How can Tom live off the tree in the future by eating it, when he was turned into a plant when he ate the tree as the Conquistador?
A. If we watch closely we see that Tom as the Astronaut in the future year of 2500 does not drink the sap of the Tree as he did as the Conquistador. The Conquistador seemed to hurt the tree as he stabbed it, and he took a lot of sap from it, consumed with greed. The sap of the tree made flowers sprout from the ground, and it made flowers sprout from inside him. But as the Astronaut, Tom is not greedy, and he takes only small parts of the tree at a time. And he does not take the sap, but only the bark. Another clue could be that the as the Astronaut, the tree itself is dying, it has no branches, and only one piece of bark that has those hairs attracted to human touch. It seems Tom has been taking pieces of the tree for so long, it too is dying. We can only assume that Tom found the tree after the death of Izzy, and lived off it for a thousand and five hundred years, taking a piece of it every so often, and slowly killing it.
