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What do the aliens in Alien/s eat to grow?

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sazzy

sazzy

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I feel like this hasn't been answered by the movies.

Shit pops out of your chest, sure its eating your innards, I buy it. But then it grows to 15+ feet tall without any food. How? Where is this magical mass coming from?

I would get it if it was eating as it grew. But don't tell me these things are converting oxygen and nitrogen only to mass and acid blood lol.
 
Was that ever even broached upon in the first film, or are you just exaggerating? I don't ever recall any explanation offered for the alien's rapid growth.
 
They are a biological weapon. They probably absorb energy from whatever they find in the atmosphere around them or some shit. They are created to be the "perfect" lifeform.

Your guess is as good as mine.
 
crackhead_bob said:
Was that ever even broached upon in the first film, or are you just exaggerating? I don't ever recall any explanation offered for the alien's rapid growth.
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The bot in Alien says something to the effect of 'its nutritional requirements are low'.

But I took that to mean only what it needs to be alive, not to grow in mass.
 
IIRC it feeds on whatever it can find; scraps, insects, it has no specific nutritional requirement. As suggested above, in the first film the Chestburster cleans out the pantry before developing into a fully developed Xeno.
 
neorej said:
IIRC it feeds on whatever it can find; scraps, insects, it has no specific nutritional requirement. As suggested above, in the first film the Chestburster cleans out the pantry before developing into a fully developed Xeno.
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I don't remember that scene at all, the pantry busting one. Gotta rewatch.
 
Isn't that part of why it's supposedly the best weapon/predator? Can adapt to any environment through breeding, and does not require a lot to sustain itself/grow.
 
Food stores on the Nostromo in Alien. In Aliens they have a human colony full of all sorts of stuff, no need for an explanation there. Any other films featuring the xenomorph isn't worth thinking about.

It's definitely implausibly fast growth though.
 
I'd imagine normally they'd eat the body of the host they burst out of. If they can't do that then other posts and food sources around.
 
How would a lifeform develop whose only means of reproduction involved mammals on a planet far far away?

It's a movie, don't take it to seriously.
 
Aliens are different to humans and mammals in this case probably

Ate some bits of the ship? Feeds on fear


Really though i don't know, i just suspend disbelief, just like i had to before i could watch a movie about xenomorphs
 
I remember hearing in an original script that the Alien was supposed to live for like 3 days and then die. It apparently was already dying at the end of Alien.
 
How was batman able to climb that bridge and paint on a flammable bat? We've never seen him climb a bridge before. We've never seen him be able to paint with flammable material. Did he just use a magical gasoline painter? I mean c'mon!
 
mac said:
How was batman able to climb that bridge and paint on a flammable bat? We've never seen him climb a bridge before. We've never seen him be able to paint with flammable material. Did he just use a magical gasoline painter? I mean c'mon!
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It's batman, he's always prepared. That bridge was built with the purpose of being flammable in that specific pattern.
 
Also, I remember hearing/reading somewhere that the Chestbursters shed their skin, and then eat it for the proteins.
 
GameAddict411 said:
made by who exactly?
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Now we have Prometheus you don't need the AvP lore, as far as we are aware they are a weapon created by the engineers, seemingly to wipe out life on a planet. It starts in that goopy crap form that creates those snake like creatures, possibly because they were suitable for that environment. From there the creature evolves as it moves through hosts and at some point the Xenomorph we see Alien was created and seemingly stuck around.

We don't really know how it works, but going from Prometheus as me has that film turned out to be, the engineers were coming to wipe out life on Earth, and they were going to use these creatures to do it.

DanteFox said:
Didn't the Alien eat a cat or a dog or am I mistaken?
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It left the car alone in Alien, we don't know why, and killed pretty much everything else. In the theatrical release of Alien 3 a facehygger infected the dog and created the Xenomorph, in the proper release it actually infected the Bull and then killed/ate the dog.
 
It was left as a mystery in Alien, it was supposed to a completely unknown 'alien' thing. Parts of it were hinted at in the deleted scene where victims are turned into eggs, it uses some different method of energy absorption to eating.

In Aliens Cameron turned them into mere large bugs that followed existing animal patterns, with the exception of the now completely non-sensical facehugger phase. So the above doesn't apply to Aliens, it's a much bigger plot hole in that film.
 
GameAddict411 said:
made by who exactly?
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In Alien, they find a dead crew member of the ship that the eggs are inside:

space-jockey14ebne.jpg


It was originally fan speculation that this species had either created or altered the xenomorphs to use as biological weapons. This was basically confirmed in Prometheus.


Phrozenflame500 said:
Oh, well that pretty much explains absolutely everything ever.

Never watched/read/played anything past the original movies, are they any good?
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AvP films are garbage. I've never read the comics, so I can't comment on the quality of those. AvP games are much better, but the third one isn't very good (Just called "AvP", released 2010 I think). The first two are pretty old though.

We see "predaliens" in this series, i.e. facehugger lays egg in a predator instead of a human. The creature that comes out has predator like characteristics. In Alien 3 the facehugger got onto a dog, or a cow, or something I can't remember. Anyway, it was different from the "normal" ones too.

If you're sticking to the strictest canon, i.e. Alien and Aliens are the only things that exist, then we don't know a lot. But the supplementary materials and spinoff series do shed a lot of light on it all.
 
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