!!!THE SCIENCE MOMENT!!!
Howard Hawk's THE THING (1951)
 SCIENCE MOMENT BY KELLY PARKS |
"The Thing" may look like Frankenstein in a jump suit but in fact he turns out to be more vegetable than animal, which is fine. And he turns out to live on blood, so he's a carnivorous plant, which is also fine. But human blood (or blood from any non-whatever-planet-The-Thing-is-from life form) should have been fatal. Every form of life on Earth is based on DNA. Life that evolves elsewhere will have its own unique chemical base so our proteins would be unknown to their biochemistry (and thus probably poison) and vice versa.
True, this movie was made two years before Crick and Watson discovered DNA,
but ignorance of the law is no excuse!
Remember That the 1951 THING is a Carnivorous Plant
 SCIENCE MOMENT by E.C. McMULLEN Jr. |
Plants do not have a digestive system remotely like ours.
Our filtering system, kidneys, liver, pancreas, are usually the first casualties when we injest the wrong proteins. Plants don't care, not even carnivorous plants like our alien Thing.
Being at the bottom of the food chain means plants generally live off of elemental chemistry, not complex molecules. Carnivorous plants, like nearly all plants, live off of dead matter because they break that down into elements the plant needs, which are mainly, Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium.
Also important to carnivorous plants in particular is Calcium, Magnesium, and Iron. All that plus CO2, water, and sunlight and you've got a healthy plant.
Complex molecules like Protein? No. The bite or sting of the most venomous animal on earth won't phase a plant. It doesn't matter what protein rich animal dies beside it, on it, in it, the plant will happily absorb the nutrients it needs from it.
Bottom line is, it never matters whether that insect, arachnid, reptile, amphibian, avian, or mammal falls into its clutches, the carnivorus plant is indifferent to the animal's possible toxins. Neurotoxic or cytotoxic, hemotoxins, myotoxins, and necrotoxins* (*well, depending on the plant), none of that matters to the plant, and that includes most digestive acids. The trapped spider can bite, the wasp can sting, the mouse can vomit, it won't matter.
"Yeah, but: this alien plant feeds on human blood!"
Yes, but the crucial question to that is, what does the alien plant use from our blood?
We never find out. Protein? No plants we know of need protein to survive and the good Doctor Carrington identified the alien as a type of plant, more specifically a kind of carrot. What else does Hemoglobin have that's good for a plant? Well there's calcium, carbon dioxide, iron, magnesium, nitrogen, and phosphorus to name a few things. Whether or not a single human has enough for it to live and for how long, who can say? But a human would definitely contain more of what a plant needs than the snow outside.
So no, an extraterrestrial "Intellectual Carrot" that can survive on the chemical elements found in human blood is not impossible or (since the discussion is about rather athletically active carrots from another planet) improbable.
Within the mind-boggling logic of discovering a plant-based alien lifeform that can live on human blood, the Science Works.
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John Carpenter's THE THING (1982)
"The way computers are portrayed made me cringe and showed a complete lack of understanding on Carpenter's part as to exactly how they work."
How the computers worked was not up to John Carpenter, but computer hardware builder, programmer, and operating system coder extraordinaire, John C. Wash. For THE THING, John programmed a "Cromemco S-100 system in FORTRAN to produce CGI imagery..."
Wash was Carpenter's computer GoTo Guy and is credited for creating the hardware and software that propelled the ultra advanced (for their time) Computer Graphic Images (CGI) used in
DARK STAR
STAR WARS
ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK
BLADE RUNNER
HALLOWEEN III
BRAINSTORM
2010
DEMOLITION MAN
OUTBREAK
THE RELIC
THE X-FILES (TV and Movies)
THE VAMPIRE DIARIES (TV)
and many more
This article copyright 2004 and 2025 E.C.McMullen Jr.
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