What was the point of the clones at all?

Ask that to them, the corporations.
They do everything to cut expenses left and right, either that or tax evasion.


I skip reading the bottom line, because it is usually some lame signature.

suppose a consultant came to you and told you he had a way for your division to save a couple billion dollars - a saving for which you could reasonably expect to get a piece of as a performance bonus. do you tell that consultant, "no thanks, i don't care about getting promoted and making more money", or do you listen to what he has to say?

for all we know, the top brass of the corporation thought the moon base was fully automated by gerty and doesn't know that some of their lower level execs added clone labor to make things run a bit smoother. since it's only a one man operation on another planet, i doubt the board of directors keeps tabs on what goes on at the moon base.

I got the idea that working on that base subjected people to high amounts of radiation or something (that is why all the previous Sams were so sick and dying). So to avoid lawsuits or whatever, they didn't use actual people to do the work.

The moon has no atmosphere or magnetosphere, therefore anyone on the surface can be horribly exposed to any solar radiation, which could explain the (relatively) quick deaths and their similarities to radiation sickness

It's a bit like The Matrix in that regard - when you think about it, it doesn't relaly work.

I mean, do you really save a lot when you consider you have to feed, clothe, and constantly simulate the clones with all kinds of fakery, plus provide entertainment, atmosphere, etc. etc.

If you take every other expense out of the equation, then it becomes 'zillions of clonse and the faculty to store and keep them, plus the infrastructure and architecture to perpetually facilitate the ongoing process' vs. 'salary of an actual worker'..

I don't know, it seems like the salary would be the easiest, most ethical, as well as the cheapest, most direct route to take instead of this conspiracy-based, convoluted trickery, where so much can so easily go wrong.

The job is so simple that it's kind of ridiculous to have all this high-tech and computers, robots and systems that wouldn't be needed, if the whole thing would be automated.

And automation should be much easier and cheaper than this whole clone-thing, considering they're halfway there already (the extractor machines are already automated, so it'd be a small step to have Gerty-like robots do the rest, if the extractors could dock once in awhile or perhaps have those smaller cars automated to retrieve the valuable materials and then send them to Earth).

Think about everything that would be instantly saved if this whole thing was automated .. no atmosphere needed, much fewer lights needed, no air, food, temperature control needed, no computers, monitors, or even the whole base needed (or most of the living quarters anyway), no incinerator or the actor talking about 'incinerating'.. etc. etc.

The savings would be -massive-, in electric bills alone!

Think about the symptoms of the dying Sam clone. What was he suffering from? Acute radiation sickness. The cheap ass company built a facility with inadequate shielding; instead of a bunker-like complex buried several feet under the lunar soil, they put it above ground with thin walls (except for the chamber where the clones were stored). So whenever there was a solar event, which occur regularly, poor Sam was exposed to massive levels of radiation.

Perhaps the original Sam was there at a time when the shielded compartment was the whole facility. Expanding while maintaining proper safety was so expensive the company came up with the idea of expendable workers and recorded Sam Bell's consciousness without his consent. Probably under the guise of a medical checkup. Most of the mining systems were automated, but probably not 100% reliable or self-repairing, one person was needed there to tend them. Tours of duty were as long as they could be before symptoms incapacitated the clones. Because they didn't come back home no one ever had to know.

The greedy corporate douche bags got their expanded capacity without having to bother with worker safety. The difference between a cheaply built huge base and a thickly shielded huge base - that's a major chunk of change they saved! It was necessary to disable the comm links of course, so their clone, with all its original memories, wouldn't see a newscast or something and be made aware of the time discontinuity.

It's a typical movie flaw, so many movies wouldn't work, if they had any common sense or logic to them.

The whole clone-thing is SO convoluted and unnecessary, considering the tech level they already have (as we are shown). They could SO easily make the whole base completely autonomous and automated, eliminating the need for zillions of complications that the silly 'clone'-thing brings.

In many movies, the question "if they have THIS kind of tech, then why can't they just...?" is never answered.

Another movie with very similar logic flaw is Oblivion - extra-terrestrials with super advanced A.I. and hovering drones somehow NEED human beings (or clones) for maintenance (and of course those beings need an enormous amount of maintenance, atmosphere, nourishment, some kind of sewer systems, entertainment, psychological and physical healthcare, etc. etc.).

It doesn't make one iota of sense - any culture with THAT high tech level would definitely not need any clones or human beings for something as basic as MAINTENANCE, for crying out loud.

Even The Matrix is guilty of this; machines with such super high tech level shouldn't need something as inefficient as 'growing humans as batteries' for energy/electricity. The 'combined with a form of fusion' doesn't really make it any more plausible. Why not just use that fusion?

Why not develop a better energy source? Why not just access the sun that's right above the clouds? (If a human-made / stolen / whatever ship can rise above the clouds, then surely an efficient machine-made drones should be able to do it, too, and collect solar energy)

Why not devote all those VAST resources needed to 'farm humans' to research and development of alternate and better energy sources (even just talking about Nikola Tesla, the machines should have found 'all the energy they would ever need' from a plethora of other sources)?

Movies can't make sense for some reason.. they have to break the logic to create some kind of excitement.