The lore is that the saarlac actually keeps you alive while digesting you. ~~Like, it puts roots in that act as life support so it has a constant source of protein or whatever. ~~ eh, that last but might not be accurate but there is some kind of enzyme in their stomach that keeps you alive? Whatever.
That makes as much sense as The Matrix using people for energy. You can’t feed people to keep them alive and get more energy out than just digesting (or in the Matrix burning) that food for energy.
I could be wrong, but I think the original idea for the matrix was that they were using human brains for processing power and not energy. But someone in the movie making process decided people wouldn’t understand that and instead went with the battery analogy.
Studio executives made the decision, you know… because there hasn’t be a long list of projects they’ve fucked over the years with their notes. 🙄
Morpheus is the only one we ever hear the battery analogy from anyway. He might well be wrong about that interpretation, and the brain processors are what’s really going on.
The humans blocked out the sun, and probably dashed all other power sources available to the Machines. What you have left are self-replicating humans. Makes sense to keep them alive and farm them just enough to tide you over before their next breeding cycle
Maybe you get “digested” in the sense that you get incorporated into the sarlacc’s body, like it’s using you in a parasitic sense. It makes you one of its internal organs, and it keeps you alive as it slowly uses you up over the course of a thousand years (assuming we take that phrase literally). I think acting as a gall bladder for an underground sand monster sounds like a fate worse than death.
Isn’t that basically the mechanism of how early complex cells formed millions of years ago.
First it was just basic cells … they fed off one another and at one point … one cell became incorporated into the other and essentially evolved into an organ of the cell … like mitochondria inside the cell, isn’t it basically thought that it was one it’s own organism at one point and just evolved into an organ inside other cells.
Same with the human body. I think the estimate is that we are only about 50% of our own generated cells and the rest is just other beneficial cooperative bacteria our body has evolved to take advantage of.
So the Sarlac taking you in is just incorporating you into it’s body for some function and keeping you alive to fulfill that role … you just happen to be conscious of it and unable to escape the entire time over a thousand years.
Could be it’s using you for nutrients it can’t get normally, so it keeps you alive to milk you for your calcium or whatever for as long as it can.
I thought it also used them for neural CPU cycles but maybe I’m misremembering
No, that’s exactly the original thing. “Wetware”, basically… But test audiences got upset and confused, so it was changed to “batteries.”
Sarlac that lost the ability to grow ‘roots’ and instead worked out venom and energy storage (fat and muscle) would outcompete and supplant the sarlacs still producing energetically-expensive, overly-complicated stasis bellies.
What happens if they momentarily fail to keep their meals alive, do they starve or become poisoned by the rotting meat? Do they have issues keeping a varied diet alive? How do they maintain a net positive energy balance after producing all that is required to keep organisms alive? Why not stun them and stash them, like wasps and spiders? Why not fatten up like -gestures broadly at all life-. Fat requires very little maintenance.
Could one, in theory, rescue one’s friends were they trapped in a sarlac?
Sounds like an organism that would quickly be out of business were there any competition at all.
edit: How do they handle the waste produced by the meals-in-stasis?
As long as we’re coming up with overly convoluted reasons that a minor plot device from a fantasy space opera makes sense in a rigorous scientific way, why not assume that they were genetically engineered specifically as a torturous punishment for the Hutt syndicate? Bioengineering is apparently canon, so there’s in-universe justification.
Wouldn’t Jabba being ‘stupid as fuck’ and making erroneous claims about nature be the less convoluted answer here? Bioengineering, canon or not, sounds like the more complicated explanation.
The worst thing about this is ‘threepio’
The worst worst part is that’s actually how it’s spelled in novelizations (or at least how they used to spell it). Artoo-Detoo and See-Threepio.
I’ve never read a Star Wars book but this makes me unreasonably unset upset.
Not just 70s and 80s, even 90s and 2000s. I grew up in 2000s thinking it is called Arturito, and I’m sure a lot of people (mostly non fans) think the same.
They absorb their prey into their own bodies
It’s Star Wars. Of course someone took an offhand comment that wasn’t meant to be thought of past the scene it’s in and wrote a whole story about it.
Well if people like OP are going to hate on it of course someones going to work out an explanation for it.
Choogana goona, youwanna wonga. Ah ha ha ha!
Well we know Tatooine orbits a pair of stars somehow and it’s still in the Goldilocks zone just enough to make it semi habitable still. My assumption is that these are white dwarfs or something smallish.
Could this be explained that the local year is much shorter? Add in that Hutt is well versed in his own biology which assuming a he isn’t strangled by a tentacle, could be slowly digested alive for a 1000 Tatooine years? He probably forgets that about his pathetic cute biped pets.
Just gonna point out that Tatooine used to be green and blue then the ancestors of the Jawa and Tusken did a slave revolt, the Rakata took offense to that so they made it glass.
Atleast thats true for legends and I frankly dont give a fuck what Disney has to say.
Speaking of which, there’s actually a fairly compelling theory that Tattoine is the human home world in Star Wars. We know a few things about the origin of humanity in Star Wars, but it’s all from the time humanity was an unimportant slave race to the Rakatan Empire. We also know Tuskens are later biological descendants of humans that genetically split after the Rakatans fell, and that the Rakatans directly raided Tattoine for slaves, meaning Tattoine was at least one source of original flavor human when it was still a relatively minor species in the galaxy.
The other in-galaxy option is Coruscant but honestly that’s kind of boring. It’s also quite far from Tattoine so it’d be weird if Tattoine was just some random human colony.
And the technically movie-canon answer is Earth and humans are an exo-galactic invasive species but that’s not as fun.
Honestly I go with the Exo-galactic refugee hypothesis kinda like the Vong for the majority of humans but that there is also a native human population in the galaxy as well. Though the reason for humanity’s supremacy in star wars has to do with the Pius Dea, which to summarize were basically when the Republic went full Imperium of Man and started purging xenos.
