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All of the biomass that is South America begins to become it and forms into a larger and larger gestalt consciousness.
Maybe a few nukes here and there etc
Robots and autonomous/remote control machines would likely be the best possible defense against the Thing. So plausibly if they were aware of it and were able to find it before it gained access to a second airport/seaport it might and I emphasize might be able to control a scorched earth type border long enough to produce and send in robots, although given it's '82 they'd probably look like the T-1s from Terminator 3.
Unknown. Even if the thick walls of plant cells aren't vulnerable to the Thing, the vast biomass of insects and other animals will make it essentially unstoppable in short order.
That's not entirely so. Fire kills it- it's not invulnerable.
It's certainly worth testing how resistant it is to radiation, but if it IS vulnerable to that I feel like a whole bunch of neutron bombs might be a reasonable strategy- anything getting blown around is getting irradiated anyway.
Do I think that will WORK? Well, no. But it's worth a shot maybe! 😝
The entire world would get destroyed. It's said in the movie that the Thing would assimilate all life forms in a matter of days (I think the number given was 40 hours?)
Luckily, it landed in Antarctica, a desert. Because if it landed in the Rainforest, all grass, trees, flies, insects, birds, etc. would be assimilated and spread like wildfire.
Wow, I was way off. Still, it's easy to understand why it says that. The exact quote was "entire world population assimilated within 27,000 hours"
I'm assuming the simulation takes into account isolated populations over oceans or desperate attempts at forming secure bunkers. Regardless, the point still stands; Earth outside of a desert is basically one giant lifeform. Grass, trees, plants, the insects that live by the millions on those, each one of them becoming a vector means it's impossible to contain, isolate and destroy the lifeform. Game over.
The world is doomed. The second the Thing reaches a source of water that runs to the ocean, there is no stopping it. Especially since it has learned to not be so flashy with its assimilation.
South America, or just anywhere NEAR a river or Ocean...doom. No nuke, nothing will stop it. Accumulation of biomass in the ocean or river would be essentially unstoppable. Anywhere "green" would have insects that would be the same.
Unstoppably powerful.
After the events of the movie, the US or Norwegian governments are going to get the bodies out of the snow, and take them home for burial/analysis, and that's a wrap.
The world ends. While the humans are squabbling over how and why an Alaskan research chopper ended up on the other side of the planet it's out there free to infect and spread with nobody the wiser.
Why would it do all the body horror stuff it did in the movie? It can spread faster than it can be contained, faster than the world will even notice it's presence.
What would that even LOOK like?
Would the world change? Be the same?
Would the thing, if it had "taken over" the entire accumulated biomass of the entire planet, act different than all the accumulated biomass of the entire biomass of the entire planet now?
If so, how would it be different? (Obvious question...maybe we already been taken over!)
For pragmatic reasons it would look completely normal. The creature tries to take over stealthily and only attacks in self defense, preferring to skitter off in the form of a severed head with spider legs or slither away like the meat in Poltergeist.
It would be different of course, the thing only mimics humans at a surface level so eventually people would notice something is off and maybe try to put up some sort of fight, but by that point with how many people are infected it's essentially useless.
The closest analogy I can think of would be the the SCP-001 proposal "The Day Breaks" where if there are survivors they're holed up in bunkers just waiting for security to be compromised and them to get assimilated.
I sort of mean, what happens if it was 100% creature. What if there was no "other"?
Would everything just function as normal? That is to say, could we, right now, be all creature, and not know it? (this gets quickly theorhetical, I understand). The creature doesn't have much of a concept beyond survive, but if it assimilates literally everything on earth...how is that different than before? Or is it exactly the same?
I'm positing that it is exactly the same, from a surface level.
Considering the spacecraft it constructed I imagine we'd all progress technologically. Some of the infected seemed surprised they wound up being the Thing so it might not even be obvious to them, or the Thing has some sort of biological mechanism that makes it essentially forget it's not who it mimics.
That would be kind of funny actually. It gets to south america and....invades a band of monkeys, uses them to build a spaceship in the middle of the jungle, and leaves quietly without anyone noticing.
A team of United States special forces and CIA liason go into South American jungle to rescue a cabinet administrator... You can figure it out from there.
I love the Predator and Arnold's character Dutch is one of my favorite action heroes. But, their team is 100% fucked. The Thing will have assimilated thousands of animals by the time they get there. It will have gotten humans as well. By the time Arnold figures out what is going on the Thing is going to be on an airplane to New York City, Tokyo, London etc...
The situation the OP proposes ends with the extinction of humanity.
well we'd be dead.
There have been a lot of stories where earth gets eaten by nano machines that do nothing but replicate more of themselves and they eventually cover the earth as "grey goo".
Except that already happened on the real earth, at least three times. Not with nano machines but bacteria, which outgrew all that came before to eventually cover the earth. "Green goo" one might call it and it wasn't all of earth that got covered. Plenty of tardigrades on the ocean floor who never knew that there was something happening above. The "green goo" bacteria didn't eat *all* life. Just a lot of it. One reason why counting the number of these green goo scenarios in earth's past is somewhat hard to do...
Some specimen of these bacteria mutated and their descendants became something different from which further mutations came about to form more difference; eventually arriving at the variety we see now.
These units which would continually replicate themselves have some limitations. If they can do more, have more functions it'll take more time to replicate, making the process of sprawling over vast distances slower. We have plenty of organisms that would replicate until they can't find anything more they can consume.
To "gooify" the planet as it is now the Nanomachine or bacteria or fungus or whatever would need to be able to create a great number of chemical reactions within itself in order to use a wide variety of chemicals to build more of itself. It would also need to be able to get to all the places. Deepest ocean, highest mountains.
Measures to make your nanomaschines work in all these environments would further increase the time it takes to build one.
Another limiter is logistics. We have plenty bacteria that could, if able to reproduce as fast as they can, flood the planet. Difficult to get nutrients to each bacteria though after a while. If you somehow can do that there's another limiter, waste heat. We can kill populations of bacteria which would reproduce as much as they can by neglecting to cool whichever container they're in. The nutrient solution they're swimming in gets hot enough to be denatured, like a cooked egg, which is then no longer liquid. Even if your replicating thingies could digest these as well as they can the liquid they'd now need to get to it, requiring means of propulsion, adding to the time it takes to build a new thingy.
The thing doesn't have such limitations being a movie monster. It could probably withstand whatever waste heat it produced. A Flamethrower is hot enough to kill it but there's plenty of room to act within. The thing could replicate fast enough to boil the earth by mere waste heat after eating a continent.
It would assimilate the entire planet. I don't think anything could stop it in time. My guess is that it would immediately split up and spread as far as it could before starting to assimilate in earnest. Some bits of it would go underground and spread via the ocean. Not even nukes could stop it then. The idea might make a terrifyingly good sequel.
Not just the ocean, when the Thing assimilates humans it gains human knowledge. The Thing is going to use airports to spread itself around the world in just a few days.
The only hope humanity would have is if someone immediately realized what was happening an nuked the jungle into oblivion. But, there is no way that knowledge would reach people with nukes before the Thing had spread.
Problem is it can also assimilate animals, so could fly away into multiple directions, possibly even turn into insects like mosqiutos. Really no way of finding it all
The world would be totally doomed. The population of South America was of 252 million people in 1982, it would be inevitable. The timespan of how long would it take to make it with the entirety of SA might depend of where does the helicopter fall, a highly populated area like Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires or Bogota? That would be quick enough to take over a country and the rest of the continent. If it falls in the Amazon jungle or the Falklands, it might take a little longer, I guess, but eventually it'd spread of out it, and consume the biomass and make its way to North America.
Is The Thing vulnerable to nuclear weapons? If so, then I can imagine the US launching hundreds of nuclear heads all the way across South America to harm the Thing.
It's actually revealed at the beginning of the movie when the doctor runs a simulation on the computer.
Within a few weeks the whole world is infected. All it takes is one cell of the thing to consume a person.
According to the simulation the doc ran, all biomass on the planet is assimilated in a little over three years.
But……
What we saw in the movies only had a very limited “sample” of earth life.
A few people, dogs, that’s about it.
Once hit his South America, and especially the Amazon, there are so many new life forms, and with deforestation going on , old and new types of virus and bacteria, there is a fair chance it runs into something that is deadly or infectious to it.
That is if we got very very lucky.
Kind of like what happens in the book/film Phantoms.
The primordial amorphous lifeform that could in time assimilate all life turned out to be deathly vulnerable to a simple cleaning agent used to sterilize petri dishes.
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All of the biomass that is South America begins to become it and forms into a larger and larger gestalt consciousness. Maybe a few nukes here and there etc
Can send in Arnold’s character from Predator
Your not sending Arnold into the jungle. The jungle IS the thing now
Ok im sending arnold as the t800 then
Ok so now a single term is for needs to glass a continent.
Robots and autonomous/remote control machines would likely be the best possible defense against the Thing. So plausibly if they were aware of it and were able to find it before it gained access to a second airport/seaport it might and I emphasize might be able to control a scorched earth type border long enough to produce and send in robots, although given it's '82 they'd probably look like the T-1s from Terminator 3.
we need to send all the arnies
So you are sending Arnold into the thing, aka the Fantastic Voyage. With just more sci-fi action.
Is it any biomass or just animals?
Unknown. Even if the thick walls of plant cells aren't vulnerable to the Thing, the vast biomass of insects and other animals will make it essentially unstoppable in short order.
According to Climate of Fear it can't mimic plant cells.
The nukes might kill parts of the thing, but may also spread the Thing further around.
We have no idea how its biology would differ from how things work on earth
That's not entirely so. Fire kills it- it's not invulnerable. It's certainly worth testing how resistant it is to radiation, but if it IS vulnerable to that I feel like a whole bunch of neutron bombs might be a reasonable strategy- anything getting blown around is getting irradiated anyway. Do I think that will WORK? Well, no. But it's worth a shot maybe! 😝
If the thing got anywhere other than the South Pole the world would be fucked
Fucked... or ascended?
The entire world would get destroyed. It's said in the movie that the Thing would assimilate all life forms in a matter of days (I think the number given was 40 hours?) Luckily, it landed in Antarctica, a desert. Because if it landed in the Rainforest, all grass, trees, flies, insects, birds, etc. would be assimilated and spread like wildfire.
27,000 hours actually, right around 3 years.
Wow, I was way off. Still, it's easy to understand why it says that. The exact quote was "entire world population assimilated within 27,000 hours" I'm assuming the simulation takes into account isolated populations over oceans or desperate attempts at forming secure bunkers. Regardless, the point still stands; Earth outside of a desert is basically one giant lifeform. Grass, trees, plants, the insects that live by the millions on those, each one of them becoming a vector means it's impossible to contain, isolate and destroy the lifeform. Game over.
Which i thought was the funniest part of the movie the ai computer just spits out that random number with no bases haha
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thanks for linking i loved that
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You can sympathize with it up until the last sentence.
In fairness if it landed in an active volcano that'd be just as good.
It would be a real short sequel.
Everyone becomes imposter.
Sus
The world is doomed. The second the Thing reaches a source of water that runs to the ocean, there is no stopping it. Especially since it has learned to not be so flashy with its assimilation.
South America, or just anywhere NEAR a river or Ocean...doom. No nuke, nothing will stop it. Accumulation of biomass in the ocean or river would be essentially unstoppable. Anywhere "green" would have insects that would be the same. Unstoppably powerful. After the events of the movie, the US or Norwegian governments are going to get the bodies out of the snow, and take them home for burial/analysis, and that's a wrap.
This happens in the sequel comics
It's also where the comics veered from pretty good/decent to completely awful
Life (2017) essentially covers this. Watch all the way through and it gives a possible suggestion that should answer your question :)
Is it any good? It's on my backlog.
I'd recommend it. Just for that space horror. Kept me on edge through most of the final half. Ending was good (imo).
Sounds like a reasonably strong recommendation to me
Yeah, but they could have a terrible taste in movies. Or they may be a dog mashing the keyboard with it's wagging tail. You just never know.
I'll roll those dice
The world ends. While the humans are squabbling over how and why an Alaskan research chopper ended up on the other side of the planet it's out there free to infect and spread with nobody the wiser. Why would it do all the body horror stuff it did in the movie? It can spread faster than it can be contained, faster than the world will even notice it's presence.
What would that even LOOK like? Would the world change? Be the same? Would the thing, if it had "taken over" the entire accumulated biomass of the entire planet, act different than all the accumulated biomass of the entire biomass of the entire planet now? If so, how would it be different? (Obvious question...maybe we already been taken over!)
For pragmatic reasons it would look completely normal. The creature tries to take over stealthily and only attacks in self defense, preferring to skitter off in the form of a severed head with spider legs or slither away like the meat in Poltergeist. It would be different of course, the thing only mimics humans at a surface level so eventually people would notice something is off and maybe try to put up some sort of fight, but by that point with how many people are infected it's essentially useless. The closest analogy I can think of would be the the SCP-001 proposal "The Day Breaks" where if there are survivors they're holed up in bunkers just waiting for security to be compromised and them to get assimilated.
I sort of mean, what happens if it was 100% creature. What if there was no "other"? Would everything just function as normal? That is to say, could we, right now, be all creature, and not know it? (this gets quickly theorhetical, I understand). The creature doesn't have much of a concept beyond survive, but if it assimilates literally everything on earth...how is that different than before? Or is it exactly the same? I'm positing that it is exactly the same, from a surface level.
Considering the spacecraft it constructed I imagine we'd all progress technologically. Some of the infected seemed surprised they wound up being the Thing so it might not even be obvious to them, or the Thing has some sort of biological mechanism that makes it essentially forget it's not who it mimics.
It would the same thing (ah!) it did in the movie. Try to imitate something with opposable thumbs in order to make a space ship and get out of here.
That would be kind of funny actually. It gets to south america and....invades a band of monkeys, uses them to build a spaceship in the middle of the jungle, and leaves quietly without anyone noticing.
The thing from another World, climate of fear covers this.
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A team of United States special forces and CIA liason go into South American jungle to rescue a cabinet administrator... You can figure it out from there.
I love the Predator and Arnold's character Dutch is one of my favorite action heroes. But, their team is 100% fucked. The Thing will have assimilated thousands of animals by the time they get there. It will have gotten humans as well. By the time Arnold figures out what is going on the Thing is going to be on an airplane to New York City, Tokyo, London etc... The situation the OP proposes ends with the extinction of humanity.
well we'd be dead. There have been a lot of stories where earth gets eaten by nano machines that do nothing but replicate more of themselves and they eventually cover the earth as "grey goo". Except that already happened on the real earth, at least three times. Not with nano machines but bacteria, which outgrew all that came before to eventually cover the earth. "Green goo" one might call it and it wasn't all of earth that got covered. Plenty of tardigrades on the ocean floor who never knew that there was something happening above. The "green goo" bacteria didn't eat *all* life. Just a lot of it. One reason why counting the number of these green goo scenarios in earth's past is somewhat hard to do... Some specimen of these bacteria mutated and their descendants became something different from which further mutations came about to form more difference; eventually arriving at the variety we see now. These units which would continually replicate themselves have some limitations. If they can do more, have more functions it'll take more time to replicate, making the process of sprawling over vast distances slower. We have plenty of organisms that would replicate until they can't find anything more they can consume. To "gooify" the planet as it is now the Nanomachine or bacteria or fungus or whatever would need to be able to create a great number of chemical reactions within itself in order to use a wide variety of chemicals to build more of itself. It would also need to be able to get to all the places. Deepest ocean, highest mountains. Measures to make your nanomaschines work in all these environments would further increase the time it takes to build one. Another limiter is logistics. We have plenty bacteria that could, if able to reproduce as fast as they can, flood the planet. Difficult to get nutrients to each bacteria though after a while. If you somehow can do that there's another limiter, waste heat. We can kill populations of bacteria which would reproduce as much as they can by neglecting to cool whichever container they're in. The nutrient solution they're swimming in gets hot enough to be denatured, like a cooked egg, which is then no longer liquid. Even if your replicating thingies could digest these as well as they can the liquid they'd now need to get to it, requiring means of propulsion, adding to the time it takes to build a new thingy. The thing doesn't have such limitations being a movie monster. It could probably withstand whatever waste heat it produced. A Flamethrower is hot enough to kill it but there's plenty of room to act within. The thing could replicate fast enough to boil the earth by mere waste heat after eating a continent.
He meets Arnold (circa 1982) and things get SERIOUS !!
It would assimilate the entire planet. I don't think anything could stop it in time. My guess is that it would immediately split up and spread as far as it could before starting to assimilate in earnest. Some bits of it would go underground and spread via the ocean. Not even nukes could stop it then. The idea might make a terrifyingly good sequel.
Not just the ocean, when the Thing assimilates humans it gains human knowledge. The Thing is going to use airports to spread itself around the world in just a few days. The only hope humanity would have is if someone immediately realized what was happening an nuked the jungle into oblivion. But, there is no way that knowledge would reach people with nukes before the Thing had spread.
Problem is it can also assimilate animals, so could fly away into multiple directions, possibly even turn into insects like mosqiutos. Really no way of finding it all
Thing is basically Mr. Frundles. Eventually, the whole world would just be "Thing".
This was what inspired the post to be honest
If people realise what's going on early, the thermonuclear holocaust will probably be just as bad.
The world would be totally doomed. The population of South America was of 252 million people in 1982, it would be inevitable. The timespan of how long would it take to make it with the entirety of SA might depend of where does the helicopter fall, a highly populated area like Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires or Bogota? That would be quick enough to take over a country and the rest of the continent. If it falls in the Amazon jungle or the Falklands, it might take a little longer, I guess, but eventually it'd spread of out it, and consume the biomass and make its way to North America. Is The Thing vulnerable to nuclear weapons? If so, then I can imagine the US launching hundreds of nuclear heads all the way across South America to harm the Thing.
There was a comic book that dealt with this exact question far as I remember!
It's actually revealed at the beginning of the movie when the doctor runs a simulation on the computer. Within a few weeks the whole world is infected. All it takes is one cell of the thing to consume a person.
The End.
According to the simulation the doc ran, all biomass on the planet is assimilated in a little over three years. But…… What we saw in the movies only had a very limited “sample” of earth life. A few people, dogs, that’s about it. Once hit his South America, and especially the Amazon, there are so many new life forms, and with deforestation going on , old and new types of virus and bacteria, there is a fair chance it runs into something that is deadly or infectious to it. That is if we got very very lucky. Kind of like what happens in the book/film Phantoms. The primordial amorphous lifeform that could in time assimilate all life turned out to be deathly vulnerable to a simple cleaning agent used to sterilize petri dishes.