“Androids” in the Alien-verse aren’t like Data in Star Trek (wires, and such) but actual synthetic persons.
Ash and Bishop both eat food, which suggests a metabolic process of some kind. And while it doesn’t explicitly show them eating Human Chow, doing otherwise would have “outed” Ash as a synthetic right off the bat. It’s possible (warning: fanwank) that Ash’s eating of human food did nothing for him beyond maintaining his cover, and that he later scarfed down Android Chow in secret, if synthetics even need food at all.
But if they don’t, why was Bishop sitting down to a meal with Gorman, Burke, and Ripley? Some programming thing to make synthetics more “life like” and thus more sympathetic to humans? That’s a big “question mark” that doesn’t have an explicit answer “in-universe.”
But if “synthetics” do actually, necessarily, eat food, be it Human or “Synthetic” food, then again that suggests some sort of metabolic process. So on a long voyage that required humans to hibernate (either to slow or stop aging, or conserve shipboard resources on a long voyage), it wouldn’t be entirely unreasonable to require the “synthetics” to hibernate also.
Do not ask me how this is justified in Prometheus. “Beautiful Nonsense,” indeed.
Did Bishop have a plate full of human-looking food, or just a cup of coffee, or that white Android Juice or what? Although it makes perfect sense for Ash to try to pass as human, all of Bishop’s teammates knew he was synthetic. Maybe he was trying to hide it from Ripley? On the off chance that she, you know, freaks the hell out?
Bishop wasn’t eating. Everyone, more or less, except Ripley knew he was a robot. Like Burke said it was just, “…standard procedure to have a synthetic on board”. Anything beyond like I said, revealing Bishop to be an android at that exact point in the story, is just fanboy nonsense…
I just popped in my Aliens disk and re-watched that scene, and you’re right, Bishop isn’t eating; there’s no plate of food where he’s sitting at the table.
Huh. I’ve seen Aliens dozens of times, and never noticed that.
So there is no evidence that synthetics need to eat; Ash was probably just doing it to “blend” and maintain his cover.
Probably has to go to the head afterwards and “void” his meals.
'nother interesting technical factoid or two…the Technical Manual states that the androids actually have a conventional computer CPU (with a 1 PetaFLOP capacity), though at least one comic that I can think of had a synthetic being grown, though it’s stated that this was very unique.
But again…how much of this showed up in the movies? Not a helluva lot.
In Isaac Asimov’s Caves of Steel, R. Daneel Olivaw, a robot police officer who appears human in every way, “eats” in public to blend into human society. Later, when he’s in the “fresher” (restroom), he removes, from his torso, a bag of the undigested food he has consumed. He offers it to his human detective partner, Lije Baley, who quickly declines, even though food is a very precious commodity in Earth’s overcrowded cities.
