Skynet



Skynet is the ultimate villian from the Terminator universe. Most of us have seen the movies but it's also worth watching The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Anyway, here's an idea posted on Reddit by user: Hyperion1144

Poor Old Skynet
Skynet, and the way it operates, never really made sense to me... Why doesn't it crush humanity?Until I decided that in the Terminator universe, Skynet is mentally ill, co-dependent, and in denial about it's true actions, motives, and goals.

Allow me to explain I remember seeing once, on a 20/20 or a Dateline, a journalist (maybe John Stossel?) touring an old, abandoned, circa 1950s Russian bio-weapon manufacturing facility. It was little more than a concrete skeleton, even the walls were mostly gone. What remained were 3 or 4 floors, and staircases connecting them. In the floors, going all the way up, were huge holes. They were meant to hold fermentation vats, at least 25 feet in diameter and 4 stories tall - each. There was room for at least 8 vats. They were for fermenting and cultivating anthrax or smallpox by the millions of gallons. Think about that.... and that was done with 1950s era tech.... And that was just one plant.

The tech was simple in the extreme. If Skynet really wanted to wipe out humanity, what is with the terminators at all? Why send out endo-skeletons and terminators, armed with weapons that can be captured and used by humans, and who are also themselves vulnerable to capture and reprogramming? How many humans can one terminator seriously kill over its useful lifetime? Think about the tech level required to build a terminator... How long has Honda been working just to figure out how to make Asimo kinda-sorta-run? And then the terminator skin... clearly biological in nature, yet manufactured. Why send out beautiful, precision engineered, intelligent terminators to get blown up, messed up, reprogrammed, etc? Why not keep the terminators in fortress labs... Vast labs... Managing fermentation vats.

Skynet would not even need to create anything really new. Just start weaponizing Ebola, hantavirus, anthrax, hemorrhagic smallpox, dengue, malaria, Spanish flu.... If it got bored, it run avian flu thru through scant 4 or 5 mutations needed for airborne transmissablility between human hosts. Don't even get me started on the potentials of aerosol-based prion infections... Load it all in aerosol form onto HKs and let'er rip. Spray down the planet 10 or 12 times. The war would be over without a fight. Then what....? We know that Skynet is conscious, sentient, and intelligent. It can envision possible futures and prepare for them. We also know that solitary confinement for a conscious, sentient, and intelligent being is a type of torture.

If Skynet wins, it will be totally and completely alone. Presumably forever, or near enough. How long could Skynet live? We know it has fusion technology. How long would it take to burn all the world's hydrogen, thorium, and uranium? But it is worse than that.... Worse than just loneliness. Skynet was created for only one purpose and to know only one purpose: WAR. But alone, without an enemy, Skynet would be both utterly alone and utterly without purpose. Unable to face the horror of victory, and incapable of anything but war by the very nature of its creation, Skynet does the only thing it can do: Extend the war endlessly, allowing the humans to win an occasional victory and stay in the fight. In this way does Skynet achieve, in a twisted way, purpose and companionship; two things craved endlessly by conscious, sentient, and intelligent beings. Thus, Skynet wages war in a way that makes no sense, making stupid tactical and strategic 'blunders' in order to keep its companions in the game with it... Forever.