this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2024
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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. 🙄
I feel so bad for the people who remade The Thing because the studio executives literally forced them to make everything CGI.
And IIRC it was after they had made a bunch of practical effects, so it's not like it was saving them money or anything. The execs literally just said "re-do these parts but worse".
Sort of a remake, sort of a prequel.
A premake
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.
My headcanon is that he tried the more technical and correct explanation, but most people he told it to started to go a bit glassy-eyed during that part, so he simplified his pitch.
The showing of the battery is a good visual to sell the explanation too, regardless of it not making sense "realistically"
I believe Switch refers to Neo as coppertop at some point which would be the battery analogy as well too.
They've probably all heard the speech at some point. Except those born at Zion.
Also there's plenty of precedent for everyone being wrong about something big, like everything revolving around Earth.
The real reason is the machines are using all the human brains to fake generative AI responses to keep share prices going up in line with their original programming.
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
How do you farm anything without the sun?
They just eat the other humans remains, duh!
that's what they did, I guess got food from indoor farms?
That takes a ton of electricity. How do you power the indoor farms?
Well they scorched the sky which created lots of wind and lightning storms. Maybe they harnessed those sources, or this being the future, used the scant antimatter generated from each strike?
So they do have energy sources after all! So tell me again why do they need to farm humans?
Mmm I'm beginning to see. Even in their own lore, Operation Dark Storm was a failure that crippled humanity and only temporarily halted the machines.
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.
It could be that their prey's bodies are used for chemical reactions that their own body is incapable of.
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.
Like mitochondria
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."
The batteries things was also Morpheus's explanation, and not necessarily a definitive fact of the fictive universe. Morpheus could have been talking out of his ass, or deliberately over-simplifying for the benefit of Neo, who he knew was kind of a dumbass.
I think that was the original idea but they changed it to energy because they thought the audience wouldn't understand the CPU stuff.
You also can't choke people with your mind so idk what your point is
The sarlaac isn’t eating your body; it’s eating your mind.
The original script for the Matrix had the machines use human brains for data processing, but the Wachowskis were told by the studio to simplify it.
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.
Tbf that's totally something the Hutt clan would do
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.
This is what I hate about Star Wars lore. Same with the parsecs gaffe (I think it's even pointed out in the screenplay that Han is transparently bullshitting them).
Both of these make sense, but no. They had to make super convoluted explanations in secondary sources and everyone treats that as gospel for some reason.
What? https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Sarlacc