How Old Can a Xenomorph Get? - Xenomorph Biology Explained
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In the old Aliens Colonial Marines comic series, Xenomorphs were flushed through an airlock into vacuum and still attempted to attack Marines magnetized to the ship hull although were unable to since there was no gravity. But the Xenos seemed to be able to survive vacuum at least for a limited amount of time.
Worth noting that Aliens were seen to ‘swim’ through the depths of space in Defiance. The Queen from Aliens is 100% still alive:
However, note the Aliens in Sea of Sorrow were slow and lethargic after awakening from their centuries of hibernation.
In defiace they are floating around aimlessly
Same with the doghead ones.
Did they get past the lethargy and back to normal after a period of time?
And oh wow about the Aliens Queen…was her, umm, character?, used again in a novel or comic or an additional movie? If so, she’ll have Ripley’s number! :)
I’m guessing their biology can endure the near absolute zero temperature of some, but I wonder if cosmic radiation will eventually prove deadly. I’m curious as to how long a xenomorph can survive in stasis while floating around in space.
Ha, imagine hitting one of them with your spaceship, in the middle of nowhere!
Nothing can "swim" in space, there's nothing to push against.
They can live to possibly a couple thousand year's as was depicted in Dean Foster Aliens out of the Shadows audio book! They could go into a hibernation and wake up later on! And yes it is Cannon!!!
Yeah as well as in Sea of Sorrows.
Makes sense, if the Eggs can survive from ancient times through hibernation than it doesn’t seem far fetched for adults to do the same
Something that has it's origins in fiction has developed an entire canon of information.
I know isnt it great!!
cmon man, we're hanging on by a string out here!
As far as I read; Queen Mothers' - the leaders of xenomorph species - survive thousands of years; at least
Yeah pretty much, I think most of the xenomorphs could live for ten of thousands of years if left to their own devices !
I don’t know how long the standard Xenomorph XX121 can live but I do know that they eventually mature and grow to become Praetorians or Royal Guards as they’re simply called. It sucks that we’ve never seen a Praetorian in any of the live action films. Most of the time the Xenomorphs get killed long before they complete their final life cycle.
The preatorians first canon appearance other than Aliens: Defiance is now going to be in Aliens: Fireteam!
There was a pretorian at the end of avp 2 game just for a second in the ending cut scene
The Alien Queen that was sent to the bottom of the Ocean in Alien vs Predator, she looked cold.
I loved that scene too! The dark depth of the ocean below and her being weighted to the bottom!! Oh man it gives me chills thinking about it!
yes i agree, maybe one of us should grab her a coat or something, maybe a couple of pocket heaters??
@@ProjectACHERON she’s probably still there, asleep....waiting for global warming when she can rise and take over the earth mwah haha
I was always worried that she’d be able to hibernate even there, and if/when whatever was holding her down would eventually rust. Then ocean currents could possibly transport her, over time - a really long time - to a warmer clime where she could reanimate and cause a ruckus.
I was just surprised that Predator was OK with her getting pulled underwater while still alive. Granted, he was in pretty rough shape, and things were happening fast, but she could eventually turn up in a future novel. Cold, but able to make babies, and really, really pissed.
Big Chap was cooked, and the Hadley Queen would have been in a decaying orbit and burned up as well, but she was already half crushed and would probably bleed out in vacuum first.
yeah i suppose
In AVP2010 was old queen, more than 1000 years as i remember.
@Rats of the rabbit ears Motel In Soviet Russia it counts, comrade...
Excellent point 👍, yes AVP definitely counts for this topic I believe.
If we are talking just xenomorph biology then sure I suppose it counts and i did sort of already address this when I was talking about how they can hybernate for Millenia !
She was an empress/matriarch
I read somewhere a while back that part of the original concept for the first Alien movie was they age extremely rapidly. That would explain how it matured so quickly and why it seemed to slow down so much at the end of the film. I really don't remember where I read this, I wish I could dig it up again. This would follow if they were meant to be bio weapons which was heavily implied in the film.
Thats since been disproven, showing instead that they mature very rapidly and them seem to age slower and slower as time goes on.
You might be thinking of the quote that came from Ridley Scott from The Book of Alien, which was all about the production and concept art of the original Alien film published in 1979 as a tie-in for the film.
The idea from Scott was that it was a very short lived creature. In the commentary on the earliest DVD Scott says during the shuttle scene that the creatures is lethargic as it is dying and retreated from the noise of the ship to the quiet of the shuttle to die. Hence why it seems uninterested in Ripley at first, only moving to attack when she alters the atmosphere in the shuttle (the gases that spray at it was her attempt to kill it, blowing it out the airlock as a last ditch attempt to kill it). Of course this is just his take, he directed but didn’t write the screenplay or come up with the ideas.
Personally I’ve always felt that the ‘Big chap’ was dying or preparing to hibernate. The ones on the colony in Aliens have the hive to sustain them, but the original creature is alone.
Another change is that in the novel of the first film (which has many differences to the finished film) the alien is caught eating supplies from the ship in a locker and escapes before Dallas can blast it with a flamethrower. It is there that they figure out it is using the vents. I recommend the novel to anyone who loves the film; some of the changes are really interesting.
@@TheCosmicFoolThanks man!
I feel a potential great opening to an Alien movie is to have one floating around, curled up tightly in a dormant state. Where upon a ship eventually comes across it.
In the original film it's life cycle was basically the duration of that film - supposedly that's why it's so lazy and slow right at the end, Ripley finds it sleeping, it's basically dying of old age. Hyper development means burning out quickly.
Anything else doesn't really make any sense.
Exactly, plus it has already layed its Eggs by ''Eggmorphing'' Brett and Dallas, at the end it's also look old and decaying. Cameron basically messed up the whole franchise by adding his xeno queen, originally, the alien was short lived, and could reproduce itself by eggmorphing.
@@MidnightatMidian i also feel that Cameron kinda ruined the franchise, glad i found someone who agrees
@@trevorfrenk4137 without James Cameron there wouldn’t be a franchise.
@@trevorfrenk4137 The issue lies in the fact Cameron basically reinvented the Alien from a Lovecraftian biomechnical stalker, to a hyper aggressive space bug that mindlessly charges into gunfire.
I really wish we could get another movie that stays closer to Big Chap's portrayal.
Holy shit has anyone commenting here actually watched Aliens, they were absolutely not “mindless bugs” (they only called it a “bug hunt” because they were downplaying a threat they had no idea about), they took out an entire colony of people barring a single and decimated all but two members of a military unit equipped with weapons of mass destruction. The whole film is the characters being eradicated by aliens, they only win because they accidentally set off a power plant to explode and Ripley almost died dumping the Queen into the vacuum of space. Aliens did nothing to make the titular aliens any more weaker or less “lovecraftian” than in the original, they just increased the stakes beyond the scope of the first film.
This was a great topic of discussion! Many of the past movies, novels and even comics have stated that the Xenomorph has lasted for hundreds, even thousands of years. In AVP when they discovered the ancient pyramid the Queen was frozen and after being thawed ce out kicking and screaming. In the comic Labyrinth when Dr.Church's family arrived on the moon his parents previously terraformed, who knows how long that hive was active? Plus the Xenomorph's were sick then too. Also your reference to the Out of the Shadow's/Sea of Sorrows novel is another excellent point, as it shows longevity of the Xenomorph's between visits to LV178.!!!! Yes, I think the Queen is still alive maybe in a dormant hibernate state...but definitely alive!!!!!
Yeah I know they truly are a force to be reckoned with. The fact they can wait out the many eons just goes to show how crazy dangerous these creatures are !
The xenos have a purpose,
they terraform with thier bodies making the place like a skeletal structure.
Yeah they could definitly be viewed as some kind of advance biological terrforming method.
in some of the comics, it seems that the aliens have the ability to farm nutrients within the hive, which would suggest sufficiency with or without more hosts
as for longevity and dormancy i'm not sure, as the ability to grow one's own food lends to sustaining active lifestyles, I don't think with aliens it precludes dormancy either
I assumed Facehuggers could live for quite a long time based on Ash’s diagnosis that he explains to Ripley. I’m paraphrasing here but something like “It has a nasty habit of shedding its cells & replacing them with polarised silicon making it one tough little son of a bitch....”. Doesn’t he also mention how they can survive long periods of harsh living conditions by going dormant?
I know they can live for a loooong time in the ovomorphs however im not sure about out. They could it is possible. However everything so far seems to indicate they die rapidly. As for Ash's statement i think its to do with its durability and strength more so than its longevity.
@@ProjectACHERON I thought facehuggers lived until they deposited a tiny alien, then died like a spawning salmon or an octopus, both of which mate once and die. Consider the eel as well: an eel can live to be over 100 years old, but once it breeds, it dies immediately. I just wish Alien 3 was a bit more clear on what happened: there must have been 2 facehuggers on board, which is unlikely. One got to the dog or bull, depending on version you watch, and one got to Ripley when her cryotube broke.
@@saintjackula9615 "queen" facehuggers, live longer, are more durable, and can lay two or three eggs in addition to the queen embryo. Its a real shame that they didn't show it in anything other than the special and behind-the-scene stuff of Alien 3.
@@saintjackula9615 The face huggers being on board the Sulaco is mostly due to the ovomorph eggs allowing them to remain there for extended periods of time
According to the lore, Facehugger eggs (ovomorphs) can last almost indefinitely, provided they are not exposed to extreme heat or ballistic trauma. This effect is immediately diminished when the Face Hugger leaves it's home. With their hyper fast metabolism and a lack of a "yolk" such as the fleshy sphere that you always see them slide and slither over when the egg opens, they can survive on their own for 2, or at most, 3 days, with their longevity being so pathetically short that there is an entirely dedicated xenomorph form with the sole purpose of transporting the face huggers from the nest to wherever a threat that could create suitable incubators would be, simply because the Face Huggers would quite literally die before they made it to their destination.
This also explains why they're so hard to remove, because a creature that lacks a significantly useful lifespan needs to be able to stay on it's host at all costs and do nothing else, no attacking anyone, not defending itself, not performing reconnaissance, just... grabbing faces. All of its energy has to he dedicated to the one task that they exist to perform, because they lack the necessary energy to do just about anything else as their life's clock ticks down ever so quickly.
Xenomorph adult seems to be immortal and mortal at the same time.
Queen Xenomorph from AVP 2004, and Queen Xenomorph from AVP 2010 said have lived for thousand years.
They also far bigger than Queen from Acheron, this is like they are elder queen. While, Queen from Acheron still a young age.
I sort of love how they are biologically immortal. Their mesoskeleton also seems to act like some kind of biological EVA suit. Anytime we see a xenomorph blown out of an airlock, the vacuum doesn't kill it.
You can't really move in a vacuum without sort of launching or pulling yourself from one object to another. You can see this when the Big Chap uses its tail to pull itself back into the Narcissus through its plasma thrusters.
If the Acheron queen floating in space managed to bump into another vessel or a station, then she will likely sense the life nearby and awaken. I once read some very lore-friendly fan fiction on that same subject. Wish I could find it again.
The Hag Queen from the AvP game was at least ten thousand years old when Weyland-Yutani found her. And despite her haggard appearance had no trouble walking and never lost her fertility as she was able to establish a new hive on the planet.
I dont think any Xenomorph or especilly Queen could die of aged. They were like perfect organism and a littlebit mechanical.
Yeah I don’t really think age is to much of a factor for them and that they just continue to grow as they mature and get older
It largely depends on their exact method of digestion and metabolism
Cells get damaged during a life and have to be replaced though. With every replaced cell and therefore cell multiplication tiny mistakes in DNA-replication are made by chance and the risk of a mutation and therefore tumors and cancer rises. Eventually after hundreds of years by pure mathematical probability some cancer will develop which cannot be countered by the immune system, and the alien will perish.
Sorry, that would violate the fourth law of thermodynamics .
All compounded phenomena are impermanent.
My favorite generation of the morphs, is Xenomorph, i somehow end up says Zenomorph by accident though.
Haha nice
The “black goo” in Prometheus is a fire starter. The ship in alien and the veins/tendrils is spot on!! It also has adapted/consume the DNA of the host. Tho alien in the original alien- those eggs were put in stasis. This stasis lasts for a 1000? Years. Great minds think alike. Totally agree 👍
thanks glad you enjoyed.
Yeah, that was one of the only flaws in the video, that the "stasis field" over the eggs shown in _Alien_ wasn't mentioned when talking about ovomorph survivability.
I think the Alien queen reentered the atmosphere of LV426, given that the sulaco was still in its dropship deployment orientation, so that big air lock would have been pointed toward the planet.
Big chap got scorched by the thrusters a bit but think it is still a threat. Might be a little slowed by the harpoon in its stomach though. or just pissed off by it.
I remember seeing the predators would keep specimens frozen. They must be forced into hibernation.
Big Chap got burned up by the Narcissus’ thrusters I thought.
the living face hugger in the tank was removed before implanting the embrio and lived till they got there
I'm unsure on the timeline for Hadley's Hope, and why this video says it proves xenos can survive for at least months. The movie does say the colony can be reached within 17 days (albeit not necessarily from Earth where we know the mission started). We also see a cocooned colonist is still alive - though maybe her story involves weeks of evading the xenos, or this is some aspect of their biology where cocooned victims can also go dormant until disturbed by a new source of prey.
I overall feel that the movie takes some artistic license in having the marine mission feel like they *just* missed the events in the colony
Well, there is a timeline based upon when the Company stopped being able to communicate with Hadley’s Hope.
There is nothing to make you that that some for of photosynthesis going on with an overmorph. I always wondered if the the matalic parts mixed with the blood acted like a normal battery
their biology seems to suggest their function like a biological battery
From Aliens, we know at least 17 days ( travel time from Earth to Acheron). After a few days, they plug into the hive walls and go dormant. The adult aliens get nourished by the hive walls.
There was a RPG back in the early nineties where the face huggers supposively only lived for 24 hours once outside of the egg
Pretty sure those facehuggers in Aliens have been out of their eggs for a lot longer than 24 hours.
Wow! A million year old xenomorph!
Big chap got blasted by the shuttle engines
i mean... yes?
I question how realistically long they could hibernate. It is theorized that the acidic blood somehow has a galvanizing effect and gives the creature its energy. As long as the acid is active, and without a known way to store that energy (fat etc.) The creature would have to either stay active as long as the blood is acidic or neutralize the pH of its own blood when entering hibernation. Though I'm not sure how it would re-acidify its blood when waking up again.
Yeah there is alot of variables to this.
Why would they need to de-acidify? Clearly if their sensors are still active, waiting for intruders to interrupt their slumber, they're still operating in low-power mode. I think it'd be more a question of running _out_ of "battery acid" over the years, but they probably have low-level metabolic processes microscopically pulling resources from the environment.
Or, they might just be forced to wake up when the acid gets too low, so they can eat something to replenish it. If they don't have either of those mechanisms, then how long it takes to react all their battery acid would probably be the limiting factor on their lifespans.
I guess one other possibility would be if the dorsal tubes are actually acid reservoirs, and some xenos could have a special role to periodically wake up and refill them somehow, without the alien being topped up having to awake.
@@DanHarkless_Halloween_YTPs_etc thats not how that works tho. The amount of power which is flowing through the body of a battery is determimed by the acidity of a battery. To turn it down the output you would have to either a) cut off the circuit, which i guess is a bad idea in a living organism, b) store the excess power in some way, but I dont see xenos getting fat, or c) lower the acidity of the ganvanizing acid.
@@thedubstepaddict3675 I'm not a battery expert (and it seems neither are you, despite your "thats not how that works tho"), but sealed lead-acid batteries require no periodic topping up of the battery acids / electrolytes, and don't require the battery to be constantly discharging at full power. They'll keep a charge for a long time if there's either zero active charge-drain, or just a low-level drain. It wouldn't make any sense to intentionally de-acidify, because that would stop the battery from working.
Note that the theory here is that the Xenos literally run on off biomechanical battery power, and do not need to regularly eat food like other organisms. Not just that their blood acid has some nebulous "galvanizing effect".
Aside from metaphorical uses, "galvanizing" refers to zinc-plating of metal to prevent corrosion. In the realm of biology, aside from the grandfathered term "galvanic skin response" (referring to measurement of skin's electrical resistance), "galvanism" is an obsolete 1700s term and concept wherein Galvani thought he had discovered a new mysterious life-force only present in animal bodies (nope; was simply muscle response to electrical stimulation).
@@DanHarkless_Halloween_YTPs_etc damn, then you know more than i do. With the "galvanizing" i refered to the alien basically beibg a galvanic cell.
I assumed the xeno in alien was dying at the end
nah just sleepy
They can survive for a time
Molten lead bath hold the lead soap
Vaccum of space ahh peace n quiet
Egg can keep face huggers in stasis
And if a full grown xenomorph finds itself without food or hosts nearby they can go into a dormant state a kind of very deep sleep kind of stasis I've read in some novels that some xenomorphs don't wake up again but end up dying and the living xenomorphs use the dead in the building maintaining of the hive nest
yeah pretty sure that was Alien: Sea of Sorrows.
@@ProjectACHERON yup
I would guess at the very least - hundreds of years.
I agree!
Back when I only saw the first Alien movie, I theorized that these creatures were biological weapons of an ancient alien race that were meant to kill off a planet's population before sending in troops, with the creatures live-span short but long enough to wipe out an entire race if needed. While I no longer believe their life span is short, I still believe the Aliens were originally biological weapons but have evolved past that now.
I wonder how well they can deal with cosmic radiation, in the ‘adrift in space’ scenario, and also the 2.7 Kelvin - almost absolute zero! - cold. Obviously they can survive for some time, but I wonder how long they’d last until they can no longer reanimate.
My guess is a VERY long time with respect to the cold of space, but that darn radiation…
Facehuggers if they don't find a host the chestburster rips out of the facehugger and they merge they look like a xeno head on a big black facehugger
not sure thats how it works
Wonder if Weyland have the original Alien in stasis...
🤔
So I guess that means the queen fr9m AVP is still sitting on the bottom of the Antarctic ocean.
I doubt it due to the crushing depths of the ocean
@@nicholasalicea1364 That's a good, super overlooked, point.
i guess it depends on how much pressure their exo-skeletal structure can take
I thought Ridley Scott said the Xenomorph in Alien was already dying at the end of the movie and that it hid away in the Narcissus to do this. This would presuppose a short lifespan. Thoughts?
He did.
Why was it already dying
@@fuhrersavior9575 Great name.
@@jewsownthemedia3811 Thank you kindly.
@@fuhrersavior9575 🤚😉
How do you know this ?
evidence found with the the canon researches, mostly out of the shadows and sea of sorrows
@@ProjectACHERON copy that those are bokks right ? or audio books ?
Both
Didn’t Darkseid state that the Ovomorph’s can last millions of years?
Darksied? like from DC?
@@ProjectACHERON Yeah, typo on the name, but under one of his feats of strength, as he squashes an Ovomorph unharmed by it's acid blood he mentions: "What kind of mortal creature could remain alive for millions of years in space?"
ha yes 😃 xenomorphs dont age WE evolve 😏, like u said WE are PERFECT😍,and yes the queen lives she is way more hardy than her warriors not that they r not hardy ha😁 but she can take way more and space is just one more hurdle to survive and she does it well😏
very very true all hail the queen!
You tell them your majesty😄
pro tip: remove the parts where you stutter
This is an old video made when I was learning the ropes of TH-cam. New content dosent have these issues
I think the opposite; they don't live that long.
If they are based like all liveforms; there are real life examples that prove that.
Animals that mature very fast usually don't live that long.
Your dog or cat age at much faster rate than humans, they are pretty much mature in less than 12 months.... an average lifespan of a cat and dog is 15 to 19 years
Flies live for about a month, and ants live for about 15 years.
The alien is based on a insect lifestyle; even the filmmakers admitted.
So it has to be 30 days to 15 years lifespan.
The longest living animal on earth are greenland sharks; they can live to 200-300 years because they mature very slowly.
Thats fair, but there is plenty evidence to say otherwise!
Wouldn't the ultimate organism be self sufficient?
So the xenomorph species, which is entirely dependant on host species, is far from perfect, or being the ultimate.
It's referred to as the perfect organism based on its structural perfection once full-size and adaptability on any given environment. Even more so than Predators, who prefer warmer climates and need their biomasks to breathe naturally since Predator 2 shows it struggling to breathe after a while and using a respirator once it loses its biomask. Plus I can't imagine a Predator surviving being poured hot lead over it like in Alien 3.
@@windowsVD
Gotta correct you here:
Predators can breathe our atmosphere.
You say he needed a respirator in 2, but he only employed that a couple of times, and went VERY long periods without it.
So I'd wager it wasn't for breathing purposes, I think it was an inhaled performance enhancer, or some kind of drug.
Think about it for a minute, there was a sizable party there, but only one of them was hunting. It's likely this particular predator was a recovering addict, going on thus supervised hunt to regain lost honor, but relapsed in the final chase.
My theory anyway.
@@windowsVD
Nor have any predators we have sent ever have problems breathing our air.
In 1 he never used anything after he removed his mask, and in 3 one was strung up, maskless for nearly the entire movie, most of a day, but easily could have been longer.
They can clearly breathe oxygen.
@@windowsVD
As to your alien bit,you have a point, but the species can't even get to its more mature forms without a host, so it's far from actually being adaptable, or structurally perfect, they can't actually do anything on their own.
@@FBI-ju5no They clearly capable of breathing oxygen, but that doesn't mean that they're adapted to breathing it as well as humans. Heck, not all humans are adapted to breathing air the same way. Highland Tibetans are better adapted to breathing in their harsher environments compared to us regular lowland folks. It only took off it's biomask briefly in Predator 1 to prove it was superior to Dutch. The respirator was only employed a couple of times in Predator 2 because it lost it after being tackled off the ledge by Harrigan. There's zero evidence that the respirator was providing some sort of drug enhancing substance either. The filmmakers literally made their lack of inherent adaptability a core plot point in The Predator (2018), although I'm willing discard that pile of crap. Predators (2010) doesn't take place on Earth, but on a game preserve planet. It would make sense that the Predators have terraformed that planet to be ideal to both Predators and humans.
Nah... They only live maybe a couple weeks. That's why they're n such a hurry to get shit done. It's running outta time. Like an ant. Just an observation. Hope this helps.👍😁✌💯