Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-6589306-20130228113457/@comment-6078851-20140216170339

i like that theory too and i'm gonna flesh it out a little...

in the realm of alien/aliens, our future and 40k's distant past, a queen is on a ship somewhere and somewhen when it accidentally falls into warp space. the ship is then spat out randomly, as befits warp travel, in another galaxy and billions of years ago. this would then give ample time for tyranids to evolve and to travel between, and consume, other galaxies. and as they accumulate traits from various species they would only need to meet a species with bio-tech once in order to gain the ability of creating their own bio-tech. plus if they are being birthed from species with a higher intellect than their own (easy for drones, a little harder for queens) then eventually they would achieve a higher general intelligence across their race - this is borne out in the novels when earth's overrun, they are continually, and rapidly, birthing from humans which raises their overall intellect.

also xenomorphs are exceptionally quick at evolving - prometheus shows that the organism which becomes the xenomorph mutates/evolves from an organic liquid to the recognisable black bipedal form in only 3 or 4 generations, all in the space of 2 days. but as we only usually see xeno's birthed from humans we've never really seen just how quick their evolution can be.

i totally don't mind xeno's being ripped off and inserted into other works because xeno's are the original, the archetype that has spawned some awesome (and some truly sucky) sci-fi creatures. surely it's a testament to the aura of the xenomorphs that they've been copied so many times - we wouldn't have tyranids if GW didn't do their own 'manufactorum-on-steroids' version of xenomorphs :) and as awesome as tyranids are they will never have the same resonance as the xeno's because they were crafted from the mould set by alien/s.

on a 'movie relation to 40k' tangent - event horizon. the premise is that in a few decades we will be testing technology that allows interstellar travel, but instead of interstellar travel it turns out to be inter-dimensional travel and from what goes down i'm thoroughly convinced (convinced to the point that even if the film makers said it had no relation i'd call them liars) that the ship ends up in 40k's warp space where the crew become subject to the deprivations of slaanesh. but as it's set in this century no-one has any idea of what they encounter which, in my opinion, is the first instance of humans in the realm of chaos :)