25 years after the first movie changed several sub-genres, Laurence Fishburne's Morpheus is already hinting in his conversations with Keanu Reeves' Neo how little is known for sure about the Earth as it presently exists.

Fans can debate all they want about the true nature of Neo being The One to save humankind from the Matrix, the setting is plenty mysterious outside this. Morpheus establishes early on that the remaining humans aren't totally sure what year it is, because much information and context was lost in the chaos of the machines taking over. He does give a reason for why humans ravaged the world itself in The Matrix, turning the skies black all around, but a well-reasoned Reddit theory once posed that even this was something that Morpheus was wrong about.

Humans May Have Scorched The Skies To Keep The Machines From Leaving Earth

Destroying The Planet Would Have Probably Been As Bad For Humans As Machines

The original explanation offered up in The Matrix is that, when they were losing the war, humans tried to cut the machines off from their power source and blacked out the sky, which is what forced the machines to turn to human life for fuel instead and ultimately contributed to the creation of the Matrix. However, the Reddit who poses that humanity's actions could have had a different motivation points out that this was an ill-advised thing to do concerning the humans who lived on Earth at the time:

"[...] the humans losing the initial war to the machines must have known that by blackening the sky they would also have killed most, if not all, of the humans still alive on Earth for little or no gain."

Thus, Operation Dark Storm, as it was called, could have had another reason. The Animatrix, the deeply underrated Matrix sequel consisting of a series of animated short films, explains that humans used nanomachines that multiplied and covered the Earth in dark clouds, supposedly to block out the sunlight. However, the Reddit theory argues that the actual purpose of the "clouds" was to prevent the machines from leaving Earth if space technology had advanced enough for surviving humans to flee the machines to colonies on the moon and Mars.

This theory is backed up by the arguments of how illogical clogging up the atmosphere with smoke was if people intended to still live on Earth, and that the machines were also probably capable of space travel and could have left the planet in search of solar power if this was really what it was about. Yet the specificity of nanomachines being used to carry out Operation Dark Storm is noteworthy if they were "designed to disable and disrupt electronic equipment as it es through the cloud barrier." With so much hidden and unclear in the world of The Matrix, this is hardly unlikely.

Humans Fleeing For Space Colonies After Losing The Machine War Makes A Lot Of Sense

Desperate Times Call For Desperate Measures

Agent Smith's (Hugo Weaving) chilling monologue in the original movie where he calls humanity a "virus" further highlights how this theory makes sense, both on a practical and thematic level. If humans really were about to be obliterated, and it was within their power to flee, they would have done so. On the other hand, Smith's argument that it is humanity's natural tendency to exploit and destroy everything around it alludes to real environmental destruction, and world leaders at the time may have long decided that the planet was beyond saving and were perhaps developing space colonies before being threatened with extinction.

The True Origin Of The Matrix Is Still The Franchise's Most Fascinating Mystery

Exactly How & When The Matrix Was Built Is Still Vague

Morpheus says: "We don't know who struck first, us or them [...]." However, the section of The Animatrix titled "The Second Renaissance" pretty definitively states that humans struck first. The Animatrix is narrated by a computer program known as The Instructor, who is, somewhat incongruously, an archive keeper in Zion. Her summation of these historical events is fairly succinct, and it once again glosses over perhaps some of the most interesting details of the inception of the Matrix. The Instructor may be unreliable if she has her own motivations, or if her narrative was edited.

Just like with Operation Dark Storm, there are certainly spaces left for reveals and retcons.

Erstwhile, The Matrix Reloaded gives us The Architect's (Helmut Bakaitis) spiel, the most detailed of the origins of the Matrix. The fact is, the creation of the Matrix and how the role of The One factors into it is still confusing. Just like with Operation Dark Storm, there are certainly spaces left for reveals and retcons. However, The Matrix is intended to be such a detailed exploration of human psychology that answering this question once and for all, of how the machines came to power and how the Matrix came to be, may rob the series of some of its spark.

Source: Reddit