Somebody explain Aliens to me
Discussion
I'm on about the films here.
Now I was under the impression that those face huggers needed to be in contact with a human, so that the real alien could grow inside a persons stomach.
If that is the case, how the hell did the Alien race ever come about? I mean if they need humans to survive, but weren't discovered by anyone, how did they come about?
Its always puzzled me, as I cannot see how they could have formed without the use of someones stomach.
Now I was under the impression that those face huggers needed to be in contact with a human, so that the real alien could grow inside a persons stomach.
If that is the case, how the hell did the Alien race ever come about? I mean if they need humans to survive, but weren't discovered by anyone, how did they come about?
Its always puzzled me, as I cannot see how they could have formed without the use of someones stomach.
I thought they just needed a 'host' ie something warm and sqishy warm blooded to feed off, ie any species would do, could be wrong but yes this still doesn't explain how they existed in the first place, or perhaps its to do with the evloution of the species and it just happened to be a human host, god knows am now confusing myself!! 
In the original movie the ship that they discoverd had skeleton of another alien species (sort of elephant like folks) lying about the place. If it were me and i saw some big chaps like that had been taken to the cleaners i would have decided to gtfoot straight away. However my course of action would not have made for a particularly great movie (or the subsequent money spinning frachise). AVP, worst movie ever?
From the biological POV, Alien is a parasitoid.
Parasites depend on hosts to live, but don't kill them, eg: fleas, mistletoe. By contrast a parasitoid kills its host. Not so sound from an evolutionary angle since if it kills all its hosts, of if the host species dies out for some other reason, so does the parasitoid.
Parasites depend on hosts to live, but don't kill them, eg: fleas, mistletoe. By contrast a parasitoid kills its host. Not so sound from an evolutionary angle since if it kills all its hosts, of if the host species dies out for some other reason, so does the parasitoid.
Polarbert said:
I'm on about the films here.
Now I was under the impression that those face huggers needed to be in contact with a human, so that the real alien could grow inside a persons stomach.
If that is the case, how the hell did the Alien race ever come about? I mean if they need humans to survive, but weren't discovered by anyone, how did they come about?
Its always puzzled me, as I cannot see how they could have formed without the use of someones stomach.
I'd imagine that the idea is that an advanced species with the capability to do genetic engineering had refined their own genes to the point that they had no new or different genetic material with which to keep their genome fresh.
As a consequence they engineered a parasitic organisim to "park" their own genome in for many years, lurking.
I mean, I'm no expert, but that's the conclusion that I've come to now that the blooming film has been on the telly for the umpteenth time. I guess it's all fiction anyway.
Wasn't the alien bio-engineered as a weapon by the original aliens you see on the planet (the big fella with the whole in his chest)? The ship they explore was a transport ship with a consignment of face huggers to release on some poor unsuspecting sods; or maybe I just made that up.....
There are several theories as to how the aliens came about. I'm quite a fan of the aliens films as well as the comics although I'm still not sure where they come from. The first thoery is that the Predators genetically engineered the aliens as prey for the coming-of-age rituals as seen in the comics and films (check out Predator 2 where Danny Glover finds himself in the Predator space ship, there's something familiar in their trophy cabinet!). The film Aliens v Predator gives more of an insight on the origins of the aliens as do the comics. Bascially the Predators seed uninhabited planets with aliens eggs that they rear from captured queens, the young predators are then sent in for the hunt.
The comics also have Ripley coming in to contact the aliens that originally piloted the ship that crashlanded on LV421, again it's hinted that the aliens were bred via gentic engineering as a weapon of some kind. The crashed ship was supposed to be transporting it's lethal cargo elsewhere when I guess a facehugger got loose, although you would have thought that there would have been a queen involved somewhere along the line.
Ahhh Moneypenny said:
I thought they just needed a 'host' ie something warm and sqishy warm blooded to feed off, ie any species would do, could be wrong but yes this still doesn't explain how they existed in the first place, or perhaps its to do with the evloution of the species and it just happened to be a human host, god knows am now confusing myself!!
Well, surely they could have slowly evolved from flies and stuff that put eggs under your skin. How did they evolve to do that?
Blue bottles and maggots?
Also, isn't their something in there, in one of the directors cut films maybe, suggesting they were engineered?
Also, they can plant the egg anywhere warm and alive. They appear in dogs in Alien 3, humans in 1 and 2, the big Space Jockey thing in the 1st one... A predator in AvP... There even appears to be some variety in the ones in Aliens if you look closely? A snake one is there? Not sure...
Dave
TheRedOnion said:
There are several theories as to how the aliens came about. I'm quite a fan of the aliens films as well as the comics although I'm still not sure where they come from. The first thoery is that the Predators genetically engineered the aliens as prey for the coming-of-age rituals as seen in the comics and films (check out Predator 2 where Danny Glover finds himself in the Predator space ship, there's something familiar in their trophy cabinet!). The film Aliens v Predator gives more of an insight on the origins of the aliens as do the comics. Bascially the Predators seed uninhabited planets with aliens eggs that they rear from captured queens, the young predators are then sent in for the hunt.
The comics also have Ripley coming in to contact the aliens that originally piloted the ship that crashlanded on LV421, again it's hinted that the aliens were bred via gentic engineering as a weapon of some kind. The crashed ship was supposed to be transporting it's lethal cargo elsewhere when I guess a facehugger got loose, although you would have thought that there would have been a queen involved somewhere along the line.
You need to get out more.
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