Discussion Anime / TheAnimatrix

Concerning this addition:

31st Dec '12 8:50:45 PM Trope Licious

Added line(s) 43 (click to see context) :

* Too Dumb Too Live: Humanity in the Second Renaissance Part 2, due to the fact that they didn't take into account that no sun = death of vegetation and lack of protein, which ended up being crucial to the machines' victory.

This comes off as Trope Licious abusing the trope to snark about the story. Too Dumb to Live deals with characters who makes choices that will obviously put them at an obvious risk of harm or death. While Operation Dark Storm was definitely going to ruin the planet, nowhere is it implicated in any of the Matrix stories that humanity ensured its extinction simply through "the destruction of the sky." Nor is it implicated that Dark Storm allowed the machines to easily roll over the humans just because humans suddenly had no source of protein.

Despite that, Trope Licious tries to put it in simple quasi-mathematical terms, stating that no sun = no vegetation + no protein = humanity stupidly commits suicide. This ignores certain facets of the story. The Matrix wikia goes into detail about food sources used by Zionites in the Real World. This isn't merely scavenging from the Machines, either: the Zionites manage to develop farms on the surface.

And that's just the efforts of rebels with scraps of technology left over from the Machine War, not human civilization as it was at the time Operation Dark Storm was executed. The human nations must have understood what they were about to do to the planet, and had contingencies prepared should their last-ditch gambit actually work.

This isn't even fanwank or science fiction. This is reality. We have developed closed ecological systems, artificial light, and seedbanks. Seeds can remain viable for thousands of years.

So, no. This wasn't a case of being Too Dumb to Live. This was an example of the Godzilla Threshold. "There are situations so bad that anything that would end them is justified. Anything." Destroying Earth's biosphere to save humanity from extinction at the hands of the machines? Sounds like a perfect example to me.