Has anyone heard about the latest theories about the Terminator universe? I thought this was interesting and wondered did it indicate a wider change in how war and consequences are thought about?
The latest theory suggests that Skynet's sending back the Terminator in the first film and the resistance securing the time machine and apparent victory over the machines was all a ploy by Skynet, this was in order to secure its own existence and the time line in which it exists, the human resistance never won, Skynet just let them think they had won.
Think about it the purpose of Skynet was/is to play wargames, it became self-aware and then played out a war game for real, targetting Russia in order to ensure the counter strike against its human enemies at home and the human survivors fighting the machines believed that Skynet was fighting a war of annihilation and wanted to wipe them all out but it didnt.
It could have surely. The only real explanation for humanity persisting and fighting back to eventual victory was sort of human will, pluck, motivation and determination. I may be cynical but those are things which do not count for much in an actual war, especially one involving seriously mismatched hardware and technology.
However annihiliation would have resulted in the end of Skynets raison detre as much as it would human kind, its enemy, so it would be much more likely to feign defeat, continue an existence of some sort. In this scenario Skynet is at least as clever as the computer in Wargames which was able to figure out the noughts and crosses game but probably more clever because they decided the only way to win was not not to play but to play deviously.
