Bodies Out of Time: Rethinking Age in the Alien Universe

Warning: This article contains spoilers for several entries in the Alien franchise.

Recently, I’ve been trying to catch up on all the shows sitting on my ever-growing to-watch list. One that I was especially excited about was Alien: Earth, the latest installment in the Alien franchise, which began way back in 1979 with Ridley Scott’s science-fiction horror masterpiece, simply titled Alien. And, as it happens, it’s Halloween while I’m writing this, so it feels fitting to reflect on one of the many philosophical questions the new series raises: age.

The passage of time — and its effects on our bodies, minds, and relationships — is hardly a new theme in science fiction. In 1986’s Aliens, yet another masterpiece, Ellen Ripley, having survived the events of the first film, awakens after spending fifty-seven years in stasis aboard an escape pod. She soon learns that her daughter has grown up, lived an entire life, and died during Ripley’s suspended sleep (though expanded materials elaborate on her daughter’s adventures). A similar leap occurs in Alien: Resurrection, set more than two centuries after the original. In each case, this temporal dislocation isolates Ripley from any semblance of home or continuity.

This unmooring from time and place also runs through Alien: Earth, emerging in two key forms.

The first, and one consistent with the series’ legacy, is cryonics. Space is vast, and travel across it takes time. To traverse the immense distances between systems, the crew of the lone spaceship seen in Alien: Earth, the Maginot, much like Ripley before them, enters suspended animation. By “freezing” themselves, they avoid the ravages of age and survive journeys that would otherwise outlast a human lifespan. It’s worth noting that both NASA and ESA (the European Space Agency) have explored similar ideas — hibernation, torpor, and metabolic suspension — as potential tools for long-duration spaceflight.

However, while the ethics of cryonics and its implications for our understanding of age are intriguing, they are not the focus here. Instead, Alien: Earth complicates our everyday sense of time’s passing in a second, more existential way: it unsettles our notions of what it means to grow older and to live a whole life.

The series invites us to question what it means to age through its portrayal of the artificial lifeforms that populate its world. Androids are, of course, a familiar presence in the Alien universe. They have appeared in every film, sometimes as antagonists, sometimes as uneasy allies. The relationship between creators and their creations has been a central concern in the prequel films — Prometheus, Alien: Covenant, and Alien: Romulus. Yet while those stories focus on the nature of life itself and the moral bonds between makers and made, one question has remained largely unexplored: what does it mean for an artificial being to grow, to mature, to age? Alien: Earth addresses this question through its introduction of hybrids — synthetic bodies into which human consciousness has been uploaded.

At first glance, this might not seem problematic. If someone transfers their mind into a synthetic body identical to their original one, we would likely still regard them as the same age. A twenty-year-old who moves into an artificial body resembling their twenty-year-old self would, intuitively, remain twenty. Yet Alien: Earth upends this expectation. In the series, consciousness transfer is still experimental, and only a handful of test subjects, known as the “lost boys,” have undergone the procedure. Each of the five children, terminally ill in their biological forms, has had their consciousness transferred into a cutting-edge synthetic body. But these new bodies are not like-for-like replacements: they resemble those of adults in their late twenties. The result is five individuals who possess the physical form of adults but the minds and behaviors of children. These bodies themselves have only existed for a certain number of years. So, the synthetic bodies resemble adults, the minds of children inhabit them, but they have only been around for a short time.

What Alien: Earth reveals is how fragile our notion of age really is. We like to imagine age as a simple measure counted in years, written in the wear and tear on the body, reflected in our behavior. But when these elements drift apart, as they do for the lost boys, our categories of child and adult blur. The series forces us to ask what it truly means to grow up when body, mind, and time no longer move in step.

For much of Western thought, age and development have been bound together. In Book 1 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle posits that every living thing has a natural trajectory, a movement from potential to fulfillment. A child is an unfinished being, one whose form is still unfolding toward its purpose. The hybrids in Alien: Earth violate this order. Their bodies appear to have reached completion, but their minds remain suspended in childhood. Indeed, it is made clear in the first episode that the development, even the very functioning, of their minds may be different because those minds now inhabit bodies devoid of hormones and other biological substances that motivate and shape cognitive functioning. The lost boys embody an unnatural disjunction between form and essence, adulthood without maturity, completion without growth. In Aristotle’s terms, they have been forced into their ends before their time.

On the other end of the spectrum sits John Locke, who offers an alternative take. For Locke, as argued in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, what makes someone the same person through time is not the body at all but the continuity of consciousness and memory. It is the awareness of oneself as the same thinking thing that secures identity. Judged by this standard, the lost boys remain children, no matter how adult their bodies appear. Their minds carry the same memories, emotions, and perspectives they held before their transfer. Their new bodies may be stronger, faster, and ageless, but the selves within them are still those of children.

Between Aristotle and Locke, the hybrids occupy an unsettling middle ground. They are caught between two incompatible notions of growth. Aristotle would see them as beings who have skipped the natural stages of life; Locke would see them as persons whose identity is unchanged despite physical transformation. Alien: Earth leaves us in this tension. It refuses to tell us whether maturity resides in the body’s development or in the mind’s continuity, and this uncertainty makes the lost boys so haunting. Indeed, the group itself reflects on this difficulty and eventually reaches no clear answer.

By imagining beings who age in one sense but not another, the series asks us to reconsider how much of our humanity depends on time itself. If growth can be engineered, if bodies can leap ahead of the selves that inhabit them, then age ceases to be a simple measure of experience. Alien: Earth reminds us that aging is not only about the number of years we live, but also about how our bodies and minds keep pace — or fail to.