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.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 1 week ago
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.
BlueLineBae@midwest.social 1 week ago
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.
RustyShackleford@literature.cafe 1 week ago
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. 🙄
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I feel so bad for the people who remade The Thing because the studio executives literally forced them to make everything CGI.
GraniteM@lemmy.world 1 week ago
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.
CeruleanRuin@lemmings.world 1 week ago
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.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 week ago
I believe Switch refers to Neo as coppertop at some point which would be the battery analogy as well too.
NigelFrobisher@aussie.zone 1 week ago
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.
tetris11@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
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
Klear@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
How do you farm anything without the sun?
GraniteM@lemmy.world 1 week ago
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 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.
ininewcrow@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
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 adage m 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.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 week ago
It could be that their prey’s bodies are used for chemical reactions that their own body is incapable of.
Rolder@reddthat.com 1 week ago
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.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Like mitochondria
JusticeForPorygon@lemmy.world 1 week ago
You also can’t choke people with your mind so idk what your point is
GBU_28@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I thought it also used them for neural CPU cycles but maybe I’m misremembering
FinalRemix@lemmy.world 1 week ago
No, that’s exactly the original thing. “Wetware”, basically… But test audiences got upset and confused, so it was changed to “batteries.”
CeruleanRuin@lemmings.world 1 week ago
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.
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 1 week ago
I think that was the original idea but they changed it to energy because they thought the audience wouldn’t understand the CPU stuff.
intensely_human@lemm.ee 1 week ago
The sarlaac isn’t eating your body; it’s eating your mind.
CitizenKong@lemmy.world 1 week ago
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.