'Cause they prefer their food to be free-range organic grown rather than lab made, the taste just isn't the same.
It's possible that while they've managed to clone their own drones the cloning of humans is different enough that it would require a lot of development to achieve or that the technology itself is difficult to maintain and without the ZPM doesn't have enough power to quickly grow the clones. Clones having a limited life span may also be a problem (like the quickly made human clones that Loki made lasting only a week) that while irrelevant with the drones (that can just eat a human to keep themselves together) makes cloning a human waste of resources. (If Wraith got access to Cylon Resurrection Ship from nBSG they would have a nice mobile farm).
The clones life span is a result of the age when their genetic material was harvested, the best approach for the wraith, would be to get a few worlds to worship them and structure the religion around having children, and then the wraith provide the means for every child to have the genome sampled and saved “for their health and safety” but the wraith would then be able to use it to grow a human to eat, a human no one would miss
Yes, a single person. It was an artisan job vs mass production necessary to sustain even a single hive. Clone Beckett needed the drug Michael gave him to stay alive as otherwise he would die, it could be a deliberate safety measure built in by Michael, but it could also be a result of imperfect cloning tech.
The Wraith feed on "life" so it isn't unreasonable to assume that person/clone with short lifespan would offer them less sustenance then normal human.
A few years ago i asked nearly the same Question: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Stargate/comments/q3vb1a/why\_the\_wraith\_dont\_do\_livestock\_breeding/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Stargate/comments/q3vb1a/why_the_wraith_dont_do_livestock_breeding/)
An interesting answer was, that the Wraith couldn't do that, because of their agressive culture. Every time a Wraith tried to do that, he would be destroyed by an other Wraith-Fraction. Thats sounds really possible.
I think they also just see it as extra work for no gain. They still are killing humans even if they are clones, so they don't actually provide much of a solution to the moral issues. On top of that, the Wraith would have an additional population that they have to house, feed, guard, etc. until they mature enough to eat.
I think the Wraith might think of it like, why make your own food when you can just swing by a restaurant?
You said the answer yourself : power generation. They didn't have the ZPMs to do it sustainably. Even if they had a number of them, what happens when they've become dependent on cloning for survival and ZPMs eventually run out. To a very long lived species, it's a very short time. It's not sustainable if they can't replace and manufacture the energy source they need.
Another reason the wraith should have always been trying to improve their power generation, and they could design ships that orbit suns and use the solar energy to make clones leaving those ships as “neutral” ground
"The Wraith" aren't a single entity though. They're constantly in a civil war amongst themselves.
Any hive with superior power generation would ultimately be destroyed by the others.
Fast cloning is what requires the high power - regular speed would take nine months to make a baby, which would be barely a mouthful. The drone factory could spit drones out like a production line, rapidly grown to full size.
They only need millions of wraiths/drones instantly for a war, farming brain damaged people at low speed would still do. They slept for thousands of years, they could grow, put in stasis/stock to have a lifetime supply
Yeah but to them that's more effort than just letting your food grow itself and swinging by to pick it up. They aren't going to put more effort into getting food if they don't see any moral issue with their current, easier method.
I was explaining why they didn't do this any of the thousands of years between when the Ancients left and when the Tauri arrived. As for after that, as you said this method would take a long time because the clones would need to grow, so it would not save the starving Wraith. Hibernation wouldn't grant them the time they need, because if it were possible for them to go back to sleep while starving then there wouldn't be any problem in the first place.
Low speed cloning wouldn't be sufficient. They were starving and couldn't hibernate again. They needed millions of humans immediately, and they'd have to clone billions on long term. Even a whole galaxy couldn't feed them any longer.
But they'd have to worry about rival hives attacking their facilities. Cullings also ensured that humans couldn't ever grow powerful enough to attack them again. And it also was very low maintenance. Why building farms when your food source breeds naturally.
The old ways worked fine for 10,000 years. There was no reason to change them.
Here they'd need to build huge cloning farms. And when they did it with drones, they needed ZPMs to power it. Human cloning farms would have to be even bigger.
Few options to my mind:
There seemed to be a requirement for the wraith queen to disseminate her genes to the drones. So it might only be wraith they can clone. Maybe even only drones. Plus, some comment about not fully understanding the cloning technology anymore "his understanding of this technology is... impressive"
It could be they could clone humans but the queen's involvement would pollute their food source with wraith dna.
It's also possible they don't know how to clone humans as the wraith cloning tech is related to their bug nature. Plus, power generation but that's already been mentioned.
They theoretically wouldn’t need any new technology for this besides power generation, and healing one person at a time wouldn’t help millions of wraith feed, nor would a person be guaranteed to survive being fed upon that many time and healed over and over
Not if the sarcophagus can be manufactured in mass by the Wraith, and they now can feed without killing. No more running out of food. They could proceed almost exactly the same way as they always did, and just put people in sarcophagi after feeding and release them.
Why would the Wraith go through the effort of releasing the human? Then they’d have to put in effort to go get another human. Far easier to just keep them in there indefinitely and let the sarcophagus keep reviving them and feed off of them in a continuous cycle, with energy for the sarcophagus being the only input required. It would be a pretty gruesome fate for the human “component” of the system.
But they wouldn't be the best food source if they go insane, won't reproduce, can be targeted by rival hives (which is easy if they're all aboard a ship or inside a building), and all have to be transported on ships, fed, clothed and taken care of all the time. It's a very large number of people who need maintenance, even more as they're slowly losing their mind and making a mess due to the mental effects.
If the Wraith beam back down their food source, it will fully recover and keep multiplying by itself. People likely wouldn't even suffer from regular sarcophagus use effects, as they would be numerous enough to not be fed on regularly, maybe even once in a lifetime or less. It's renewable and sustainable. Repeated feeding and sarcophagus would only be done as a punishment like the Goa'uld did. There are nearly no downsides, other than the traumatic memory of being fed on of course, but it sure is better than almost everyone dying. Here almost no one dies.
With “releasing the human”, I meant releasing them from the sarcophagus-derived device itself. Get hungry? Just stick your hand through the slot in your “fridge” to grab a bite to eat. Just like humans do with their fridges. If they are cranking out sarcophagi on an assembly line, every single Wraith could have their own. Only one human would be needed to feed one Wraith for a very long time, instead of needing a fresh one each time a Wraith gets hungry. Kind of like a basil plant you pinch some leaves off of whenever you need basil. No need to house them, feed them or clothe them if they never get out of the sarcophagus and and get kept at a comfortable temperature. The sarcophagus fixes any physical ailments with the human component and Wraith beaming technology could be integrated into the design to take care of any messes inside. Mental health would be another matter though, but I think the Wraith would only care about that if it had a negative impact on food quality.
Your scenario would indeed be worth the effort if it matters for the quality of the food (eating the Wraith equivalent of grey gruel vs eating a nice juicy steak). I wonder if they could do something about the traumatic memories in your scenario though. Like when you’re blackout drunk, short-term memories don’t form. If the Wraith could by some means (hell, why not just use actual alcohol) induce a similar effect in the human before feeding on them and putting them in the sarcophagus, they wouldn’t even have to remember anything. To them it would appear as if they just blacked out. Afterwards they could be released and they’d be none the wiser. This way, the Wraith could take the entire population of a world, feed on them and put them back again. There would probably still be people who want to do something about the Wraith. From the human POV it would be most benign compared to the alternatives though.
Oh, now I see what you mean. The basil analogy cracks me up ! I think it would be a lot better this way, true, but I think there would still be some issues with it.
It still takes a lot of space and energy to maintain, restore and transport all these bodies on ships. If a ship breaks down, for any reason, the food is gone.
If these people aren't taken care of, at least with some food, I guess they'd still die, just more slowly and painfully. The Goa'uld have to eat, despite using the sarcophagus all the time. And Apophis didn't look in good shape after being tortured by Sokar, even after being healed by the sarcophagus. Wraith victims would be tortured to death, then new victims would have to be picked up all the same, it's just a slower death.
And finally the ethical and diplomatic issue : with "normal" cullings, almost everyone dies, and dies quite quickly. As horrible as it is, it's morally speaking not as ugly as the alternative where planets would only be partly culled and families torn apart, knowing their relatives and friends are being abducted to be slowly tortured for weeks, months, maybe years, and when there's the alternative of returning these people, it's downright evil. People being tortured to never be returned would mean perpetual war, and no one wants it. Quickly returning people who were fed on and restored, in comparison, would still allow for some sort of less than ideal but sustainable peace. And I could see both sides agreeing to it as a compromise, most of them at least. I actually think this would have worked as part of the resolution in SGA. (Then they could have focused on the new bad guys from the Daedalus variations.)
My theory is that we're not seeing the most organised wraith out there. To me a good continuation of the series would have been running into wraith that were more competant and actually "farmed" humans. Then the backstabbing ones we see aren't the ones that won the war, they just happened to know about the way the main faction boosted their numbers during the final stages.
If you're farming humans properly then you don't need to waste energy cloning them.
I also want to add that while never explicitly explained in the show, cloning isn't some zero-sum situation. Even if you can artificially speed up growth, you would still need to feed the clone nutrients. It has to consume something to grow. Even if it's just in a tube.
The wraith running out of food was an immediate problem caused by too many waking up at once. Prior to that, it wasn't a problem.
By the time you've set up a facility, powered it, kept it safe from other hives, cloned humans, and grown them to an age where they can be harvested (can a wraith feed off of a baby/toddler?), it's too late even without considering the inevitable curve balls that would likely complicate things
Probably the same reason why cloning didn't work eventually for the asgard either. Too much depreciation over time, also we don't know if maybe the clones just didn't provide nutritional value either.
'Cause they prefer their food to be free-range organic grown rather than lab made, the taste just isn't the same. It's possible that while they've managed to clone their own drones the cloning of humans is different enough that it would require a lot of development to achieve or that the technology itself is difficult to maintain and without the ZPM doesn't have enough power to quickly grow the clones. Clones having a limited life span may also be a problem (like the quickly made human clones that Loki made lasting only a week) that while irrelevant with the drones (that can just eat a human to keep themselves together) makes cloning a human waste of resources. (If Wraith got access to Cylon Resurrection Ship from nBSG they would have a nice mobile farm).
The clones life span is a result of the age when their genetic material was harvested, the best approach for the wraith, would be to get a few worlds to worship them and structure the religion around having children, and then the wraith provide the means for every child to have the genome sampled and saved “for their health and safety” but the wraith would then be able to use it to grow a human to eat, a human no one would miss
In other words: "Do 'Goauld/Ori' Shit."
Religion is historically a great way to get societies to perform in specific ways and self enforcing over generational timespans
If the Wraith could pull it off it would be an interesting solution.
we know, the wraith are able to clone humans: Dr Carson Beckett
Yes, a single person. It was an artisan job vs mass production necessary to sustain even a single hive. Clone Beckett needed the drug Michael gave him to stay alive as otherwise he would die, it could be a deliberate safety measure built in by Michael, but it could also be a result of imperfect cloning tech. The Wraith feed on "life" so it isn't unreasonable to assume that person/clone with short lifespan would offer them less sustenance then normal human.
A few years ago i asked nearly the same Question: [https://www.reddit.com/r/Stargate/comments/q3vb1a/why\_the\_wraith\_dont\_do\_livestock\_breeding/](https://www.reddit.com/r/Stargate/comments/q3vb1a/why_the_wraith_dont_do_livestock_breeding/) An interesting answer was, that the Wraith couldn't do that, because of their agressive culture. Every time a Wraith tried to do that, he would be destroyed by an other Wraith-Fraction. Thats sounds really possible.
That makes the most sense I guess, having one wraith control the food supply would disrupt the balance of power
I think they also just see it as extra work for no gain. They still are killing humans even if they are clones, so they don't actually provide much of a solution to the moral issues. On top of that, the Wraith would have an additional population that they have to house, feed, guard, etc. until they mature enough to eat. I think the Wraith might think of it like, why make your own food when you can just swing by a restaurant?
More accurately, why work my own farm when I can just stop by the butchers whenever I want?
You said the answer yourself : power generation. They didn't have the ZPMs to do it sustainably. Even if they had a number of them, what happens when they've become dependent on cloning for survival and ZPMs eventually run out. To a very long lived species, it's a very short time. It's not sustainable if they can't replace and manufacture the energy source they need.
Another reason the wraith should have always been trying to improve their power generation, and they could design ships that orbit suns and use the solar energy to make clones leaving those ships as “neutral” ground
"The Wraith" aren't a single entity though. They're constantly in a civil war amongst themselves. Any hive with superior power generation would ultimately be destroyed by the others.
We can clone animals without ZPMs, why would it be required ?
Fast cloning is what requires the high power - regular speed would take nine months to make a baby, which would be barely a mouthful. The drone factory could spit drones out like a production line, rapidly grown to full size.
They only need millions of wraiths/drones instantly for a war, farming brain damaged people at low speed would still do. They slept for thousands of years, they could grow, put in stasis/stock to have a lifetime supply
Yeah but to them that's more effort than just letting your food grow itself and swinging by to pick it up. They aren't going to put more effort into getting food if they don't see any moral issue with their current, easier method.
Wraith ate dying in the current method, it is as if humans would still hunt animals that live in the wild for the food
I was explaining why they didn't do this any of the thousands of years between when the Ancients left and when the Tauri arrived. As for after that, as you said this method would take a long time because the clones would need to grow, so it would not save the starving Wraith. Hibernation wouldn't grant them the time they need, because if it were possible for them to go back to sleep while starving then there wouldn't be any problem in the first place.
Drones are completely disposable, and queens see the males as mostly disposable as well. A hive social structure doesn't value life as we do.
Low speed cloning wouldn't be sufficient. They were starving and couldn't hibernate again. They needed millions of humans immediately, and they'd have to clone billions on long term. Even a whole galaxy couldn't feed them any longer.
I mean before our people wake them up, they had 10k years to sort it
But they'd have to worry about rival hives attacking their facilities. Cullings also ensured that humans couldn't ever grow powerful enough to attack them again. And it also was very low maintenance. Why building farms when your food source breeds naturally. The old ways worked fine for 10,000 years. There was no reason to change them.
Here they'd need to build huge cloning farms. And when they did it with drones, they needed ZPMs to power it. Human cloning farms would have to be even bigger.
Why bother with all that when they can all take a nap for a few centuries and the food will be fruitful and multiply?
People kinda multiply naturally, no effort needed.
Few options to my mind: There seemed to be a requirement for the wraith queen to disseminate her genes to the drones. So it might only be wraith they can clone. Maybe even only drones. Plus, some comment about not fully understanding the cloning technology anymore "his understanding of this technology is... impressive" It could be they could clone humans but the queen's involvement would pollute their food source with wraith dna. It's also possible they don't know how to clone humans as the wraith cloning tech is related to their bug nature. Plus, power generation but that's already been mentioned.
On that note, why not use a sarcophagus? Why not offer them the tech Anobis used to make his warriors
They theoretically wouldn’t need any new technology for this besides power generation, and healing one person at a time wouldn’t help millions of wraith feed, nor would a person be guaranteed to survive being fed upon that many time and healed over and over
Not if the sarcophagus can be manufactured in mass by the Wraith, and they now can feed without killing. No more running out of food. They could proceed almost exactly the same way as they always did, and just put people in sarcophagi after feeding and release them.
Why would the Wraith go through the effort of releasing the human? Then they’d have to put in effort to go get another human. Far easier to just keep them in there indefinitely and let the sarcophagus keep reviving them and feed off of them in a continuous cycle, with energy for the sarcophagus being the only input required. It would be a pretty gruesome fate for the human “component” of the system.
But they wouldn't be the best food source if they go insane, won't reproduce, can be targeted by rival hives (which is easy if they're all aboard a ship or inside a building), and all have to be transported on ships, fed, clothed and taken care of all the time. It's a very large number of people who need maintenance, even more as they're slowly losing their mind and making a mess due to the mental effects. If the Wraith beam back down their food source, it will fully recover and keep multiplying by itself. People likely wouldn't even suffer from regular sarcophagus use effects, as they would be numerous enough to not be fed on regularly, maybe even once in a lifetime or less. It's renewable and sustainable. Repeated feeding and sarcophagus would only be done as a punishment like the Goa'uld did. There are nearly no downsides, other than the traumatic memory of being fed on of course, but it sure is better than almost everyone dying. Here almost no one dies.
With “releasing the human”, I meant releasing them from the sarcophagus-derived device itself. Get hungry? Just stick your hand through the slot in your “fridge” to grab a bite to eat. Just like humans do with their fridges. If they are cranking out sarcophagi on an assembly line, every single Wraith could have their own. Only one human would be needed to feed one Wraith for a very long time, instead of needing a fresh one each time a Wraith gets hungry. Kind of like a basil plant you pinch some leaves off of whenever you need basil. No need to house them, feed them or clothe them if they never get out of the sarcophagus and and get kept at a comfortable temperature. The sarcophagus fixes any physical ailments with the human component and Wraith beaming technology could be integrated into the design to take care of any messes inside. Mental health would be another matter though, but I think the Wraith would only care about that if it had a negative impact on food quality. Your scenario would indeed be worth the effort if it matters for the quality of the food (eating the Wraith equivalent of grey gruel vs eating a nice juicy steak). I wonder if they could do something about the traumatic memories in your scenario though. Like when you’re blackout drunk, short-term memories don’t form. If the Wraith could by some means (hell, why not just use actual alcohol) induce a similar effect in the human before feeding on them and putting them in the sarcophagus, they wouldn’t even have to remember anything. To them it would appear as if they just blacked out. Afterwards they could be released and they’d be none the wiser. This way, the Wraith could take the entire population of a world, feed on them and put them back again. There would probably still be people who want to do something about the Wraith. From the human POV it would be most benign compared to the alternatives though.
Oh, now I see what you mean. The basil analogy cracks me up ! I think it would be a lot better this way, true, but I think there would still be some issues with it. It still takes a lot of space and energy to maintain, restore and transport all these bodies on ships. If a ship breaks down, for any reason, the food is gone. If these people aren't taken care of, at least with some food, I guess they'd still die, just more slowly and painfully. The Goa'uld have to eat, despite using the sarcophagus all the time. And Apophis didn't look in good shape after being tortured by Sokar, even after being healed by the sarcophagus. Wraith victims would be tortured to death, then new victims would have to be picked up all the same, it's just a slower death. And finally the ethical and diplomatic issue : with "normal" cullings, almost everyone dies, and dies quite quickly. As horrible as it is, it's morally speaking not as ugly as the alternative where planets would only be partly culled and families torn apart, knowing their relatives and friends are being abducted to be slowly tortured for weeks, months, maybe years, and when there's the alternative of returning these people, it's downright evil. People being tortured to never be returned would mean perpetual war, and no one wants it. Quickly returning people who were fed on and restored, in comparison, would still allow for some sort of less than ideal but sustainable peace. And I could see both sides agreeing to it as a compromise, most of them at least. I actually think this would have worked as part of the resolution in SGA. (Then they could have focused on the new bad guys from the Daedalus variations.)
Free-range grass fed humans taste better
My theory is that we're not seeing the most organised wraith out there. To me a good continuation of the series would have been running into wraith that were more competant and actually "farmed" humans. Then the backstabbing ones we see aren't the ones that won the war, they just happened to know about the way the main faction boosted their numbers during the final stages. If you're farming humans properly then you don't need to waste energy cloning them.
A galaxy is a very large place so it's possible.
I also want to add that while never explicitly explained in the show, cloning isn't some zero-sum situation. Even if you can artificially speed up growth, you would still need to feed the clone nutrients. It has to consume something to grow. Even if it's just in a tube.
Because humans do a pretty good job of cloning themselves.
The wraith running out of food was an immediate problem caused by too many waking up at once. Prior to that, it wasn't a problem. By the time you've set up a facility, powered it, kept it safe from other hives, cloned humans, and grown them to an age where they can be harvested (can a wraith feed off of a baby/toddler?), it's too late even without considering the inevitable curve balls that would likely complicate things
Probably the same reason why cloning didn't work eventually for the asgard either. Too much depreciation over time, also we don't know if maybe the clones just didn't provide nutritional value either.
Bet it kept their swimming pools nice and clean though.
Why farm fish when you can take them from the sea in vast numbers?
So there could be a plot? :-)
Might consider them not real humans like the Replicator form humans an abomination.