[Ar-list] Re: Ar-list digest, Vol 1 #8 - 2 msgs

[mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca]

On Fri, 12 Apr 2002, horza wrote:
> > hold water. So I'm left with an uncomfortable decision: Do I give some
> > hokey reason why they keep humans around? Or do I leave it unexplained?
> > Neither one sits well with me.
> >
> > Anyone have any good ideas?
> 
> didn't they say in the movie that the humans were the power generators 
> that kept the machines going?

That is what they said in the movie, but it really makes no sense - if you
want electricity, you don't need life at all to produce it, and even if
you need your energy in the form of some kind of chemical that living
things synthesize, it would seem much easier to just splice the
appropriate genes into bacteria and grow them in vats.  Even if you
supposed that that didn't work for some reason and multicellular life was
necessary, there's no clear reason why *humans* would be needed.  Humans
seem like the most inconvenient creatures possible to use as domestic
animals; anything else would be better, and a sane machine society would
go to extreme lengths to use anything other than humans as its power
source.

Fortunately, my friend Quetzalcoatl Bradley thought of a simple answer to 
this question; it's one of those things that as soon as you understand it,
you see that is must be correct and wonder why you didn't think of it
yourself.  As he put it, "One word:  orgone."
-- 
Matthew Skala
mskala@ansuz.sooke.bc.ca                    Embrace and defend.
http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/