WALL E question

[Havok]

Also, if BnL could make fleets of FTL ships to transfer a 6 Billion+ population off planet... why couldn't they just transfer the garbage off planet?

[Ghost Rider]

A REAL question that i was wondering about was the other ships, or more specificially did they return? One thing that I had thought about was what if AUTO said that all communications are Terminated, he managed to cut all long range ship to ship communication systems as his directive was to keep mankind from Earth, so even if EVE and WALL-E sucseeded the rest of the BnL fleet would not know its time to return and not return.

If the other ships are launching EVEs, they'd be returning with more and more plants as Earth recovered. They wouldn't need the signal from Axiom to know they could go home.

That raises the question of if the other ships A.I. will be successful at suppressing the findings. With out Wall-E and EVE helping, I don't see the humans on the other ships ever getting back to Earth.

Given it practically needed WALL-E's obsession with EVE to get the plant to her mutliple times, the Captain's own little desire to see Earth it likely stands to reason the ships are more successful in keeping said people in the dark. The AIs have such completel control, the instant the plant is found, they dispose of it and the captain is none the wiser. Though given their level of production capabilites, planetside habitation is just a bonus.

[tim31]

Also, if BnL could make fleets of FTL ships to transfer a 6 Billion+ population off planet... why couldn't they just transfer the garbage off planet?

What do you suppose they planned to do with the skyscraper-high piles of compressed garbage cubes that the single remaining WALL-E unit continued to build?

[lord Martiya]

Seriously though, did they ever give a population for the Axiom? Was it ever hinted at in any directors interviews or anything just what happened to prevent the return? LordOskuro makes a very good point. Now that I think about it the final message from the CEO had a rather tense feel to it, like there was some kind of immediate danger.

Maybe it was some Captain Harlock-like guy decided Humanity had fucked up too much and was killing all the men still on Earth with some poison gas, then repaired the ecosystem the biosphere enough to recover gradually on its own and left.

[Bedlam]

Also, if BnL could make fleets of FTL ships to transfer a 6 Billion+ population off planet... why couldn't they just transfer the garbage off planet?

What do you suppose they planned to do with the skyscraper-high piles of compressed garbage cubes that the single remaining WALL-E unit continued to build?

According to the DVD commentery there was suposed to be another type of robot which would then come along and burn the things.

[tim31]

Seriously?? I know it was a kid's film, but if you're going to have a social message, get some facts in order.

Or was that part of the reason why the clean up didn't work? 'Okay, we burned all our waste, now what do we do with all the carbon?'

[RedImperator]

That raises the question of if the other ships A.I. will be successful at suppressing the findings. With out Wall-E and EVE helping, I don't see the humans on the other ships ever getting back to Earth.

I suppose that depends on how much freedom the AIs have to disregard their orders in the face of new information. In the film, EVE was the only probe out of at least a dozen to return with a plant, and it was just a seedling. Her own recorded footage showed Earth was still entirely devastated. Once the recovery initiated by Axioms passengers is well underway, the other ships' probes would all be returning with plants, and they'd have footage of a green world with an established human civilization. If the AIs have any autonomy at all, they should be able to realize their orders are obsolete. And even if they don't, it's going to be much harder to suppress the evidence.

[Simon_Jester]

There's something wrong with you.

Really now. Soylent Wall-E? You horrible little man.

Why? Mass graves and streets strewn with bodies would almost certainly be within the mission of the WALL-Es on Earth to clear up. Frankly, if the WALL-Es composted human and animal corpses, they could probably start refining fuel from decomposition products, for emergency power to back up their solar power. At a certain point, rubbish is rubbish and it all ends up in a cube, whether its tin cans or humans who missed the boat.

Biodegradable rubbish will, by definition, take care of itself. If no one is left around to worry about the sanitation problem, it isn't a problem. Metal, plastic, and long-lasting toxins are.

Since it was meant as a kids movie, the disaster that rendered the Earth uninhabitable was designed as something silly a child might come up with, that is, the world being covered in trash. I guess the notion with the evacuation is pretty much the same, everyone made it out, and that's it, no room for kids going all sad about how many people died, and thus not paying attention to the robots.

I imagine it as a setting where we ended up doing a lot of automated asteroid mining to the point where we honestly could carpet the planet hundreds of feet deep in metal and plastic. The chemical byproducts would have been the real cause of the evacuation, but hazardous chemicals degrade eventually after several hundred years of solar UV bombardment.

I always got the impression that the BnL President was on Earth managing the evacuation process and then the initial WALL-E deployment. Remember, they thought it would only take a couple of years to do the clean up. As things continued to get worse he sent out the order not to return to Earth and he and the other BnL staff still on Earth hightailed it out of there.

I'm imagining the guy having a "what have I done!?" moment as the climate got worse and redirecting the company's resources towards the evacuation/cleanup. He recorded the final message and tried to board the last shuttle leaving the planet after he issuing some last instructions to the cleanup robots, just as a massive toxic dust storm destroyed BnL headquarters.

Not likely behavior from a CEO, I know, but if it wasn't what happened it ought to be.

Maybe a large portion of the population was placed in cold storage as they couldn't afford the tickets But in honesty if they had cryogenics then you could store alot of people in a small area and they wouldn't use up many of your resources. Hell they could have built a cold storage facility on the moon powered with solar power.

Sounds plausible to me.

[Havok]

Also, if BnL could make fleets of FTL ships to transfer a 6 Billion+ population off planet... why couldn't they just transfer the garbage off planet?

What do you suppose they planned to do with the skyscraper-high piles of compressed garbage cubes that the single remaining WALL-E unit continued to build?

According to the DVD commentery there was suposed to be another type of robot which would then come along and burn the things.

Really? That is fucking stupid. Good thing it is just commentary and I don't ever acknowledge that as meaningful to the respective movie.

[Havok]

That raises the question of if the other ships A.I. will be successful at suppressing the findings. With out Wall-E and EVE helping, I don't see the humans on the other ships ever getting back to Earth.

I suppose that depends on how much freedom the AIs have to disregard their orders in the face of new information. In the film, EVE was the only probe out of at least a dozen to return with a plant, and it was just a seedling. Her own recorded footage showed Earth was still entirely devastated. Once the recovery initiated by Axioms passengers is well underway, the other ships' probes would all be returning with plants, and they'd have footage of a green world with an established human civilization. If the AIs have any autonomy at all, they should be able to realize their orders are obsolete. And even if they don't, it's going to be much harder to suppress the evidence.

Good point. I wonder if they have a contingency for getting the humans back in to gravity shape.

[Uraniun235]

Seriously though, did they ever give a population for the Axiom? Was it ever hinted at in any directors interviews or anything just what happened to prevent the return? LordOskuro makes a very good point. Now that I think about it the final message from the CEO had a rather tense feel to it, like there was some kind of immediate danger.

Maybe it was some Captain Harlock-like guy decided Humanity had fucked up too much and was killing all the men still on Earth with some poison gas, then repaired the ecosystem the biosphere enough to recover gradually on its own and left.

Tangential nitpick here, but that's not Harlock-like at all; he wouldn't take up arms against the people of Earth.

[lord Martiya]

Maybe it was some Captain Harlock-like guy decided Humanity had fucked up too much and was killing all the men still on Earth with some poison gas, then repaired the ecosystem the biosphere enough to recover gradually on its own and left.

Tangential nitpick here, but that's not Harlock-like at all; he wouldn't take up arms against the people of Earth.[/quote]
I know Harlock wouldn't shoot first against Earth forces (after all, to defend himself he TOOK ARMS and used them enough to scare away or incapacitate the attacker). But I wasn't talking about him, I was talking about an HarlockESQUE guy with similar ideas and more willingness to kill imbeciles.

[Uraniun235]

Yeah but that's just a renegade ecologically-motivated misanthrope. There's more to Captain Harlock than just being a renegade, just like there's more to Captain Kirk than just being a brash starship commander. I don't see what's Harlock-ian about your speculated third party, I think you're just trying to make a reference to another show you like, and it's not working.

[Gemini-Preserver]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c0GYZYyX-M

How Wall-E might of delt with any humans left on earth

[NecronLord]

Really? That is fucking stupid. Good thing it is just commentary and I don't ever acknowledge that as meaningful to the respective movie.

As I remember the film, the cubes he was making were largely out of metal waste. Why assume they mean literally burn, and not, say, 'melt, purify and produce ingots of aluminium, copper, tin, steel and so on to be used later.'

[Havok]

Really? That is fucking stupid. Good thing it is just commentary and I don't ever acknowledge that as meaningful to the respective movie.

As I remember the film, the cubes he was making were largely out of metal waste. Why assume they mean literally burn, and not, say, 'melt, purify and produce ingots of aluminium, copper, tin, steel and so on to be used later.'

Because it is the commentary on a movie that deals with the wasteful way humans live and destroying the environment, if they meant 'melt, purify and produce ingots of aluminium, copper, tin, steel and so on to be used later.', they should have said so, and again, as it is the commentary, and not dialogue that needs to be in the movie, they could have easily said so free of the editing process. I'm not going to sit there and think 'recycle' when someone says 'burn'.

Edit: I am however taking Bedlam's interpretation of the DVD commentary at face value at the moment, so they very well may have gotten more into detail, or may not have said 'burn' at all. Until I see it though, I'm giving the benefit of the doubt that he is accurate.

[avatarxprime]

I think it's likely to be an actual "burning" of the trash. I mean look at the Axiom, they didn't recycle waste they just dumped it out into space. Even with the industrial ability to just mine more resources, if they had learned from the past you'd think they would have begun recycling after the first decade or so.

[The Yosemite Bear]

Hell, I think WALL-E would've been first programmed to process corpses and organic waste in order to PROMOTE the growth of plant-life in wasted Earth.

It would be a priority to create fertilizer that can be used to try and restore or promote plant-growth in Earth's wasted ecosystem. When that is done and they're waiting for plantlife, or when WALL-E's finished his original priority mission (of compacting rotting flesh and bones), then he goes to his secondary priority of prettying up the place and making it look nice and neat and orderly for the eventual resettlement effort that will rely on regrown plants cultivated by the sacrificial corpse of wasteland Earth's asphyxiated populace.

lets also not forget all those funeral parlors, and cemetaries, certinly those little guys had their work cut out for them.

[The Yosemite Bear]

we see the bigger versions of Wall-E just jettisoning garbage out into space....

the great big land fill....

[His Divine Shadow]

Well I suppose that cochroach had to eat something besides twinkies. Maybe wall-e gave it the finger every now and then.

[NDR-113]

Another question is what's happened to the BnL president. He appeared to have remained on Earth long enough to figure out they had fucked up too royally, did he left after sending his last message?

I assume he did leave, and eventually died. After all, there were portraits of many previous captains aboard ship, and the President's message was left several hundred years ago.
On the other hand, we don't know the lifespans of any of these people.
The other thing I always wondered is, how was the Axiom made self-sustainable? Did they use chemical by-products to make food? Or perhaps they grew it all with different kinds of yeast, as Asimov theorized people would do one day.
Or, they might have made it from human waste and dead bodies. Nom nom.

[RedImperator]

Or, they might have made it from human waste and dead bodies. Nom nom.

That would require the passengers of Axiom to be perpetual motion machines.

I always just figured they had hydroponics farms on board. The ship is big enough and we see very little of it, and the robots could do all the work.

[Molyneux]

Or, they might have made it from human waste and dead bodies. Nom nom.

That would require the passengers of Axiom to be perpetual motion machines.

I always just figured they had hydroponics farms on board. The ship is big enough and we see very little of it, and the robots could do all the work.

These folks had some fairly impressive tech...I figured they probably had a whole fleet of robots mining debris for raw materials to replace those jettisoned into space.

[Darth Raptor]

Burn in a fire, or burn in a molecular furnace?

It's abundantly clear that niether energy nor raw materials are a problem for them. Waste processing and disposal is. Their approach to handling (perfectly usable) refuse aboard the Axiom was for the WALL-As to just shove it all out the airlock. I thought it a trenchant, if perhaps unintentional, insight into how their technology and society works, and why Earth is ruined by TOO MUCH GARBAGE, of all things.

If they had some kind of magic factory powered by a magic energy source, it would be cheaper in terms of time, energy and whatever raw materials they harvest to make new stuff instead of reprocess the old. Yes, it's dumb, but this is a society run by Wal-Mart. In deep space, it's a perfectly viable strategy, which may be another reason why they gave up on Earth.

[GuppyShark]

It's abundantly clear that niether energy nor raw materials are a problem for them. Waste processing and disposal is. Their approach to handling (perfectly usable) refuse aboard the Axiom was for the WALL-As to just shove it all out the airlock. I thought it a trenchant, if perhaps unintentional, insight into how their technology and society works, and why Earth is ruined by TOO MUCH GARBAGE, of all things.

Umm, congratulations, you've unearthed the secret message of the film.