Quote from: Xenomrph on Dec 20, 2008, 04:01:52 PM
I mean, why are they always hitch-hiking onboard spaceships when they're allegedly intelligent enough to make starships of their own?
Why wouldn't they use guns, or vehicles, or body-armor, as opposed to running head-long into automatic gunfire?
(it's probably because they're not super-geniuses )
Simple:
Every hive we've ever seen is ignorant.
That's what O'Bannon postulated and that's what I've stuck with ever since. The first Alien wasn't just deadly - It was a baby, had no idea what the shit was going on, and didn't have the best idea what to do.
Humans are smart, right? Planes and cars and microprocessors and all that?
Two things.
Firstly, can
you build a microprocessor? If by cruel chance that's your profession, well, I can't. And I don't know anyone else who can.
Secondly, if you took a person, chucked 'em in the wild, and watched 'em grow (assuming they weren't eaten/starved to death) ... do you honestly think they'd be anywhere near as intelligent as the rest of us? Sure, they'd have some pretty good problem solving skills and learn how to make basic tools, maybe even clothes.
But chances are they couldn't even make a fire, let alone do basic maths.
Which is exactly what we've seen every time we've had Aliens on-screen. The hive, the individual, has started fresh. Yes,
Alien Resurrected said there were "genetic memories", but the life and times of Bobby the Hobo isn't going to do me much friggin' good if I find myself in the arctic tundra, is it?
Additionally there's no way of knowing if that was
just the Queen that gets them.
Human intelligence - Our ability to build guns, vehicles, computers, etc. - comes from all the knowledge of past generations being handed down to the next. One generation learns some stuff, passes it down, the next generation learns more stuff to go on top of it, etc. The people who build microprocessors now are only doing so because they have the work of hundreds of other people as a starting point.
Until we get to the Alien homeworld, or see a hive that's had uninterrupted development for a prolonged period of time, it's pretty unfair to say just how intelligent they are based entirely on the goings-on of a few ignorant individuals.
On their homeworld they might act entirely differently to how they've been shown so far. They might be doing basic lab work, like in
Labyrinth, or the ant analogy could've gone to the limit and they're farming livestock, cultivating plants, making slaves, etc.
They might have architecture beyond the hastily constructed hive-goo-slapped-on-a-wall look. Hell, O'Bannon might be right. They might have writing or a weird non-ant social order.
I don't think they should be shown as starship-building intelligent, or anything near that, but the possibilities are certainly there.