Inspired by a current Pit thread about cannibalism in early Jamestown.
You’re hungry. REAL hungry. Tink of yourself in the middle of a desert on a desert planet. Nothing, animal or vegetable, to eat. You don’t have an option to eat friends or family. Or even kill strangers for their delicious selves.
But you DO have a magnificent robot-operated surgical suite – the finest in any barren desert in the world. You can program it to do anything, include operate on you with a near certainty of success.
The hunger gets worse. You know for certain you will starve to death before help arrives. You have one chance of survival, and that is to reduce your caloric needs to the maximum extent possible, and FIND FOOD.
There are only two choices. You can program your robot to amputate your limbs and any other organs you can do without – you don’t need TWO kidneys or two lungs, really, do you? This is a fabulous robot that is not only a surgeon but a nurse and a cook and a waiter. It can preserve your meat in the freezer, then prepare it and feed it you.
Which do you do?
Screw it. I starve to death.
I commit suicide, or program my robot to kill me, rather than face the prolonged agony of starvation.
I program my robot to salvage everything my body can do without and put it into storage ASAP.
I have my robot chop off a bit of me at a time, so there might me more of me left when help arrives. But I know I will have to suffer significantly more pain and trauma by undergoing a half-dozen or more little amputations than one comprehensive one.
Me? I clamp a mask with a flow of 100% nitrous oxide gas over my nose, and die laughing. And I program my robot as a backup – if my scheme fails to kill me, it will just do something simple like cut my throat.
Knowing the Dope, I’m sure this q has been covered - the medical answer being that even with expert surgery the trauma to the body far exceeds the calorific benefit you’d get - the body using the energy to simply repair itself.
Ah! Here’s the thread (from 2003). Our resident MD Qadgop dishes the dirt on autocannibalism.
Starvation is self-cannibalization. Your body is consuming itself to keep you alive until you can get food. Cutting off your leg and eating it just wastes calories - in the effort needed to perform the surgery, in the blood lost during the process, and in calories burned by breaking down the meat, processing it, and turning it back into meat. It’s even worse if you cook it first. You’re far better off leaving your meat inside of you, and letting your body burn it as needed until you can find some more food supplies.
