I had a moment of introspection, and it gave me some thoughts:
ALIENS
If Ripley hadn’t gone with the Space Marines, the xenomorphs never would have gotten off the planet and would have been wiped out when the colony exploded.
Even if Bishop, as the "sole survivor" called the backup shuttle from the main ship, he wouldn’t have lingered around on that platform for the mother alien to get on board and impregnate him with an egg. He was only there because he was saving Ripley and Newt.
Perhaps if all of the humans had been killed, he would have followed the orders from the company and brought some xenomorph samples off planet, but there’s a good chance that he would have been "killed" along with the humans. It was with space marines protecting him that he was able to make a hole in the pipe for him to crawl out to the beacon and call down a shuttle. By himself, he probably would have been torn apart by xenomorphs before he could get into the pipe. And who knows if he would have been able to close the hole after himself, as it was Valdez(?) that welded it shut behind him.
Any way you look at it, if Ripley had told Burke to fuck off and had stayed on Earth… All those prisoners on the prison planet would have lived. All those military guys in Aliens Resurrection would have lived. And Ripley herself would have been able to live out the rest of her life… though she would be spending that life paying off the cost of the Nostromo. Plus the company was fucking her over, making it hard for her to get any kind of good paying job, so who knows how miserable her future would have been.
SUPERMAN
I had a thought wondering why Jor-El didn’t save himself and others along with Kal-El, especially since Kryptonians know that the light of the yellow sun gives them superpowers. There have been instances where Superman was able to use artificial yellow sun to keep himself powered up even when he was on a planet with a red sun, especially in conjunction with an armored protective suit. So I had to wonder why artificial yellow sun technology wasn’t something Kryptonians played around with.
I understand that there were only a few weeks or months as warning to Krypton’s destruction, and most Kryptonians were like "Pshaw. Climate change isn’t real. GTFO." when Jor-El tried to warn them that their rampant mining of the planet’s core was going to cause catastrophic destruction and the extinction of their species. But I had to wonder why he didn’t save more children or send along a whole bunch of frozen sperm and ova that could be grown by the robots and technology he packed into Kal-El’s little ship.
I had questions.
But when I looked things up, there were several answers as to why more Kryptonians weren’t saved: Something called the Eradicator tied all Kryptonians to their home planet. So Jor-El changed Kal-El’s DNA which allowed him to be able to leave. Or there’s other storylines where Jor-El was basically on house arrest, and he was only able to assemble a small ship to be able to break containment. Or he was planning on saving more Kryptonians by using the shrinking technology, but he was attacked by Braniac and only Kal-El’s ship was able to escape destruction.
So my questions about why more Kryptonians didn’t survive were answered, but… If I knew that blasting myself with artificial light could naturally give me superpowers? Why wouldn’t I be flying around inside my house? Superspeeding around and having a great time?
And the idea that even the animals on Krypton were able to get superpowers with a yellow sun? Holy shit. What if some cockroaches had made it aboard Kal-El’s little ship? Or like what if his blanket was infested with bedbugs or something?
News anchor: "The small town of Smallville is under quarantine as the CDC deals with a fungus that does not respond to any available antifungals. Bleach does nothing. The fungus only seems to become stronger when exposed to sunlight. Multiple herds of cattle have had to be euthanized to prevent the spread of the deadly fungus."
A Kryptonian prion would be a nightmare for Earth scientists. Mad cow disease times 1,000,000,000,000,000,00…
~Harper Kingsley
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