About the Blob- is this one?
You know, really, the most dangerous alien in Niven’s Known Space were the Puppeteers.
They played with the Kzin and Humans like children’s toys.
It is always the quiet ones.
SF worldbuilding at
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
I don’t care who wins, as long as Natasha Henstridge gets naked.
THIS SITE not only has the script, but will tell you more about Alien 3’s script problems than you ever wanted to know.
True. Aliens die pretty easily when shot up or run over with trucks. Far from indestructible. A platoon of TODAY’S Marines, with today’s weapons, would slaughter them if they met on the battlefield.
Depending on the battlefield, that is.
Aliens are natural guerilla fighters, from what I’ve seen. They size up their opponents from hiding, and sneak in close, and attack by surprise. They mature and reproduce INSANELY fast.
So maybe those Marines are in trouble. Because if they’re facing Aliens on the battlefield, that means there’s enough of the Aliens to make the swarming bug battles in Starship Troopers look like playground scuffles.
When I think of the Blob, though, I generally think of the one from the 1988 remake. We know EXACTLY how that one hunted and digested its food (as opposed to the other versions in the other films), and we know that it was capable of organizing itself into some pretty complex and potent configurations (most notably a giant wormlike thing with a mouth, and a massive, muscular tentacle capable of punching up through a street in order to escape the sewer).
Could it hurt Aliens? Yes, if only by virtue of the fact that it could swat them like flies. Could the Aliens hurt it? Depends on whether their acidic blood could harm the thing. Considering that Alien blood seems to dissolve everything except Aliens, I would say that this seems likely.
So, we start with a life-sustaining planet. We airdrop a Blob at one point on the equator, and an Alien Queen on the other. At some point in the very near future, they are going to meet, and oh my. For safety’s sake, I say we watch this one from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure, you know.
When they meet, it will be as a seething horde of Aliens that has stripped all life down on the continent to fuel its expansion…
…versus a continent-sized Blob that has stripped all life on the continent to fuel its expansion.
Battle is joined. The Blob absorbs some Aliens, and loses some big chunks of tissue to the Aliens’ acid blood.
The Aliens attack, tearing the Blob apart. Can Blob chunks operate independently, like the Thing? Hell, can Aliens EAT Blob chunks? If so, the Blob is quite doomed. The Aliens will scarf it down like an Australia-sized birthday cake. Meanwhile, the Blob continues to squash Aliens. Is the Blob smart enough to realize that it hurts itself every time it does this? Is there ENOUGH Blob to keep doing it until it runs out of Aliens?
Ultimately, I dunno. It comes down to too many questions. The only thing I can tell you for sure is that that planet is utterly screwed. I hope it wasn’t Earth.
Meanwhile, we still have The Thing. Originally seen in the John Carpenter movie, liberally lifted from the John Campbell short story “Who Goes There?”, the Thing is basically a single-celled organism of insane complexity, capable of uniting with other Thing cells and developing complex hierarchies and functions damn near instantly. Get a couple of billion of them together, and they can organize into a multicellular organism, like a snake, or a man. INSTANTLY. Chop up the man, and the parts can operate independently, or change into other shapes.
They need not reproduce. They simply introduce cellular matter into other lifeforms, which then becomes “infected.” A human infected with Thing material simply becomes another Thing. Furthermore, he’s a Thing which now knows everything the human knew.
The Blob wouldn’t stand a chance. Not unless it’s sufficiently different from any form of life that the Thing couldn’t infect it. Given the fact that the Blob is basically a mutated giant bacterium (established by the 1988 movie), this seems unlikely.
The Aliens could put up a good fight. Based on the “antimatter” remark from William Gibson’s script, we can assume that Things couldn’t infect them, so we’ve got a fight on our hands. Unfortunately, Things can fight like sonsabitches, and sprout as many hands, claws, fangs, and forked devil penises as they need to win any given fight.
Unfortunately, winning any given fight will likely kill the Thing, as acid blood splatters all over it. At the very least, the Thing is going to lose a hellacious amount of body mass, and not be in much shape to face the next Alien.
It’s going to come down to a war of attrition, I think. The Things have a slight edge, in that any hunk of a Thing that survives a fight may continue to exist and live. A hunk of Alien is just a hunk of dead Alien.
But, again, the planet in question is doomed.
Although an idea occurs to me. Pick three equidistant points on a planet. Airdrop Alien Queens on one, a Blob on the other, and a Thing on the third.
Then transmit the coordinates of the planet to the Predators. Along with an invitation to go hunting.
I’d pay to see THAT.
No, they don’t. The Newborn only has them because it’s a hybrid.
There are still Protectors on the Ringworld, they are not extinct. There was also a huge fleet of them fleeing the galaxy core when it blew up, and I’m sure not all of them were destroyed by Brennan - they probably decided to settle somewhere other than Known Space.
Some of the Protectors on the Ringworld lack the main weakness of their kind - the overpowering urge to protect those they are related to. Teela found Ringworld hominids who had no remaining close relatives and fed them from the Tree of Life. Their instincts have been transformed so they protect ALL of the Ringworld hominids.
I’d say the Protectors that run the Ringworld are probably some of the most dangerous beings in their universe. They have a home millions of times the surface area of the Earth, 16 trillion subjects to create new Protectors from, and are in control of the Ringworld defense system, which can basically make it’s sun flare and then lase the output. If the Blob, Thing, or Gigers landed on the Ringworld they would be destroyed, even if they were allowed to spread for a while. Continent sized Blob or Giger Alien hive? That section of the Ringworld would be burned down to the scrith as soon as the Protectors were able to manipulate someone into firing the defense system on that section of the Ringworld surface (a Protector would not be able to do it themselves because they would not be able to directly cause that many hominid friendly fire casualties).
We have no idea what the thing can and can not absorb. It appears from a few of its metamorphosis that it also absorbed alien plant life.
We do know from the dialogue that it retains cellular activity even after being torched. like the Blob the Thing hates the cold but will not die from it. The Thing also has an extremely long life span.
Can the Blob be absorbed by the Thing… lord I hope not or you have a large growing ravonous goo that also can assum other characteritics.
The Blob can exist in split form
as per the end of the 1988 film where a chunk is seen in the priests bottle
The Alien is tough but once dead it is dead. The hing can try to absorb or become something more leathal.
The Preditor is intellegent and heavily armed giving it the advantage men have had in these movies.
The Body Snatchers require you to sleep before they can replace you… they in their pod form are vunerable and therefore not much of a threat but their replicants could be a problem as they seem to work in concert as a civilization.
No my freinds! The true super alien is the Mugatoo!
Yes, they do. The book Giger’s Alien is all about the concept and designs Giger used to create the aliens as well as the ships and other aspects of the movie. The book also contains a lot of photos of the suit and whatnot. It plainly shows that the dome on top of the aliens head, although rather opaque, in the right light is clear, and makes the face of the alien rather visible. It has rather human-like skull features, with large eye sockets placed in the front of the head (again, just like the hybrid). Also, if they were all blind with the exception of the hybrid, why did they have “xenomorph vision” in Alien 3?
As for a continent sized blob versus a continent swarming with xenomorphs? I’m pretty sure once the blob covered the continent, the aliens would all be dead. Maybe not all eaten, but smothered. There would still be some organic material for the blob to eat on the continent, so it would grow larger still, and any tactile damage it took due to slashing and tearing would result in another blob (again, the ending shows how one little crystal thawed out and created a new blob). If an alien swallowed any bits of the blob, I’m pretty sure it’d be royally screwed. Like I said, it’s exoskeleton may be hard enough to withstand it, but they’re insides are still soft and mushy.
Wasn’t the exoskeleton I was thinking of. It was the acidic blood, and the characteristics of muscle tissue that uses the stuff for blood.
And any protector who saw what the Blob or the Thing was capable of would merrily incinerate a thousand of his own offspring, I think, in order to be certain he’d cleaned out the infestation. I mean, EEK!
Then again, we get into the realm of theoreticals. The Pak would have no trouble whatsoever with Aliens, and would eat the Kzinti and the Predators for lunch, and would manage the Pods without too much trouble… and would probably manage the Blob, although not without casualties…
…but the Thing? By the time they were aware there was a problem, half of the Pak protectors would already BE Things…
Oh, now there’s a scary thought. Pak protectors with the ability to shapechange…
Oh, and the Bandersnatches were, as I recall, humungous white bean-shaped masses of muscle tissue with a mouth and sensory organ at one end. Niven described them as looking a bit like giant Shmoos.
They were immune to mutation, due to their weird cellular biology – their chromosomes were quite long, and as thick as your finger, too big for radiation to affect. They were sapient, too, although it took a while for anyone to realize this.
Their method of harming other lifeforms was not unlike the method a bull elephant would use… but a mature Bandersnatch was several times the size of a bull elephant.
“If Daredevil is blind, why did they have Daredevil-vision in the movie?”
The xenomorphs aren’t blind, but that doesn’t mean they have eyes in the “traditional” sense.
Because “Daredevil Vision” wasn’t showing what he saw with his eyes, it was showing what he saw with his ears/sonar. If the xenomorph’s vision were shown as sonar like that, or like the creatures from Pitch Black, it would be one thing. What Alien 3 showed was vision. Somewhat distorted due to the curvature of the dome on it’s head. Still, if this doesn’t work for you, again, Giger’s specs for the creature, as well as photos from the original movie show that, underneath the dome, the xenomorph creature clearly has eyes.
As for the Bandersnatches…if their chromosomes are as big as a person’s finger, how exactly are they immune to radiation? Wouldn’t that make them more suseptable (bigger things being a bigger target and all)?
Just so I can show I’ve seen what I’m talking about, here’s a link with some photos and such.
At the top, there are three pictures, the one on the far right shows two shots of the xenomorph’s head minus the dome.
Oooookay…that will teach me to check my links better. Go to the navbar and select “Behind the Terror” and you’ll see the pictures I was talking about (rassmfrassmnotunderstandinghowtolinkpagesproperlygrumblemumblegrrr…)
Again I must state that the predators could take down all of them because they can in fact “nuke the site from orbit”. The one-on-one hunt is a ritualistic cultural practice for them and I doubt they would operate that way during an all-out war or when dealing with a real danger to their poplation as a whole.
First: that’s pictures of Rambaldi constructing the head. The skull is rather obviously only part of the framework he used.
Second: how much accuracy are you going to credit a site with, when they continually misspell the name of one of the movie industry’s best known effects designers?
Third: Are you really saying that the xenomorphs have evolved natural motorcycle helmets?
The Bandersnatch are’t immute to radiation. They are imune to any sort of mutation. They are as they are and forever will be. Why is this? Because Niven wrote them that way.
How exactly do they kill, anyways?
Just in the interest of perspective…
Kryptonians
Oans
Q
Okay, back to the debate. 
First: They could have used anything as a framework. Why’d they choose a human looking skull? If the eyesockets weren’t needed, then why have them there? Why add any of theose little bumps on the skull if they were just going to be covered up? Also, if you look at some of the other sketches, Giger drew some rather obvious eyes in some of the earlier sketworks as well.
Second: If you read it, there’s a whole lot of piss poor English and horrible misspellings of simple words. Just because he mispelled a person’s name doesn’t mean much. I give this guy credibility because he’s got a lot of good information on his site, and has obviously checked a lot of sources. And again, there are the photographs.
Third: Not motorcylce helmets, but there are animals on earth with specific lenses that cover their eyes for protective purposes (sharks and crocodiles for example). It’s an interesting design characteristic, who knows why they were designed that way? Because Giger’s got a huge phalic complex, that’s why. It doesn’t change the fact that the things have eyes.
Other examples that the xenomorphs have eyes from behavioral context in films. In Alien: Resurrection, the xenomorphs in the cage “flirting” with the scientist watches him push the button that hits it with the nitrogen gas. Later, that same alien moves into the control room, watches as a guard gets into place, and then pushes the button. If the things relied on smell or sonar, there’s no way it would have been able to mimic an action like that.
In Aliens, pretty much the entire first interraction with the queen shows she can see Ripley. She recognizes the weapon (flamethrower) for one, and when following Ripley, watches Ripley get in the elevator and then follows her up as soon as the next one arrives. An animal existing on smell/sonar wouldn’t be able to draw a connection between an elevator and it’s lift capabilities. All it would know is something got between her and her prey, and her prey went up. The arrival of the second elevator would have meant nothing aside form an few interesting sounds.
But hey, that’s just some proof I’ve given. What do you have to offer to the contrary? Are there any specs on the Aliens out there that may help?
Pretty much by smothering and digesting. They are immensely powerful in the books. In one story a Bandersnatch uses it’s bulk to pop a hatch out if ti’s hunge. The hatch is made of something called “hull metal” as is the hunge. A super strong alloy that is about 100 times stronger than the most sturdy steel. The hatch was three or four inces thick.
Now even this might not be so impressive, but the Bandersnatch had slmost no leverage to do this with.