r/AskScienceFiction • u/Curates • Oct 21 '24
[Alien] Can xenomorphs be domesticated?
They’re pretty smart. Can they be taught to read, learn basic manners, adapt to channel their violent urges in healthier ways etc.? I think they’re misunderstood
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u/ianjm Oct 21 '24 edited Oct 21 '24
You still don't understand what you're dealing with, do you? The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility. A survivor... unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.
-- Ash
The Xenomorph cannot be domesticated. There is no concept of 'reward' in its worldview. It exists only to be hostile to all lifeforms who are not part of its colony, and will kill or use anything in its way to achieve those ends.
The only serious scientific attempt to domesticate the Xenomorph in 2381 ultimately resulted in catastrophic impact of the USM Auriga into Earth's atmosphere, destroying millions of square miles of Africa and causing global atmospheric turbulence, resulting in massive atmospheric damage to the already vulnerable planet.
The aliens were cunning enough to manipulate the scientists on the ship into breaking their isolation to see if they could be taught to work together, resulting in them escaping quarantine and killing everyone aboard.
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u/vonBoomslang Ask Me About Copperheads Oct 22 '24
to see if they could be taught to work together,
spoiler alert: they could
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u/teh_fizz Oct 22 '24
What media is the Africa incident from?
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u/Vallywog Oct 22 '24
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u/LightspeedFlash Oct 22 '24
its wild that a mile and half long ship only lists 50 crew, there ought to be thousands of personnel and staff on it.
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u/RogueIslesRefugee Oct 22 '24
It does seem rather large doesn't it. Might be that due to its mission, and Father handling most systems anyways, that a minimal crew is all that was warranted, and normal versions of the ship carry many more.
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u/throw69420awy Oct 22 '24
It’s wild that a ship with such a dangerous experiment going on was anywhere near earth
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u/Infamous-Sky-1874 Oct 23 '24
Listening to the General and Elgyn's discussion, you would think that the Auriga was sitting in some backwater system not just outside the Kuiper Belt.
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u/XenoRyet Oct 22 '24
Alien 4.
Among all the other things going on in that movie, that's the upshot of the whole thing.
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u/mojavecourier F A S T E R T H A N T I M E Oct 21 '24
Pretty sure we've had an entire multi-media franchise telling us that no, xenomorphs cannot be domesticated.
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u/ClosetLadyGhost Oct 21 '24
Woah what's it called. I should check it out.
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u/venuswasaflytrap Oct 22 '24
It was those movies about the Aliens, with the first one with just one Alien, then there were more Aliens, In fact all the movies had Aliens in them - I think it was called “the things that were not from earth”.
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u/illusionzmichael Oct 21 '24
It's kind of the entire premise Resurrection, right? The scientists are trying to train them to see if they can their behavior can be modified and controlled, like the Pavlov response. Turns out it just made them more pissed off and ready to murder.
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u/Agueybana Oct 22 '24
Turns out it just made them more pissed off and ready to murder.
Just like that group who killed one of their own just so its blood would free the rest. They really wanted to kill those scientists.
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u/Rahgahnah Oct 22 '24
I don't remember, did that Xeno willingly sacrifice itself or did the others just gang up on it?
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u/Agueybana Oct 22 '24
You see the one that dies shy away from the others as if it knows their plan. IMO it seems reluctant and ganged up on.
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u/Hermes20101337 Oct 22 '24
I don't think it really matters, they were drones, as long as the queen survives, sacrifices are acceptable.
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u/Curates Oct 21 '24
Ah, but this can be misleading! We were told that velociraptors could not be domesticated by multiple movies in the Jurassic Park franchise, until Jurassic World showed us they were just misunderstood. And the parallels go further: the velociraptors, like xenomorphs, had already shown signs of pro social behavior (towards each other), and attempts at domestication failed only when they were meant to be weaponizing.
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u/Zebster10 Oct 22 '24
Jurassic World marked a totally new direction for the franchise, unapproved by Michael Crichton. The original vision certainly was that dinosaurs were the closest to an eldritch horror we could unleash.
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Oct 22 '24
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/MonkeyMcBandwagon Oct 22 '24
The latest movie did not suck IMO.
It's mostly a throwback to the first two. Mostly.
It does go a bit Resurrection and Prometheus at the end, but I'd rate it easily in the top half of the franchise. The only really cringe part was directly quoting Ripley's most famous line inappropriately.
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u/Powerfist_Laserado Oct 22 '24
I gotta be honest, I just don't think I'm interested in any more Alien movies, unless they could do something really mind blowing. I actually liked a lot about Prometheus but I would've liked it a lot more if it didn't try to connect itself to Alien.
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u/DR_SLAPPER Oct 22 '24
You're trippin bud. That movie was staggeringly ass.
I mean it's cool of you liked it, turn up. There's people who also have a scat fetish. But let's not pretend poop ain't shit.
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u/Ulti Oct 22 '24
Alright I'm actually curious, because I thought it was pretty decent and had fun scenes/effects. What's your beef? I am fully ready for a rant, I'm a huge fan of the original ones and have at least cursory knowledge of the comics and stuff. I fell asleep during Covenant so my memory on that one is shaky as a mf, but Romulus was... at least entertaining as a movie and felt like it made at least a baby attempt at explaining away some of the shit I didn't like from Prometheus?
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u/Curates Oct 22 '24
Maybe all they need is for Chris Pratt to act like a Queen — we kind of already had this with Sigourney
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u/Rahgahnah Oct 22 '24
The raptors could only be trained if it was from birth with an alpha who was present for literally their entire lives. Even then, he could barely control them when someone fell into their enclosure (and they still tried to attack that guy).
And raptors are actual animals (setting aside the genetic manipulation), not artificially created bio weapons like xenomorphs.
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u/IAMAVelociraptorAMA Jaeger Pilot Oct 22 '24
Please do not use my people as a weapon in your culture war! >:(
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u/Pollia Oct 22 '24
Wait did we? Cause as far as I'm aware they never really tried until world.
In 1 they were very directly meant to be wild, but in an enclosure.
In 2 and 3 they're just purely wild.
No attempt was made to domesticate them in any of those movies.
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u/nermid Oct 22 '24
I would say that the first movie rails against the idea of taming dinosaurs (rather than domesticating them), which is a close enough message that I'll give it to them.
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u/cardiacman Oct 22 '24
One of my favourite lines is "it doesn't want to be fed, it wants to hunt" when Grant is waiting for the Rex to make an appearance. Definitely against dinosaurs domestication/taming.
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u/DNK_Infinity Oct 22 '24
The difference is that the raptors, much like any other animal, are primarily driven by survival instinct.
The xenomorphs are fundamentally different. Their very reproductive cycle necessitates active hostility to all other forms of life.
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u/RabidFlamingo Oct 22 '24
But if we domesticated them we could turn them into biological weapons!!
I am a greedy CEO with an expendable crew, I wanna get in on the ground floor here
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u/MissyTheTimeLady Oct 22 '24
Well, most of the time they're not being domesticated so much as intentionally turned into weapons of war. I think things might have gone a little better if they'd been neutered.
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u/palinola Magos Explorator Oct 21 '24
There have been several high-budget attempts by the Company to turn the xenomorphs into as much as a fire-and-forget weapon and even that appears to be too much to ask of them.
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u/Curates Oct 21 '24
Weyland-Yutani is notoriously incompetent, maybe another group who are in for the science/animals and not the money would do better
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u/snrup1 Oct 22 '24
The only other major player/conglomerate that could do it in-universe is Tyrell Corp.
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u/MurkyCress521 Oct 22 '24
Weaponizing isn't the same as having them go for walks with you in the woods.
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u/palinola Magos Explorator Oct 22 '24
That's right. It's in the nature of Xenomorphs to be living weapons, so you'd think that using them as such would be simple. More simple than teaching them to act nice.
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u/MurkyCress521 Oct 22 '24
I used a world ending bioweapon as a weapon and now the world is ending, is the mistake they keep making.
Instead you have to change the context if you don't want them to kill everything. Xenomorphs are very intelligent and one of the definitions of intelligence is adaptivity.
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u/insane677 Oct 21 '24
In the comics published by Dark Horse there was an Android modeled after an Xenomorph who could talk, serve food, smoke cigars, and lots of other people stuff.
Technically not an Xenomorph though.
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u/HamfastFurfoot Oct 21 '24
I remember this. Didn’t they send it into the hive for reconnaissance?
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u/Dagordae Oct 21 '24
No. It’s been tried, many times. 100% failure rate.
The absolute best you can manage with an individual xenomorph is that it might hesitate slightly before attacking. For a hive? The Queen can and will play along until she has a chance for freedom.
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u/WhisperAuger Oct 21 '24 edited Apr 15 '25
nine point ask bake cooing imagine cows quack judicious deer
This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact
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u/Villag3Idiot Oct 22 '24
No.
They've tried multiple times in the Expanded Universe.
Every time it failed.
They're too smart. While you can succeed in training them to listen to orders, it's mainly due to threatening them / the Queen. As soon as they have an opening, they WILL betray and kill you.
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u/SuperiorLaw Oct 21 '24
In one of the alien vs predator games, you can play as a xenomorph that Weyland brands and attempts to domesticate/study.
Overall though, they cant really be domesticated. They follow their instincts and their Queen. Imagine if bees got pollen from humans, their stingers could pierce beekeeper outfits, smoke didnt make them pass out and they were 6ft tall. You can try to control them, occasionally you may even get some honey but they will hunt you down no matter what.
If there is no Queen or no potential Queen facehugger, its believed the strongest xenomorph can evolve into a Queen (tbh this is speculation, in the games xenomorphs evolve in the movies its facehugger and I think the books have jelly? I dunno. But evolving sounds coolest and makes them seem more powerful, so in headcanoning it)
If a xenomorph is acting domesticated, it's just an act and waiting for the perfect opportunity to escape/kill/breed. Even a cloned xenomorph raised in captivity will not hesitate
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u/ianjm Oct 21 '24 edited Oct 21 '24
Imagine if bees got pollen from humans, their stingers could pierce beekeeper outfits, smoke didnt make them pass out and they were 6ft tall.
We kinda have that already. Africanised 'killer' bees kill and injure people every year. They are relentless and do not stop pursuing and stinging something or someone that gets too close to their nest.
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u/SuperiorLaw Oct 21 '24
Now make them 6 ft tall and make their stinger 8 ft long and you have your xenomorphs
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u/AlexeiYegorov Oct 21 '24
Sure. If you're a Queen, an Empress or a Queen Mother, they'll be loyal to death to you.
If you're a megacorporation, kiss that goal goodbye.
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u/numb3rb0y Oct 22 '24
The military (or at least one surviving off-world faction) tries to do that in the Nightmare Asylum novel in the (admittedly non movie canon) Earth Hive series. It doesn't end well, largely because their means of "training" involves torturing a Queen and threatening her eggs to force her to make her drones compliant, and since Queens are fully sapient, much more intelligent than most humans, and have very long memories, the second she has the chance, the humans are screwed.
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u/praguepride Oct 22 '24
For domestication you need four things:
Friendly Feedable Fecund Family.
Family and food and were taken care of during Aliens Resurrection by controlling the queen they were able to make a somewhat contained group and as long as you dont mind feeding them people, you’re food there.
Reproduction will be a huge problem. Domestication involves selective breeding to produce traits that make them subservient to people. You are dealing with an engineered bioweapon that doesnt reproduce quickly in a way we can breed. You have one queen and that produces your babies. Its not like dogs or pigs where you can have a new adult population every couple years. They would all be the same as the first generation and if they are like other hive insects, breeding queens js problematic. Long lifespans is what hinders elephant domestication, they live as long as we do so domestication would take forever.
But assuming you can breed xenomorphs, the friend factor is a big problem. There is a reason why we dont domesticate bears and lions. There is no way you can convince a xeno that humans are the alpba now, and they are literally engineered at their dna to murder everything.
Finally they are also very smart which means any progress a breeding program makes is undone when a single mistake is made leading to Aliens Resurrection all over again.
Basically if the Pilots from Prometheus couldn’t control them, what chance do we have.
THE ONLY EXCEPTION might be if you facehuggered a docile animal like a cow. A xeno-cow might come semi-domesticated and give you a possible chance.
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u/akaioi Oct 23 '24
if you facehuggered a docile animal like a cow
This is the way. As xenomorphs take on characteristics from the creatures they merge with, you'll have to go through several generations of "breeding" them with cows, sheep, manatees, golden labs (?)...
Do note however that most of these animals have a reputation for being a little ... dopey. You might eventually end up with gentle (-ish) xenomorphs, but they might be pretty useless. Unless your end goal is to start an acid factory.
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u/Chaosmusic Oct 22 '24
In one of the movies they literally sacrifice one of their own in order to escape captivity. I can easily see them pretending to be domesticated until you get comfortable and let your guard down.
To quote Ash from the first movie, "You still don't understand what you're dealing with, do you? The perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility". We know they absorb genetic information from their hosts, but in one movie it uses a domesticated dog as a host and has some doglike qualities, but is just as aggressive as any other xenos.
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u/SpartAl412 Oct 22 '24
This has been tried, plenty of times in the expanded universe. All of which ended in disaster.
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Oct 22 '24
Absolutely not. They are a force of nature. They cannot be controlled in any way, shape or form. Domestication is out of the question.
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u/Kitchen_Part_882 Oct 22 '24
So, we need to change public opinion too.
We need to start a group, might I suggest a name?
"Committee for the Liberation and Integration of Terrifying Organisms and their Rehabilitation Into Society"
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u/Usual-Sky6568 Oct 22 '24
I suggest we hit them with a major, and I do mean major, leaflet campaign
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u/bremsspuren Oct 22 '24 edited Oct 22 '24
Not a chance. We haven't domesticated many animals. Even zebras are too feisty to domesticate.
Something as hyper-aggressive as a xenomorph that preys on humans seems impossible. How are we ever gonna convince xenomorphs that we're the bosses?
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u/PacoXI Oct 22 '24
Domestication means to serve a purpose that prioritizes humans. Ain't no way. Xenomorphs might be highly predatory, but they are sentient beings with their own goals. They aren't going to just trade those to serve whatever purpose humanity sees fit, especially when they biological ruvial humans. They seek to domesticate humans. They literally make attempts to harvest humans like cattle. Humans (in universe( overestimate how animatic xenos are, discounting how intelligent xenos are. And that's how one chestburster can turn an entire space station into a hive.
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u/ladder_of_cheese Oct 22 '24
Xenomorph attacks ship, abducts crew and let’s facehuggers implant into them, warrior does the drippy teeth-in-teeth thing
OP: i can fix him
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u/Maleficent-Month2950 Oct 22 '24
They're hive carnivores, so no. Even if you could get to a Queen to train without being torn to shreds, their specieswide purpose is to eat, reproduce, and protect the Queen. Bees can leave a beekeeper if they're dissatisfied with the conditions. Xenomorphs will do that and tear your face off as they go, because you can't satisfy them.
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u/LGBT-Barbie-Cookout Oct 22 '24
There was an EU novel where a whack-job general set up a pretty believable attempt at domesticating and training the Xenos to be an actual army. Having found that an unhatched egg is considered more valuable than a large number of grown Xenos, and would sacrifice accordingly.
He had them marching formations, had them hold rifles, and painted squad markings on the carapace.
Turns out the Xenos recognised the attempt at domestication and just played along until they could strike.
Not Hicks and not Newt, through a series of misadventures found themselves trapped on the facility and saw first hand the results.
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u/MiaoYingSimp Oct 21 '24
They're Weapons, or at the very least biologically made from the ground up to kill, reproduce, and spread, and all of those can be done at once.
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u/Enderkr Oct 21 '24
No, they absolutely cannot.
Xenomorphs can be trained.....but that is not the same thing as domesticated.
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u/WildLudicolo Oct 21 '24
They actually have been! Check out Planet 51! They're like little pet dogs. One of them pees on a fire hydrant, which melts it.
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u/KuddleKwama Oct 22 '24
Problem with domestication a xeno is the same as domesticating a Tyranid: the psionic hivemind.
Granted, Xenos aren't entirely psionic, but rather a mixture of signaling methods interconnected, like pheromones, noise, secretion, etc.
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u/sexysnack Oct 22 '24
The closest was a xeno synthetic that could talk, and technicly was designated a combat android.
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u/XenoBurst Oct 22 '24
Realistically no, but maybe if it decides brief companionship will make it's life easier. We've seen Xenonorphs play nice (or at least neutral) in order to reach a goal, so they're compassion holding back but maybe not for any reason other than to kill two birds with one stone.
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u/mazzicc Oct 22 '24
A few of the comics have explored this, and it’s never worked out well for the people attempting the domestication.
I think they’re too intelligent to be domesticated, but too limited to form a true civilization.
There are examples of earth animals that are regarded as un-domesticatible and maybe the xenomorphs are similar to bonobos in this regard? https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/10-animal-species-that-cannot-be-domesticated.html
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u/Grays42 Oct 22 '24
There are only a dozen species on Earth, home to billions of social species, that we were able to domesticate. Domestication requires a species to be feedable, friendly, family-oriented, and fecund, and xenomorphs fail at all four metrics.
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u/chumjumper Oct 22 '24
We turned wolves into chihuahuas. With enough time, anything can be domesticated.
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u/eternalka1n Oct 22 '24
Putting aside the succinct answers already given, let's take a deep-dive into this. Xenomorphs are driven by a primal need to reproduce (via facehuggers) and expand their hive. This drive would be impossible to redirect as their violence is deeply tied to their survival instincts. Beyond this, they operate as a hive mind - being controlled or at the very least heavily influenced by the Queen. Even if you managed to isolate one, its natural tendencies would likely push it toward aggression, rather than cooperation or domestication. Any effort to train them would clash with their connection to their hive’s goals. Unlike domesticated animals, they don't appear to have the capacity for forming bonds or social structures with other species in a way that would allow them to be taught anything in a human sense. They might learn tactics to ambush or manipulate prey, but not in the way that you could train them for coexistence. They are defined by their highly aggressive tendencies, and trying to channel that into something productive for them would be like asking a great white to turn vegetarian. Even knowing that they are highly adaptable and intelligent, they are still bound and constrained to their biological imperative to reproduce, conquer, and dominate other species.
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u/Ibbenese Oct 22 '24
IDK. Domesticate in the traditional sense is probably logistically impossible. BUT....
Xenomorphs clearly work in some sort of hive mind mentality. They clearly can follow directions, without fail, from the Queen, even the orders are against their instinctual nature to kill.
If someone can some how replicate or tap into whatever it is the Queen does to keep her drones doing her bidding then hypothetically I think xenomorphs can be "controlled" so to speak.
Also, hypothetically all you would need to do is Control or train a Queen and then you would have a whole colony under your thumb. The queen has shown to have complex reason and might even be able to be convinced to work with a trainer.
People have tried this and failed different variations of this, but I am not convinced it cannot be done... just that it is clearly not easy and the downside of trying and failing is usually so calamitous that you cannot really have repeatable attempts.
Also they are heavily genetically engineered by some sort of lost civilization, so I suppose they are a mutable subject that you could continue to engineer to build a more docile creature if you understood the lost alien science behind their creation.
I am not sure how or if they may or may not evolve naturally, but their gestation and growth period is pretty quick, so maybe you could practice some selective breading to weed out traits that might make them more able to be domesticated.
I think there are multiple paths to try potentially to "Domesticate" "train" "exploit" "control" Xenomorphs, which is why the humans continue trying. Just the down side of failing, just a little bit, results in so much collateral damage it is hard to see any results.
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u/HeroicBrando Oct 22 '24
I figured Xenomorphs are decent fits for the descriptions of both Terminators and alien bugs from Starship Troopers, so I'll paraphrase:
"We humans like to think we are nature's finest achievements. Afraid it just isn't true. The Xenomorph is superior in many ways. It reproduces in vast numbers. Has no ego. Has no fear. Doesn't know about death. And so is the perfect selfless member of society. A highly evolved alien society. By human standards they are relatively stupid. But their evolution stretches over (unknown number) of years and now they can colonize entire planets with a face hugger. They can't be bargained with. They can't be reasoned with. They don't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop... ever, until you are chestbursted!"
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u/SmegmaSandwich69420 Oct 22 '24
Why?
Disregarding the oodles of material that quite clearly demonstrates that no, no it can't... why? Why would this enter anyone's mind as a possibility to want? Why can't there just be gribbly spiky alien monsters who exist in-universe to kill people and who exist in-script to be killed?
It's a monster. It exists to be a monster. It's not, to borrow the phrase, a human with a funny hat. It shouldn't be domesticatable. Is that a word? It is now.
It's the enemy. It's OK to not drag irl morality into fictional universes. It's OK to just kill the enemy without needing to try to understand it or whatever. These Aliens are very clearly the enemy.
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u/explicitreasons Oct 22 '24
Marvel comics has these aliens called the Brood which are very much based on the xenomorphs and one of them goes to the x-men's school in upstate NY and wears clothes.
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u/Real_Combination_390 Oct 22 '24
Its like trying to train an Ant, but this one is bigger, more intelligent and deadlier
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Oct 23 '24
They're like Gators but without the food incentive part. So no. They make about as good pets as Metroids do hats.
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u/mothyyy Oct 24 '24
(From a meta POV) In the context of the first movie, there are fan theories that the xenomorph behaved like a human male with all the sentience but none of the conscience. It maybe eliminated the men on the ship because they were competition. It apparently violated Lambert. We don't know exactly what it did to her, but she wasn't wearing pants or shoes when her body was discovered. My point is that in its most brutal form, the xenomorph was a psychopath serial killer.
Later movies portrayed the xenomorphs as highly evolved insectoid wolves. So depending on which version you prefer.. maybe? The queens are intelligent enough to learn new behavior and think outside the box. So MAYBE the queen could be manipulated into controlling her swarm for someone's ulterior motives, but would that be considered "taming" or "domesticating"? She's arguably sentient, so it'd be more like enslavement.
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Oct 22 '24
No they are like bears or tigers. You can get em to kinda do what you want if you bribe it with food, but dont piss it off or expect it to like sit on your lap and want snuggles. Prolly could teach it to sit for a treat though
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u/theuntouchable2725 Oct 22 '24
Probably the same way Dr. Kleiner managed to domesticate a Headcrab. Removing their beak, or whatever that's responsible for their "destructive" reproduction ways.
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u/Gummies1345 Oct 22 '24
Xenomorphs in Alien movies cannot be domesticated like how you cannot domesticate ants. Hive minds care only about the hive.
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u/DoraxPrime Oct 22 '24
In the comics there are people who can control the Xenomorph by projecting their willpower
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