From: daynem@byron.u.washington.edu (Dayne Miller)
Subject: Re: Natives Down the River (was re: ALIEN^3 Eggs on Sulaco)
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Date: Tue, 18 Aug 1992 20:45:59 GMT

	There's been a lot of speculation, both on the Net and in my 
e-mail, on alien physiology since I originally posted my essay. 
Thanks to everyone who responded. Anyway, I don't mean to 
imply that I'm any kind of authority on the subject (far from it, in 
fact) but I've tried to incorporate everyone's comments and 
suggestions (and yes, need I say it, criticism) into a revision. 
This (hopefully) explains all those mysteries such as where the 
eggs on the Sulaco came from, why the alien actually exploded 
after water hit it, how it suvived the lead, where the hell they all 
came from in the first place, and the like. Note that much of this 
article has been posted before, but at the same time parts of it 
have undergone some fairly substantial revision. I encourage 
any comments, and realize that there are many out there more 
learned than me in areas of chemisrty, biology, physics and 
everything else this essay covers. Also, large portions of this 
come from suggestions of other posters; I can't take credit for 
much more than about two-thirds of this. 

*************************************************	
	The Alien is, essentially, an electrically-based life form. 
Why? Numerous reasons. First, the acid blood. Useful as a 
defensive (or at least retributive) system, sure, but also consider 
that batteries generate electricity through an interaction between 
an acid and a base in a controlled environment. This begs the 
question "So where's the base?" Most likely, it's either held in a 
buffered state and released as needed (in either every cell or in 
a specific repository, similar to the adrenal gland in a human) or, 
perhaps, this is one of the reasons that aliens need to eat. A 
sufficiently strong acid (organic chemists correct me if I'm 
wrong) will react to less acidic material as if it were basic; 
organic (aka human, dog, etc.) material fits this description 
nicely. The alien must have some way of storing or otherwise 
metabolizing the organic material (just as a camel stores energy 
in the form of fat; what IS that long head and each of those 
protrusions out the back for, after all?!!)
	The second reason for the theory that the alien is electrically 
based is this: it is capable of EXTREME feats of strength and 
speed, but otherwise seems to spend most of its time utterly 
motionless. A more familiar physiological system, such as ours 
which produces energy in the mitochodria of the cells, and then 
has to actuate a series of synaptic responses to move anything, 
would have a tough time doing this. (Yes, I know there are 
counter-examples, such as certain insects and arachnids, but 
they are restrained in size by the same physical principals which 
enable them to be so disproportionally strong and quick; 
namely, energy requirements go up exponentially as body size 
increases linearly; a scorpion the size of a German Shephard 
would be butt-slow, assuming some genetic anomaly even let 
one get close to that big; lizards don't count either, because 
they're endoskeletal, which the aliens obviously are not). 
Anyway, the point is that energy consumption for the alien is 
ideally kept close to zero, with an "Instant ON" option after 
which it has unbelievable speed and strength.
	Remember, too, that the entire alien physiology is based on 
H.R. Giger's designs (specifically, NECRONOMICON, and then 
shown after the movie in GIGER'S ALIEN and his 
BIOMECHANICS). Electrical power, or any other machine-like 
attributes, seem to fit with Giger's whole view.
	The general rule (and again, any chemists out there correct 
me if I'm wrong) is that to store an acid, you use a ceramic (a 
silicate), and that to store a base, you use a plastic 
(hydrocarbon). This makes sense from the aliens' physiological 
standpoint; the exoskeleton in particular is most likely a carbon-
carbon composite in a silicate matrix. I would guess that the 
alien itself is a joint silicon/carbon-based life form, able to 
use/feed off/gestate inside either carbon-based life (i.e. us) or 
silicon-based life (the other most likely base for extraterrestrial 
life).
	The reason that a carbon-carbon composite structure for the 
exoskeleton is important is this: such composites are extremely 
stong (though somewhat brittle), and maintain their strength up 
to extremely high temperatures, but once a critical point is 
passed they break down immediately (those working on the 
national aerospace plane, or NASP, have found this to be a 
problem; the leading edges of the airfoils (which are all carbon-
carbo composite construction) will have to be somehow cooled 
or insulated to prevent the wings from spontaneously 
combusting). Relatively low temperatures (lead melts at only 
328 degrees Celsius, after all; figure the vat of lead was likely no 
hotter than 400-450 degress Celsius) pose no problem; high 
temperatures (such as from a flame thrower, probably around 
900-1300 degrees Celsius; the jury is still out on the burning 
temperature of napalm) are at or above the flash point for the 
carbon, and thus are avoided. This provides a handy reason for 
the aliens' aversion to flame, but survival in the lead foundry. 
Also, remember that the exoskeleton's silicate matrix would give 
a protection similar to that of the silica thermal tiles on the 
Space Shuttle for short-term purposes, thus protecting any 
"organic bonds" on the inside body. The flamethrowers don't 
melt the steel in the various locations that they're used for 
several reasons: first, most steel has melting points between 
1400 and 1550 degrees Celsius (approximate), so the 
flamethrowers wouln't be hot enough anyway; and second, a 
few brief seconds of flame has slight chance of raising the 
temperature of any large quantity of steel or iron to sufficient 
temperature to melt no matter how hot it is (remember that little 
physical property called specific heat?).
	So why did the alien explode when doused with water? Well, 
several possibilities come to mind. The most probable, to me, is 
that the heating the critter got in the vat of lead caused the 
exoskeleton to expand slightly. Lead seaped in through those 
microfine gaps that were thusly created in the joints of the 
chiton. The lead reacted with the acid blood (as any metal will; 
remember lead-acid batteries?) to give the alien a quick burst of 
energy (bio-electric organism, right?), which enable it to get out 
of the lead and rush Ripley. Now, Ripley starts the water going. 
The temperature differential causes the chiton to crack (that 
shell IS fairly brittle, after all) and water seeps into both those 
cracks and the ones already created by the heating expansion. 
The water reacts with the acid AND with the molten lead still 
trapped under the exoskeleton, causing huge quantities of 
steam and enough pressure to blow apart the damn thing. Yeah, 
I know that's stretching physics a bit, but it's the closest I can 
come to merging real-world science with what we saw in the 
film.
	Now we come to the tricky part: reproduction and life cycle. 
Insects are obviously the most analogous group, so by 
modifying some known insect life cycles it should be possible to 
deduce much of that of the aliens. Also, don't forget that ALIEN 
3 was supposed represent the AIDS struggle in some respects; 
this gives us another avenue of approach to the problem. There 
are several facts to consider:

1)	Ripley identified the embryo inside her as a queen. It was 
tough to see on the display, but when it eventually came out of 
her it sure looked a helluva lot like the one that burst out of 
Caine in the first movie.

2)	According to the book and (so I've been told) the cut scenes 
from the movie ALIEN, the original beastie did not kill Dallas & 
Co., but cocooned them instead. Since we never actually SAW 
any deaths after the initial chest-burst, we can assume this to be 
the case. Supposedly Dallas also has an embryo implanted in 
him.

3)	The dog-bursting alien in the third flick was somehow able to 
identify not only the presence of an embryo inside Ripley, but in 
all likelihood that it was a queen. Presumably it did this through 
some sort of electro-magnetic signal, or through pheremones, or 
something similar. How is unimportant; the important thing is 
that it COULD detect the queen.

4)	The dog-burster seemed to be quadrapedal (somewhat) and 
very different in form from the aliens that burst from either Caine 
or Ripley; Ripley commented on this.

5)	The dog-burster developed much more quickley than did 
Ripley's queen, even though Ripley's was actually implanted 
much sooner.

	With these things in mind, we can now draw a probable 
picture of alien lifecycle.
	All pods (or eggs, or whatever you want to call them) are 
layed by queens, and are identical at the genetic level. Each 
facehugger (one per pod) is also genetically identical. The 
facehuggers are released according to some signal (likely heat 
or motion in proximity to the pod). The huggers implant identical 
parasites as well.
	At this point differentiation takes place. The dog-burster's 
ability to detect the embryo inside Ripley implies some form of 
easy identification of proximity to other aliens (let's assume 
electromagnetic; for an electrically-based life form, this would 
not be too unlikely). Each and every parasite has the 
POTENTIAL to develop into a queen, and will naturally do so 
EXCEPT when it detects another embryo nearby. Thus Ripley's 
alien, which was implanted first, began developing as a queen. 
The dog's embryo, when it was implanted, somehow sensed the 
relative proximity of the developing queen, and so began 
developing in a different manner. This process would tend to 
prevent two queens from being around at the same time as 
rivals to each other's territory and jurisdiction, in much the same 
way that two queens will not develop in a bee's nest or an ant 
colony at the same time, unless there is overcrowdind, in which 
case the new queen will leave with a portion of the drones 
(fertile males) and workers as soon as she matures. With the 
aliens, I don't believe there are fertile males, and I'll explain why 
in a moment.
	Anyway, a developing embryo takes on some FEW 
characteristics of its host. Researchers are having a hard time 
developing a vaccine for the HIV virus in part because certain 
areas of it keep mutating. The core genetic material remains the 
same, but some of the DNA which would normally serve as 
marker points are capable of change. As an analogy, consider 
taking all the aluminum body panelling off of a car, replacing it 
with fiberglass, changing the clear windows to tinted, painting it 
a different color and pattern, putting in a new stereo, and 
changing the license plates. It's still a car, and in certain 
fundamental areas the SAME car (engine, four tires, brakes, 
suspension, steering wheel, frame, etc.), but virtually all of the 
external features (by which most people would identify it) have 
changed, and so it APPEARS to be a different vehicle. 
Something similar happens to alien embryos. There is most 
likely a core of genetic material which is essentially immutable 
(due to size, multiple redundancy, error-correcting proteins, or 
whatever). However, some of the host's genetic pattern 
(perhaps pertaining to locomotion and maybe respiration, 
assuming aliens breathe) is mapped on top off the immutable 
core. Thus an alien which implants into a whale, for example, 
will probably be able to swim well, and maybe even one that 
implants into a large bird would have some flight (or at least 
gliding) capabilities. This feature allows aliens to survive more 
easily in whatever environment their hosts live in. This would 
explain the quadrapedal locomotion of the dog-burster, even 
though the rest of the alien remains essentially the same.
	There is an added reason why this scenario fits with the 
overall aethetic as developed by Giger. We already have 
biomechanics in the design, I've explained why I think the aliens 
are bio-electrical, and now we have a kind of bio-electronic 
aspect. Consider the core genes to be analogous to a 
computer's hardware, especially those instructions imbedded in 
the hardware (ROM). Those basic genes are for the most part 
unchangable. Now, the developing alien embryo uses its host's 
genetic structure (or at least limited forms of it) as a sort of 
software to guide its development, eventual appearance and 
ablity to cope with environmental variables. The core is passed 
on from generation to generation without change.
	So, assuming an embryo finds itself implanted either first or 
alone, it develops as a queen. Otherwise, it develops as a 
worker-warrior. Queen development is much slower than 
worker-warrior development (and we can guess that maybe 
Ripley's embryo was further slower by hypersleep). What about, 
you say, the alien that burst out of Caine on the Nostromo? Was 
it a queen? YES! THE ORIGINAL ALIEN ON THE NOSTROMO 
WAS A YOUNG, NOT-YET-MATURE QUEEN!!! Nothing says a 
queen can't go through a development, pre-pod-laying stage (or 
at least a stage where egg-laying is secondary to eliminating 
rivals and cocooning new hosts; perhaps immature queens are 
only able to lay one of two eggs at a time). A queen that 
develops without any worker-warriors around it almost has to, in 
order to coccoon future hosts for its offspring, as well as merely 
to dispose of any potential threats. The aliens metemorphosize 
so quickly that the progression from warrior-queen to pod-
laying-queen might  be only a matter of a few days, or perhaps it 
occurs only after certain conditions are met (hazards removed, a 
certain number of hosts coccooned, etc.) The young alien queen 
on the Nostromo was able (according to the book (and the 
Special Edition???) to implant Dallas, thus she must have layed 
at least one egg, but there wasn't any kind of mass-production 
effort like in ALIENS.
	So where did the pods in the Sulaco come from? Just 
because the alien queen lost her egg sac doesn't mean her 
reproductive glands weren't still working. The egg sac possibly 
served only as an aid to maturation of the pods. If you accept 
the theory that the Nostromo alien was a young egg-laying 
queen (who didn't have an egg sac), there's no reason to 
assume that a mature queen can't also lay eggs without the sac. 
Maybe depositing a pod or two is even a survival-of-the-species 
response by the queen to finding herself in a new location 
without any worker-warriors. The pods certainly had a long time 
to mature; we have no idea how long Ripley was in hypersleep 
after the Sulaco left Acheron (aka LV426). And as for Ripley 
being dumb enough to not check for pods in the dropship 
nacelles, well, everyone screws up from time to time. Ripley was 
lilely in delayed-reaction shock at the time for a while, and after 
that it just slipped her mind. Maybe she was even subconciously 
avoiding thinking about the possiblity that the Sulaco was NOT 
in fact necessarily a safe place to be.

	So why don't I think there are any fertile male aliens? 
Because I think the aliens are a created species, not an evolved 
one (put THAT in a pipe and smoke it, Darwin). I find it difficult 
to imagine a planetary environment where the aliens would have 
evolved into the form and lifecycle that they have (and if they 
did, what kind of species evolved as their rivals?) Here's the 
idea. Two races are involved in some sort of interstellar racial 
war. One of them develops a killer organisn (the alien we all 
know and love) and attempts to seed it onto the planet or 
planets of their enemy. The ship we saw crashed on Acheron 
was POSSIBLY one of the seeding ships, with an architecture 
designed to transport thousands of the eggs to the enemy. 
Somehow someone screwed up and miscalculated, and at least 
one of the aliens got free, killed the pilot, and caused the ship to 
crash. Alternately, the ship could belong to the original target 
race, which has been "infested", or even (and this is BY FAR my 
prefered theory) to a third race which wandered onto the scene 
after the aliens wiped out both their designated enemies and 
their miscalculating progenitors. The ship of that race that was 
infected was at least able to start a warning beacon before it 
crashed.
       Another reason to assume that there aren't any males is
that in most species sexual reproduction allows genes from the
male and genes from the female to (hopefully) combine in a manner 
that produces an offspring that is more capable of survival. In 
the case of the alien, the gene-borrowing aspect of embyonic
development takes care of this. The embryos take what they might
need from their host, rather than hoping that some male happens
to provide the right mix of genetic material.
	The bio-engineered theory works, for me, in that it helps to 
explain the machine-like attributes of the alien (bio-mechanics, 
bio-electrics, and a sort of bio-electronics). Also, I have been 
told (third-hand info) that Gibson's screenplay for A^3 deduced 
something similar. Someone got some tissue samples from the 
alien and attempted to mutate them, or something to that effect, 
and one of the characters replied that the genes were changing 
almost as if they'd been made to do so. I know Gibson's work, 
since it wasn't actually used, is only to be treated as 
speculation, but I'm just glad someone else was thinking along 
the lines that I was. Remember, too, the Company wanted the 
aliens for their bioweapons division. What better (in their minds) 
than a creature that has already been developed for such a 
purpose? The only thing that bothers me is why the Company 
reps didn't go after tissue samples from the exploded alien in 
A^3. You'd think they'd try to clone the thing or at least examine 
the genetic structure (though I realize that just because we 
didn't see them grab any samples doesn't mean they didn't).

	I think that covers everything, and should clear up some 
points. I welcome any Net discussion on the subject.