Not bying into the xeno cleanup theory.

"Giger once said the idea of the facehugger was that it had to fuck you before it killed you" And that's what it does. (facehuggggggggggs)

what if the xeno eggs are a delicacy found by the engineers, and they are taking them to be examined and thats all they are not even the engineers know what they are, they just find them on their travels and load them onto a cargo ship for testing.

What if the eggs have a built-in parachute? Then carpet bombing a planet with them would make perfectly sense. And who told you that the eggs are not covered with cell-huggers that do the same thing to bacteria? (Actually that kind of thing already exists, it's called a virus).

Ithink the ending is going to be that the engineer is punished by his Gods above him for letting man steal technology, and the punishment is to deliver a strange cargo back home. On his journey home he snoops into the cargo and a hugger impregnates him, he gets into the chair and carries on his travels then gets serious cramp emegency lands on the moon of the planet hes headed to and a creature rips through his side. To punish man for stealing from him i wreckon he sends a fake distress signal to earth knowing that man will come and find the trap.

Maybe the facehugger is designed to attack humanoid life forms only, not just humans as the Jockey himself got facehugged. But yeah I agree with Giger, the creature is a weapon designed to make you suffer not just kill you. As for the delivery mechanism, I guess the Juggernaut ship has to land first because if it's shooting the eggs into the atmosphere from the chair thing... LOL. Then again, maybe they are just dropped from the cargo bay? Those xenos are tough little bastards.

Yes, I'm with you some way, on this. I have always thought it's a very strange and inefficient, "weapon", in it's first principle. I've never been able to fully understand it. I can find a way to accept that face-huggers they are exactly human scale and whatever - there could be lots of interesting Sci-Fi reasons for that - but I've always had a problem with the basic way they are supposed to work: you drop these things - and then you wait for something to get too curious? That seems a very passive kind of attack. But, fine: they are a little like mines - but mines that are just sitting there? In plain sight?... When the first one goes off, surely the game is up? Everyone knows to at least avoid looking inside those eggs and/or destroy any of them they can find - which shouldn't be too hard as they are just sitting there all over the place, waiting to get torched?.... It just doesn't seem to completely work, to me. Maybe I'm misunderstanding. Meanwhile, there's a little bit of history getting changed slightly, with this film and, personally, I'm really hoping that the whole, "weapon", is one thing just goes away or gets adjusted or clarified as part of all that, to be honest.

The alien is a pretty lame weapon, agreed. My guess is that a civilization as sophisticated as the engineers seem to be could come up with something way better. Guess it depends on what you mean by "clean up" - seems like it would be more effective as a means of terrorizing an enemy city than actually sterilizing a whole planet. My guess is that there is much more to them than just being bombs. Could be a naturally occurring organism or something engineered for a completely unrelated purpose. The fact of the matter is that when we see the poor little guy in Alien, he's not in the environment he is supposed to be in. It would be nice to see what they would be like in their "intended" role. They could just be fabricators of some sort. After all, someone had to build those temples.

In the Dark Horse comics they showed the eggs being extracted from a queen and placed in "escape pod" looking devices that were being dropped on planets as part of a short story. I wish I still had the comic. If they are meant to be weapons how they are deployed will be technological but I think the cylinders with the goo are the real key. Not so much that the eggs are transported but the DNA to accomplish it is. Mankind manages to travel to another world. A crewman gets infected by the DNA, changes into a Space Jockey and travels back to the home world in the horse shoe space ship. All the while eggs are being made or have been made in the space craft. Ready made bomb when landing. We've seen in the trailer that the SJ becomes part of the chair. Probably permanently. I think the SJ also becomes the genetic source for the eggs to be made. That way they are genetically adapted to our physiology and can better destroy our race. IMO I think it may be a mechanism for preventing other species from conquering space. The SJ's have a hold over space and want to keep it. Mankind venturing out or any other race would be competition. This concept allows them to destroy themselves for their own curiosity. I hope there are answers in Prometheus that tie to Alien.

Although after seeing Alien when it first came out I always thought the Aliens were a sort of "space barnacle". something the SJ picked up in space. The warning (In Alien) was to avoid his race from attempting a rescue so as not to infect the homeworld. I always liked that idea better. Something even the SJ's couldn't combat.

@arcaneradio But Ridley has personally spoken of the eggs as "cargo". This implies intentionality and the fact that they are valuable. I've NEVER considered that they eggs were intended to be SHOT out of anything. I also agree with takka that the "deadliness" of the aliens could simply be a byproduct. Their reproductive system is modeled on the (horrible to us) model of [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMG-LWyNcAs&feature=related]parasitic wasps[/url] that use caterpillars as hosts. The wasps are not "weapons" and they're not "evil." They're just wasps. The xenos need hosts to reproduce. On desolate worlds and in spaceships where we're the only thing around that works well as a host. Well, that's just what happens, right? In Alien 3 version 1 a dog serves as a host. In Version 2 it's an ox. They seem to be good to go in any mammal.