Why did the Matrix simulate 1999 instead of a pre-computer year?

Question

In The Matrix, the people within the Matrix live in a simulated version of the year 1999. It's already been asked why the machines bothered with the Matrix at all, but let's assume that they had a good reason. My question is: why simulate 1999 or a similar year in which computers are prevalent?

It seems that those who get free, and notably Neo, benefit greatly from the knowledge of computers that they learn while growing up in the Matrix. So why didn't they simulate a year that was before computers, say 1890 or even something more primitive like 900 AD. If they had simulated one of these years, then the machines wouldn't have had as much problem if a human had managed to get free as the human would have no concept of what a computer was, meaning not only would they have greater difficulty conceptualizing the Matrix but also they wouldn't know how to operate computers and other technology that would ultimately be used to fight the machines.

I realize that there is Smith's line about how 1999 was "the height of human civilization", but it doesn't sound like not being in 1999 would make the Matrix any less effective at controlling humans. So why did the Matrix simulate 1999 instead of a pre-computer year?

Answer 1

Maybe 1999 was the era that had the longest life expectancy for the average human.

Neo: If you're killed in the Matrix, you die here?
Morpheous: The body cannot live without the mind.

Maybe the machines thought humans would relive their past, and in the early 20th century they would have major wars that resulted in "entire crops" being lost. Or a repeat of the crusades.

The average life expectancy in 1900 was 47 years, compare that to 1999 where it was 76.7 - cdc.gov. That doesn't necessarily mean anything though, because the humans are in a controlled environment. Presumably, they don't have exposure to viruses, bacteria, or harmful substances (unless the gel is harmful).

If the most common cause of unexpected death in the Matrix is violent death, you want to choose a setting where that is at a minimal. Maybe you could disperse the population over a massive area, so no one ever interacts with anyone else, but then people would die from lack of social contact. Better to choose a time and place where the people are more docile. Perhaps 1999 marked a time with less conflict (although the movie didn't know this, it was right before 9/11, and the subsequent wars with Afghanistan and Iraq).

Answer 2

This was sort of explained in the first movie by Agent Smith. He explained that the first Matrix was designed as a utopia, but that the humans connected to it rejected the program, and "entire crops [of human Duracells] were lost". He goes on to say that the Matrix was redesigned into its current form, "the peak of your civilization". So it was done to ensure that the people plugged into the Matrix would not "reject" it.

Of course, the real explanation is that if they did design the Matrix as you suggest, there would be no movie.

Answer 3

The reason that The Matrix was placed in 1999 was because the previous ones had failed... The Machines needed humans to accept the virtual world rather than the real world, which I will explain in detail later.

There were two previous version as far as we know.

Matrix Beta Versions (Matrix Wiki)

The first was the Paradise Matrix, which human minds rejected.

The first Matrix (known as the Paradise Matrix) was designed to be a perfect human world, where none would suffer and everyone would be happy. It was supposedly a utopic realm where's one's desires, namely the mind connected to it, would manifest. However, human minds could not accept this concept, and scores of humans rejected the program.

The second was the "Nightmare Matrix"

A second Matrix (known as the Nightmare Matrix) was created. This time, the Architect didn't try to make a perfect world, but one based on human history, "to more accurately reflect the varying grotesqueries of your nature".[2] This time, the Architect inserted a primitive cause and effect option into the virtual world.

This one was a failure because it didn't resemble close enough to the real world.

If the Merovingian's chateau and artifacts are any indication, while the second Matrix beta was designed to more closely resemble real human history, it somewhat resembled a stilted soap opera or B-horror movie. Instead of a fluffy and soft "Paradise" like the previous version, the Nightmare Matrix was populated with various "Monsters" such as vampires and werewolves. Humans within this Matrix did now operate within a framework of cause and effect, but didn't have true choice, so much as acting out these scripts. Human minds within the second Matrix beta could still discern on a certain level that it wasn't real. While it wasn't the catastrophic failure of the first Matrix beta, the second Matrix beta was still ultimately deemed to be a failure.

The final version is the Modern 1999 version we see in the film... It was made more realistic than the previous two where human civilization was at its peak:

"As I was saying, she stumbled upon a solution where nearly 99% of all test subject accepted the program as long as they were given a choice, even if they were only aware of the choice at a near-unconscious level." The Architect to Neo

Thus the Architect redesigned the Matrix into its third and final form, a realistic world approximating human civilization at its peak, circa 1980 - 2025, right before human started developing Artificial Intelligences that became the Machines.

Answer 4

I'm surprised that this hasn't been mentioned before, but it seems reasonable to assume that it comes down to optimal power generation.

We're told in the first movie that humans are kept alive and in the matrix so that their heat energy can be used as a power source. From a scientific perspective this makes little sense, but there is nothing in the movies that refutes this from a lore perspective. So the matrix is one component of a power plant.

The power output of the matrix would be directly proportional to the number of human beings involved, but the number of humans is limited by the viability of the virtual world. In other words, the world must be believable so that the humans do not reject it. So it makes sense to choose a setting that allows for maximum population density.

Imagine they created the matrix to simulate the 1500s. How would they realistically (virtually) feed billions of people with no modern farming technology? How would society (virtually) house them without modern construction technology? And average life expectancy, and per-capita killings, were lower in 1999 than when feudal wars were the norm.

Setting the matrix in 1999 maximizes population without rejection, and thus optimizes power generation.

Answer 5

A possible answer might lie in changes made to the premise of the Matrix during the making of the first movie.

The original plan had the machines constructing the Matrix to link humans together as neural computing units. It would have been easy to explain any feature of the virtual reality by saying that was just how the dreaming parts of the mind experienced the computations being fed to them.

But someone thought that "human minds = processors in a network" was too complicated for movie watchers to grasp, so it got changed to "they're keeping us around for our body heat", which unfortunately left the plot hole of why the machines didn't commit some psychosurgery to make everyone a lot more tractable.

Answer 6

Other answers cover the whole "keep the people happy" side of the matrix, but in the scene with the Architect he mentions that the 'One' is a manifestation of imbalance in the system, and allowing the cycle of: The 'One' shows himself, fights the system, gets the choice to rebuild zion with a group of people and reset the matrix; to continue is an acceptable solution. Setting the matrix in an age where humans can have a deep knowledge of computer systems and hacking probably helps ensure the cycle happens in this way, rather than risk those who are unplugged rejecting the real world and not comprehending what the matrix actually is.

Another point is that it seems that the majority of the population lives in a 'megacity' inside the matrix. Simulating a gigantic city with a dense population was probably easier than simulating an even bigger area with a sparse population, and 1999 technology invented by humans would provide the necessary 'administrative' systems to make the simulation work and make sense to the inhabitants. Assuming the downfall of human civilization in the early 21st century, a believable 'megacity' needs to exist in a time period with human-invented technology to support it without being set in a time where humans have invented AIs.

Answer 7

Another possible option is that the machines have no data at all to recreate realistically a Matrix in a previous years. Maybe they take the original data from human living brains, and when they achieved consciousness this was the oldest year possible.

Answer 8

Morpheus tells Neo:

What we know for certain is that at some point in the early twenty-first century all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to A.I.

Agent Smith says:

The Matrix was redesigned to this, the peak of your civilization. I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you it really became our civilization, which is of course what this is all about.

So there you have it -- the machines wanted to recreate a time that provided as much technology and "modern life" as possible while still ending prior to the advent of artificial intelligence -- and then restarting at some other (unspecified) point early in the computer age.

(I can only imagine the complications that would arise if a human-created A.I. would be invented within the Matrix simulation -- one possibility is that it would by its nature become aware of the simulation and inform its human creators.)

Answer 9

The one depicted in the movie was the 6th iteration of the Matrix and was considered to be the optimum iteration. As we know from the movie, every story about a warewolf or vampire from long ago was a program from a previous more primitive variation and those presumably didn't work out well. It is also stated in the movie that the Oracle was the program who came up with the piece of the puzzle that saved entire crops of humans from being lost because they rejected what they were seeing - the illusion of choice and presumably normalcy. The war between the humans and machines happened in modern times - after the advent of computers. If you put the humans into a scenario that is alien to them they would reject the program and the crop would be lost.

Answer 10

I think the answer comes from what Smith tells Morpheus about the original Matrix, which was a paradise. Humans rejected it, so the Machines were forced to make a more realistic virtual world.

SMITH: The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was re-designed to this: the peak of your civilization.

So originally, the Machines aimed to create a world where humans were as happy as possible. But on the second try, their goal was to create a world where humans were as happy as realistically possible. If that meant there were some computers (computers that no doubt would seem laughably ancient to the Machines), so be it.

Also, you make the point that creating a Matrix with computers in it seems to help out Neo and the human resistance. But keep in mind, the very existence of the human resistance and the One was accounted for when the Matrix was created. According to the Architect, the Oracle came up with a method where "99.9%" of individuals would accept the Matrix, and it was always understood that there would be some able to break out.

Answer 11

The original script called for the humans in the Matrix to be used for their mental computational power, not their ability to produce energy. In that context, 1999 may have been the point at which our culture was producing the most rational thinkers, etc.

Answer 12

The Matrix is a metaphor for our society.

As such, the only time that could possibly make sense was "now", which was 1999 for practical reasons, such as the movie being shipped in 1999.

Answer 13

It's possible that it did - simulate a pre-computer world to begin with, that is. Individuals grow up in the matrix, from infancy to adulthood. The created world has to reflect that - the simulation has to run forwards in time. It's also communal, each individual is born, and grows up in a world where they are mostly interacting with other human beings (albeit through an interface). Human parents, human teachers, human peers, human scientists and theorizers. The machines can't interfere too much - disbelief is a game ender, as the attempt to program a paradise shows, human minds will reject the world if it doesn't work as they believe it should.

What does that mean? The simulation had to be old. Old enough to accommodate generations. Old enough people had been rescued out of it for a long time. If there were resets at all they would be rare and dangerous - after all, if people can sense (as deja vu) minor resets and glitches, then their lives can't be rewritten in the middle - any major change in their world would trigger disbelief, and they would kill themselves trying to wake up. So the simulation could not possibly run less than a full lifetime. On the other hand, people's lives overlap, and the simulation is communal. It has to be not only old enough for any individual, but also their parents, and children. And resets have to be tricky, probably using fake generations to age the populations in and out so the machines aren't back to disbelief wiping out their power source.

The easiest answer, for the machines, would be to pick a time in history, and let it run forward. The longer the loop, the better (since it means fewer resets). "The peak of your civilization" might be a hundred years, or a thousand. And given a world full of people and time, things would probably progress similarly in the simulation as it did in the "real" history it was emulating. People causing conflicts, making problems, looking for solutions, and inventing. Humans invented computers, they can probably reinvent them as often as the simulation resets.

And the machines probably couldn't stop them. The might be able to nudge history a bit, either to follow the 'real' history, or try to move away from it, but their influence had to be minimal so as to not invoke the disbelief again. They probably can't make people not-invent things, or make the inventing not-work... so computers have to exist as long as people invent them, and they have to let it play out or summarily discard everyone to start over.

Answer 14

If you accept the fact that the Matrix is not actually a power source for the machines, it becomes much simpler to justify the reason they choose 1999.

This answer keenly explains how the Matrix as a power source makes no sense, so we're left with the conclusion drawn from the two sequels.

The Matrix, the 1999 simulation, is a lower-level simulation, outside of which there is Zion and the Robot Wars. The movie that we see is a second-level simulation for those who break out of the 1999 simulation - those who reject the Matrix, and who live their lives fighting a battle against the machines.

And if we recall from the first movie...

Neo only meets the resistance members through his life as a hacker - something that wouldn't be present without the presence of technology. In this way, those who reject the Matrix can be filtered out of it, to lead a life in the second-level simulation.

Without that level of technology, it wouldn't have been possible.

So the reason they simulate a 1999-era Earth is specifically because they need to have some method by which humans can be extracted from the first level of the Matrix, so that those who reject it can be brought into the second level of the simulation.

Answer 15

I base this answer on nothing more than the thoughts I had while I watched The Matrix for the very first time.

In The Matrix movie we observe that at some point humans create AI. Suppose that AI wished to reproduce and discovered it did not know the secrets that humans used to create the AIs.

Why then it might make sense for that AI to plug humans (who did eventually solve the problem) into an environment that simulates the environment in which they were able to solve it. Since this time the machines are watching, then they will discover how humans create new AIs.

My solution provides a very neat and scientifically interesting plot twist to the original The Matrix movie and it explains why they chose the specific setting (time & place) of that simulation (they wanted to recreate the environment that lead to the creation of the first AI) but it blows the sequels out of the water :(

but I never liked those anyway...