Five science fiction movies that get the science right

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Everything I need to know I learned through Googling.

I figured 2001 and Gattaca would be on such a list, but Alien is something of a surprise, considering the acid blood and overnight growth spurt of the title creature.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

Of all the things in Alien, the one I find hardest to believe is that a creature that evolved separately from Earth life could utilize earth life's nutrients. That's like filling a car's gas tank with coal and expecting it to run.

But, selectively erasing memories and a guy running through a library with books disappearing....no way! The mind is very complicated--it is not like a "memory" is even a well-defined entity. remove a cell that contains part of a "memory" and you've removed parts of other memories too--remove every cell that relates to a specific memory, and you have probably killed the person.

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

Who says you remove the cells? Just break the connections between cells that store specific memories. You don't toss a hard drive into a furnace to demagnetize it. You just have the read-and-write head flip the tiny magnets on the disk's surface around, erasing it.

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If we don't play god, who will?-James Watson
I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.-Albert Einstein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits

Of course, the alien of the title doesn't actually eat the humans it catches - it uses them to reproduce.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

THAT'S even weirder, parasitic relationships tend to be rather specific,especially ones of that complexity.

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A warm, wet place to grow?


tdvance is assuming the Alien is a naturally evolved organism. It may be, but it's not made clear one way or the other in the movies.

If it's not natural in origin, engineering, of a rather perverse kind (or perhaps not--who knows the mind of an alien engineer?), could account for how it can use any living species as a host. That's just my rationalization though, your mileage may vary.

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If we don't play god, who will?-James Watson
I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.-Albert Einstein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits

You know there is these wonderful wasps that do what Alien aliens do. The moms lay the eggs inside these caterpillars, and the baby's hatch and grow inside the caterpillars, eating the creature, but leaving the internal organs alone so the nice warm cozy host stays alive until it hatches, and it can fend for itself. IIRC we use these wasps in biological pest control.

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I have long thought the abilites of the aliens, in particular their acid blood defense and super-quick growth, points to the idea that they were engineered rather than evolved. The fact that when they were first encountered it was as the cargo of another species is a possible indicator too.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

wouldn't change my conclusion!

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

In that case, the most likely scenario (to be revealed in Alien V or VI or whatever we're up to now) would be an nefarious alien species engineered it specifically for humans!

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

The facehugger is the most evolutionarily implausible phase of the alien lifecycle: it's rather a parochial assumption that a target creature would have a face, never mind one with a tube of convenient length leading to a suitable site to incubate the chestbuster...

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If our brains were simple enough for us to understand, we'd be so simple we couldn't

QQR

It's called a facehugger because it happens to grip onto a human's face. Who says any piehole wouldn't do?


There's an alien on the Alien Ship in Alien--the large being in the seat--which has had a chestburster come out of it. Seems to indicate that the egg-depositing tube can stretch--think hollow octopus tentacle. A muscular hydrostat.

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If we don't play god, who will?-James Watson
I never think of the future, it comes soon enough.-Albert Einstein
The large print giveth and the small print taketh away.-Tom Waits

Well thank heavens the astronaut hadn't dropped the soap...

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The Devil offered me power. I told him I preferred aperture.

Wouldn't want to be around when that one burst out...

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"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day." - Douglas Adams

In the novelization for the original "Alien" (by Allen Dean Foster I believe) he at least took the time to explain that growth spurt thingy by including a scene where they found the ship's food stores broken into & oh, what word? what word? - gone.

I think the most realistic depiction in cartoons of a mini-sub I've ever seen was Scooby Doo and the Loch Ness Monster.

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Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"The only way to explore the universe is to go and look." - Brian Cox
Well, the best way to find out is to go there and, find out. - Raven's Cry
'Evolution and science are one thing, but you don’t mess with Yoko Ono. Everybody knows that. ' - 386sx

SOME SPOILERS FOLLOW:

How do you know it was cargo? I think the film is ambiguous. It was never clear to me whether the aliens were being carried by the ship, or the crew happened to stop in the planet, and find them there in a cave of some sort.

Another detail that creates some doubt is that one of the crew's members was apparently infected and killed by an alien -- why would they carry a cargo that was deadly to them as well?

The fact that the alien parasite could infect humans is not problematic: it had clearly evolved, or been designed, for humanoid hosts. What is less believable is what happens in Alien³.

My objection to the story would be that the alien parasite seemed to get an awful lot of nourishment from just one human body, which it didn't even consume extensively. The newborn parasite ate very little of its host, who remained alive until the end, and died not from being consumed, but from the violent birth of the alien. Yet that little squirt somehow still managed to grow up to become stronger and taller than a human! Where did it get its proteins from?

But I still like the story.

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"All your bias are belong to us." Ara Pacis
"A witty saying proves nothing." Voltaire

I'm sure everybody can guess who wins when you type in "Alien" and "Predetor" on googlefight.com

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Rovers forever! - ToSeek
"The only way to explore the universe is to go and look." - Brian Cox
Well, the best way to find out is to go there and, find out. - Raven's Cry
'Evolution and science are one thing, but you don’t mess with Yoko Ono. Everybody knows that. ' - 386sx