Clueless about Biology

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- I thought it also used them for neural CPU cycles but maybe I'm misremembering
- 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.
What? https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Sarlacc

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.
- I was seven when I learned this and I've always hated it.
Have I got some ‘news’ for you:
- 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.
- Damn, I quite like that now.
- This is hilarious
- I worked with an Arturo once and his nickname was R2

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.
- It's canon
FIRST escape? Did he do it again??
- https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KK-GGYXf7Tc

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.
- Yeah, I can imagine the locals would tell the younglings "don't play near the Sarlaac Pit! It'll eat you for a thousand years!"