From: wbarnes@sura.net (Bill Barnes)
Subject: Re: Aliens as xenoterraformers?
Organization: SURAnet, College Park, MD, USA, NA, Earth, Milky Way
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1992 23:40:16 GMT

>In article <1992Jul24.210837.20596@ncsu.edu>, 
> melody@grad02.math.ncsu.edu (Patrick Melody) writes:
>> It occured to me that they could be "terraforming" machines for the
>> elephant-like pilot's race seen in the first movie.  This could explain
>> the huge cargo hold of eggs.  Other races might not care about indigenous
>> life on other worlds, but instead just "erase" the ecosystem of any world
>> they wanted and replace it with their own.  The inside of the big alien
>> ship in the first movie was very similiar to the inside of the alien hive
>> in the second movie.  If you dropped a load of eggs into an ecosystem, the
>> resulting aliens could wipe it out if they encountered no intelligent resist-
>> ance.  They could they "hive over" and otherwise transform the planet into
>> the kind of world the elephant people wanted.  The aliens are well equipped 
>> to fight and defend themselves, and naturally destroy other life to perpetuate
>> their own species.  (Though I suppose any species does this as well)  Also, the
>> aliens seem to deal well with very harsh environments, something terraformers
>> would need to do.  Any other thoughts on this?

An intriguing idea, except what do the elephants do with the aliens
once they're done?  Wait for them to die out?  This might work,
except, as near as I can tell, the eggs can survive indefinitely on
their own.  Which means after the Aliens died out, you'd still have
lots of eggs lying around.  Not exactly the kind of thing you want to
have waiting for you on your new home!  How would they dispose of the
eggs?  Maybe they could nuke 'em, but in that case why not just nuke
the planet clean in the first place.  Unless they know how to kill the
eggs with Deadly Cosmic Rays(tm), I would imagine such a procedure would
be too risky.  Also, I'm not sure the elephants would want to live in
the Aliens' hives - but they could always get rid of them later.

In article <1992Jul27.151314.9666@waikato.ac.nz> cdb@waikato.ac.nz (Craig D. Beere) writes:
>It does seem strange that such a natural predator as the Alien (can feed of
>almost anything - plastic, metal, flesh, can survive in all sorts of areas,
>acid for breath, etc) can evolve naturally.

A friend of mine who used to be a biology major maintains that no
species as totally parasitic as the Aliens could've evolved naturally;
they use up their food supply (i.e. humans) too quickly and would die
out after it was gone.  This is assuming that they "eat" people - I
never got the impression they did more than use them as hosts.  Come to
think of it, what *do* adult Aliens eat to survive?!  That's never
really established.

>It is also strange that a race
>that requires other races to breed (the facehuggers need a host) can evolve
>naturally.

What about all those parasitic species out there?  They require a host
to survive and they evolved naturally.

>It seems that this latter point is a good population control
>measure...

Good way of driving a species to extinction, I think.  Having insufficient
food is population control; killing off your food supply is stupid.  I
wonder what that says about humans...8-)
-- 
Bill "Whassamatter?!  Can't you take a joke?!" Barnes   wbarnes@sura.net
Disclaimer:  The author apologizes for any thought-provoking material he may
	     have accidentally included and promises not to do it again.
Datclaimer:  My employers wouldn't WANT to share some of my opinions.
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.movies