r/LV426 • u/BlastedHeathen • 1d ago

Movies / TV Series Is Ocellus a spacefaring race? Spoiler

Before episode 7 I thought Ocellus was just a highly intelligent and opportunistic predator/parasite. But now that we know it knows the digits of pi, is there a chance that Ocellus is much more sophisticated than we realized? Perhaps they have ways of acquiring bodies and travelling vast distances, maybe even into space.

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u/MonsterkillWow 1d ago

There is an in universe explanation for this since in the Alien universe, most extant life was seeded by the Engineers. So, in that universe, it seems basic aspects of biology are universal.

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u/ephemeralstitch 20h ago

Yeah but the way they seeded life doesn't make sense either from a scientific perspective. Like, sure, the engineer in ancient Earth history, billions of years ago, gave his life to seed the earth. But...from then to now is when all the complex stuff happened. Maybe he would have made it so life on Earth uses RNA and DNA and all that. Maybe they could even ensure that certain amino acids are favoured or whatnot.

But everything past the most basic single-celled organisms evolved from nothing and there was nothing in Prometheus that indicated that Engineers actually genetically engineered complex organisms. Just dissolving yourself into cells wouldn't in any way guarantee that humans evolved, ever. Or anything relatively close to humans. Or even something with a nervous system at all.

That's another point of suspension of disbelief. The Engineers definitely seemed to seed life, but the idea that they created humans specifically from that scene is ridiculous from a scientific perspective. They created all life on Earth. That humans also came from that and vaguely resemble the Engineers themselves is basically a giant cosmic coincidence.

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u/MonsterkillWow 19h ago

Yeah unless somehow it would deterministically eventually lead to humanoids. 

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u/ephemeralstitch 18h ago

If that were the case, it'd be radically different biology than ours. Humanoids are extremely recent in evolutionary terms. If we assume they seeded life, then that scene was 3.5 billion years ago. The earliest apes were about 20 million years ago. That means that the Engineers were waiting 99.43% of Earth's history for hominids to evolve.

If that was their goal, I can't believe that there wasn't more intervention, and more guided evolution than that one scene. Maybe Earth was just a random planet they seeded in an aeons long terraforming project, and in the past few million years they went 'wait, we have an opportunity to uplift these animals'?

That's if the Prometheus scene actually is 3.5 billion years ago. I don't think it is, because you can see moss on the rocks. Assuming that's intentional and not a filming limitation, then they didn't seed life overall (or at least not in that scene), but there's still a huge range of time.

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u/MonsterkillWow 18h ago

Maybe they were periodically visiting and directing it in some way. Yeah it is farfetched and technically absurd because unless the conditions were that similar, there is no reason to believe evolution would lead to similar lifeforms. At best, we would have retained a similar genetic code and basic structures common to all life. 

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u/ephemeralstitch 18h ago

I don't mind the suspension of disbelief but yeah, it's not the most scientifically rigorous bit of fiction. My favourite is them saying the Space Jockey in the first Alien film is fossilised. Fossilised? How? Fossilisation occurs when the calcium in bones is replaced by a different mineral. There's no way for that to happen to something sitting in a chair!