E.C. McMullen Jr.
Not difficult really, consider: It is entirely probable that the alien has two things going on.
1. A cache of raw surplus stored within its body.
2. Extra food from its host.
After Kane wakes he says how
hungry he is and at the dining table eats ravenously. The alien
embryo inside of him could very well be using his own body
against him, metabolically sucking the protein and nutrients right out of
his muscles and organs in order to reach a stage where it
can "hatch". Kane's ravenous hunger could stem from his body
telling him that he is starving and needs to eat right now to replenish himself.
Yet even with that said, there is still the question of weight.
For one thing, we don't need to assume that the alien is 300
pounds. Even though it can lift a full grown man off of the
ground, that is not a matter of weight. An adult female chimpanzee
can weigh up to 70 kg (about 154 pounds) ~ a little less than that of an average full grown chimpanzee male (90
kg or 200 pounds). In a sitting position, that chimp
can lift a platform holding a 300 pound man and his identical twin, over her
head with one arm^.
In 1924 at the Bronx Zoo, the one arm pulling strength of a 134 pound female chimp named Suzette was measured at 1,260 pounds!++
Raw muscle power is not an act of weight but tensile strength.
In addition to strength, our alien also has sharp claws, teeth,
tongue, and tail to rapidly put down its prey. It would seem
that these creatures were built for a quick fight, not a drawn
out one. This would suggest that the creature is
light-weight for its size and lacks the ability to engage
in a protracted battle. The fact that, even full grown, it
chooses to hide and perform stealthy rapid attacks is a method
used by smaller predators on earth, like moray eels, spiders,
rats, and badgers. All things considered, having a hungry Alien loose in your spaceship is not half as bad as having a hungry Grizzly in it.
So lets assume that, full grown, the creature weighs about 150
pounds (it's taller than the chimp, but when I first wrote this, I didn't take into account the
difference in water to body ratios). Well for a fact
the newborn alien creature wasn't 150 pounds. Where did the
weight come from? Even assuming that the alien, with its alien
make-up, could have weighed 150 pounds as a newborn, it still
doesn't work.
This is why: Assuming that it had the ability, like some parasites, to
inject a pain killer into Kane's bloodstream so he wouldn't
feel the discomfort, there is just no way that a 150 pound
object could have gone unnoticed to even the most casual observer.
There is nothing within the ribcage of the human interior
to support a 150 pound object. Even human parasites like tapeworms, which
can get up to 30 feet long and weigh as much as 50 pounds,
distribute their weight throughout the small intestine. Kane
was a slight man, so he would have been carrying about his
own weight, about twice the weight he is used to carrying.
So no, the infant alien wasn't 150 pounds.
So back to the main question. Even if we assume that the full
grown alien had all the raw ingredients in reserve to grow
to full height, it still needed the raw material to actually
weigh 150 pounds: where did the weight come from?
Consider the human body. We are, by weight, over two thirds or
roughly 80 to 85 percent water*.
Every time we see the alien, it is always wet, literally dripping
from everywhere with liquid. The alien is quite possibly a
water creature, and as such, could be as much as 90+ percent
water by weight - like some sharks.
But what a creature is as an adult and what it is as an infant
are two different things. If we assume, as Kelly does, that
this creature was originally created in the lab, then the
creature may have been born to be as little as 20% water,
like some insects. This puts the weight of the creature around
a possible 13.6 kg or 30 pounds. The creature's body is about a foot
and a half and the tail may add another foot. Two and a half
feet total and curled like a snake: Well within the limits
that a man the size of Kane could carry without notice from
others. If that same weight was in the lower torso, the bulge would
have been obvious, but the creature burst from Kane's chest, not his abdomen.
150 pounds, dripping wet
So if the infant creature, after its chest birth, has a reserve of all the
nutrients and raw materials to grow to an adult alien without
further feeding, then all it needs to process or metabolize that
reserve is water and lots of it.
We first see the full grown alien in the condensation towers of the spacecraft.
The creature headed straight for the ship's water supply. It is so wet there that crewman Brett removes his hat to
allow the cool water to shower his face. It is there that
the alien found its water to hide and grow to a full 150 pounds.
The alien grabs Brett, immediately shoves its mouth/tongue into Brett's head,
and while Brett is still alive and screaming, rises into the
air to finish his Brett meal in peace. In the original theatrical
release of ALIEN, we
are led to believe that the creature apparently ate its human victims.
"But it's like a bug," you may say. "It could eat anything on the ship,
even insulation."
Well it could if that insulation was packing
protein or some other recognizable growth ingredient. And
I won't go into the wide varieties of insulation materials
available, including metal. As alien as its body is, it
needs us for survival once it adapts itself to our genetic code. As
for insects eating insulation+:
cockroaches eat insulation and a number of other things. But
if you feed a cockroach just non-organic insulation it is
going to starve and die. Like humans, a cockroach
can eat many things that do little or nothing for its
health, but to grow and survive, it needs nutrition
same as the rest of us. For the creator of an alien creature
that can adapt to the widest possible range of varmints, the
certainty of food on hand would be the prey itself, which
the alien genetically adapts to so it can use that creature
for breeding and eating.
Kelly sez:
Excellent! This is a good explanation. It fills up with water
and mixes in a few choice proteins to turn the water into
a gel or some such which then solidifies into body structures.
It's also worth noting that the fact that the "Company" has
a regulation requiring their commercial freighter crews to investigate
any "systematized transmission" and that the crew isn't
overly surprised at the sight of the crashed spaceship on LV-426
means humans have already encountered other civilizations.
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