time and the visual effects were a step beyond in 1999. Incredible.
But I am not here to comment the film, just to find a subtle connection with climate change. Lets read the scrpit:
Morpheus : A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don’t know who struck first – us, or them. But we know it was us that scorched the sky. At the time they were dependent on solar power and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun. Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
In this case not exactly climate change but solar energy. As Morpheus explains to Nero the machines were powered by solar energy, all of them, and humans induced a kind of black out of it to destroy the machines. The situation in the film of humans as energy sources, comes from that. Of course, scientifically a human body is not very effective to produce energy, it produces heat but wasting energy that comes from plants, and eventually from the sun. So this idea is nonsense but the faith of solar power in the late nineties is remarkable. I wish it was more widespread now.
Amateur Climate Change 