This week I have a special issue in store for all of you Matrix fans out there. I will of course try to make sense out of whether the matrix can really be true or not. Is it possible for an entire planet complete with billions of people, Mother Nature and a badass attitude to all be simulated seamlessly with no lag on a computer system? Is it possible for someone to have such “leather” outfits all without a special system hack? We’ll just have to find out, through intense reasoning and about 8 cups of cappuccino.

    First off, in the Matrix we have our input which just happens to be the billions of humans we have that are “plugged into” the Matrix. An input of this scale is roughly feasible in the real world because we have our typical computer which has about an average of 10 people or “clients” that it can handle without lag over the net (those results are possible with a cable modem of at least a bandwidth of 100MB/sec). Now I believe to be able to have billions of clients on our server, (which just happens to be the Matrix) we would need a system of colossal magnitude just to be able to serve the clients without ANY lag on the system. The fundamental server I speak of that can hold 10 people with no lag would have these specifications; 1.5GB of RDRAM, 2.5 GHz processor, a 100MB/sec networking connection, and about 50GB of Hard drive space. Now to fulfill the needs of a server with the capabilities of the Matrix we would require our standard server to have these specifications; 7.50 x 109MB of RDRAM (750 million GB), a 1.25 x 1010Hz processor (12.5 million THz) and 2.5 x 109 GB of Hard drive space (250 billion GB). AS it seems to me right now, we are nowhere close to being able to produce a machine with these kind of specifications on it, we barely can get up to a set of fifteen 6 GHz processors! System wise, the Matrix is implausibly out of the question for our real world situation. There would also have to be a method developed to absorb energy in the colossal amounts that the machines harvest from the humans every day.

    Now, we move over to our possibility of being able to keep our human subjects in a sleep like meditative state with this program taking the place over our basic thought patterns. One way the humans could be controlled in this manner would be to actually control input and output from the frontal lobes in the brain, the plugs in the back of the head really don’t make any sense because the only parts of the brain that are in the back are the subconscious feelings, senses, organ control and motor skills centers. We would have to the entire brain plugged into the “Matrix” to make the simulation operate correctly and effortlessly illustrate and broadcast all the brain functions into the system. We would need an exceedingly superior system to be able to complete all these tasks not only simultaneously and flawlessly for one brain, but also for 5 billion other brains! This seems quite out of the league of even our most ultramodern sophisticated technology.

    Now we have the correlation of body and mind coming after us now. In the Matrix, when people get injured and die in their sleep like meditative state they experience this trauma in real life as if the Matrix represented the real world. This would not occur due to the lack of push that the temporal lobes have on the organs and organ systems of the human body. At most, the body would feel pain and discomfort in even the highest meditative states; it WOULD NOT be able to perfectly simulate the wounds and physical trauma that is displayed in the Matrix. The client would not be killed, or physically hurt due to the disturbance of their “virtual” bodies in the Matrix.

    In conclusion, I think that the Matrix could be possible in some small way, but not until a VERY long time passes and many technical advances make their way into the scene. The Matrix is a very interesting movie and just the idea of every human on earth being controlled by machines in a virtual world while being harvested for their thermal energy is attention-grabbing and thought-provoking but at the same time, it seems absurd but it does make the viewer’s imagination go wild, which is basically the point of a movie anyway. I like the idea and I think that if we have movies that make us some of the big thinkers think, they could possibly fuel the ideas of the future.