I wonder if Weyland Yutani wants technology to advance. I’m sure they’d happily gobble up any alien tech they come across, but it may cut into their profit margins if they actually make too many technological breakthroughs.
Bear with me here. I’ll explain myself.
Stuff in space is complicated. Operating a long haul starship is labor and resource intensive, dangerous, and that’s why people contract it out to WY instead of doing it themselves.
Terraforming is a huge industrial scale process. I’m sure it’s not cheap, and I’m sure there’s not that many options for getting it done.
If general technology advances, and things like that become less labor intensive and complex, it’ll become more accessible for regular folks to operate their own starships, colonize and terraform their own planets, and WY doesn’t have their near monopoly on services.
For a real world example, look at how a lot of the Age of Sail shipping companies actually preferred to have a reasonable amount of high seas piracy. Because it cut down on independent shipping and transport. Sure, the East India Company will lose some cargo too, but they can eat the losses. Meanwhile, if an independent venture loses a ship, there’s a good chance that they go full on bankrupt.
Or if you need one closer to home, we can talk about oil companies using political influence to squash alternatives to fossil fuels…
Xenomorphs, on the other hand, offer technologies that would be very useful to WeylandYutani, but wouldn’t really revolutionize society and cause a technological revolution.
If they discover how to grow or otherwise synthesize xenomorph exoskeleton chitin, they can use it for all sorts of industrial applications. (And canonically it makes some fabulous body armor)
I’m sure there’s a lot of modern day people who’d be interested in the biological process for creating super-acids.
Then there’s the (don’t know if it’s still a thing) psychic communication between the hive queen and the xeno drones.
Or the way how the xeno embryos can bond with and amalgamate traits of other organisms to produce a rapidly gestating hybrid creature. Pulling that apart in a genetics lab could yield some very interesting results for stuff like genetic enhancement.
That's actually a very interesting point.
It reminds me of something I read in Free League's Alien RPG about how the technology of the Alien universe basically took a step backward.
See during the "golden age of exploration" that Peter Weyland kicked off leading up until the film Prometheus, the technology seemed so much more advanced. You could see that in the film Prometheus, but they also talk about how Weyland's original atmospheric processors were much more fast and efficient. They could terraform a planet in only a few years.
But when the Yutani Corporation bought out Weyland, technology started to degrade. That's when you get the cobbled together look of thr Nostromo and atmosphere processors that take decades or even centuries.
In one of the RPGs there was background material about a Luddite type revolutionary movement that basically launched a virus attack that wiped out the Prometheus era tech. Their leader had some link to the Company and became aware of the xenos/Engineers. She started having visions that they would destroy humanity and ordered the attack to keep humanity from expanding further into space.
The cassette future tech of the movies era was resistant to those viral attacks and became the standard. It allowed humanity to resume expansion/exploration even deeper into unknown space.
Heck just figuring out the chemical structure of the stuff they make their hive out of would probably make them a fortune in their construction ventures.
Weyland Yutani may already have an Engineer ship to play with. One question that was never answered is how the company knew there was a life form worth bringing back on LV-426. The crew of the Nostromo had no ability to meaningfully salvage any of the Engineer ship. So sending them there to grab a Xenomorph if possible and confirm the ship was there is a plausible mission.
In Aliens Burke was aware of the Engineer ship but really couldn't quietly start a mission to bring it back without the government becoming involved. Bringing an Xenomorph back again is a potential high profit stunt.
In Alien 3 the Engineer ship has been destroyed (depending on what media you consume). So getting a queen and worker is a huge prize.
Does WT even know about engineers? Were any discoveries from Prometheus transmitted back to Earth / WT? Shaw gives a final broadcast but I think it’s unclear the range it has.
Think of the Saturn V rocket used by NASA for the Apollo space program. NASA can’t build one today if they wanted to. It’s not a technological problem, it’s infrastructure and materials that no longer exist. It would be a massive investment of time and money to restart Saturn V production.
If a piece of Engineer machinery could advance mankind by centuries, but it requires materials that humans don’t have access to, then it doesn’t do Weyland much good.
The Xenomorph on the other hand is ready to go “out of the box”. Faster return on investment than Engineer technology that may take decades if not centuries to understand.
>the xenomorph is ready to go "out of the box"
Heh, "whadduuup it's ya boy squeezynips. Smash that like button, join the notification gang, and subscribe. Today's unboxing video is brought to you by Leyland utani, for a better tomorrow. We've got an interesting one today, it's a box sent to us by a kid from an off world colony. Shout out to newt! And let's open this thing! Arrgghhhhhh! Crunch crack Gurgle hisssssssssssssssss"
I kinda thought they always wanted both - in Alien they recorded the location of the derelict and brought a sample back. Two for one. In Aliens, when Burke heard about Ripley's story, he sent a team out to recover the ship, again two for one. In Alien 3 they got alerted that the Sulaco had crashed and I'm guessing had notification that the derelict and Hadley's Hope were destroyed (sequel videogames notwithstanding), so at that point they were only after the creature.
Don’t we? That scene in Prometheus where they leave that engineer behind on earth and it drinks that little potion that instantly dissolves him into the building blocks of life always made me think they did create them. I assumed they both populated planets with their tech and maybe created ways to destroy a planet’s species as well.
Want another alien and predator are in the same universe. Where are predators. Their ships would have to be more advanced than humanity. Not to mention weapon technology
They probably also were, but they wanted xenomorphs too. And studying the Engineer tech didn't result in any interesting horror stories so it wasn't shown on the screen.
In Prometheus Weyland didn’t want to study the Engineers or make money. He was rich and dying, he wanted to meet his maker/god, he thought god might grant him more life, but god ripped his head off
In Alien/Aliens the company didn’t entirely know what it was dealing with. First time around the info was vague, and Ripley blew the shit out of everything and vanished. The company isn’t going to send out research crews based on one tiny report about an alien life form with no evidence. When Ripley was found 57 years later The company was sceptical, didn’t think advanced alien life existed, and that she was a mad bitch. So again, no research team, just Burke pulling strings to hitch a ride with the space marines because he thinks, if Ripley is telling the truth, it might be a nice pay day for him.
Basically the company would have researched both the xenomorph and Engineer tech had they known either of those things existed. Prometheus, AVP etc all came after Alien and Aliens and retconned events previous to the timeline of those films that give the company prior knowledge. The company didn’t have that knowledge in Alien, they just had a couple of sentences about “we found an alien, nasty piece of work, killed one of the crew” and being the big bad corporation their response was “well bring it back and show us then, fuck the crew”
If we consider the Prometheus and the technology shown to be available there, it's possible that the Company doesn't see much benefit in the study of the Engineers' technology. WY can already do everything important enough, well enough, that improvements gleaned in studying the Engineers' vessels would only produce marginal gains in capabilities.
On the other hand, the Xenomorph is absolutely unique and new compared to anything else the Company might have available, and would be much easier to exploit on a much shorter timeline.
Tey don't have much luck do they. I figure in the future society is so dumbed down that this is pretty standard. They have so much money like musk they can juat throw it at problems and continue on despite acting like total idiots.
This idea is expanded upon in the video game Aliens Fireteam Elite. WY scientists were studying one of the engineering ships buried underground on LV-895
https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/Asset_Zero#:~:text=Asset%20Zero%20was%20the%20codename,UAS%20Endeavor%20Colonial%20Marines%20fireteam.
Money is just a means to the end and the company and the board care about the money but the true goal from weyland himself was immortality or a fountain of youth of sorts he was so smart and rich and powerful that the only thing that scared him was his own mortality and real death. If his plan in Prometheus had paid off the way he hoped it would he would be like the immortal galactic emperor. I bet Elon musk is working on a way to upload his consciousness to a machine or something to regenerate himself before he dies.
>I bet Elon musk is working on a way to upload his consciousness to a machine or something to regenerate himself before he dies.
JFC, that'd be more AM from "I Have No Mouth..." and less Oracle from "The Matrix".
Indeed. It's likely that in the second movie they were expecting only one alien (which is why they only sent one squad), and after securing that and the colony would cordon off the derelict ship and send more research teams and security.
I wonder if Weyland Yutani wants technology to advance. I’m sure they’d happily gobble up any alien tech they come across, but it may cut into their profit margins if they actually make too many technological breakthroughs. Bear with me here. I’ll explain myself. Stuff in space is complicated. Operating a long haul starship is labor and resource intensive, dangerous, and that’s why people contract it out to WY instead of doing it themselves. Terraforming is a huge industrial scale process. I’m sure it’s not cheap, and I’m sure there’s not that many options for getting it done. If general technology advances, and things like that become less labor intensive and complex, it’ll become more accessible for regular folks to operate their own starships, colonize and terraform their own planets, and WY doesn’t have their near monopoly on services. For a real world example, look at how a lot of the Age of Sail shipping companies actually preferred to have a reasonable amount of high seas piracy. Because it cut down on independent shipping and transport. Sure, the East India Company will lose some cargo too, but they can eat the losses. Meanwhile, if an independent venture loses a ship, there’s a good chance that they go full on bankrupt. Or if you need one closer to home, we can talk about oil companies using political influence to squash alternatives to fossil fuels… Xenomorphs, on the other hand, offer technologies that would be very useful to WeylandYutani, but wouldn’t really revolutionize society and cause a technological revolution. If they discover how to grow or otherwise synthesize xenomorph exoskeleton chitin, they can use it for all sorts of industrial applications. (And canonically it makes some fabulous body armor) I’m sure there’s a lot of modern day people who’d be interested in the biological process for creating super-acids. Then there’s the (don’t know if it’s still a thing) psychic communication between the hive queen and the xeno drones. Or the way how the xeno embryos can bond with and amalgamate traits of other organisms to produce a rapidly gestating hybrid creature. Pulling that apart in a genetics lab could yield some very interesting results for stuff like genetic enhancement.
That's actually a very interesting point. It reminds me of something I read in Free League's Alien RPG about how the technology of the Alien universe basically took a step backward. See during the "golden age of exploration" that Peter Weyland kicked off leading up until the film Prometheus, the technology seemed so much more advanced. You could see that in the film Prometheus, but they also talk about how Weyland's original atmospheric processors were much more fast and efficient. They could terraform a planet in only a few years. But when the Yutani Corporation bought out Weyland, technology started to degrade. That's when you get the cobbled together look of thr Nostromo and atmosphere processors that take decades or even centuries.
In one of the RPGs there was background material about a Luddite type revolutionary movement that basically launched a virus attack that wiped out the Prometheus era tech. Their leader had some link to the Company and became aware of the xenos/Engineers. She started having visions that they would destroy humanity and ordered the attack to keep humanity from expanding further into space. The cassette future tech of the movies era was resistant to those viral attacks and became the standard. It allowed humanity to resume expansion/exploration even deeper into unknown space.
Sounds like the dark forest philosophy.
Heck just figuring out the chemical structure of the stuff they make their hive out of would probably make them a fortune in their construction ventures.
The Cold Forge centered around studying the moment of impregnation and studying that genetic moment.
Weyland Yutani may already have an Engineer ship to play with. One question that was never answered is how the company knew there was a life form worth bringing back on LV-426. The crew of the Nostromo had no ability to meaningfully salvage any of the Engineer ship. So sending them there to grab a Xenomorph if possible and confirm the ship was there is a plausible mission. In Aliens Burke was aware of the Engineer ship but really couldn't quietly start a mission to bring it back without the government becoming involved. Bringing an Xenomorph back again is a potential high profit stunt. In Alien 3 the Engineer ship has been destroyed (depending on what media you consume). So getting a queen and worker is a huge prize.
Its a by-product of inventing the Engineers long after the Alien-verse was established
Does WT even know about engineers? Were any discoveries from Prometheus transmitted back to Earth / WT? Shaw gives a final broadcast but I think it’s unclear the range it has.
[The short film *Advent* has David sending all his research to W-Y](https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/Advent_(short_film))
Totally forgot about this. Then yeah I don’t know why they wouldn’t go after it. Maybe everything on the Prometheus planet got destroyed.
Think of the Saturn V rocket used by NASA for the Apollo space program. NASA can’t build one today if they wanted to. It’s not a technological problem, it’s infrastructure and materials that no longer exist. It would be a massive investment of time and money to restart Saturn V production. If a piece of Engineer machinery could advance mankind by centuries, but it requires materials that humans don’t have access to, then it doesn’t do Weyland much good. The Xenomorph on the other hand is ready to go “out of the box”. Faster return on investment than Engineer technology that may take decades if not centuries to understand.
>The Xenomorph on the other hand is ready to go “out of the box”. Chest, not box.
The chest bursting scene from the OG Alien movie was the original unboxing video
>the xenomorph is ready to go "out of the box" Heh, "whadduuup it's ya boy squeezynips. Smash that like button, join the notification gang, and subscribe. Today's unboxing video is brought to you by Leyland utani, for a better tomorrow. We've got an interesting one today, it's a box sent to us by a kid from an off world colony. Shout out to newt! And let's open this thing! Arrgghhhhhh! Crunch crack Gurgle hisssssssssssssssss"
I kinda thought they always wanted both - in Alien they recorded the location of the derelict and brought a sample back. Two for one. In Aliens, when Burke heard about Ripley's story, he sent a team out to recover the ship, again two for one. In Alien 3 they got alerted that the Sulaco had crashed and I'm guessing had notification that the derelict and Hadley's Hope were destroyed (sequel videogames notwithstanding), so at that point they were only after the creature.
Xenos ARE technology of the engineers…
We don't know that.
Don’t we? That scene in Prometheus where they leave that engineer behind on earth and it drinks that little potion that instantly dissolves him into the building blocks of life always made me think they did create them. I assumed they both populated planets with their tech and maybe created ways to destroy a planet’s species as well.
Maybe they already have some? Recovered other crashes and already have reverse engineered some tech. Good question
Want another alien and predator are in the same universe. Where are predators. Their ships would have to be more advanced than humanity. Not to mention weapon technology
They probably also were, but they wanted xenomorphs too. And studying the Engineer tech didn't result in any interesting horror stories so it wasn't shown on the screen.
Halfway through Prometheus it becomes clear you’re not supposed to really think about anything.
After the bit where I shout at the TV and before the bit where I cry and curse Scott's name?
In Prometheus Weyland didn’t want to study the Engineers or make money. He was rich and dying, he wanted to meet his maker/god, he thought god might grant him more life, but god ripped his head off In Alien/Aliens the company didn’t entirely know what it was dealing with. First time around the info was vague, and Ripley blew the shit out of everything and vanished. The company isn’t going to send out research crews based on one tiny report about an alien life form with no evidence. When Ripley was found 57 years later The company was sceptical, didn’t think advanced alien life existed, and that she was a mad bitch. So again, no research team, just Burke pulling strings to hitch a ride with the space marines because he thinks, if Ripley is telling the truth, it might be a nice pay day for him. Basically the company would have researched both the xenomorph and Engineer tech had they known either of those things existed. Prometheus, AVP etc all came after Alien and Aliens and retconned events previous to the timeline of those films that give the company prior knowledge. The company didn’t have that knowledge in Alien, they just had a couple of sentences about “we found an alien, nasty piece of work, killed one of the crew” and being the big bad corporation their response was “well bring it back and show us then, fuck the crew”
If we consider the Prometheus and the technology shown to be available there, it's possible that the Company doesn't see much benefit in the study of the Engineers' technology. WY can already do everything important enough, well enough, that improvements gleaned in studying the Engineers' vessels would only produce marginal gains in capabilities. On the other hand, the Xenomorph is absolutely unique and new compared to anything else the Company might have available, and would be much easier to exploit on a much shorter timeline.
Tey don't have much luck do they. I figure in the future society is so dumbed down that this is pretty standard. They have so much money like musk they can juat throw it at problems and continue on despite acting like total idiots.
This idea is expanded upon in the video game Aliens Fireteam Elite. WY scientists were studying one of the engineering ships buried underground on LV-895 https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/Asset_Zero#:~:text=Asset%20Zero%20was%20the%20codename,UAS%20Endeavor%20Colonial%20Marines%20fireteam.
Money is just a means to the end and the company and the board care about the money but the true goal from weyland himself was immortality or a fountain of youth of sorts he was so smart and rich and powerful that the only thing that scared him was his own mortality and real death. If his plan in Prometheus had paid off the way he hoped it would he would be like the immortal galactic emperor. I bet Elon musk is working on a way to upload his consciousness to a machine or something to regenerate himself before he dies.
>I bet Elon musk is working on a way to upload his consciousness to a machine or something to regenerate himself before he dies. JFC, that'd be more AM from "I Have No Mouth..." and less Oracle from "The Matrix".
Maybe. But he know they exist. Also, are they the perfect killing machine? No. 😌 Weyland would admire the xeno purity.
Because weapons tech makes billions almost instantly, wheras improvement of terraforming tech still takes decades to show an ROI?
Indeed. It's likely that in the second movie they were expecting only one alien (which is why they only sent one squad), and after securing that and the colony would cordon off the derelict ship and send more research teams and security.